maurice blanchot and fragmentary writing - the eye...2 maurice blanchot and fragmentary writing...

Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary

Writing

ii


WritingA Change of Epoch

Leslie Hill

Continuum International Publishing GroupA Bloomsbury company

50 Bedford Square 80 Maiden Lane London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10038

wwwcontinuumbookscom

copy Leslie Hill 2012

Extracts from Awaiting Oblivion reprinted from Awaiting Oblivion by Maurice Blanchot translated by John Gregg by permission of the University of Nebraska Press Copyright 1962

by Editions Gallimard Translation copyright 1997 by the University of Nebraska Press

Extracts from The Infinite Conversation reprinted by permission from The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot translated by Susan Hanson The University of Minnesota Press 1993 English translation copyright 1993 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Originally

published as LrsquoEntretien infini copyright 1969 by Editions Gallimard

Extracts from The Step Not Beyond reprinted by permission from The Step Not Beyond by Maurice Blanchot translated by Lycette Nelson The State University of New York Press

copy1992 State University of New York All rights reserved

Extracts from The Writing of the Disaster reprinted from The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot translated by Ann Smock by permission of the University of Nebraska

Press Copyright 1980 by Editions Gallimard Translation copyright 1986 1995 by the University of Nebraska Press

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical

photocopying recording or otherwise without the permission of the publishers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataHill Leslie 1949ndash

Maurice Blanchot and fragmentary writing a change of epochby Leslie Hillp cm

Includes bibliographical references and indexISBN-13 978-1-4411-2527-9 (hardcover alk paper)

ISBN-10 1-4411-2527-2 (hardcover alk paper)ISBN-13 978-1-4411-6622-7 (pbk alk paper)

ISBN-10 1-4411-6622-X (pbk alk paper)1 Blanchot Maurice--Criticism and interpretation I Title

PQ2603L3343Z684 2012843rsquo912--dc232012002893

ISBN HB 978-1-4411-2527-9e-ISBN 978-1-4411-8698-0PB 978-1-4411-6622-7

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services Chennai India

ContEnts

Acknowledgements vi

1 A turning 1

2 The demand of the fragmentary 103

3 An interruption 171

4 Writing ndash disaster 279

5 A change of epoch 433

Index 437

ACKnoWLEDGEMEnts

I should like to thank the many friends colleagues and students who sometimes without realising have contributed to the writing of this book I am particularly indebted to Andrew Benjamin Christophe Bident Christopher Fynsk Seaacuten Hand Kevin Hart and Joseph Kuzma for their encouragement support and insight and am grateful to the University of Warwick for the provision of study leave that enabled me to complete what became a significantly longer book than first envisaged

Earlier versions of portions of this book have appeared elsewhere and I am grateful for permission to use some of that material again Parts of Chapter One and Chapter Two were first published as lsquoA Fragmentary Demandrsquo in The Power of Contestation Perspecshytives on Maurice Blanchot edited by Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H Hartman (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 2004) 101ndash120 205ndash209 copy 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press adapted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press Some further remarks from Chapter One were borrowed for inclusion in an article in a Blanchot special issue of the journal Europe (August-September 2007) and an initial draft of the opening section of Chapter Three likewise first appeared in French in Maurice Blanchot la singulariteacute drsquoune eacutecriture edited by Arthur Cools Nausicaa Dewez Christophe Halsberghe and Michel Lisse (Les Lettres romanes hors seacuterie 2005) A preliminary sketch of the first section of Chapter Four was published in Blanchot dans son siegravecle edited by Monique Antelme and others (Lyon eacuteditions Parangon 2009) All these texts have been substantially revised for the present book

1

A turning

I

A spectre

All becomes suspense a fragmentary arrangement of alternating and facing elements contributing to the total rhythm which may be deemed the silent poem with its blanks translated only in singular manner by each pendentive [Tout devient suspens disposition fragmentaire avec alternance et visshyagraveshyvis concourant au rythme total lequel serait le poegraveme tu aux blancs seulement traduit en une maniegravere par chaque pendentif]

MALLArMeacute lsquoCrise de versrsquo1

For more than two hundred years testifying at once to the weighty legacy of the past and the uncertain prospect of the future a spectre has haunted literature Its name is legion its signature nevertheless unmistakeable it is the spectre of fragmentary writing of the text as fragment and the fragment as text Time and again whenever a fresh break in continuity is diagnosed or a new episode in cultural history declared under such grandly vacuous names as romanticism Modernism Postmodernism even Postpostmodernism it is repeatedly to the literary fragment that critics have turned in search of an emblem of the seemingly unquenchable desire to make it new Since the early nineteenth century the list of literaturersquos fragmentary artists is at any event a long one Schlegel Houmllderlin Keats Novalis Coleridge Buumlchner Nietzsche Mallarmeacute Pound Eliot Kafka Valeacutery Proust Musil

MAurICE BLAnChot AnD FrAGMEntAry WrItInG2

Artaud Char Bataille Beckett numerous others too in whose work the fragment whether calculated as such or merely abandoned to its fate bears witness to the trials and tribulations birthpangs as well as death-throes of literary historical and cultural upheaval

The time of the fragment in other words is never the fullness of the present It is the time of between-times between remembering and forgetting continuity and discontinuity obedience and objection and what speaks most powerfully in the fragment is no doubt precisely this unreconciled tension between the artwork and its unravelling between its gathering and its dispersion between time past and time still to come In that tension lies redoubtable energy and this explains why in critical discourse and artistic practice alike the fragment today is little short of ubiquitous Little has escaped its appeal not fiction not poetry nor theatre not autobiography not memoir nor essay not philosophy not theory nor criticism Notwithstanding its unassuming discretion despite the intimations of apocalypse that sometimes follow in its wake fragmentation seems now to have become almost synonymous with the possibility of writing itself But the phenomenon is not limited to the printed word Much the same goes for other artforms too for painting music sculpture dance film photography and the many other multimedia activities that taking their lead from the fragment tenaciously defy categorisation

And yet there is something deeply ambiguous about this fidelity to the fragment that is such a remarkable feature of modern and contemporary experience It is that even by its most enthusiastic exponents the fragment is rarely considered to evoke anything other than negativity Whether seen to force itself on its audience with fractious transgressive violence or to withdraw into the melancholy disenchantment that comes from shattered dreams the fragment is customarily described by critics not according to what it is or to what it might be but to what it already is not in terms that is of the continuity it interrupts the unity it breaks apart the authority it contests the norms it breaches reasons for this strange state of affairs are admittedly not hard to find They follow in part from the concept of the fragment itself As Adorno argues in his posthumous (and itself fragmentary) Aesthetic Theory a literary fragment forcibly never stands alone It is always preceded by a totalising past or future whole which however unavailable or simply hypothetical is what constitutes the fragment as a fragment

A turnInG 3

Without this memory or promise of totalisation writes Adorno (and Derrida Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy albeit to different ends will argue the same) there can be no such thing as a fragment Both it and the absent whole to which it silently gestures belong together lsquoThe category of the fragmentary which here finds its placersquo remarks Adorno referring to the proliferation of fragmentary finished-unfinished works characteristic of the early twentieth century lsquois not that of contingent particularity the fragment is that part of the totality of the work which resists totalityrsquo2

This is not to say the fragment is a mere figment of the writerrsquos or criticrsquos imagination On the contrary as Adorno explains it is a crucial reminder that the totalising artwork can never properly coincide with itself and achieve closure According to Adorno it is of course the very purpose of art not to reconcile opposing tendencies but rather to articulate the impossibility of reconciliation Within this dialectic the intervention of the fragment is therefore crucial As Adorno comments

The ideological affirmative aspect of the concept of the successful artwork has a corrective in the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect work If perfect works did exist this would mean reconciliation was possible amidst the unreconcilable to which art owes its allegiance It would then be a case of art annulling its own concept the turn to the fragile and the fragmentary [die Wendung zum Bruumlchigen und Fragmentarischen] is in reality an attempt to salvage art by dismantling the claim that works are what they cannot be and to which they must nevertheless aspire both moments are contained in the fragment3

As these words suggest modern literaturersquos turn to the fragment was for Adorno a function of a double philosophico-historical process First it was a token of broken promises of defeat and failure the failure of culture to preserve itself from barbarism the failure of art to engage in progressive fashion with its own social and political destiny from which it retreated or was forced to retreat in order to preserve its fragile provisional perhaps even sham autonomy Fragmentary writing in this sense was nothing new merely a symptom of a larger history that spoke of the impasse affecting modern art its disengagement and decline Not for nothing did Adorno cheerfully suggest then to his readers they might view as a


literal indictment of the last hundred and fifty years Hegelrsquos famous dictum from the first of the Lectures on Aesthetics of the 1820s that lsquoart considered in its highest vocation is and remains for us a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]rsquo4 Was it not already clear by the second half of the nineteenth century he adds that artrsquos days were numbered citing in support the example of rimbaud abruptly abandoning at the age of eighteen his burgeoning career as a poet in order to take up a position elsewhere says Adorno as a junior clerk5

rimbaudrsquos lapse into silence though it showed the direction of things to come did not however mean art was finished reneacute Char in 1948 was not alone in proclaiming in a prose poem of the kind inaugurated by his illustrious precursor that lsquoyou were quite right to leave Arthur rimbaudrsquo6 For from within the sequestered confines to which it was relegated art nevertheless owed it to itself still to carry on Adorno insisted and to keep playing the game not unlike Hamm in Beckettrsquos Fin de partie (Endgame) a play much admired by the German thinker and whose tenuous ironic structures disintegrating as the work progresses were all that art in the philosopherrsquos view could truthfully muster in the wake of those events to which like others to come he elected to give the epochal name of Auschwitz Failure to conclude in other words did not relieve the artwork of the possibility of persisting in failure As Beckettrsquos protagonist had it lsquo[l]a fin est dans le commencement et cependant on continuersquo lsquo[t]he end is in the beginning and yet you go onrsquo7 Here stood the second moment in Adornorsquos dialectic For even as the fragment testifies to totalisationrsquos failure it also makes a paradoxical and problematic last-ditch attempt to redeem art by recalling it to those very duties it cannot fulfil The fragment here protests resists objects challenging the totalising artwork as such together with those social political and economic forces that have turned artistic expression into an alienated consumer product But while doing so it also strives to save the prospect of the work by insisting on what art nevertheless must undertake in times of ideological and aesthetic distress even if few illusions remain regarding the possibility of any effective or successful outcome But art Adorno points out is not an activity that chooses to be ruled by effectivity or success

So far so good it may be said and there is little doubt that Adorno provides a critically probing nuanced account of the

A turnInG 5

possibilities and impossibilities that the art of the fragment reveals It is however apparent that in Adornorsquos presentation of the dialectical relationship between protesting fragment and unreconciled work one of these two contradictory moments (necessarily) takes precedence over the other that of the finished-unfinished ironically reflexive modern or modernist artwork whose incompletion is paradoxical ndash dialectical ndash testimony to its status as a work animated by a totalising if unsatisfied ambition to be what it must be that is an integrated artwork For its part though its testimony may be significant the role of the fragment remains entirely secondary its structure and status always already predetermined by the deferred delayed problematic possibility of the artwork to which in spite of itself it is held to aspire As a result of the negative dialectic of which it is no more than a minor function the fragment itself is at best a passing phase so to speak a mournful hiatus in the realisation or non-realisation of the futural totality of the work

For Adorno it therefore follows that in an important sense the fragment as such does not exist In order to be what it is the fragment must be detachable from a possible past present or future whole For Adorno however no sooner is the fragment detached from that whole than by dialectical recuperation it becomes an integral part of it So long as it is a fragment in other words it is part of an absent whole however once it is deemed to be part of that whole it ceases properly to be a fragment The totality that confers on the fragment the status of a fragment also denies it the status of a fragment The fragment lives on then only as a kind of lingering ghostly memory of itself without specificity singularity or self-identity and this arguably explains despite Adornorsquos own long-standing preference for fragmentary forms of writing as witnessed for instance by the aphoristic structure of Minima Moralia or by the self-consciously exploratory nature of the essays found in the four-volume Notes to Literature why there is little explicit treatment of the fragmentary as such in the whole five hundred pages of the Aesthetic Theory In the end fragmentary writing for Adorno it seems is merely one of the ways in which compromised damaged or unachievable totality in pessimistic if critical vein speaks of its fraught divided relation to itself

But what if this concept of fragmentary writing were itself a deep expression of nostalgia a melancholy symptom of unrequited


yearning for the totalising artwork of old What if rather than being subordinate to the dialectic of the work fragmentary writing preceded and exceeded the very possibility of any work leaving it always already undone dispersed and put asunder its impossible pretensions to aesthetic totalisation merely an unsustainable regressive hypothesis What if in the end the fragment were therefore both more and less than a secondary negative effect of the work and what if the impossibility of defining it in itself and as such were its most prodigious resource And what if the abiding indeterminacy of the fragment rather than indicating a duty to labour in vain towards the completion of the work suggested instead an entirely different conception of literature one that was no longer subject to the logic of the work but beyond presence autonomy or reflexive closure affirmed itself instead as the futural promise of a radical multiplication of writing as a proliferating series of singular events

These questions are not idle ones From the 1950s onwards they emerged tenaciously and persistently as key concerns in the writing of the French novelist critic and thinker Maurice Blanchot serving to inform not only the writerrsquos account of literature literary criticism philosophy and politics but also his own work as an author of fiction and of many other more and less than fictional more and less than essayistic fragmentary texts Blanchot was not however some latecomer casting postmodern doubt on the achievements of his predecessors On the contrary he was Adornorsquos virtual contemporary born scarcely four years after his German counterpart and sharing with him (aside from a vastly different appreciation of the importance of Heidegger) not only many of the same literary and philosophical points of reference including Houmllderlin Hegel Kierkegaard Valeacutery Proust Kafka Surrealism and Beckett but also some of the same historical experiences albeit from a very different political ideological and geographical standpoint In his engagement with literary modernity however Blanchot also came to significantly different conclusions concerning the possibility or impossibility of art in the time of distress it fell to both men to witness For while similarly rethinking the legacy of traditional ie Hegelian aesthetics Blanchot attempted something arguably far more radical than Adorno which was to resist without compromise the romantic or Modernist temptation even though it might sometimes profess the opposite to subordinate fragmentary

A turnInG 7

writing to a conception of the unified artwork and the dialectic of realisation or unrealisation it implied8

Otherwise than Adorno then the challenge Blanchot sought to meet was to turn the fragment not towards the irretrievable past nor even the recalcitrant present but towards a future irreducible to any present and beyond the reach of any dialectic This meant no longer treating the fragment as governed primarily by negativity but affirming it instead as an always other promise of futurity which in turn implied an entirely different relationship with writing thinking time and politics As the world threatens increasingly to move into a new and perhaps even final epoch dominated by globalised exploitation technological uniformity and cynical nihilism it has arguably become more urgent than ever to draw on the resources of Blanchotrsquos still neglected rethinking of the fragment An important task faces readers here which is to relinquish residual fascination with the fully achieved artwork which in any case as Adorno agrees does not exist and to explore further outside of unity outside of myth outside of literature even what is at stake in fragmentary writing and what therefore comes to be affirmed in Blanchotrsquos own late fragmentary texts

As Blanchot was aware the attempt to rethink the fragment is not without risks There was always the danger as Derrida was keen to emphasise that lsquojust like ellipsis the fragment ndash the ldquoIrsquove said virtually nothing and take it back immediatelyrdquo ndash might maximise [potentialise] the dominance [maicirctrise] of the entire remaining discourse hijacking [arraisonnant] all future continuities and supplements in advancersquo Blanchot took the admonishment seriously To signal his agreement however he chose to reproduce Derridarsquos warning some sixteen or so pages before the end of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ndash as a fragment of a fragment9 This was to imply that the risk of dialectical recuperation however real was only one possibility among others and that whatever its subsequent complicities or compromises fragmentary writing was also inseparable from a kind of sovereign disobedience which meant that it necessarily contested all forms of authority including its own What fragmentary writing put at risk then was not only the possibility of totality including the negative totality envisioned by Adorno and suspected by Derrida it was also the case that once the fragment secured its divorce from any memory or prospect of totalisation it ceased to be identifiable as a fragment at all and was


therefore left to affirm itself anew not as what it was since it was plainly without proper definition but as always other than what it pretended to be as an irrepressible force of dispersion proliferation and multiplicity Dangers such as these according to Blanchot were not only unavoidable they were to be welcomed for what they demonstrated above all else was the fragmentrsquos resistance to all forms of identity or certainty As Blanchot puts it in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre

uml Fragmentary writing might well be the greatest risk It does not refer to any theory and does not give rise to any practice definable by interruption Even when it is interrupted it carries on Putting itself in question [srsquointerrogeant] it does not take control [ne srsquoarroge pas] of the question but suspends it (without maintaining it) as a non-response If it claims that its time is when the whole ndash at least ideally ndash is supposedly realised this is because that time is never certain [nrsquoest jamais sucircr] is absence of time absence in a non-negative sense [en un sens non privatif] anterior to all present-past [anteacuterieure agrave tout passeacuteshypreacutesent] and seemingly posterior to all possibility of any presence to come [comme posteacuterieure agrave toute possibiliteacute drsquoune preacutesence agrave venir]10

With these words Blanchot puts forward a radically new agenda For what is inscribed in fragmentary writing in response to the demand of the fragment is no codicil or belated homage to totality no failed adjunct or piece of literary jetsam left floating after modernityrsquos collapse but a different relation to time irreducible to the dialectical temporality of the work a different temporality in other words that Blanchot elsewhere will describe as un changement drsquoeacutepoque a change of epoch which is not simply or even at all a new period in history but more precisely and more importantly features as a turning a caesura a step beyond a moment of pure time so to speak in which what appears (without however appearing as such) is absolutely other From which it follows as Adorno perhaps suspected that it can no longer be said with confidence what a fragment lsquoisrsquo or even if it lsquoisrsquo at all This is one of Blanchotrsquos most incisive interventions For in so far as it escapes any attribution of ontic or ontological identity his writing suggests the fragment is no longer an (aesthetic) object

A turnInG 9

nor a preamble to any (aesthetic) work at all It is a demand a requirement or an imperative an exigency (from the Latin exshyagere to force out or extract) that draws writing and thinking beyond the shelter of philosophy culture or art towards something still without name in the direction of what as early as 1952 in an essay on Kafka Blanchot called the outside lsquothe streaming flow of the timeless outsidersquo lsquole ruissellement du dehors eacuteternelrsquo11 Which is also to say that one of the implications of the fragment is to call upon readers writers and others to begin to lsquosense [pressentir ie to feel something before it is properly present] that nothing fragmentary yet exists [qursquoil nrsquoy a encore rien de fragmentaire] not properly speaking but improperly speakingrsquo12

Fragmentary writing then corresponds to nothing that can be identified as such It is a non-phenomenal spectral event in both writing and thinking that it is possible ndash perhaps ndash only to affirm as a radical futural trace irreducible to presence And in the pages that follow with Blanchotrsquos help this will be the thought this book will endeavour to pursue and prolong

II

Writing the future

lsquondash Would you agree there is every certainty we are at a turning [un tournant]rsquo lsquondash If there is every certainty it is hardly a turning The fact that we may be witnessing a change of epoch [un changement drsquoeacutepoque] (if such exists [srsquoil y en a]) surely also affects the certainty with which we might define that change making both certainty and uncertainty equally inappropriatersquo

BLANCHOT LrsquoEntretien infini13

The mid- to late 1950s prompted a remarkable sea-change in Blanchotrsquos writing career They coincided in particular with a crucial historical or historial moment that with all due precautions the author was soon to describe in April 1960 as a change of epoch a period of interruption displacement and undecidability A certain history he suggested had reached an uncertain point of closure something unprecedented and necessarily indeterminable was in the


offing both on and yet beyond the horizon As Blanchot was at pains to point out the long-term consequences of that turning ndash lsquoif such existsrsquo he insisted ndash were incalculable The more immediate effects on his own intellectual project were however dramatic

On at least three distinct but closely related frontsFirst the relationship between Blanchotrsquos fictional texts and the

institution of literature underwent a remarkable shift Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man) first published in 1957 bore its title like an ironic promise and was indeed to be the last of Blanchotrsquos reacutecits or shorter fictional narratives explicitly to designate or present itself as such LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (Awaiting Oblivion) from 1962 though legible in part as a narrative declined from the outset to ascribe itself to any given or even recognisable genre True enough Blanchotrsquos fiction had long maintained an uneasy relationship with the expectations of literary form From LrsquoArrecirct de mort (Death Sentence) onwards all the writerrsquos shorter narratives had offered themselves to reading as interrogative explorations whose exorbitant status is paradoxically confirmed by the modesty with which they fall short of narrative and exceed their own boundaries by withdrawing from them If stories such as LrsquoArrecirct de mort Au moment voulu (When the Time Comes) and Celui qui ne mrsquoaccompagnait pas (The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me) belong to the genre of narrative then it is only in so far as they give voice to the impossibility of narrative itself the non-occurrence of the event or events they struggle to narrate and their own infinite futurity as a witnessing of the finite

Le Dernier Homme did this too but went one step further For it ends not by bringing a residual narrative to a proper or even improper close but by a vertiginous act or non-act of fragmentary and abyssal self-citation lsquoLater [Plus tard]rsquo we read lsquohe wondered how he had become so calm He was unable to talk about it with himself Only joy at feeling in relation with the words [en rapport avec les mots] ldquoLater he [Plus tard il ]rdquorsquo14 In finishing or better in suspending the possibility of its finishing in this way Blanchotrsquos reacutecit detaches itself from itself in order to display a singular logic of duplicitous self-repetition which twenty years later the text went on to reaffirm in an astonishing manifestation of simultaneous self-referral and self-displacement when in 1977 without changing in any other respect bar this respect itself the book suddenly began redescribing itself to incontrovertible

A turnInG 11

but undecidable effect as a new version of itself as Le Dernier Homme nouvelle version (The two dozen actual but largely insignificant changes to the 1977 version that differentiate it from the 1957 text were already in place in the printing immediately preceding dated 24 March 1971 which far from describing itself as a new version of the reacutecit did not even present itself as a reacutecit at all) This most perfect of repetitions then was also the purest of variations ndash and this most spectral of returns the most decisive of metamorphoses In future after Le Dernier Homme as La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day) had already intimated there would indeed be lsquono more reacutecitsrsquo as such For each of the fictional parafictional or semi-fictional narratives that followed including the reissue of LrsquoArrecirct de mort in 1971 and of La Folie du jour in 1973 not to mention the 1971 printing of Le Dernier Homme as well as all subsequent editions of these texts including the very last almost already posthumous text LrsquoInstant de ma mort (The Instant of My Death) was to be ironically voided of any explicit generic categorisation15

This scepticism with regard to conventional generic markers should not be seen as a repudiation of narrative as such It serves rather to emphasise the extent to which narrative in Blanchot was from the outset a mode or manner of writing whose contours and self-identity were constantly in question lsquoThere is nothing self-evident about story-telling [Raconter ne va pas de soi]rsquo the author put it in 1964 apropos of Kafka16 The notorious closing words of La Folie du jour cited above alongside numerous other possible examples said the same lsquoA story [Un reacutecit]rsquo the reader is told lsquoNo no story ever again [Non pas de reacutecit plus jamais]rsquo17 But who writes or speaks these words Is it the narrator of Blanchotrsquos story in which case he might simply be thought to be contradicting himself declaring an end to storytelling at the very moment he is retelling the end of his story Or is it some authorial figure coming reluctantly to a disappointed or disappointing conclusion or even making a sincere but unverifiable promise Either way it is clear that the text gives the lie to whoever may be thought to speak on its behalf and the audience is left at the end moving uncertainly back and forth in perpetual oscillation between a story that is not a story and an absence of story that tells a story of some kind The text in the end cannot be delimited and the question remains forever in suspense Was or is La Folie du jour a story at all If


so or not what is it that happened or did not happen And what might then be at stake in such a singularly indeterminable (non-)event

Beginnings middles and endings it is well known are what give stories their definition direction and purpose and La Folie du jour by redoubling its apparent beginning and ending and folding them into a middle that is itself dispatched to the edge as Derrida has shown repeatedly challenges its own narrative coherence and structure18 La Folie du jour has no proper beginning nor ending no development other than its own occurrence as a story that may be told only in so far as it resists or exceeds its telling and is possible as an act of narration only in so far as it measures up to the impossibility of narration Vertiginous though they are these paradoxes are not however extraordinary or exceptional running through La Folie du jour in common with all Blanchotrsquos narratives is the realisation that no narrative without exception can ever begin or end itself19 No narrative can dominate its own borders all storytelling relies on an outside to which it silently appeals but which it cannot name This is what in the discussion of Kafka mentioned earlier Blanchot describes as lsquola voix narrativersquo the narrating voice referring to that possibility of narrative that is necessarily prior to the work and without which the work cannot be written but has no existence outside the work and no possibility of appearing within the work where it functions instead only as a kind of absent ground perpetually divorcing the work from itself As Blanchot explains

The narrating voice which is inside only to the extent that it is outside at a distance without distance cannot embody itself whether it takes on the voice of a judiciously chosen character or even creates the hybrid function of a mediator (this voice that ruins all mediation) it is always different from whoever or whatever utters it it is the indifferent-difference that disrupts the personal voice Let us (for amusement) call it spectral ghostlike [spectrale fantomatique]20

Each and every narrative then in so far as it comes to be written at all is exposed to the outside Even when a narrative is complete it is simultaneously necessarily incomplete Any narrative that is all there is is always less and more than all there is lsquoIsrsquo it even at all Blanchot (and later Derrida) will ask Even in the absence of any

A turnInG 13

actual or hypothetical whole of which it may be considered to be a fragment it is in any case always already a fragment ndash of that which cannot be integrated or incorporated within it and which does not exist as such This is what is most powerfully at stake in Blanchotrsquos threefold (re)writing of Le Dernier Homme Le Dernier Homme reacutecit (1957) Le Dernier Homme (1971) and Le Dernier Homme nouvelle version (1977) Le Dernier Homme is all there is but each version each turning returning or return of the text is only one of a multitude each of which is the same as each of the others without ever being identical with it21 In its multiple repetitive (re)writings Le Dernier Homme is like a perpetual quotation of itself repeatedly the same but therefore different constantly stepping aside from itself stepping (not) beyond itself without self-coincidence or self-identity As its title suggests Blanchotrsquos text is both final and finite but it is also incomplete and infinite a fragment What marks it as a text traversed by the fragmentary is not its relative brevity then but its inability to end whether properly or improperly This does not mean it is necessarily continuous with itself On the contrary as it moves towards its suspended conclusion Le Dernier Homme becomes increasingly discontinuous intermittent dispersed across a number of possible voices styles tenses and typefaces But nor does this imply Blanchotrsquos text is an exercise in negativity a failed attempt to articulate the ineffable Indeed one of the most powerful motifs in Le Dernier Homme in its innumerable possible versions is the motif of affirmation lsquoThe happiness of saying yes of affirming without end [Bonheur de dire oui drsquoaffirmer sans fin]rsquo says the narrator in Le Dernier Homme repeating the phrase two more times in the book each time varying it as though to remind readers that repetition as in the rewriting of the text itself never guarantees identity but is always creative of difference dispersion multiplicity22

Le Dernier Homme was finally published in January 1957 Prior to that date or coinciding with it following common French publishing practice various prepublication extracts from the text had already appeared in magazines notably Botteghe Oscure La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise and Monde nouveau23 Some years before something similar had happened with selections from Au moment voulu and Celui qui ne mrsquoaccompagnait pas24 In the case of those earlier narratives the passages published had been relatively autonomous sections of the text and up to a point the


same is true of the extracts from Le Dernier Homme But the final selection from the book in the January 1957 issue of Monde nouveau managed to piece together as one continuous whole no fewer than four separate passages from the book bearing witness as it were to the increasing propensity of Blanchotrsquos prose to lend itself to fragmentary rearrangement

It therefore came as little surprise to some readers in August the following year to be confronted under the title lsquoLrsquoAttente [Waiting]rsquo with an extract from another forthcoming work which began in continuous prose only quickly to transform itself into a series of free-standing paragraph-long fragments each separated from the others by a five-pronged floral device standing at its head25 A second extract under the same title and containing some of the same sentences albeit in a different sequence and with other textual material appeared a year later in a Festschrift for the philosopher Martin Heidegger while in October 1961 some months before the publication of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli the future book to which both extracts seemed to be pointing readers of an essay on Michel Foucaultrsquos Histoire de la folie (History of Madness) in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise were given to consider a three-page introduction lsquoSur lrsquooubli [On forgetting]rsquo which in turn reiterated and refashioned many similar ideas and formulations26 Literary narrative philosophical tribute critical essay the same body of writing by Blanchot seemed to be traversing all these genres applying itself purposefully to each and respecting their different responsibilities while at the same time exposing them together with itself to the threat or promise of what escaped them What this announced was that Blanchotrsquos fictional writing assuming the expression may be maintained at all had already entered into a new and challenging phase that of the fragmentary

It was not only Blanchotrsquos literary narratives that testified to this sense of epochal change The future possibility of literary criticism was also crucially at issue The publication of Blanchotrsquos Le Livre agrave venir (The Book to Come) in 1959 marked another important threshold The book gathered together a selection of the writerrsquos monthly essays from the period between July 1953 and June 1958 for La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise (as the title of the journal remained until 1959 a consequence of its appropriation by the Nazis during the Occupation) One early article briskly sums up Blanchotrsquos thinking lsquoOugrave va la litteacuteraturersquo

A turnInG 15

lsquoWhither literaturersquo it asked The answer was disconcertingly straightforward lsquoLiteraturersquo Blanchot answered lsquois heading towards itself towards its essence which is disappearance [la disparition]rsquo27 The goal of literature Blanchot explained meaning both its purpose and its destination could no longer be identified with some external source of value whether cultural human or natural But neither could it be located within the work itself as a function of its aesthetic autonomy or its status as truthful or alethic disclosure Literaturersquos end Blanchot put it was inseparable from its ending its erasure and effacement

Like Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory and as Heidegger had also done some years earlier in the postface to lsquoThe Origin of the Work of Artrsquo Blanchot in his essay recalls Hegelrsquos celebrated remark of 1820ndash21 declaring art to be already lsquoa thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]rsquo28 Hegelrsquos position put forward paradoxically enough as Blanchot was quick to emphasise at a time of intense cultural philosophical and literary activity in Germany was that art in the modern age had forfeited its lsquoauthentic truth and vitality [die echte Wahrheit und Lebendigkeit]rsquo29 It had lost so to speak its teleological mission Art in other words had parted company with history truth reality worldly action science philosophy had taken over For the first time in its existence according to Hegel art was now merely an object of aesthetic literary critical contemplation which is also to say that for the first time it was now properly constituted as itself as art This end of art then was also its beginning and its demise the promise of a rebirth as other than it was

In Le Livre agrave venir Blanchot in the first instance appears largely to endorse Hegelrsquos verdict which is also the verdict of philosophy or history as Heidegger and Adorno in their vastly differing ways seem to agree But while Blanchot concurs that art and truth (in Hegelrsquos sense) have henceforth consummated their divorce he diverges forcibly in his assessment of this development He is not prompted to reinterpret the history and meaning of truth nor does he endeavour to recast Hegelrsquos argument in the direction of a materialist or negative dialectic Instead Blanchot seizes a chance and takes a risk The risk is that of art itself this lsquoarduous tortuous search in the dark [recherche obscure difficile et tourmenteacutee]rsquo this lsquoessentially risky experience in which art the work truth and the essence of language are all put in jeopardy are all part of what is at riskrsquo30 For Blanchot the fall of art is not proof of its historical submission to philosophical or


metaphysical truth it is the sign of a more essential more radical lapse into the necessary possibility of its own endless self-questioning And art that continually questions itself Blanchot argues which as art is inseparable from its self-questioning paradoxically enough cannot exist as art but only as a withdrawal or retreat from art No sooner does literature appear to itself as possibility then than it disappears as impossibility no sooner is the work of art constituted as such than it gives way to its own worklessness

Blanchot in this way neither entirely confirms nor entirely contradicts Hegel He follows Hegelrsquos thought part of the way only then to displace it sidestepping the numerous other implications historical here ontological there which for their part Adorno and Heidegger draw from Hegelrsquos diagnosis For it is soon apparent from Blanchotrsquos perspective that neither history nor ontology can provide a solution to artrsquos questioning Not only is art irreducible to history from whose progress it is excluded it is also incapable of making any persuasive claims as to its own essence It survives therefore only as a furtive fleeting trace of its own erasure History does not hold the truth of literature nor does literature disclose the truth of being Like language itself literature is without inside or outside beginning or end archegrave or telos As Blanchot goes on

it is precisely the essence of literature to escape any determination of its essence any assertion which might stabilise it or even turn it into a reality literature is never given but remains always to be rediscovered or reinvented It is not even certain that the word lsquoliteraturersquo or lsquoartrsquo corresponds to anything real or possible or important

And he continues

Whoever affirms literature in itself affirms nothing Whoever seeks it seeks only that which slips away whoever finds it finds only what falls short of literature or even worse what lies beyond it This is why in the end it is non-literature that each book pursues as the essence of what it loves and yearns passionately to discover31

But if the artwork by definition cannot coincide with itself what then of the literary criticism that derives its coherence and rationale from

A turnInG 17

the presumed existence of the object called literature The question is an urgent one with far-reaching implications for whoever like Blanchot writes on literature and endeavours to say something meaningful about it For while on the one hand literaturersquos non-coincidence with itself is what makes literary criticism possible since without it the critic would simply have nothing to say so on the other for the exact same reason no criticism by the power of its discourse can ever overcome the incompletion of the work it seeks to make its own The artwork cannot endorse or validate the words of the critic and literary criticism is quickly brought to the uncomfortable realisation not only that it is entirely parasitical on the artwork but also that its own discourse is necessarily superfluous to the existence of the work Ironically however if this were not the case criticism again would have little alternative but to fall silent Paradoxically then it is the inability of literary criticism to guarantee the truth of what it says about the artwork that is the best nay only hope of its longevity Its survival in other words is not a result of the discursive authority or rigour it prides itself on possessing but a function of its founding inescapable impotence32 In this of course it shares more than might at first have appeared with the literature it adopts as its object For just as the one is premised on its irresistible disappearance so the other is ultimately reliant on its abiding failure By a surprising twist literature and criticism which a moment ago seemed to exist in an inverse relationship find themselves exposed to the same risks of interminability irrelevance and incompetence Blanchot more than others from the early 1960s onwards proved particularly sensitive to this unexpected convergence In his writing the border between the two without ever being abolished became as a result increasingly permeable As the literature being written and published at the time refused more and more to legitimise itself by appeals to truth or to established values so criticism too found itself in much the same quandary forced to devise for itself a new strategy and a new language

Two examples of Blanchotrsquos changing critical idiom in response will suffice In April 1960 the writer published a first broadly philosophical dialogue the lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoeacutepoque [Conversation on a change of epoch]rsquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise This he followed up three months later with a second dialogue initially entitled lsquoLa Marche de lrsquoeacutecrevisse [Walking Sideways]rsquo33 A year after the lsquoEntretienrsquo he also published a review of Beckettrsquos recently


published novel Comment crsquoest (How It Is) which is made up of a continuous-discontinuous sequence of detached unpunctuated strophe-like blocks like so many movements or motions of text which slowly trace a narrative of sorts involving a body or procession of bodies crawling through mud interacting occasionally and violently with the help of a providential tin-opener lsquoin me that were without when the panting stops scraps of an ancient voice in me not minersquo34 Faced with so many fragmentary bribes the majority of critics at the time saw it as their task to make Beckettrsquos novel more accessible to its readership which they largely did by describing it as a further episode in that long sequence of solipsistic soliloquising on the part of an increasingly disembodied consciousnesss begun it was argued in Molloy Malone meurt and LrsquoInnommable some ten years earlier But not so Blanchot who responded instead to the unruly disconcerting strangeness of Beckettrsquos writing by transforming his own critical commentary into a hesitant and inconclusive dialogue between two (or more) unnamed interlocutors each grappling with the problematic challenge of passing judgement on Beckettrsquos fragmentary fragmented disorientating and sometimes shocking text lsquoTruly [En veacuteriteacute]rsquo says one of these voices lsquowhat to say about a workrsquo And it carries on

Do we even dare say in praising Beckettrsquos How It Is that it will live on in posterity Would we even want to praise it Which is not to say it is beyond praise rather that it discredits all praise and that it would be paradoxical therefore to read it with admiration There is a category of works that are more misunderstood by being praised than by being denigrated to disparage them is to touch the power of refusal [la puissance de refus] that has made them what they are and to witness the distance that is their measure [lrsquoeacuteloignement qui les mesure]

Do some books ndash those of the Marquis de Sade for instance ndash even want to be read asks a further perhaps the same voice to which another voice offers the following rejoinder

Let us say perhaps that works like these and Beckettrsquos in particular bring closer together far more than is customary both the movement of writing and the movement of reading seeking to integrate the two in an experience that while not joint is at

A turnInG 19

least barely differentiated and here we come back to the idea of indifference of a neutral affirmation equal-unequal [drsquoune affirmation neutre eacutegaleshyineacutegale] beyond the grasp of anything that might valorise or even affirm it [la valoriser ou mecircme lrsquoaffirmer]35

The lesson then was clear Criticism with its abiding appeal to values and truth had no purchase on the lsquolittle blurts [petits paquets]rsquo and lsquomidget grammar [grammaire drsquooiseau]rsquo36 of Comment crsquoest which refuse to obey its normative assumptions Faced with Beckettrsquos lsquonovelrsquo (which is how the original 1961 Minuit text described itself) criticism was disabled forced to carry on if at all only by enduring through its own interruption It had no other option in other words than to affirm its own impossibility True enough the text to be read still required its reader in the sense of both needing and obligating that reader but reading itself was now bound to discretion both reserve and discontinuity

This is the strategy that informs many of Blanchotrsquos critical essays from the early 1960s Alongside Beckett another influential figure in the writerrsquos changing critical strategy was the poet reneacute Char to whom he devoted two important essays subsequently collected with significant revisions in LrsquoEntretien infini lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutre [reneacute Char and the Thought of the Neuter]rsquo (1963) and lsquoParole de fragment [Fragmentary Speaking]rsquo (1964)37 Charrsquos prominence for Blanchot was not insignificant for the poet too was a writer of fragmentary texts fiercely admiring of Heraclitus a translation of whose fragments he briefly prefaced in 194838 responding to Char in the early 1960s Blanchot adopted a range of shifting approaches The 1963 essay for instance is in three distinct sections the first consists of a series of expository digressive remarks concerning Charrsquos use of impersonal neuter expressions like those found in Heraclitus turning on the question of poetryrsquos relationship (its rapport) with the unknown (lrsquoinconnu) next as a kind of abyssal illustration of this relationship without relationship with the unknown Blanchot provides a dialogue between unnamed interlocutors before signing off on a modest more personal note with a brief evocation of the current beleaguered status of Char the poet (who at the time was much criticised in France for the fragmentary quality of his recent work) which concludes in the version contained in LrsquoEntretien infini with


an unsourced fragment from Charrsquos Pauvreteacute et privilegravege which is inscribed in Charrsquos original to meaningful effect with two politically resonant locations and dates Algiers 1944 Paris 196739

Two sentences earlier Blanchot had defended Char in the following terms lsquoWhat was written still at the margin [en marge] is no longer solely marginal [marginal]rsquo40 Underscoring the implications of this remark passing so to speak from margin to interjection immediately after the version of lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo given in LrsquoEntretien infini and again immediately after the version of lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo that follows it Blanchot added two further fragmentary dialogues printed in italics each published for the first time in LrsquoEntretien infini which served to supplement the two original essays with two additional sequences of fragmentary remarks each consisting of six or seven fragmentary subsections marked with a redoubled mathematical plus-minus neuter sign and each bearing the title Parenthegraveses This twofold redoubled title was in itself of course already double for these two Parenthegraveses not only inscribed a redoubled parenthesis within Blanchotrsquos book the continuity of which they interrupted suspended and fragmented they also offered a possible thematic or philosophical treatment ndash albeit one that fell short of being a full-blown thesis ie not a thegravese but only a parenthegravese not a positing but a putting between or alongside ndash of the phenomenon of parenthetical bracketing inseparable from language as such and thus always already announcing the threat or promise of the fragment Blanchotrsquos two fragmentary parentheses then in so far as they were fragments were necessarily parenthetic in so far as they were parenthetic they were necessarily always already fragments

The main conceptual or quasi-conceptual burden of Blanchotrsquos two parentheses was the thought of the neuter he had begun expounding in the first Char essay In the opening paragraph of lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo in a passage added in 1969 Blanchot turned to glossing the still implicit relationship between the neuter and the fragmentary announced some pages earlier in LrsquoEntretien infini by way of the subtitle used for the third section of the book (lsquoLrsquoAbsence de livre le neutre le fragmentairersquo) borrowed with its word order reversed from the second piece on Char Charrsquos recourse to fragmentary writing Blanchot explained lsquoshows us how to hold together [tenir ensemble] like a repeated expression

A turnInG 21

the fragmentary the neuter [le fragmentaire le neutre] even if the repetition only repeats this enigmatic relationrsquo41 In writing or rewriting le neutre le fragmentaire or le fragmentaire le neutre in this way Blanchot sought to make at least two points First by simply juxtaposing the two expressions without punctuation he indicated a relationship between them but abstained from specifying that relationship which was evoked as a kind of unknown relationship (or relationship with the unknown) that might always revert to an indeterminate relationship without relationship Second by carefully reversing the terms of the relationship he refrained from imposing any hierarchical structure upon them with the result that neither the neuter nor the fragmentary can be said to contain the truth of the other What counts then in Blanchotrsquos thinking of the neuter the fragmentary or the fragmentary the neuter is not any of these terms in themselves but the movement between them by which each prolongs displaces replaces suspends brackets or fragments the other

Each term in Blanchotrsquos pairing then comes to be haunted by the other and no longer coincides with itself as a self-identical concept Each moreover is only available in Blanchotrsquos text as a kind of third-person adjectival substantive or substantivised adjective albeit a substantive without substance so to speak ie simultaneously as both noun and adjective but by that token neither the one nor the other and irreducible to both As he unfolds the expression lsquofragmentary speaking [parole de fragment]rsquo Blanchot goes on to insist that the fragment or fragmentary like the neuter is not merely the effect of some prior simple or dialectical unity Admittedly the temptation of seeing it in those terms cannot easily be dismissed But what is crucial for Blanchot is that the disseminating force of writing necessarily precedes the possibility of any unified or totalising work lsquoFragmentary speaking [Parole de fragment]rsquo he writes lsquoa term that is hard to approach ldquoFragmentrdquo a noun but having the force of a verb which nevertheless does not exist like a fracture [brisure both break and join] a scattering without debris [briseacutees sans deacutebris briseacutee refers to a broken branch leaving a trace or trail] interruption as speech when the halting [lrsquoarrecirct] of intermittence does not halt [nrsquoarrecircte pas] the process but on the contrary provokes it in its very disjointedness [la rupture qui lui appartient] To speak of a fragment is to refer not merely to the fragmentation of an already existing reality nor to some


future wholersquo lsquo[I]n the violence of the fragmentrsquo Blanchot adds lsquoin particular that violence to which reneacute Char gives us access an entirely other relation [un tout autre rapport] is released at least as a promise and a taskrsquo42 Of this other relation this relation with the other that the poem may be thought to enact no doubt little can be presumed in advance except that it exceeds any presumption of identity or dialectic of unity lsquoIn this way the fragmented poemrsquo Blanchot remarks lsquois therefore a poem which is not incomplete [non pas inaccompli] but which makes available another manner of completion [accomplissement] that which is at stake in waiting [lrsquoattente] and questioning [le questionnement] or in affirmation irreducible to unityrsquo43

These are cautious words But if what is at issue in the fragmentary the neuter is another relation or relation with the other that cannot be determined or decided such as Blanchot finds in waiting and questioning this is not to imply that the neuter the fragmentary is a retreat from the necessity of decision or determination On the contrary argues Blanchot the fragmentary the neuter in Char as in Heraclitus is not dedicated to quietistic sameness nor to contemplative passivity but to Difference lsquoDifference that is secret because always deferring speaking and always differing from that which signifies it but also such that everything makes a sign and becomes a sign because of it which is sayable only indirectly but not silent at work in the detour of writingrsquo44 In following this turning this turning aside or around writing is not displaying a merely self-reflexive concern On the contrary albeit discreetly Blanchot in both essays on Char in LrsquoEntretien infini is keen to emphasise the political implications of this detour In quoting the poet at the end of the first essay as we have seen in coded but patent manner he was careful to remind readers of Charrsquos radical commitment to the resistance and his fierce opposition to the Gaullist regime And in concluding lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo Blanchot made a similar point quoting back to Char in acknowledgement and solidarity the exact words Char had sent on rereading (in 1964) lsquoLa Perversion essentielle [Essential Perversion]rsquo that powerful diatribe with which Blanchot six years earlier had denounced de Gaullersquos return to power lsquoPoliticallyrsquo Char had begun lsquoMaurice Blanchot can only go from disappointment to disappointment that is to say from courage to courage [ne peut aller que de deacuteception en deacuteception crsquoestshyagraveshydire de courage en courage] since he does not

A turnInG 23

have the amnesic fickleness of the majority of great contemporary writersrsquo lsquoThus through fragmentary writingrsquo Blanchot concluded in reply lsquothe return of the hesperic accord is announced It is the time of decline but ascending decline [deacuteclin drsquoascendance] a pure detour in its strangeness that which (reneacute Char somewhere says) making it possible to go from disappointment to disappointment leads from courage to courage [permettant drsquoaller de deacuteception en deacuteception conduit de courage en courage] The gods returning having never comersquo45

What was at stake then for Blanchot in the turn to fragmentary writing during the late 1950s and early 1960s was not merely of literary literary critical or philosophical significance There were political implications too which bore on the third important shift taking place in his thinking during that period intimately related to these other changes but with a specific exigency and urgency of its own Blanchotrsquos return to active involvement in politics

In 1958 Blanchot moved back to Paris from Egraveze that village lsquoin the Southrsquo which features so mysteriously (and anonymously) in Au moment voulu where despite frequent trips to Paris he had spent the bulk of the preceding decade He quickly resumed the active interest in politics that had been such a powerful feature of his earlier career as a journalist working for a string of right-wing nationalist and conservative newspapers and magazines up until July or August 194046 But much had changed since then and Blanchotrsquos main priority was now to exercise and defend what he described in 1984 as the right to unexpected speech le droit agrave la parole inattendue a right that for Blanchot the writer and intellectual was inseparable from the detour of the fragmentary47 And as he renewed his passion for the political Blanchot did so not as a dissident member of the nationalist right as he had in the 1930s but on the side of the radical non-communist left notably in partnership with Dionys Mascolo whom Blanchot joined in rejecting de Gaullersquos return to government as a so-called man of providence and in campaigning for an end to Francersquos undeclared colonial war in Algeria As Mascolo recalled some years later Blanchotrsquos first letter on receipt of the inaugural issue of Le 14 Juillet the broadsheet Mascolo had founded with Jean Schuster to coordinate resistance to de Gaulle was uncompromising in its simplicity and its commitment to the future lsquoI should like to express my agreementrsquo wrote Blanchot lsquoI accept neither the past nor the presentrsquo48


Much of what happened next is relatively well known Blanchotrsquos continuing support for the campaign against de Gaulle and alongside Mascolo and others his fierce opposition to the Algerian war culminating in September 1960 in the lsquoManifeste des 121rsquo supporting French conscripts in refusing to take up arms in Algeria which Blanchot was closely involved in drafting though he always insisted that the lsquoDeacuteclaration sur le droit agrave lrsquoinsoumission dans la guerre drsquoAlgeacuteriersquo (as it was more properly known) was a collective document owned by all who signed it and not attributable to any single author49 It was this commitment to collective action experienced in the resistance to the war but pointing beyond Algerian independence itself finally achieved at eacutevian in April 1962 that led Blanchot and a number of friends and associates ndash Dionys Mascolo robert Antelme and Louis-reneacute des Forecircts together with Elio Vittorini Hans Magnus Enzensberger and other collaborators from Italy West Germany and elsewhere ndash to form the project of an international journal which would bring together writers from France Italy and Germany perhaps other countries too and begin to challenge national and nationalist boundaries But after extensive discussions the project for the journal collapsed a casualty of growing mistrust and disagreement between the French and German contingents50

At least in conventional terms the Revue internationale as it has become known was a failed enterprise with merely a selection of essays articles and other interventions (including the first version of Blanchotrsquos lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo) appearing in Italian in 1964 in a solitary guest issue of the journal Il Menabograve edited by Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino The demise of the project was keenly felt by Blanchot but not before he had taken the opportunity in preparatory discussion to argue in favour of the necessary link between political intervention of the kind envisaged by him for the journal and the fragmentary writing he had been exploring since the late 1950s For what was implicit in the turn to the fragmentary among others was the impossibility of attributing any text explicitly fragmentary or not to any single self-present origin This meant not only that all texts were in a sense always already fragmentary but that any fragmentary text already had an indeterminable that is always future relationship with the other or with others This is what Blanchot had endeavoured to show in his reading of the poems of Char By that logic any fragmentary

A turnInG 25

text was always already a text with multiple authors it was by definition a collective text that might be signed in a gesture of irreducible singularity by each and every indeterminable other This is why for Blanchot it followed that the preferred manner of writing for the proposed journal would have to be fragmentary writing carried out collectively and in common

But how to tell the difference between that which may and that which may not be described as fragmentary if indeed that difference exists In a long paper bearing on the project at hand and not originally intended for publication mindful too of the fact that the fragmentary was itself not one but always already several Blanchot set out in some detail the thought of the fragmentary that had come to dominate his relationship to literature criticism and philosophy and inflect his understanding of the political agenda as it presented itself in France and elsewhere in the early 1960s Thinking aloud perhaps as well as addressing his potential collaborators Blanchot wrote as follows

The journal will be made up of fragments not articles (the essay searching for a form) Simplifying things we can say that there are four types of fragments (1) The fragment that is merely a dialectical moment within a much larger whole (2) The elliptical obscurely violent form of the aphorism which as a fragment is already complete in itself Etymologically aphorism means horizon a horizon that limits and closes (3) The fragment that is linked to questing mobility and that nomadic thinking which occurs in affirmations that are separate from each other and demand to be separated (Nietzsche) (4) Finally a literature of the fragment [une litteacuterature de fragment] which stands outside the whole either because it supposes the whole to have already been realised (all literature is a literature of the end of time) or because alongside those forms of language in which the whole is articulated and expressed (ie knowledge work and salvation) literature senses an entirely other kind of speaking releasing thought from simply being thought with a view to unity in other words demanding an essential discontinuity In this sense all literature is the fragment [toute litteacuterature est le fragment] irrespective of whether it is short or infinitely long provided it points to a space of language in which the sense and function of each and every moment is to render all others


indeterminate or else (this is the other aspect) where what is at stake is some affirmation irreducible to any process of unification51

The collapse of the Revue internationale was a painful disappoint-ment for Blanchot But as Char had assured him disappointment was only one part of the story and in years to come in publishing LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli in 1962 in composing during and after the eacuteveacutenements of May 1968 various unsigned fragments that later appeared in the solitary October 1968 issue of the journal Comiteacute in reworking important sections of LrsquoEntretien infini in 1969 (which also included a fragmentary narrative already entitled lsquoLrsquoEntretien infinirsquo from March 1966) and most ambitiously of all in refashioning a complex new fragmentary idiom for himself in Le Pas aushydelagrave (The Step Not Beyond) and LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Blanchot was to display extraordinary persistence and resourcefulness in keeping faith with the fragmentary His aim no doubt was to affirm writing as a response to the threat and promise of the future But before that he also had to reconsider the past history of the fragment which he did by returning more than once to some influential predecessors the Jena romantics Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis and perhaps most importantly of all Nietzsche

III

From fragment to fragmentary

Many are the works of the ancients that have become fragments Many are the works of the moderns that were fragments the moment they were produced [gleich bei der Entstehung]

FrIEDrICH SCHLEGEL Athenaeum Fragments52

As Blanchot was aware this was not the first time the fragment had been identified with literaturersquos future Nor was it the first time the completion of philosophy had given way to the incompletion of writing nor was it the first time the boundaries between fiction theory and criticism had been boldly redrawn nor indeed was it the first time writing in fragments had been entrusted with a

A turnInG 27

new challenging political purpose To equate literature with the fragment to rediscover the infinite within the finite to reach a new understanding of poetryrsquos relationship with the unknown these were already some of the most pressing concerns of those contemporaries of Hegel with whom the philosopher had grown quickly impatient the Jena romantics notably Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis who in a brief period at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were among the first to explore the future possibilities and implications of fragmentary writing

But there were Blanchot pointed out many different kinds of fragments And on several occasions in the wake of his own turn to fragmentary writing as already apropos of reneacute Char and Heraclitus Blanchot was drawn to reconsider critically the past history of the poetic literary or philosophical fragment An early contribution to that effort from August 1964 sandwiched appropriately enough between texts dealing with interruption and the narrating voice was an essay on the Athenaeum that short-lived but hugely influential journal edited by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel in Jena between 1798 and 1800 in which much of what is now commonly associated with the romantic artwork was first formulated53

That there are several aspects of the Jena Fruumlhromantik which find a ready echo in Blanchotrsquos writing has often been noted54 Among these might be listed for instance the assertion that lsquowhere philosophy stops so literature [Poesie] must beginrsquo as Fr Schlegel puts it in fragment 45 of the Ideen of 1800 which Blanchot reworks in distinctive fashion the recasting of the critical essay as semi-fictional dialogue already attempted in Schlegelrsquos 1800 lsquoGespraumlch uumlber Poesie [Dialogue on Poetry]rsquo and explored by Blanchot as we have seen in texts from the late 1950s and early 1960s the recourse to authorial anonymity which was a feature not only of the fragments published in the Athenaeum but of many of Blanchotrsquos own later political writings notably in the samizdat broadsheet Comiteacute the appeal too to friendship with both the familiar and the unknown as being decisively linked to the plural space of literature indeed the very notion that history itself might be subject to an upheaval whose character far exceeded what it was possible to think under the rubric of the political not to mention the ironic self-reflexivity without which the critical thinking of the Fruumlhromantik would not be what it was and which in its


own particular manner is a signature characteristic of Blanchotrsquos reacutecits too

These convergences between Blanchotrsquos work and the Jena romantics are far from coincidental55 What they emphasise is the extent to which the mutation traversing Blanchotrsquos fiction and critical and political thinking was more than simply a response to the anxieties of the postwar world for it was fundamentally related to the constitution of (modern) art itself As Blanchot was quick to realise literaturersquos future as disappearance necessarily returned it together with the literary criticism shadowing it to the place where both had always already begun which is to say in philosophy Yet as literature and criticism rediscovered this common origin they did so with the enduring sense that there was something in literature and therefore in philosophy too that remained strangely inassimilable to philosophy Hegelrsquos inaugural words according to Blanchot already implied as much For if philosophy had supplied literature with a birth certificate it had also handed it a death warrant It had launched literature into the world as an autonomous possibility subject to its own effectivity freedom and finality but by the selfsame gesture it had dismissed it as that which was ineffectual constrained and without purpose which survived itself interminably as worklessness ineluctable demand and boundless error Which was why the ending of literature for Blanchot was anything but an end it affirmed instead literaturersquos future as that which is still and forever yet to come

This made a critical understanding of literaturersquos past as both thing and concept all the more pressing and in rereading the texts of Schlegel and Novalis in 1964 Blanchot was particularly attentive to the competing strands present in the thinking and the legacy of the Athenaeum Much depended on whether the critic privileged the movementrsquos beginnings or ending In the case of Fr Schlegel the choice was particularly acute for it meant deciding whether to place the emphasis on the youthful radical atheistic and individualist firebrand or to favour instead the mature diplomat journalist and Catholic convert best known for his association with Metternich56 So while Blanchot was deeply sympathetic to what Schlegel and Novalis had attempted under the rubric of fragmentary writing he remained sharply critical of Schlegelrsquos reluctance to affirm radically what was at stake in the fragment Schlegelrsquos failing in Blanchotrsquos eyes was to

A turnInG 29

have persisted in thinking of the fragment solely on the model of the aphorism lsquoentirely separate from the surrounding world like a miniature artwork and complete in itself like a hedgehog [ein Igel]rsquo as Schlegel famously and memorably described it in 179857 Blanchot explained his objection as follows

In truth and particularly in the case of Friedrich Schlegel the fragment often appears to be a means of facile self-indulgence [un moyen de srsquoabandonner complaisamment agrave soishymecircme] rather than an attempt to elaborate a more rigorous mode of writing If so writing in fragments [fragmentairement] simply means accepting onersquos own disorder retreating into oneself in self-satisfied isolation and thus refusing the opening represented by the demand of the fragment [lrsquoexigence fragmentaire] which does not exclude but exceeds totality [ ] [Schlegel] takes the fragment back to the aphorism that is to the closure of a perfect sentence The shortfall [alteacuteration] is perhaps unavoidable but it means (1) considering the fragment as a quintessential text [un texte concentreacute] having its centre in itself rather than in the field [le champ] set up by that fragment together with other fragments alongside (2) neglecting the interval (suspension or pause) that separates the fragments from each other and turns that separation into the rhythmic principle of the work in its very structure (3) forgetting that the tendency of this manner of writing is not to make a view of the whole more difficult or to loosen any bonds of unity but to make possible new relations that are no longer part of any unity in the same way that they exceed any whole58

Two versions two turnings two understandings of the fragment come into focus here the one attributed to Schlegel appeals to the interiority wholeness and solipsism of self the other articulated by Blanchot affirms exteriority dispersion otherness That on which they turn is the distinction between an art of the fragment that is nostalgic for the work and content to remain within established horizons and one that reaches beyond the horizon and beckons to an unforeseeable future without present between what in 1978 in an analysis much indebted to Blanchot Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy at least provisionally proposed calling incompletion (inachegravevement) and worklessness (deacutesœuvrement)59


But how tenable how reliable is the distinction Neither Lacoue-Labarthe nor Nancy nor indeed Blanchot is entirely convinced60 With good reason ndash for there is nothing about the fragment or the fragmentary that is ever completely decided The fragmentary Blanchot suggests is a promise To that extent it is also an infinite task to which the writer returns on numerous occasions not to define the fragmentary as such since it is precisely what resists appropriation lsquoas suchrsquo but rather to subtract the fragmentary from the fragment and divide or separate it from itself Consider for instance the following exploratory restlessly questioning fragment on the question of the fragmentary in Le Pas aushydelagrave

uml The fragmentary what does it offer us ndash a question demand or practical decision No longer to be able to write except in relation to the fragmentary is not to write in fragments except if the fragment is itself a sign for the fragmentary To think the fragmentary think it in relation to the neuter the one and the other seemingly uttered together yet without community of presence and each so to speak outside the other The fragmentary writing belongs to the fragmentary [relegraveve du fragmentaire] when everything has been said There would have to be an exhaustion of speech and by speech the completion of all (of presence as all) qua logos for it to be possible for fragmentary writing to let itself be remarked Yet we cannot in writing free ourselves from a logic of totality by considering it as ideally completed in order to retain as a lsquopure remainderrsquo a possibility of writing outside of everything without use or without term which a quite different still elusive logic (of repetition limits and return) might be thought to make available to us to study What is already clear is that writing of this kind will never be lsquopurersquo but on the contrary will have already been adulterated by dint of an adulteration that in no way might be defined (ie fixed) with reference to some norm not only because it coexists always with all forms of existence speech thought or temporality which alone may be thought to make it possible but because it excludes any consideration of pure form that is any attempt to approach it as true or proper even in its disappropriation even the inversions to which one has recourse by sheer convenience ndash rebeginning as beginning disappropriation as authenticity repetition as difference ndash leave us still within the logic of validity

A turnInG 31

The fragment then concludes without concluding as follows

The fragmentary expresses itself best perhaps in a language which does not acknowledge it Fragmentary meaning neither the fragment as part of a whole nor the fragmentary in itself Aphorisms sayings maxims quotations proverbs themes set phrases are perhaps all further removed from it than that infinitely continuous discourse whose only content is lsquoits own continuityrsquo a continuity that is only sure of itself when it supposes itself to be circular and in that circuit accepts the precondition of a return whose law is outside [aushydehors] and where the outside is outside the law [horsshyloi]61

Not the fragment as closure then but the infinite continuity of the fragmentary writing not as obedience to the law but radical scepticism and exposure to the outside the work not as self-coincident reflection but the endless unworking of that which dispersed always already differs from itself The fragmentary in other words is not an identifiable literary critical or philosophical genre it is a spectral demand that does not exist as such but which beyond aesthetics or ontology continues to inscribe itself time on the edge of time as a limit on the limit never to be grasped as such but always already effacing itself as an impossible trace a trace of the impossible Which is why it requires Blanchot again and again to return partly in response to the work of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy to the example of Schlegel together with other key romantic figures such as Novalis Fichte Schelling Schleiermacher Bettina von Arnim and August Klingemann the anonymous author of Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura62 all of whom Blanchot reads and rereads in the course of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre perpetually reiterating the point ever the same but ever different that the romantic fragment is not yet the fragmentary the fragmentary is still to come

Such was already Blanchotrsquos conclusion in lsquoLrsquoAthenaeumrsquo an essay overshadowed by the collapse of the project for the Revue internationale towards which it silently gestured In closing the essay however he also let slip another name that of another fragmentary thinker and writer of the future Nietzsche

But who or what was NietzscheNietzsche was of course a crucial reference point albeit an

intensely contested one for a host of writers and thinkers in France


and elsewhere during the 1930s 1940s 1950s and 1960s including of course Heidegger Bataille Jaspers Jean Wahl Karl Loumlwith Eugen Fink Deleuze Klossowski Foucault Derrida and Blanchot too63 Having first written at any length about Nietzsche (with whose work he had no doubt long been familiar) shortly after the war Blanchot began thinking in more detail about the contemporary figure of the thinker some twelve years later in August 1958 in an essay entitled appropriately enough lsquoNietzsche aujourdrsquohui [Nietzsche Today]rsquo mainly concerned with the history of the falsification of Nietzschersquos texts revealed by the recent editorial work of Karl Schlechta64 In the essay Blanchot also took the opportunity to consider recent work by Jaspers Lukaacutecs and Heidegger including notably as far as the last was concerned the material on Nietzsche contained in Holzwege (1950) Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze (1954) and Was heiszligt Denken (1954) retaining the same title eleven years later in LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchot was naturally obliged to make extensive revisions to his text in order to bring it up to date which he did by nuancing his account of Schlechtarsquos editorial labours in the knowledge that a new edition of Nietzschersquos work undertaken by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari had at last begun to appear and by adding a few passing references to Fink Foucault Deleuze and Klossowski More significantly in this later version of the essay Blanchot also needed to take stock of Heideggerrsquos two volumes on Nietzsche based on lectures originally delivered between 1936 and 1941 but not published till 1961 which prompted the second of the two lengthy footnotes added or extended in 196965

In the interim Blanchotrsquos own views had also begun to change Whereas in 1958 for instance largely following Jaspers (for whom lsquothe whole literary form of Nietzschersquos thinking remained aphoristic throughoutrsquo66) he was able to describe Nietzschersquos writing as lsquoessentially aphoristic [essentiellement aphoristique]rsquo he now revised the comment to read lsquoin principle fragmentary [en principe fragmentaire]rsquo Similarly the proposition advanced in 1958 again after Jaspers that Nietzsche may have suffered from lsquothe aphoristic nature that was one of the essential sources of his originalityrsquo was replaced eleven years later by the observation that the source of possible dismay on Nietzschersquos part was lsquothe demand of the fragment [cette exigence fragmentaire]rsquo There were other minor adjustments too In 1958 summarising the tasks facing any interpreter of Nietzsche Blanchot citing Jaspers spoke of the need to lsquograsp the

A turnInG 33

ldquoreal dialecticrdquo [ressaisir ldquola dialectique reacuteellerdquo]rsquo at work in Nietzschersquos writing But by 1969 this recommendation was no longer sufficient If anything it might be thought dangerously regressive whence no doubt Blanchotrsquos decision to gloss if not entirely displace the original meaning of the phrase which in revised form now commended the reader to lsquograsp the ldquoreal dialecticrdquo thinking as the play of the world the text as fragment [ressaisir ldquola dialectique reacuteellerdquo la penseacutee comme jeu du monde le texte comme fragment]rsquo67

But even in August 1958 Blanchotrsquos original essay was already not enough and was followed a month later by a further essay on Nietzsche mainly concerned with the question of nihilism largely refracted through the work of Heidegger notably the lecture course Was heiszligt Denken and Heideggerrsquos sixtieth-birthday exchange with Ernst Juumlnger which in 1955 gave rise to the publication of Heideggerrsquos long letter to Juumlnger Uumlber die Linie better known under its later title Zur Seinsfrage68 Here too when Blanchotrsquos September 1958 essay was reprised in LrsquoEntretien infini adjustments were needed and in the two closing paragraphs of his account of nihilism in Nietzsche (more essentially a debate with Heidegger) Blanchot departed almost completely from his eleven-year-old script to claim a very different status for Nietzschersquos writing than that conferred upon it by the thinker of Being lsquoPhilosophy trembles in Nietzschersquo Blanchot now wrote But was this because he was the last philosopher the ultimate metaphysician as Heidegger contended Or was it not rather Blanchot went on

because required [appeleacute] by an entirely other language the disruptive writing [lrsquoeacutecriture drsquoeffraction] which is destined to accept lsquowordsrsquo only in so far as they have been crossed out [barreacutes] spaced out [espaceacutes] put under erasure [mis en croix] by the very movement that sets them apart but in that distance holds them back as a place of difference he had to contend with a fractious demand [une exigence de rupture] which constantly diverts them from what he has the power [pouvoir] to think69

It was not however until the next essay in LrsquoEntretien infini lsquoNietzsche et lrsquoeacutecriture fragmentaire [Nietzsche and Fragmentary Writing]rsquo originally published in two parts in December 1966 and January 1967 and written in the margins of recent work by


Fink (Nietzsches Philosophie and Spiel als Weltsymbol) Foucault (Les Mots et les choses) Deleuze (Nietzsche et la philosophie) and Derrida (LrsquoEacutecriture et la diffeacuterence) that Blanchot began fully to measure the consequences of this radical shift in emphasis As his title suggested it was now time to turn aside from philosophy in order to attend to a very different exigency in Nietzschersquos thinking that of writing itself in its relation with the fragmentary70

Blanchotrsquos first move was once more to subtract there were he suggested two ways of speaking in Nietzsche two paroles two voices two tendencies two modes of inscription The first was continuous coherent and systematic even in its tireless efforts to undermine each of these traits of its own and such key themes or concepts as will to power eternal return or the overman were ample proof of the traditional philosophical perhaps even metaphysical ambitions of Nietzschersquos anti-dialectical dialectic But there was also something else Blanchot argued that was dissymmetrical with the first irreducible to any conceptual programme and inassimilable to any dialectic or anti-dialectic which manifested itself albeit by not manifesting itself in so far as it exceeded all manifestation as such in the responsiveness of Nietzschersquos writing to the demand of the fragment The distinction was not an arbitrary one It was of some urgency for Blanchotrsquos own writing For mirrored in the two slopes coexisting in Nietzschersquos thought were the two directions of what Blanchot at an earlier moment in his career had thematised alongside Levinas as the il y a ontological proposition here (and as such a continuation of metaphysics) and suspensive affirmation of the neuter there (and as such irreducible to all ontology)71 The stakes in other words could not be higher and this explains no doubt as we shall see the increasing prominence of Blanchotrsquos engagement with Nietzsche in the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s

The fragmentary in Nietzsche Blanchot went on in LrsquoEntretien infini was neither a theoretical discourse nor a literary manner It was less a force than an array of differences an exigency making itself felt in a number of oblique disparate and shifting ways Blanchotrsquos strategy was not to gather together and seek to reconcile the many apparent contradictions in Nietzschersquos writing by appealing to any single ontological psychological biographical historical or political explanation But nor was he content to let the disjoined parts of Nietzschersquos writing stand as the sign of an essentially literary

A turnInG 35

or pathologically compromised intellect Several years earlier he had applauded Heidegger for awarding Also sprach Zarathustra the same status and importance for Western thought as a treatise by Aristotle72 But rather than firmly rooting Nietzschersquos work within the history of metaphysics as Heidegger had sought to do Blanchotrsquos concern was to explore the internal slippages and discontinuities by which motifs themes concepts even names were divorced or separated from themselves in Nietzschersquos writing that is subtracted exceeded neutered or neutralised Blanchotrsquos efforts therefore were primarily directed towards thinking that towards which Nietzschersquos work gestured too without ever being able to formulate it as such that which thought is constrained to think once it leaves itself behind without relinquishing itself and strains or reaches towards the outside This for instance is what Blanchot has to say at one stage with a murmur of disagreement addressed to Eugen Fink (and to Heidegger) about Nietzschersquos thinking of the concept of world (lsquoworldrsquo in Nietzsche Heidegger had it lsquois the name for beings as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen]rsquo)

Nietzsche thinks the world this is his concern And when he thinks the world as lsquoa monster of forcesrsquo as lsquothis mystery-world of twofold delightrsquo as lsquomy Dionysiac worldrsquo or as he does elsewhere as the play of the world of this world this enigma that is the solution to every enigma he does not think being [lrsquoecirctre] On the contrary rightly or wrongly he thinks the world in order to free thought just as much from the idea of being [lrsquoideacutee drsquoecirctre] as from that of the whole [lrsquoideacutee du tout] just as much from the requirement of meaning [lrsquoexigence du sens] as from that of good [lrsquoexigence du bien] in order to free thought from thought obliging it not to abdicate but to think more than it can [penser plus qursquoelle ne peut penser] think something other than what it is possible for it to think [autre chose que son possible] in other words to speak by saying the lsquomorersquo [ce laquo plus raquo] the lsquoexcessrsquo [ce laquo surplus raquo] which precedes and follows all speech The method may be criticised but what it proclaims cannot be so easily dismissed For Nietzsche being meaning aim value God day and night the whole and unity are only valid within the world but the lsquoworldrsquo cannot be thought cannot be said as meaning or as a whole even less as a world beyond the world The world is the very outside of itself [est son dehors mecircme] the affirmation


that overwhelms [deacuteborde] all power to affirm and in the ceaseless movement of discontinuity is the play of its perpetual redoubling will to power eternal return73

In writing about Nietzsche Blanchot was fond of citing Jaspersrsquos remark that every proposition in the thinkerrsquos work is echoed elsewhere by another that contradicts it74 Blanchotrsquos purpose however was not to identify inconsistencies as such in order to resolve them or even allow them to cancel each other out His strategy was rather to search for a vanishing point a point de fuite indicative not of the power or potency of conceptual thought (ie what it can) but far more radically its impossibilities weaknesses and erasures (ie what happens when it exceeds its horizon of competence) The approach then is not so much hermeneutic as hyperbolic the aim being to push Nietzschersquos assertions to the limit to that extreme point where something other than the regularity of the concept is exposed an otherness that escapes conceptual explication and can only be inscribed by way of a logic of supplementarity that is a logic of both subtraction and addition according to which every articulation by dint of the fragmentary is no sooner affirmed than withdrawn such that withdrawal features henceforth as a species of affirmation and affirmation as a species of withdrawal the one erasing or overwriting the other in a ceaseless movement of dispersion Such logic has no proper name which is why it can receive provisionally at least the modest unassuming title of the neuter the neuter that has no centre unity or self-identity but which nonetheless exceeding positive and negative alike cannot but be affirmed which speaks in language but is not identifiable with any single word or expression or concept for it precedes and outstrips all available terms which it hollows out displaces and re-marks Neither one nor the other then but always the other the other such is Blanchotrsquos reading and writing strategy when faced with the challenge of the demand of the fragment

In attending to Nietzsche then Blanchot not only reads a discourse reaching beyond its own extremity He also pushes his own writing to the limit in an effort to respond to the fragmentary as that which at once urgently demands yet obstinately resists thinking In its response to Nietzsche it is by necessity rather than sympathy that Blanchotrsquos own writing becomes fragmentary in its turn with the writer insistently re-marking his text as a sign of

A turnInG 37

simultaneous withdrawal and effacement with the same double neuter plus-minus mathematical symbol () adopted elsewhere in LrsquoEntretien infini as witness to the parenthetical movement of writing as both exposition and exposure

In traversing the fragmentary in Schlegel Char and Nietzsche Blanchot was not seeking to resurrect the past The task was much rather to fashion an idiom as he put it in LrsquoEntretien infini such as might simultaneously name the possible and respond to the impossible75 In doing so Blanchot was to encounter some of the most pressing questions of the age

IV

the limits of nihilism

uml The last witness the end of history an epoch a turning a crisis ndash or even the end of philosophy (metaphysics) [ ] Why does writing understood as a change of epoch [changement drsquoeacutepoque] under-s tood as the experience (non-experience) of disaster in each case imply the words inscribed at the head of this lsquofragmentrsquo while also revoking them ndash even if what they announce is announced as something new [un nouveau] that has always already taken place a radical change [changement radical] from which all present is excluded

BLANCHOT LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre76

For all who experienced them at first hand the 1950s were years of anxiety and uncertainty of upheaval and stagnation discovery and obfuscation readjustment and resistance The challenges were numerous material political social intellectual philosophical literary

Heidegger put it more grandiloquently and solemnly than most for arguably particular reasons of his own in his famous 1951ndash52 lecture course Was heiszligt Denken The bookrsquos title as its author was at pains to point out was avowedly twofold meaning both what is called thinking and what is it that calls for thinking It referred not only to the sempiternal question of the nature of thinking but also in a more originary or radical sense to


that which in Heideggerrsquos view demanded or required thought lsquotodayrsquo that moment both within and beyond history which the lecturer glossed with unmistakeable contemporary relevance by reminding his German-speaking listeners of the celebrated opening lines of the second version of Houmllderlinrsquos lsquoMnemosynersquo dedicated to the goddess of memory mother to the nine muses lsquoEin Zeichen sind wir deutungslos Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast Die Sprache in der Fremde verlorenrsquo (lsquoA sign we are without meaning Without pain we are and have nearly Lost our language in foreign landsrsquo)77 In the Winter of 1951 having started with Houmllderlin Heidegger went on to develop two further closely connected propositions The first was in the form of a quotation from the confidential fourth part of Also sprach Zarathustra from 1884ndash85 lsquoThe wilderness is growing [Die Wuumlste waumlchst]rsquo went Nietzschersquos text lsquowoe to him who harbours wildernesses [weh Dem der Wuumlsten birgt]rsquo78 As for the second this came from Heidegger himself and summed up the essential theme of the lecture course as a whole lsquoWhat most calls for thinking [Das Bedenklichste]rsquo he announced lsquoin our time that calls for thinking [in unserer bedenklichen Zeit] is that we are not yet thinking [ist daszlig wir noch nicht denken]rsquo79

In unfolding these twin assertions Heidegger was quick to defend himself against the charge of cultural pessimism Nietzschersquos prognosis contained a fundamental truth that the present epoch was essentially synonymous with the reduction of the Being of beings to a series of metaphysical representations which made modern scientific and technological progress possible but by the same token transformed the whole of being into an all-encompassing nihilistic wasteland bereft of all memory and of all future This according to Heidegger was what Nietzsche had in mind when he resorted in Zarathustra to the strange figure of the ever growing wilderness lsquoWhat it means is thisrsquo he commented

devastation [Verwuumlstung] is spreading Devastation [Verwuumlstung] is more than destruction [Zerstoumlrung] Devastation [Verwuumlstung] is eerier [unheimlicher] than annihilation [Vernichtung] Destruction [Zerstoumlrung] only eliminates what has already grown and been built but devastation [Verwuumlstung] prevents future growth and obstructs any building Devastation [Verwuumlstung] is eerier than mere annihilation [Vernichtung] This too eliminates everything

A turnInG 39

including Nothing whereas devastation [Verwuumlstung] fosters and promotes that which prevents and obstructs [das Unterbindende und Verwehrende]80

These then were dark times though they were not incompatible Heidegger hastened to add in this period of incipient Wirtshyschaftswunder with extensive material happiness The future however remained bleak and the prospect of infinite overcoming that the Nietzschean overman seemed to promise was no different for it was merely a continuation or more accurately a culmination of the same unremitting centuries-old history of metaphysics

The present epoch though endless nevertheless had its limits This is what Heidegger gleaned from the temporal structure of his second proposition which in the form of a lsquonot yetrsquo implied an essentially futural dimension What it was that required thinking according to Heidegger as the fundamental question of this (and any other) epoch was the crucial twofold of Being and being(s) in other words the ontological difference This for Heidegger was not only what it was imperative to think it was what made thinking possible at all The onus placed on thinking was not however that in mechanical fashion it should simply repeat itself but that it should envisage another turning another thinking so to speak of the ontological difference Much hinged on this possibility not so much history in the conventional sense but the fate the Geschick of the West What was therefore needed insisted Heidegger was a different kind of repetition a renewal in the shape of a return to the beginning to the Presocratics and those originary texts in which thinking had first been spoken and which for the purpose of Was heiszligt Denken Heidegger limited to a small number of fragments from Parmenides But this return was less of a restoration than an attempt to speak anew what had never been thought as such and necessarily so not by historical accident nor by sinister design This was the task in which Heidegger was himself engaged and in which he sought to enlist not just the thought of the Greeks but the poetic thinking of such rare poets as Houmllderlin

There is little doubt that in the mid-1950s Heideggerrsquos lectures found in Blanchot an attentive and responsive reader First they extended and developed a poetico-philosophical dialogue between Heidegger and Houmllderlin that had long been a centre of concern for


the writer and which he acknowledged again some months after the publication of Was heiszligt Denken in an article on Houmllderlin and Heidegger for La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise initially entitled lsquoUn tournant [A Turning]rsquo the burden of which was explicitly to comment on the figure of the turn [Wende] already associated with Houmllderlin by Heidegger in an important essay from Holzwege five years earlier but to which Blanchot imparts a further political (but also more than political) turn of his own by joining to it the thought of that vaterlaumlndische Umkehr or retournement natal (lsquonative reversalrsquo suggests Ann Smock in her translation of The Space of Literature) found in Houmllderlinrsquos notes to his 1804 translation of Sophoclesrsquo Antigone81 lsquoWe are at a turning [Nous sommes agrave un tournant]rsquo this was Blanchotrsquos thought too in January 1955 and this his immediate question both to himself and to his readers lsquoThis sense of being at a turning this call to turn or to turn back what does it mean [Ce sentiment drsquoecirctre agrave un tournant cet appel agrave se tourner ou agrave se retourner que signifieshytshyil]rsquo82

For Blanchot the question was not an isolated one For the second set of reasons why Blanchot felt particularly solicited by Heideggerrsquos lecture course was that Heideggerrsquos exploration of nihilism in Also sprach Zarathustra turned not only on the figure of the overman Nietzschersquos Uumlbermensch but also of the last man der letzte Mann who would shortly provide Blanchot with the title of his last self-professed reacutecit of 1957 which may even be read as a covert or oblique commentary on the disparaging claim made by Heidegger explicating Nietzsche to the effect that it was precisely because the last man in Nietzschersquos view embodied humanity as it was hitherto formed [das bisherige Menschenwesen] that he the last man as Heidegger put it was lsquofurthest removed from the possibility of passing beyond himself [am weitesten von der Moumlglichkeit entfernt uumlber sich hinweg zu gehen]rsquo83 If indeed it was the case as Blanchot would later write that nihilism might be defined as the idea that everything can be overcome and therefore summed up in lsquothe possibility of all transcendence [la possibiliteacute de tout deacutepassement]rsquo84 then it followed that the last man exposed to the impossibility of ending was the only available necessarily indecisive response to nihilism one that invoked the impossibility (for reasons that Blanchot would soon endeavour to explicate) of that total human destruction which in other respects seemed only too possible in this age of nuclear

A turnInG 41

proliferation For by the mid-1950s Blanchot was not alone in realising that something radically new had entered the world It was now within humanityrsquos power to destroy both itself and the planet on which all life depended It was enough to define an epoch a new era which at least one of Blanchotrsquos interlocutors from April 1960 was able to sum up using an expression Heidegger had increasingly made his own la technique moderne modern technology As that anonymous voice explains

In the same way that earliest times [les temps originels] were characterised by the importance of elemental or telluric forces so today the event we are facing has an elemental aspect to it the impersonal forces [puissances impersonnelles] represented by the intervention of mass phenomena the supremacy of a machine-like calculus [du jeu machinal] and the harnessing of the constitutive forces of matter These factors can be summed up in a single term modern technology [technique moderne] which comprises collective organisation on a planetary scale for the purpose of calculated planning mechanisation and automation and atomic energy atomic being the key word here What hitherto only the stars could do man now does Man has become a star [astre] The astral era [cette egravere astrale] now commencing can no longer be contained within the bounds of history [nrsquoappartient plus aux mesures de lrsquohistoire]85

This is not to say that Blanchot was at one with Heidegger in his analysis of the demands of the present Indeed his diagnosis differed from that of the philosopher in a number of crucial respects This was already apparent from his reading of Nietzsche Indeed when in 1966 he began explicitly to address the question of fragmentary writing in Nietzsche he took up the phrase from Also sprach Zarathustra ndash lsquoDie Wuumlste waumlchst rsquo lsquothe wilderness is growing rsquo ndash which had provided Heidegger as we have seen with a key emphasis in his account of nihilism and wrote to very different effect as follows

And when Nietzsche says lsquothe wilderness is growing [le deacutesert srsquoaccroicirct]rsquo fragmentary speaking [la parole de fragment] takes the place of this wilderness without ruins except that in the case of the former the devastation always more vast is always


kept tightly within the dispersion of limits A stationary process [Devenir drsquoimmobiliteacute] That fragmentary speaking may appear to play into the hands of nihilism and provide it in its very inappropriateness [disconvenance] with an appropriate form [la forme qui convienne] this is something it is careful not to deny [deacutementir] And yet how far it outstrips this power of negation mdash not that by outplaying it it evades it [qursquoen srsquoen jouant elle la deacutejoue] on the contrary it gives it a free hand Nietzsche recognised mdash this was the point of his tireless critique of Plato mdash that being was light [lrsquoecirctre eacutetait lumiegravere] and he subjected the light of being to the severest suspicion This was a decisive moment in the destruction of metaphysics and mdash even more so mdash of ontology86

Before translating Nietzschersquos motto into a truthful pronouncement a true word about truth ein wahres Wort as Heidegger calls it87 Blanchot cautiously hesitates Not because he doubted the authority of Nietzschersquos fragment sung at both the beginning and the ending of his song in a bellowing voice and to the accompaniment of a magicianrsquos harp by the wanderer claiming to be Zarathustrarsquos shadow but because its fragmentary status putting it at the limit (Blanchotrsquos analysis begins lsquoFragmentary speaking is speaking only at the limit [La parole de fragment nrsquoest parole qursquoagrave la limite]rsquo) divides it from truth ie both the truth of nihilism which the fragmentary disobeying its own apparent negativity silently exceeds and the truth of Being closely associated by Heidegger with light as opening and manifestation but which the fragmentary withdrawing from any possibility of world discreetly contests What the fragmentary suggests here for Blanchot is that there is something inexhaustible neither positive nor negative about Nietzschersquos ever expanding wilderness and it is this realisation that in the passage cited best explains Blanchotrsquos abrupt transition from nihilism to Platonism The will to power or force of the wilderness (words that even in Nietzsche are already under erasure) as mobilised by the fragmentary lies here lsquoforcersquo says Blanchot lsquoescapes light it is not what might be thought to be simply deprived of light darkness still aspiring to become daylight what it shrinks from scandal of scandals is any reference to sight at all [toute reacutefeacuterence optique] consequently however much its action may be determined by form and held within formal

A turnInG 43

boundaries form itself an arrangement of structure always lets it slip away Neither visible nor invisiblersquo88

The wilderness then on Blanchotrsquos reading to the extent that it is drawn ever further beyond its own boundaries by the fragmentary is thus neither full nor empty neither closed nor open neither true nor false It is a space or non-space whose only trait is its neutrality its status or non-status as a neuter lying between or outside all positionality And it is worth noting that as he moves from Nietzsche to detailed exegesis of a key fragment from Parmenides in his Summer 1952 lecture course Heidegger too pauses for a moment to consider that the syntactic structure of the opening phrase of that fragment (Fr 6) hinges on an impersonal subjectless expression in the Greek a neuter [Neutrum] he briefly calls it crὴ usually translated as it is necessary or required89 This however does not satisfy Heidegger who proposes instead to give Parmenidesrsquo neuter the same syntactic status as the es in the talismanic es gibt Sein and thus construe it as proposed in the lsquoLetter on Humanismrsquo of 1946 as referring to Being But the impersonal neuter es that gives Being cannot be more originary than Being and cannot therefore be otherwise than Being giving itself to itself90 This allows Heidegger in turn to retranslate Parmenidesrsquo neuter in originary authentically Greek manner as signifying the presence of the present and this is arguably one of those moments that enabled Blanchot in a discreet footnote in October 1958 to declare Heideggerian Being in so far as it was a Neuter as Levinas contended to be a shamefaced Neuter lsquoun Neutre un peu honteuxrsquo says Blanchot that fell far short of what for Blanchot always already preceded any origin91

That the fragmentary exceeded all negation or negativity was a crucial insight for Blanchot What it implied was that nihilism at the limit by a kind of homeopathic reversal already contained its own remedy At that extreme point but only at that extreme point nihilism reversed itself92 On this prospectus though Blanchot maintained a strong interest in the fragmentary writings of Heraclitus as we shall see it also followed that Heideggerrsquos turning back to the Greek beginning was anything but unproblematic More urgent at any event than any such step back (or Schritt zuruumlck)93 as far as Blanchot was concerned was the need to meditate the consequences of the exposure of thought to what in 1973 in a pointed rejoinder to Heidegger he would explicitly thematise as the step ndash not ndash beyond le pas aushydelagrave There were other more immediate questions


too for Blanchot ndash which were political On that front between his own thinking and that of Heidegger there had long been a crucial difference not to say a veritable chasm and in several earlier texts Blanchotrsquos reservations with regard to the political implications of Heideggerrsquos thought were plainly in evidence In subsequent years most markedly from the publication of LrsquoEntretien infini onwards as the changes made in 1969 to the essay lsquoNietzsche aujourdrsquohuirsquo amply testify he was to become increasingly forthright in his condemnation of Heideggerrsquos support for the Nazi State But nowhere was Blanchotrsquos political thinking with regard to the legacy of nihilism more sharply focussed (though Heideggerrsquos name is in fact nowhere mentioned and the word itself evoked only fleetingly and ironically) than in one of his most incisive texts of the early 1960s also given the oblique form of an exploratory dialogue published in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise in April 1962 and reworked seven years later in which Blanchot responded to the republication of robert Antelmersquos concentration camp memoir LrsquoEspegravece humaine94

lsquoHumankind is the indestructible that can be destroyed [Lrsquohomme est lrsquoindestructible qui peut ecirctre deacutetruit]rsquo this was the proposition that at least one of Blanchotrsquos unnamed voices sought to defend in the discussion about Antelme95 There too Blanchot had recourse to an impersonal neuter expression lrsquoindestructible The formulation is important for it testifies to Blanchotrsquos refusal to centre discussion on the question of what is essentially proper to man or to men In avoiding the question of human existence as such Blanchot was clearly following Heidegger whose postwar lsquoLetter on Humanismrsquo had persuasively demonstrated the reliance of humanism on a metaphysics of the subject96 So Blanchotrsquos point was not that man or men or humans are indestructible in themselves by dint of their unquenchable human spirit say or the sanctity of human life or because of the overwhelming supremacy of human or humanistic values Blanchotrsquos observation was quite different it was that humankind participates in the impersonality and anonymity of that which is indestructible and yet can be destroyed This was no wilful lapsing into premature paradox or self-indulgent aporetics as critics have sometimes charged Nor was it an appeal to a new fragile or residual humanism as others have more recently suggested Nor did it testify to the survival of a dialectic of power or value some how able modestly even heroically to overcome pain and suffering and transmute loss into meaningful experience For at

A turnInG 45

least two reasons first because humanism founded on the idea of that which is proper to man necessarily implies something improper to man which must be expelled or eliminated by dividing for instance the strong from the weak the clean from the dirty the human from the bestial even the male from the female with the result that humanism in the face of human degradation is often little more than a distasteful insult And second because to have faith in manrsquos identity with himself was necessarily to endorse in the end that constant transcending and redrawing of the limits of possibility synonymous with nihilism and to legitimate the potential for murderous destruction that was inseparable from the power of humans many we know are the living species that have born the cost of the supreme power of humans and many too are the humans who on the grounds of their supposed bestiality have been sacrificed to prescriptive humanism Humanism and nihilism can of course be strange bedfellows as cinema audiences of the mid-1950s would be aware reminded by Alain resnaisrsquos 1956 film Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) of the grim symbolism of Goethersquos tree respectfully preserved by the Nazi authorities at the centre of Buchenwald concentration camp a few miles outside Weimar

Blanchotrsquos opening question in his reading of LrsquoEspegravece humaine which like others he approached as someone without immediate personal experience of the camps was not as Giorgio Agamben describes borrowing the expression from Bruno Bettelheim how to remain human (to which inside or outside the camp there are any number of possible or impossible answers) but who is Autrui who is the Other (using the invariant impersonal expression singularised by Levinas)97 Blanchotrsquos gesture in reading Antelme then was neither ontological nor moral it was not to appeal to humanism in any of its current forms but to recognise something far more radical which was that a trace neither human nor non-human testifying not to infinite human possibility but absolute human impossibility far exceeded with incontrovertible force or weakness this finite invention that was man and that the trace itself this neuter being irreducible to any kind of positivity or negativity was itself indestructible This trace is itself neither something nor nothing Blanchotrsquos text variously calls it a lsquosilent presence [preacutesence silencieuse]rsquo a presence which is that of the other [autrui] in whoever speaks lsquothe infinite and infinitely silent presence of the other [la preacutesence infinie et infiniment silencieuse drsquoautrui]rsquo testifying to a speaking or a refusing to speak


still to come and carrying with it as an outward token what Antelme describes as lsquoan abiding sense of belonging to humankind [un sentiment ultime drsquoappartenance agrave lrsquoespegravece]rsquo but which not fixing itself in any possibility of speaking in the first person is not in itself either a value or an object of evaluation and is thinkable for Blanchot only as radical impersonal anonymous need lsquoempty and in a sense neuter need therefore virtually that of all [le besoin vide et neutre en quelque sorte ainsi virtuellement celui de tous]rsquo98 lsquoIn such a wayrsquo comments one of Blanchotrsquos voices lsquothat deposed from myself [deacutechu de moi] and a foreigner to myself [eacutetranger agrave moishymecircme] what is affirmed in my stead is the foreignness of the other [autrui] ndash man as absolutely other a foreigner and a stranger the dispossessed and rootless or as reneacute Char writes unimaginable man [lrsquohomme inimaginable] ndash by whose presence passes the affirmation of an infinite demand [lrsquoaffirmation drsquoune exigence infinie]rsquo99 Inimaginable unimaginable the word was also Antelmersquos from the preface to LrsquoEspegravece humaine describing the return from the camp naming that which it was impossible to imagine and yet absolutely necessary to do so lsquoBarely did we begin telling our story than we suffocated To ourselves the story we had to tell had begun to appear unimaginable [inimaginable]rsquo100 What the experience implied then was not residual recognition but compelling exteriority

Humans then could be destroyed and yet a trace or inscription survived not as an entity not in the form of anything necessarily human or non-human but as that which testified to the impotence of the negative and therefore resisted beyond all power Like death itself perhaps it might be what provided the possible grounds for discourse history action work negativity but as for itself so to speak it necessarily withdrew from those possibilities which is no doubt why it cannot be named as such only as an absolute limit Blanchotrsquos political thinking reformulated in the encounter with Antelme was not a thinking of the human then but a thought of the outside101 It was essentially double For while it was imperative to recognise the irreducible ineluctable exteriority of empty neuter need this did not imply renouncing political action On the contrary the demand or exigency of the indestructible required that power be resisted which is what enabled indeed constrained Blanchot to reaffirm the need for historical action which he himself clearly endorsed albeit indirectly within his own text published the very month when the eacutevian accords signed between the Algerian FLN

A turnInG 47

and the French government were bringing the Algerian war to a close when he joined his voice to those of numerous others in roundly condemning torture both in the camps and in the police stations of colonial Algeria Indeed the silent presence to which he refers in discussing Antelme in April 1962 is also without possible ambiguity the refusal to speak that found its embodiment in the torture victims not only of the dark years of the Occupation but also of the bleak decade of the Algerian War

As one of Blanchotrsquos voices explains lsquoit is essential that on the basis of this attentiveness to affliction [attention au malheur] without which all relation succumbs to darkness another possibility should intervene ie for a Self [un Moi] outside me not only to take my place as it were [comme agrave ma place] and become aware of the affliction but also become responsible for it [le prenne en charge] by acknowledging it as an injustice to all and take it as the starting point for a set of common demands [une revendication commune]rsquo102 And what remains crucial in this movement from one thought to another is the necessity of the double relationship the double rapport on which Blanchot insists elsewhere the absolute requirement that of these two thoughts neither should take precedence over the other and reintroduce the authoritarian pre-eminence of a dialectic of power and possibility not that Blanchot was ever reluctant to use the power of the dialectic to think the dialectics of power as even a cursory reading of his more specifically political writings will show only that he was steadfastly resistant to the lure of its totalising omnipotence103

One of the lessons of Antelmersquos book for Blanchotrsquos political thinking was the important reminder that history was not all There was an outside a form of radical indigence a quasi-biological limit as Antelme phrased it resistant to all possible power which interrupted or suspended the possibility of history not least because it was irreducible to the history of possibility In the dialogue on Antelme as we have seen Blanchot endeavours to address this trace of impossibility by deploying the word presence preacutesence as proof of the promise of a future chance of speaking or refusing to speak The word preacutesence separated though it often is from the cognate term preacutesent may seem surprising in this context and in later work by Blanchot would increasingly be set aside or explicitly rejected It is however common enough in texts published by Blanchot in the early 1960s as we shall see including most notably of all


LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli which came out only a month before the article on Antelme The following year in Summer 1963 Blanchot also published in LrsquoArc the essay lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo discussed earlier Glossing Charrsquos poetical question lsquoHow to live without the unknown in prospect [Comment vivre sans inconnu devant soi]rsquo and drawing on Heraclitusrsquo characterisation of the oracle at Delphi Blanchot wrote as follows

Searching [La recherche] mdash poetry thought mdash relates to the unknown [lrsquoinconnu] as unknown This relation discloses [deacutecouvre] the unknown but by a disclosure [drsquoune deacutecouverte] that leaves it veiled [agrave couvert] through this relation there is presence of the unknown [preacutesence de lrsquoinconnu] the unknown in this presence is rendered present but always as unknown [comme inconnu] This relation of presence [rapport de preacutesence] must leave intact mdash untouched mdash what it conveys and still veiled [non deacutevoileacute] what it discloses [deacutecouvre] This relation will not be an unveiling [deacutevoilement] The unknown will not be revealed but indicated104

Six years later reprising the selfsame passage in LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchot nevertheless paused to reconsider the word preacutesence The first two occurrences in the passage given above he rewrote not as preacutesence but as ldquopreacutesencerdquo within quotation marks while in the case of the third (rapport de preacutesence) he deleted preacutesence entirely At a stroke of the pen preacutesence was no longer entirely present to itself it had undergone an internal or external displacement separating it from itself or even annulling it entirely it was no longer therefore in Blanchotrsquos handling of it a properly phenomenological concept105 And elsewhere in the essay Blanchot has recourse to a similar strategy of effacement and reinscription A page later for instance where it had been enough in 1963 to refer to lsquorelating to the unknown without unveiling it [sans le deacutevoiler] through a relation of presence [une relation de preacutesence] that might not be termed a disclosurersquo now in 1969 it became urgent to write of lsquorelating to the unknown without unveiling it through a relation of non-presence [une relation de nonshypreacutesence] that might not be termed a disclosurersquo106 Not only was preacutesence returned to itself as ldquopreacutesencerdquo or indeed effaced entirely it was now synonymous with nonshypreacutesence

A turnInG 49

In such instances it might be said the word reaches the limit of its own possibility and power it survives barely no longer as itself but only as itself without itself it has become inseparable from the otherness disclosed but not unveiled within and without it Presence then at this stage is not a self-belonging in the luminosity of Being but merely a trace effaced without name futural and always already past which is how Blanchot visibly and invisibly inscribes within his own text the effect without effect of the neuter And it is also what for Blanchot is crucially at stake in Antelmersquos modest affirmation of the quasi-biological unity of the species Here as there without rhetorical appropriation there is suspension of power withdrawal of possibility experience without experience a disclosure that does not reveal ontological ethical or moral certainty but an exigency an imperative a requirement a prescription that of the other the stranger the unknown the outside demanding to be thought in terms irreducible to the language of power or the language of concepts

What this implies for both Antelme and Blanchot is this that history (both the possibility of meaning and the meaning of possibility) was inseparable from its interruptions its absences its suspension All historical periodisations all moments sequences or ages turn on something necessarily withdrawn from history dividing history from itself so to speak allowing history to be told or recounted but which history as such cannot assimilate save as an event that while being historical through and through is nevertheless always already more or less than historical Events in this sense have a dual status they both belong to history and interrupt it Invited in 1986 by La Quinzaine litteacuteraire to comment on the magazinersquos twentieth anniversary this was the point Blanchot sought to make lsquoTime timersquo he wrote lsquois something of which we have no need [Le temps le temps nous nrsquoen avons pas besoin]rsquo And the key events of those twenty years reaching beyond their particular meaning he added had thereby acquired absolute status which it was impossible to diminish overcome or deny107 Similarly when some short time after the events of May 1968 in Paris it fell to Blanchot to evoke without defining it the change of epoch or changement drsquoeacutepoque that affecting numerous other contemporary cultural phenomena including developments in literary theory and the avant-garde novel served to reveal the epoch to itself he was categorical the historical but also more-than-historical absolute


event in question was lsquowhat happened there [ce qui srsquoest passeacute lagrave]rsquo in Auschwitz Warsaw (the ghetto and uprising) Treblinka Dachau Buchenwald Neuengamme Oranienburg Belsen Mauthausen ravensbruumlck so many others Why so many names and why the refusal of any one emblematic name Because each was singular each belonged to history but was irreducible to it each demanded memory and responsibility both here and now and beyond the confines of the present Immediately after recalling the events of May 1968 summed up in the famous retort to antisemitic attacks on Daniel Cohn-Bendit lsquoWe are all German Jewsrsquo lsquoNous sommes tous des Juifs allemandsrsquo Blanchot traced two other names that of a non-Jewish writer and a solitary book Antelmersquos LrsquoEspegravece humaine108

An epoch then is not simply a period of time grounded in teleological or archeological self-identity as blithely assumed by those who glibly refer to the postmodern age postmodernity postmodernism or even postpostmodernism Indeed in order to be thought at all no epoch can be fully contemporary with itself Not only does it have its beginnings elsewhere in some other time or age but it is always already marked or re-marked within itself by a caesura or hiatus a pivot or moment that does not belong to history as such if only because it is what makes history thinkable at all While enabling history then it also interrupts it which is why all periodisations are necessarily provisional speculative and inconclusive An epoch is what begins or ends But it is also what can never begin or end And this is why as Blanchot explains in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre all writing under the aegis of the fragmentary ndash and all writing suggests Blanchot partakes in the fragmentary ndash not only interrupts history but just as importantly interrupts its own interruption

V

radical suspension

Here then lsquoThe scene illustrates but the idea not an effective action in a hymen (from which proceeds the Dream) dissolute but sacred between desire and fulfilment perpetration and its

A turnInG 51

memory here preceding there recalling in the future in the past under the false appearance of a present Thus operates the Mime whose acting is limited to a perpetual allusiveness without breaking the glass it installs thus a medium pure of fictionrsquo [Voici ndash laquo La scegravene nrsquoillustre que lrsquoideacutee pas une action effective dans un hymen (drsquoougrave procegravede le Recircve) vicieux mais sacreacute entre le deacutesir et lrsquoaccomplissement la perpeacutetration et son souvenir ici devanccedilant lagrave remeacutemorant au futur au passeacute sous une apparence fausse de preacutesent Tel opegravere le Mime dont le jeu se borne agrave une allusion perpeacutetuelle sans briser la glace il installe ainsi un milieu pur de fiction raquo]

MALLArMeacute lsquoMimiquersquo109

Etymology not always a trustworthy guide had already said as much For an epoch from the Greek έpόcή is not primarily a period of time but an interruption a stoppage or a station a fixed point or pause a detour or a turning a remarkable moment therefore that implies a holding to the edge and a suspension of judgement

Much earlier in the twentieth century while still a student in Strasbourg Blanchot had no doubt encountered the term έpόcή epocheacute or epoch in a similar sense not only in the original Greek but also in a more contemporary setting in the work of Edmund Husserl where in the guise of the phenomenological reduction it represents the first conceptual move in the discovery and exploration of a radically innovative dimension of philosophical experience which Husserl would call transcendental consciousness Much of this will have been familiar to Blanchot One of his closest friends and fellow students at the time Emmanuel Levinas had been working on a doctoral thesis on Husserl since 1927 As Blanchot reported in a letter to Salomon Malka in November 1981 the pair at the time discussed Husserlrsquos work lsquoon an almost daily basis [au jour le jour]rsquo110 There is every likelihood too that Blanchot together with Levinas also attended the two lectures delivered by Husserl in Strasbourg in early March 1929 which later formed part of the matter of the philosopherrsquos Cartesian Meditations a book which Levinas in collaboration with Gabrielle Pfeiffer soon after translated into French111

As Husserl argues in his 1929 lectures the phenomenological epocheacute owed something if not to the aims and methods at least


to the possibility of Cartesian hyperbolic doubt For following in Descartesrsquos footsteps Husserlrsquos purpose was likewise to break philosophically with all naive dogmatic unfounded but well-established assumptions about the structure and meaning of experience ndash what Husserl for his part describes as the lsquonatural attitudersquo otherwise known as lsquothe world [die Welt]rsquo which is to say lsquothe sum total of objects of possible experience and experiential cognition of objects that on the basis of actual experiences are cognizable in correct theoretical thinkingrsquo ndash in order to proceed to a more rigorous foundation or better refoundation of philosophical and scientific knowledge112 To fulfil that aim Husserlrsquos strategy was not to doubt however provisionally all that was capable of doubt in order to establish as Husserl puts it lsquoa sphere of absolutely indubitable beingrsquo under the auspices of the celebrated cogito ergo sum and thereby proceed to the ontological proof of the existence of the human self or soul in the world113 More modestly albeit in the end with more radical consequences rather than negating the natural attitude as Descartes had proposed which in Husserlian terms was already to adopt an unwarranted stance or position in respect of worldly experience it was to abstain from any act of belief as to the existence or non-existence of the world and thus to put the so-called natural attitude lsquoout of action [auszliger Aktion]rsquo to lsquoexclude [ausschalten]rsquo or lsquoput it into parentheses [einklammern]rsquo114 As a result of this turn or shift in perspective opening up lsquoan infinite realm of being of a new kind [eine neuartige unendliche Seinssphaumlre]rsquo as Husserl formulates it (une sphegravere nouvelle et infinie drsquoexistence Levinas and Pfeiffer write) the epocheacute inaugurated an entirely new set of fundamental originary philosophical questions bearing on the manner in which transcendental consciousness bestows sense or meaning on worldly experience as such115 As Husserl explains in the first of the 1929 Meditations

The universal depriving of acceptance [Auszligergeltungsetzen in Husserl mise hors valeur in Levinas-Pfeiffer] the lsquoinhibitingrsquo [lsquoInhibierenrsquo lsquoinhibitionrsquo] or lsquoputting out of playrsquo [lsquoAuszligerspielshysetzenrsquo lsquomise hors jeursquo] of all positions taken towards the already-given objective world and in the first place all existential positions (those concerning being illusion possible being being likely probable etc [existence apparence existence possible hypotheacutetique probable et autres in Levinas-Pfeiffer]) mdash or as it

A turnInG 53

is also called the lsquophenomenological epocheacutersquo and lsquoparenthesisingrsquo [lsquoEinklammernrsquo lsquomise entre parenthegravesesrsquo] of the objective world mdash therefore does not leave us confronting nothing On the contrary we gain possession of something by it and what we (or to speak more precisely what I the one who is meditating) acquire by it is my pure living with all the pure subjective processes making this up and everything meant in them purely as meant in them the universe of lsquophenomenarsquo in the (particular and also the wider) phenomenological sense The epocheacute can also be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend myself purely as Ego [als Ich comme moi pur] and with my own pure conscious life in and by which the entire objective world exists for me and is precisely as it is for me116

Husserlrsquos project he was at pains to stress in this later work was not grounded in psychology The ego of which he speaks was irreducible to any psychological entity of that name and the consciousness at stake in his analysis anything but merely empirical As the philosopher reminds his readers towards the end of the first Meditation

by phenomenological epocheacute I reduce my natural human Ego and my psychic life mdash the realm of my psychological selfshyexperience mdash to my transcendental phenomenological Ego the realm of transcendental phenomenological self-experience The objective world that exists for me that always has and always will exist for me the only world that can ever exist for me mdash this world with all its objects [ ] derives its whole sense and its existential status which it has for me from me myself from me as the transcendental Ego the Ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental phenomenological epocheacute117

The rigour and detail of Husserlrsquos carefully differentiated analyses are well known This was not to say as far as Levinas was concerned notwithstanding a certain intellectualism that there was anything dryly technical about Husserlrsquos project On the contrary for Levinas who had arguably begun approaching Husserl from a perspective informed or at the very least inflected by Heideggerrsquos recasting of the tasks of phenomenology Husserlrsquos key concerns were already ontological ones This at any event was the burden of his 1930


dissertation which concluded by arguing that lsquo[t]he thesis of the ontological value inherent in subjectivity and in its intrinsic meaning constitutes the true basis of all Husserlrsquos thinking that to be is to be lived [ecirctre crsquoest ecirctre veacutecu] and to have a meaning in life [avoir un sens dans la vie] The phenomenological reduction has no other purpose than to make our true self present to us albeit to render it present to a purely theoretical and contemplative perspective which considers life but is no longer synonymous with itrsquo118

Here then for Levinas and arguably for his friend Blanchot too was a radically new philosophical resource characterised by two complementary yet equally essential perspectives On the one hand the Husserlian theory of intentionality according to which consciousness was always consciousness of something served to embed consciousness in concrete differentiated experience where it was faced with the transcendence of worldly objects not to mention the thorny question of intersubjectivity which was of particular concern to Levinas as subsequent developments would show On the other by dint of the logic of intentionality itself it remained a defining property of all transcendental consciousness that it could and should exceed the givenness of any world Both motifs came together in the phenomenological epocheacute and notwithstanding various differences of opinion or emphasis the promise of renewal that Husserlrsquos thinking represented for Levinas was to remain undiminished throughout the following decade and beyond Indeed writing in 1940 in a fresh overview of Husserlrsquos achievement published only two years after the philosopherrsquos death against the backdrop of radically changed historical and political circumstances Levinas marked the important legacy of the Husserlian epocheacute in the same unmistakeably redemptive terms lsquoThe transcendental reductionrsquo he wrote

is a violence which man mdash a being among other beings mdash does to himself in order to find himself again as pure thought To find himself again in this purity it will not suffice for him to reflect on himself for reflection itself does not suspend his involvement in the world does not re-establish the world in its role as point of identification of a multiplicity of intentions To transform manrsquos lsquotechnicalrsquo thought into spiritual activity it will therefore be necessary to refrain from presupposing the world as a condition of the mind Every truth that implicitly contains the

A turnInG 55

lsquothesis of the existence of objectsrsquo must thus be suspended The philosopher denies himself the technical habits of the man he is and who finds himself situated in the world each time he posits the existence of an object What he then discovers is himself as a philosopher and his consciousness as a consciousness that bestows a meaning upon things but does not lsquoweighrsquo upon them and the truths themselves suspended as noemata of his thought whose meaning and existence he envisages without allowing himself to be lured into positing the latter He discovers himself as transcendental consciousness The phenomenological reduction is thus an operation through which the mind suspends the validity of the natural thesis of existence in order to study its meaning in the thought that has constituted it and that for its part is no longer a part of the world but prior to the world In this returning to primary self-evidence in this manner I recover at once the origin and the significance of all of my knowledge and the true meaning of my presence in the world119

In retrospect it is not hard to understand the appeal of this radically new philosophical project for a writer such as Blanchot for whom hopes of far-reaching even violent renewal counted for so much in the years after he left university Like Husserl who concluded the Cartesian Meditations on this note Blanchot too might well have subscribed to the notion that it was first necessary to lose the world through phenomenological reduction in order properly to regain it by universal self-reflection120 As Levinas was quick to notice it is perhaps enough to read the opening pages of the 1941 version of the novel Thomas lrsquoObscur to sense the powerful literary impact the phenomenological epocheacute had on Blanchot during that period just as it did for other influential thinkers and writers in France at the time121 In 1938 at any event while still at work on Thomas lrsquoObscur but having in the meantime read further in Heidegger (notably the 1936 rome lecture lsquoHoumllderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung [Houmllderlin and the Essence of Poetry]rsquo)122 Blanchot enthusiastically paid tribute to Sartrersquos La Nauseacutee by pointing out how that novel much like his own albeit in different fashion was lsquovisibly inspired by a philosophical movement that is little known in France but is of the utmost importance that of Edmund Husserl and especially Martin Heideggerrsquo123 And in the years that followed in numerous book reviews for the Journal des deacutebats between 1941 and 1944


Blanchot continued explicitly and implicitly to maintain his belief in the literary significance of the founding philosophical texts he had encountered during the preceding decade and a half124

But how far was Husserlrsquos phenomenological epocheacute consistent with Blanchotrsquos experience as a writer of fiction In the early part of Le Pas aushydelagrave published many years later Blanchot reflects on his early encounter with literature in the 1930s and on his experience as a writer whose writing turned its author aside from the world as such and forced him to suspend what might easily have been described in the words of Husserl cited earlier as lsquoall positions taken towards the already-given objective world and in the first place all existential positions (those concerning being illusion possible being being likely probable etc)rsquo a movement that in 1973 referring to his former self in the third person Blanchot restages as follows

Try as I may I cannot picture the person [celui] who was not me and who without wishing it [sans le vouloir] began to write writing (and then realising it) in such a way that as a result the pure product of doing nothing introduced itself into the world and into his world This went on lsquoat nightrsquo During the day there were the acts of the day everyday words everyday writing statements values habits nothing that counted and yet something one dimly had to call life The certainty that in writing he was putting this certainty itself into parentheses [la certitude qursquoen eacutecrivant il mettait preacuteciseacutement entre parenthegraveses cette certitude] including the certainty of himself as a subject of writing led him slowly but also immediately into an empty space whose void (the barred zero like a heraldic device) in no way prevented the twists and turns of a lengthy itinerary125

Notwithstanding an obvious difference in purpose there is much here that is readily reminiscent of the kind of epochal procedure recommended by Husserl Like the philosopher Blanchot the writer of fiction sets aside the world and his own worldly activity neither of which are negated or denied but carry on as before at least by day while at night a new kind of experience prior to both world and work makes itself felt and takes hold in which all manner of everyday positions or propositions are simply left out of account In the process while the writer writes literally as well as metaphorically lsquoat nightrsquo his individual psychological self is also put in limbo And

A turnInG 57

as a whole new universe (or pre-universe) of thoughts and questions offers itself it becomes apparent ndash apparent without being apparent in the darkness of this other night as Blanchot will later call it ndash that thought language writing have the strange radical propensity not only to exhaust the horizon of what is already thinkable as such but also to pass beyond the world as it is seemingly given in order to apply themselves to the constitution of such a world previously thought to be necessarily out of reach thus affirming one of the crucial insights in all Blanchotrsquos (and Levinasrsquos) subsequent thinking inspired by Husserlrsquos theory of intentionality and even found by Blanchot as we have seen in the fragmentary texts of Nietzschersquos Nachlaszlig which is that thought always contains more than it can contain and words always say more than that of which they are capable126

On the other hand these parallels ought not to obscure the far-reaching incompatibility between the phenomenological epocheacute and the epochal experience of writing as described by Blanchot in 1973 The differences are several The most prominent relate to the divergent nature of the two projects if indeed the second can be adequately termed a project at all in so far as Blanchot insists that writing in those early years was not something willed by the writer it was simply what occurred In any case notwithstanding the phenomenologistrsquos experiential investment in thinking the fact remains as Levinas points out that Husserlrsquos enterprise was explicitly driven by a conceptual agenda under the control of the meditating self inquiring into the conditions under which consciousness is rooted in the world and meaning bestowed upon the world as such In Blanchot however the epochal experience of writing was far more radical It was not conditioned by the strategic ambition of uncovering lsquoa new scientific domainrsquo127 as Husserl called it It therefore not only set aside the world and its activities not only suspended everyday psychological experience it went a step further in neutralising all certainty including the transcendental claim to which Husserl confidently subscribed not least out of sheer philosophical necessity that a first or last ground might thus be reached embodied in what Husserl deploying the phenomenological reduction as the gateway to understanding of the constitution of the world as such articulated as lsquopure consciousness in its own absolute being [das reine Bewuszligtsein in seinem absoluten Eigensein]rsquo For lsquothat is what is leftrsquo he explained lsquoas the sought-after ldquophenomenological residuumrdquo even though we have ldquoexcluded


[ausgeschaltet]rdquo the whole world with all physical things living creatures and human beings ourselves included In actual fact we have lost nothing but gained the whole of absolute being which correctly understood holds within itself and thereby ldquoconstitutes [konstituiert]rdquo all worldly transcendencesrsquo128

Blanchotrsquos own encounter with writing however which probably explains his closer affinity with the thought of Heidegger was less a thinking of the constitutive irreducible originality of transcendental consciousness than an abyssal exposure to the ontological anxiety and groundlessness of language exceeding all worldly constitution in general This was at any event the burden of the lengthy previously unpublished essay opening Faux Pas in which the author endeavoured to describe the predicament of the writer as moving lsquoDe lrsquoangoisse au langage [From Dread to Language]rsquo129 And as that 1943 presentation made clear showing in passing how far the writer had also begun to distance himself from Heidegger what was at stake for Blanchot was not the status of language as ground but more radically as that which being always already prior to any ground as the thought of the il y a that Blanchot shared with Levinas had long testified bore the irreducible albeit paradoxical mark of an original absence of all origin130 In so far as the term may be used at all then Blanchotrsquos literary (yet always more or less than literary) epocheacute as Le Pas aushydelagrave shows was no simple (re)foundational gesture It could not therefore be thematised as such in thought but like the always possible addition or removal of a pair of invisible parentheses only performed in writing as an unceasing movement of inscription and effacement of differentiation deferral and displacement in which language rather than supplying any transcendental ground was synonymous only with its own distance from itself its past fragility and futural alterity Language in this perspective was anything but coincident with itself Its failing was its strength its excess its insufficiency and this reversibility a necessary feature of its ongoing articulation Which is also to say that however much it shared a condition of possibility with Husserlrsquos phenomenological epocheacute Blanchotrsquos thought of the neuter remained irreducible to all phenomenology

Already in Husserl of course as Derrida would later show in La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene (Speech and Phenomena) the question of language in general was a constant source of unresolved difficulty131 As Derrida famously argues these derived from Husserlrsquos decision

A turnInG 59

within the opening afforded by the epocheacute to emphasise that lsquocore of properly adequate experiencersquo found as he puts it in lsquothe living self-presence expressed in the grammatical meaning of the proposition ego cogitorsquo132 In order to maintain this privilege motivated by tacit adherence to long-established metaphysical tradition Husserl found himself obliged to subtract or extract the speaking voice in so far as it was synonymous with consciousness (voice for Husserl writes Derrida lsquois consciousnessrsquo133) from the irreducible and inescapable exteriority both spatialisation and temporalisation of what Derrida in his analysis articulates as writing (or archi-writing) in general The precarious nature of Husserlrsquos account of language was such that in attempting to drive a wedge as Derrida puts it lsquonot between language and non-language but within language in general between the expressive and the non-expressiversquo134 he was left with the self-presence of a speaking voice that was what it was only because of what it excluded and to which it owed its possibility and which it necessarily retained within itself as an indelible mark of temporalisation ie retention and protention alterity deferral and difference lsquoAnd that pure differencersquo observes Derrida

which constitutes the self-presence of the living present reintro-duces into it in originary fashion [originairement] the very impurity it was thought possible to banish from it The living present surges forth [jaillit] on the basis of its non-identity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace It is always already a trace This trace is unthinkable on the basis of the simplicity of a present whose life might be deemed internal to itself [dont la vie serait inteacuterieure agrave soi] The self of the living present is originarily [originairement] a trace The trace is not an attribute of which it might be said that it is what the self of the living present lsquooriginarily isrsquo [laquo est originairement raquo] Originary-being [lrsquoecirctreshyoriginaire] must be thought on the basis of the trace and not the other way round Archi-writing is at work at the very origin of meaning135

In so far as the epocheacute was essential for the articulation of Husserlian transcendental consciousness what this also meant was that the possibility of the epocheacute was not lodged in transcendental consciousness itself but in the writing and language that made reduction possible


prompting Derrida to entertain the suggestion earlier in the discussion lsquocontrary to Husserlrsquos express intentionrsquo as he ironically puts it that lsquothe ldquoreductionrdquo even before becoming a method might be deemed no different [se confondrait] from the most spontaneous act of spoken discourse the simple activity of speaking and the power of expressionrsquo136 If so rather than providing any secure transcendental ground what the epocheacute may be said to reveal is nothing other than the irreducible propensity of words themselves even as they advance meaning(s) at the same time to suspend withdraw or overwrite them and in so doing perpetually efface and reinscribe themselves the one as the other the other as the one in a manner radically inimical to all hierarchy with the result as Derridian diffeacuterance went on to suggest that the divide between the transcendental and the empirical however necessary for thought could not do other than fall victim to its abyssal fragility What comes to stand in the place of the self-coincident origin then is what Derrida in his discussion of Husserl proposes to call originary supplementarity this complex logic (or alogic) of impurity alteration displacement and substitution by which what comes first is not what is one or originary but that which is second or secondary a redoubled repetitive non-identical trace refusing to obey the teleology of temporal progression constantly referring and deferring to another137

Like originary supplementarity the neuter as articulated by Blanchot is also traversed by irreducible otherness disturbing and unsettling each and every position and possibility of demarcation Indeed both terms speak in different idiom of a parallel movement of non-identical repetition difference and dispersion For the neuter too this most modest and self-effacing of words is not attributable in Blanchot to any simple origin but rather to a movement of erasure and inscription that is always at least double always already a case of substitution for what only belatedly seems primary or final The neuter then is never itself lsquoas suchrsquo is always a supernumerary imposter (is) always already inscribed or effaced in the form of a supplementary mark supplementing nothing At times it does this almost visibly as in lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo in the quotation marks surrounding ldquopreacutesencerdquo or in the suspensive trace of a privative prefix (as in nonshypreacutesence) or in the play of quotation marks and parentheses cultivated say by Mallarmeacute (at the elusive and ever retreating centre of lsquoMimiquersquo ie both the scene described and the text describing it were it not that this difference too is nothing

A turnInG 61

other than precarious) At other times it does so invisibly without ever finding (for good reason) a recognisable place to call its own as in the case of literary discourse But both here and there it moves in indeterminate and indeterminable manner separating each word from itself and overwriting it with the spectre of always another (and another and another) not necessarily part of any language nor part of any one language but belonging to all known or unknown languages in general working (or better unworking) as a force of fragmentary dispersion exceeding the horizon of intended meanings and silently speaking in the gaps and interstices of language as the threat and promise of that endlessly recapitulative movement (or ressassement eacuteternel) carried by the neuter and which likewise carries the neuter in its turn

The neuter then is not Being neither ground nor foundation138 Both multiple and singular it (is) radical non-foundation which is why it can become a provisional name for the fragmentary which is itself but a provisional name for the neuter and why each is synonymous with the possibility of literature a possibility that does not bestow on literature any self-presence self-identity constitutive meaning defining contours or essential originating autonomy but serves only as a name for the infinite suspension division or referral that is an irreducible trait of all language and therefore all literature all non-literature and all silence past and future lsquoWould meaning in that case only exist through the neuterrsquo asks one of Blanchotrsquos voices in the strategically named Parenthegraveses following lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo To which the other rejoins lsquoOnly in so far as the neuter remains outside meaning [eacutetranger au sens] by which I mean above all neuter in respect of meaning not indifferent but haunting the possibility of meaning and non-meaning alike [sens et nonshysens] by the invisible deviation of a difference [lrsquoeacutecart invisible drsquoune diffeacuterence]rsquo And the conversation continues

mdash lsquoFrom which one might conclude that phenomenology had already begun to lose its way [eacutetait deacutejagrave deacutevoyeacutee] in the direction of the neuterrsquo mdash lsquoJust like everything that goes under the name of literature if one of its characteristics is to pursue indefinitely the epocheacute the rigorous task of suspension and self-suspension without it being possible to attribute this movement to negativityrsquo mdash lsquoNeuter might be a way of describing the literary act that participates neither in affirmation nor in negation


[ni drsquoaffirmation ni de neacutegation] and (in the first instance) releases meaning as a ghost [comme fantocircme] a haunting obsession [hantise] a simulacrum of meaning as though it was in literaturersquos nature to be spectral not haunted by itself but because we might think of it as supplying this prerequisite of all meaning [ce preacutealable de tout sens] which is its haunting obsession [sa hantise] or more simply because it might be reduced to being concerned with nothing other than simulating the reduction of the reduction [simuler la reacuteduction de la reacuteduction] irrespective of whether it was phenomenological or not and thus far from negating it (even if on occasion it pretends to do so) magnifying it by way of the interminable with the addition of everything that undermines and disrupts itrsquo139

These exchanges and others like them printed in italics marked at the start of each sequence with a redoubled symbol are themselves as far as LrsquoEntretien infini is concerned self-avowedly parenthetical like so many conversational asides hesitating in the wings of the text interrupting and framing Blanchotrsquos many discussions of literary and other topics while also being interrupted and framed by them the one and the other the other and the one They are each part of the book but also gesture impossibly beyond its covers For what is the relationship between Blanchotrsquos parentheses and the texts surrounding them but equally surrounded by them If the purpose of parentheses is to exclude disable or put out of action as Husserl suggests do Blanchotrsquos parenthetical remarks set aside a given discourse on literature that of the presumed author or are they not themselves set aside by that discourse In which case as part of that very discourse as well as bracketing Blanchotrsquos other essays do they not necessarily also bracket themselves A curious instability of the kind that arises whenever linguistic borderlines or margins are at stake comes to affect the putative relationship between parenthesising agent and parenthesised thing between lsquotranscendental consciousnessrsquo and lsquoworldly objectrsquo with the result that each is infiltrated by the other and loses its place making it impossible as in Mallarmeacutersquos lsquoMimiquersquo to decide which is which

As emblems of the neuter then Blanchotrsquos own parentheses are themselves both neutralising and neutralised All hierarchy

A turnInG 63

between subject and object transcendental ground and objective world becomes henceforth largely untenable and as in Mallarmeacutersquos enactment or re-enactment of the mime of Pierrot announced in 1886 the reader is faced with a textual theatre without stage or spectator without actors or roles without inside or outside constantly referring or deferring to other texts in a citational motion where everything and nothing is always already quotation simultaneously joined and disjoined as Mallarmeacute puts it in cod italics that there as here prove a joyful erasure of origin rather than any guarantee of authority lsquounder the false appearance of a presentrsquo lsquosous une apparence fausse de preacutesentrsquo As Blanchot suggests in these circumstances the phenomenological reduction (but Blanchot at this stage has no doubt left phenomenology behind) reverses itself testifying not to restriction but to ramification not to presence or absence but to difference or diffeacuterance not to visibility but to that which lies beyond the visible and the invisible without negativity at a distance without distance the trace effaced of the neuter

The neuter then for Blanchot is a thought perpetually other than itself and other than the other Its time is not that of human history nor divine presence but the time of the absence of time outside history work or project but aside from eternity or timelessness too Neither the one nor the other its time is that of return or returning what Blanchot returning again to Nietzsche calls le retour And when Blanchot once more had occasion to cite the Mallarmean (and by now Derridean) tag about the false appearance of the present it was as we shall see in 1973 in Le Pas aushydelagrave in the course of an exposition of what secretly fictitiously madly is invoked by Nietzsche as the experience the revelation at times even the doctrine of what he names as the Eternal return of the Same ndash were it not that what returns is precisely not the Same in its presumed identity with itself but ever the always deferred and differentiated other

Dispersing all thought of identity in this way the neuter effects in thought a radical turning ineliminable and yet indeterminate whose consequences are necessarily difficult to gauge as far as any sense of the direction character or meaning of a given historical epoch is concerned Already in 1960 in the lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoeacutepoquersquo at times ironically with reservations and with necessary uncertainty at times transferring responsibility for their remarks


to such questionable authorities as Ernst Juumlnger and Teilhard de Chardin (not to mention Hegel Marx Herodotus Kant Nietzsche or the Bible) Blanchotrsquos two interlocutors spoke of the impending changes perhaps afoot in France and the Western world in general changes that were likely to have significant political philosophical and other consequences revisiting those apocalyptic pages some nine years later Blanchot chose to leave them to their fate neither negating nor endorsing them merely adjusting here or there this or that form of words He supplemented them however with a sequence of fragmentary remarks each incised once more with a redoubled sign This extended conversation piece accordingly acquired a double title in two parts each six syllables long held together and held apart by a colon It was no longer lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoeacutepoque [Conversation on a Change of Epoch]rsquo but lsquoSur un changement drsquoeacutepoque lrsquoexigence du retour [On a Change of Epoch the Demand of return]rsquo140 The rhetorical effect was calculated but only in so far as Blanchotrsquos text thereby offered itself as a response to the incalculable

Blanchot began this second previously unpublished part of the chapter where the 1960 discussion had been suspended with Nietzschersquos daring profession of faith in the future as expressed in a famous aphorism from Die froumlhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) lsquoldquoMy thoughtsrdquo said the wanderer to his shadow ldquoshould show me where I stand but not disclose where I am going I love ignorance of the future [Ich liebe die Unwissenheit um die Zukunft] and will not succumb to impatience nor the premature enjoyment of promised thingsrdquorsquo141 There was added poignancy in Blanchotrsquos repeated quotation for in earlier times amidst the upheavals of 1937 and 1944 it had been countersigned and reaffirmed at least twice over by the friend who was Georges Bataille and whose life in the meantime before time as the aphorismrsquos certain endorsement of uncertainty demanded had itself sadly reached an end142

In his supplementary remarks perhaps still in silent homage to Bataille Blanchot first addressed the paradoxes and aporias arising from the thought or supposition of the impending end of history It was not that Blanchot had somehow become a belated convert to Kojegraveversquos teleological anthropology it was rather that like Bataille and like Nietzsche Blanchot in LrsquoEntretien infini was endeavouring to think the challenge of a future that was radically irreducible to presence a future not as being but as event not as a possibility

A turnInG 65

always already contained within a horizon of appearance but as an unprecedented unforeseeable occurrence beyond calculation or recognition His was not a transcendental inquiry then with the aim of legislating for all possible experience or experiences but an exploration of the impossibility that announces itself in thought as it does repeatedly in Thomas lrsquoObscur as the limit and condition of thinking itself What interested Blanchot in the notion of the end of history like Bataille was that while it started from an inalienable belief in the absolute omnipotence of a dialectic of progress unity and meaning it was soon forced to admit defeat at the hands of what it sought to conquer ending up turning into its own irrecuperable opposite as an experience without object sense or purpose For what would happen if the teleological ambition of the end of history were to be fulfilled No sooner would historyrsquos end be achieved than it would make any announcement to that effect impossible or meaningless in which case history would not be over and it could no longer verify or confirm its claims of totalisation A trace of incompletion would be left a repetitive witness to the unachievable possibility of its ending The end of history would not then be a dialectical dream it would become an impossible nightmare a thought to end all thoughts whose only realisation would be an endless interruption of all realisation

But Blanchot does not linger long on this fable of the end of history essential though it may seem not only to epochal thoughts of apocalypse but to epochal thought in general Approaching anew the prognosis of the initial 1960 text this fresh spiral of writing also displaced the temptation literally to accept the myth of a new age a new beginning or a new foundation Dissipating the notion of any simple epochal break Blanchotrsquos analysis of historyrsquos impossible end soon gave way to an exploration of the infinitely more tortuous aporetics of Nietzschersquos thought of eternal return As Blanchot recalls the status of that thought in Nietzsche was subject to often wildly differing interpretations For some like the influential early commentator Ernst Bertram it was a source of embarrassment the sign of a more than momentary lapse of reason on the part of its proponent lsquoa pseudo-revelation [Scheinoffenbarung]rsquo a lsquodeceptively teasing delusional mystery [dies truumlgerisch aumlffende Wahnmysterium]rsquo and alongside the overman one of Nietzschersquos two lsquogreat pedagogical liesrsquo143 For Karl Loumlwith on the other hand writing in the mid-1930s it was a key element in Nietzschersquos philosophical system where it


featured not only as an inescapable consequence but also a potent radicalisation of contemporary nihilism from which it offered the sole possibility of redemption The logic of Nietzschersquos project in this sense according to Loumlwith was rigorously double lsquoNietzschersquos whole philosophical systemrsquo he argued lsquois characterised by this twofold turning of the path along the one path to wisdom from the ldquoyou oughtrdquo of the devout to the ldquoI willrdquo of the freed spirit and from there to the ldquoI amrdquo here and eternally returnrsquo144

More significant however in renewing understanding of eternal return than Loumlwithrsquos efforts at reconstructing the system of Nietzschean thought at least as far as Blanchot was concerned in 1969 were the lectures given by Heidegger between 1936 and 1939 in which eternal return was given due prominence alongside will to power and radically inseparable from it as one of Nietzschersquos two fundamental metaphysical propositions lsquothe trait of beings as a whole [le trait de lrsquoeacutetant dans son ensemble] Will to Power Being [lrsquoecirctre] the Eternal return of the Samersquo as Blanchot sums it up145 There was however in Blanchotrsquos eyes a cost which was that lsquoin so far as Nietzsche is still deemed to belong to metaphysics and even fulfils it by bringing it to a close Heidegger thereby reintroduces the thought of Eternal return into metaphysics eternity is thought as an instant [lrsquoeacuteterniteacute y est penseacutee comme instant] and the instant as an instance of presence [lrsquoinstant comme lrsquoinstance de la preacutesence]rsquo146 In LrsquoEntretien infini for reasons he would go on to explain at greater length four years later Blanchot demurred and was reluctant to follow In so doing he drew sustenance from the thinking of two long-standing friends who had likewise lingered at length in the precincts of eternal return Bataille and Klossowski But if the first according to Blanchot on the basis of their many discussions about Nietzsche much preferred the sublime experience at Surlej to the doctrine Nietzsche sought to derive from it so it fell to the second in his more recent work to begin exploring the possibility or perhaps better the aporetic impossibility of any metaphysical expansion of that experience in which case Blanchot observed lsquonot only is Nietzsche the recipient of a new dispensation [une justice nouvelle] as a result of that questioning but also what is at stake in that questioning is a change so radical that we are incapable of mastering or even suffering [subir] itrsquo147

The thought of eternal return was far more slippery and intan-gible then than many of its interpretations suggested To unpack

A turnInG 67

it further Blanchot soon realised was to yield to a bewildering series of impossibly paradoxical and aporetic conundrums that tested thinking to the limit In 1969 Blanchot distinguished at least four critical ways in which the eternal return of the same turns aside from itself or upon itself in literally revolutionary fashion First not unlike the thought of the end of history the realisation of eternal return even as it aspires to the greatest possible coherence Blanchot pointed out is itself fundamentally incoherent There is disparity between its own status as revelation and the content of that revelation Indeed to claim eternal return as a revelation of the most radical sort simply cannot be possible if any truth value attaches to the revelation which then ceases to be Conversely if eternal return is indeed as the revelation suggests the boldest of all possible truths then it follows that the revelation is itself at best a trivial and insignificant occurrence repeating what has already been known since the beginning of time and is at worst an impossible delusion Second it follows from the thought of eternal return itself that whoever experiences it as revelation cannot be a mere individual but already an endless circle of interchangeable personas including lsquoevery name in historyrsquo148 as Nietzsche put it a celebrated letter to Jakob Burckhardt in January 1889 even though eternal return also requires of the one whom it visits as a thought to hold his or her unique place in the infinite round as the one to whom return returns As a result Nietzsche as proponent of eternal return is both radically anonymous and yet absolutely singular But what is it that returns Blanchot asked Is the lsquosamersquo the lsquosamersquo by virtue of returning or is it always already the lsquosamersquo prior to returning But if the latter how is it possible to know it is lsquothe samersquo and if the former is it not then the case that the lsquosamersquo becomes what it is only by differing from itself and therefore without ever being the lsquosamersquo at all And finally if eternal return is the object of so many enigmas and inconsistencies that deprive it of thematic stability as a ground for interpretation what is it that is being revealed communicated or commented upon by Nietzsche and his readers

Blanchotrsquos exposition this exposure to eternal return was itself not simple It occurred by way of a sequence of fragments each bearing the fracture or interruption of a double emblematic of the neuter and each testing out the effects of a thinking of the future of that which is still to come announced in the lsquonon-identity


of the samersquo and lsquorepetitive differencersquo149 The neuter here then is only another name for return and vice versa lsquoIf Eternal return can be affirmedrsquo writes Blanchot lsquoit does not affirm return as a circle nor the primacy of Unity [la primauteacute de lrsquoUn] nor the All [le Tout] even in the name of the requirement that by Eternal return ldquoall returnsrdquo for no more than the circle and circle of circles are able to represent it can the All encompass Eternal return or coincide with it Even if ldquoall returnsrdquo it is not All that returns but it returns return (as neuter) returns [cela revient le retour (comme neutre) revient]rsquo150 And if return returns then as a neuter it necessarily also returns as the fragmentary Not the fragment or fragments these remnants left behind by the completion of the all but the fragmentary in so far as it is no longer the fragment and traverses in endless detours all writing and all language without ever being graspable or realisable as such an infinite exigency to which all possible response was necessarily finite And as Blanchotrsquos fragments on the demand of return came to a fragmentary end of their own this was why they again reached out to Nietzsche lsquoThat is how you preparersquo he wrote quoting from one of Nietzschersquos 1881 notebooks lsquofor the time when you have to speak Perhaps then you will be ashamed to speak rsquo151

From the mid-1950s onwards all Blanchotrsquos texts in one way or another would participate explicitly in the fragmentary From that point on if the future was the fragmentary as far as Blanchot was concerned it was no doubt because the fragmentary was ndash or no doubt better lsquowasrsquo not ndash the future

notes

1 Steacutephane Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes 2 vols edited by Bernard Marchal (Paris Gallimard 1998ndash2003) II 211 In architecture pendentives are lsquothe spherical triangles (or triangular segments) formed by the intersection of a hemispherical dome (or in extended use a conical surface) by two pairs of opposite arches springing from the four supporting columnsrsquo (OED) Mallarmeacute is referring to the effects and implications of what he goes on to describe as lsquoune brisure des grands rythmes litteacuterairesrsquo lsquoa break in literaturersquos major rhythmsrsquo (II 212) As Derrida recalls in De la grammatologie (Paris Minuit 1967) 96 Of Grammatology translated by Gayatri Chakravorty

A turnInG 69

Spivak (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press (1976) 1997) 65 brisure is not only a break but also an articulation or joint

2 T W Adorno Aumlsthetische Theorie edited by Gretel Adorno and rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1970) 74 Aesthetic Theory translated by robert Hullot-Kentor (London Athlone 1997) 45 translation modified

3 Adorno Aumlsthetische Theorie 283 Aesthetic Theory 189ndash90 translation modified

4 G W F Hegel Werke edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel 20 vols (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1970) XIII 25 Aesthetics translated by T M Knox 2 vols (Oxford Clarendon Press 1975) I 11 Compare Adorno Aumlsthetische Theorie 13 Aesthetic Theory 3ndash4

5 Adorno Aumlsthetische Theorie 13 Aesthetic Theory 3ndash4 True enough Adornorsquos claim that having abandoned poetry rimbaud became an office worker (or Angestellte) is not entirely consistent with the known facts of rimbaudrsquos subsequent career

6 reneacute Char Œuvres complegravetes (Paris Gallimard 1995) 275

7 Samuel Beckett Fin de partie (Paris Minuit 1957) 91 Endgame (London Faber 1958) 44 According to Gretel Adorno and rolf Tiedemann in their editorsrsquo postface Adornorsquos original intention was to dedicate his Aesthetic Theory to Beckett who is mentioned several times in the book Adornorsquos best known essay on Endgame lsquoVersuch das Endspiel zu verstehen [lsquoTrying to Understand Endgame]rsquo is collected in his Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1974) 281ndash321 Notes to Literature translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen 2 vols (New York Columbia University Press 1992) I 241ndash75 it is there that he remarks that lsquoBeckettrsquos dustbins are emblems of post-Auschwitz culturersquo

8 This is not to say that either Adorno or Blanchot explicitly rejected each otherrsquos work There is however little evidence of any sustained engagement between the pair though Blanchot does make passing reference to Adorno with some of whose work he was evidently familiar notably Philosophie der neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music) the second edition of which from 1958 Blanchot discusses in a 1963 essay entitled lsquoArs novarsquo mainly devoted to Thomas Mannrsquos Doktor Faustus (which had itself drawn significantly on Adornorsquos thinking) but principally concerned with defending artistic innovation against culture that is with affirming the demand of the fragment against the artworkrsquos aspiration to totalising unity See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini (Paris Gallimard


1969) 506ndash14 The Infinite Conversation translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1993) 345ndash50 An analogous if more fiercely polemical critique of Adorno may be found in Jean-Franccedilois Lyotard Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris Union geacuteneacuterale drsquoeacuteditions 1973) 115ndash33 where Lyotard charges as follows lsquoTotality as missing there is no god to achieve reconciliation reconciliation can only ever be present in its impossibility as parody it is Satanrsquos work However much you replace god with the devil or the prefix super- with the old subterranean mole you remain stuck within the same theological frameworkrsquo (p 125) So far critics have been disappointingly slow to investigate the relationship between Blanchot and Adorno For a helpful overview see Vivian Liska lsquoTwo Sirens Singing Literature as Contestation in Maurice Blanchot and Theodor W Adornorsquo The Power of Contestation Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot edited by Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H Hartman (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 2004) 80ndash100

9 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre (Paris Gallimard 1980) 203 The Writing of the Disaster translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1986) 134 For Derridarsquos original remark which Blanchot slightly adapts see Jacques Derrida Du droit agrave la philosophie (Paris Galileacutee 1990) 129 Whorsquos Afraid of Philosophy Right to Philosophy 1 translated by Jan Plug (Stanford Stanford University Press 2002) 80 Derrida makes a similar point on numerous occasions elsewhere as for instance in response to David Tracy in God The Gift and Postmodernism edited by John D Caputo and Michael J Scanlon (Bloomington Indiana University Press 1999) 181ndash2 The point is made too by Jean-Luc Nancy LrsquoExpeacuterience de la liberteacute (Paris Galileacutee 1988) 191ndash2 The Experience of Freedom translated by Bridget McDonald (Stanford Stanford University Press 1993) 148ndash9 Nancy concurring with Blanchot adds that lsquophilosophical discourse today is fragmentation itself [la fragmentation mecircme]rsquo

10 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 98 The Writing of the Disaster 59ndash60 emphasis in the original translation modified

11 Blanchot LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire (Paris Gallimard 1955) 81 The Space of Literature translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1982) 83 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos lsquothought of the outsidersquo see Michel Foucaultrsquos classic 1966 essay on Blanchot lsquoLa Penseacutee du dehorsrsquo in Dits et eacutecrits 1954ndash1988 4 vols (Paris Gallimard 1994) I 518ndash39 unfortunately mistranslated by Brian Massumi as lsquoThe Thought from Outsidersquo in FoucaultshyBlanchot

A turnInG 71

(New York Zone Books 1987) 7-58 It is worth emphasising that Blanchotrsquos outside is a radical outside prior to any dialectic of inside and outside in much the same way that the other night evoked in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire precedes and exceeds the (dialectical) complementarity of day and night

12 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 102 The Writing of the Disaster 62 translation modified

13 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 394 The Infinite Conversation 264 translation modified The dialogue from which this exchange is taken was first published as lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoeacutepoquersquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 88 April 1960 724ndash34 In reprising the text nine years later as we shall see Blanchot added a second section consisting of a sequence of fragments dealing with eternal return (LrsquoEntretien infini 405ndash18 The Infinite Conversation 271ndash81)

14 Blanchot Le Dernier Homme (Paris Gallimard 1957) 147 The Last Man translated by Lydia Davis (New York Columbia University Press 1987) 89 translation modified When Le Dernier Homme was reissued in 1971 the pagination was changed Unless otherwise indicated all references here will be to the 1971 printing

15 On the shifting self-presentation of Blanchotrsquos shorter fictions see Derrida Parages revised edition (Paris Galileacutee [1986] 2003) 9 Parages edited by John P Leavey translated by Tom Conley James Hulbert John P Leavey and Avital ronell (Stanford Stanford University Press 2011) 1ndash2 I examine the specific case of Le Dernier Homme in my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit (Oxford Oxford University Press 2001) 229ndash31 Conversely subsequent reprints of Au moment voulu (1987) and Celui qui mrsquoaccompagnait pas (1996) under Gallimardrsquos standard imprint retained the generic description reacutecit which was however removed when the texts were reissued in the Gallimard LrsquoImaginaire series in 1993

16 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 561 The Infinite Conversation 383 translation modified

17 Blanchot La Folie du jour (Paris Gallimard [1973] 2002) 30 lsquoThe Madness of the Dayrsquo translated by Lydia Davis The Station Hill Blanchot Reader edited by George Quasha (Barrytown Station Hill Press 1998) 199 translation modified

18 See Derrida Parages 233ndash66 Parages 217ndash49

19 LrsquoArrecirct de mort already knew this at least in its 1948 printing which concludes with this short third-person address to the future reader (omitted in 1971) lsquoIn the darkness he would see me my


word would be his silence and he might think he was holding sway over the world but that sovereignty would still be mine and his nothingness mine and he too would know that there is no end starting from a man who wants to end alone [il nrsquoy a pas de fin agrave partir drsquoun homme qui veut finir seul]rsquo See Blanchot LrsquoArrecirct de mort (Paris Gallimard 1948) 148 lsquoDeath Sentencersquo translated by Lydia Davis The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 187 translation slightly modified

20 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 565ndash6 The Infinite Conversation 386 translation modified

21 Blanchot makes a similar point in the brief note accompanying the new vastly abbreviated 1950 version of Thomas lrsquoObscur lsquoThere is for every workrsquo he writes lsquoan infinity of possible variantsrsquo see Blanchot Thomas lrsquoObscur nouvelle version (Paris Gallimard 1950) 7 lsquoThomas the Obscurersquo translated by robert Lamberton The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 53

22 Compare Blanchot Le Dernier Homme 11 117 and 123 The Last Man 4 70 74 translation modified

23 See as follows (the corresponding passages in the 1971 printing are given in parentheses) Blanchot lsquoLe Calmersquo Botteghe Oscure 16 1955 28ndash36 (Le Dernier Homme 106ndash21 The Last Man 63ndash72) lsquoLe Dernier Hommersquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 46 October 1956 653ndash63 corresponding to Le Dernier Homme 7ndash23 The Last Man 1ndash11) lsquoComme un jour de neigersquo Botteghe Oscure 18 1956 11ndash19 (compare Le Dernier Homme 125ndash7 134ndash47 The Last Man 75ndash7 81ndash9) lsquoLrsquoHiverrsquo Monde nouveau January 1957 43ndash52 (compare Le Dernier Homme 26ndash8 44ndash6 47ndash56 58ndash61 The Last Man 13ndash14 24ndash5 26ndash31 33ndash5)

24 See Blanchot lsquoLe retourrsquo Botteghe Oscure VII 1951 416ndash24 lsquoLe Compagnon de routersquo Botteghe Oscure X 1952 39ndash53

25 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Botteghe Oscure XXII August 1958 22ndash33

26 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag (Pfullingen Neske 1959) 217ndash24 lsquoWaitingrsquo translated by Michael Holland The Blanchot Reader edited by Michael Holland (Oxford Blackwell 1994) 272ndash8 lsquoLrsquoOubli la deacuteraisonrsquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 106 October 1961 676ndash86 (this last text appears in LrsquoEntretien infini 289ndash99 The Infinite Conversation 194ndash201) and LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (Paris Gallimard 1962) Awaiting Oblivion translated by John Gregg (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1997) Greggrsquos choice of title for his otherwise commendable English translation of Blanchotrsquos 1962

A turnInG 73

book is doubly unfortunate for it not only abandons the carefully calculated parallelism of Blanchotrsquos dual title it also forces upon the title a transitivity absent from the French original and significantly at odds with what at stake in Blanchotrsquos writing I return to the questions raised by Blanchotrsquos homage to Heidegger in my next chapter

27 Blanchot lsquoOugrave va la litteacuteraturersquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 7 July 1953 98ndash107 (p 98) Though one of the earliest to be written the essay does not in fact appear till the beginning of the fourth and final section of the book under the title lsquoLa Disparition de la litteacuteraturersquo Le Livre agrave venir (Paris Gallimard 1959) 237ndash45 lsquoThe Disappearance of Literaturersquo The Book To Come translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford Stanford University Press 2003) 195ndash201

28 See Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 237 The Book To Come 195 Compare Martin Heidegger Holzwege (Frankfurt Klostermann 1950) 65ndash6 Off the Beaten Track edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2002) 51ndash2

29 Hegel Werke XIII 25 Aesthetics I 11 translation modified

30 Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 240 The Book To Come 196 translation modified


32 On this tension between the impossibility and necessity of literary criticism see Blanchot lsquoQursquoen est-il de la critiquersquo Arguments January-February-March 1959 34ndash7 subsequently reprinted with slight changes in Lautreacuteamont et Sade (Paris Minuit 1963) 9ndash14 Lautreamont and Sade translated by Stuart and Michelle Kendall (Stanford Stanford University Press 2004) 1ndash6 it also appears in English as lsquoThe Task of Criticism Todayrsquo translated by Leslie Hill The Oxford Literary Review 22 2000 19ndash24 I explore the implications of what Blanchot says here about the future of literary criticism in my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism (Notre Dame Indiana Notre Dame University Press 2010)

33 These two dialogues reappear in the 1969 volume with slightly different titles the first (as mentioned earlier) as lsquoSur un changement drsquoeacutepoque lrsquoexigence du retourrsquo the second as lsquoParler ce nrsquoest pas voirrsquo see LrsquoEntretien infini 394ndash404 35ndash45 The Infinite Conversation 264ndash71 25ndash32 A series of other dialogue essays


notably in connection with Emmanuel Levinasrsquos Totaliteacute et infini (Totality and Infinity) (1961) soon followed

34 I quote here from Beckettrsquos subsequent English translation How It Is (London Calder amp Boyars 1964) 7 The original French runs (or crawls) as follows lsquoen moi qui furent dehors quand ccedila cesse de haleter bribes drsquoune voix ancienne en moi pas la miennersquo Comment crsquoest (Paris Minuit 1961) 9

35 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 481ndash2 The Infinite Conversation 328ndash9 translation modified

36 Beckett Comment crsquoest 94 How It Is 84

37 See Blanchot lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo LrsquoArc 22 Summer 1963 9ndash14 in LrsquoEntretien infini 439ndash46 The Infinite Conversation 298ndash302 translation modified and lsquoLa Parola in arcipelagorsquo translated into Italian by Guido Neri Il Menabograve 7 1964 156ndash9 first published in French in a much revised extended version as lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo in LrsquoEndurance de la penseacutee (Paris Plon 1968) 103ndash8 and further revised in LrsquoEntretien infini 451ndash5 The Infinite Conversation 307ndash10 Blanchotrsquos interest in Charrsquos poems was long-standing An early essay on the poet first appeared in La Part du feu (Paris Gallimard 1949) 103ndash14 The Work of Fire translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford Stanford University Press 1995) 98ndash110 and Blanchot refers to him again in closing his 1959 essay collection (Le Livre agrave venir 305 The Book to Come 251) where he cites a fragment from lsquoLa Bibliothegraveque est en feu [The Library Is On Fire]rsquo from 1956 subsequently collected in Charrsquos La Parole en archipel (1962) which he quotes again in LrsquoEntretien infini 452 The Infinite Conversation 458 lsquoIn the explosion of the universe which we are experiencingrsquo it runs lsquoa miracle the pieces that fall to the ground are alive [Dans lrsquoeacuteclatement de lrsquounivers que nous eacuteprouvons prodige les morceaux qui srsquoabattent sont vivants]rsquo translation modified see Char Œuvres complegravetes 383 On Blanchotrsquos friendship with Char whom he first met in 1940 and with whom he shared left-wing anti-Gaullist sympathies after the war see Christophe Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible (Seyssel Champ Vallon 1998)

38 See Char Œuvres complegravetes 720ndash1 Blanchot refers to Charrsquos two-page preface which had originally served to introduce Heacuteraclite drsquoEacutephegravese edited by Yves Battistini (Paris eacuteditions Cahiers drsquoArt 1948) in lsquoLa Becircte de Lascauxrsquo in Une voix venue drsquoailleurs (Paris Gallimard 2002) 55ndash7 A Voice from Elsewhere translated by Charlotte Mandell (Albany State University of New York Press

A turnInG 75

2007) 40ndash2 Char later became an important and influential friend of Heidegger to whom he was introduced by Jean Beaufret in 1955 On their relationship see Franccediloise Dastur lsquorencontre de reneacute Char et de Martin Heideggerrsquo Europe 705ndash6 January-February 1988 102ndash11 Together with Blanchot as we shall see Char was one of only four non-German-speaking contributors to Heideggerrsquos 1959 seventieth-birthday Festschrift

39 See Char Œuvres complegravetes 651 The text from which Blanchot quotes at the end of the version of the essay printed in LrsquoEntretien infini is entitled lsquoOutrages [Outrages]rsquo It recalls Charrsquos unflinching involvement in the French resistance which took him to Algiers in 1944 and his bitter political opposition to de Gaulle as the putative external nationalist leader of the resistance (whom he first met in North Africa) it also calls attention by 1967 two years before LrsquoEntretien infini to the precarious nature of the Gaullist presidential regime in France which continued to claim its legitimacy from the resistance movement but whose political authority was to be so spectacularly called into question a year later On Charrsquos meeting with de Gaulle in 1944 see Laurent Greilsamerrsquos useful if unevenly documented biography LrsquoEacuteclair au front la vie de Reneacute Char (Paris Fayard 2004) 207 Char recorded his grudging impressions of de Gaulle by writing that lsquoWe find it hard to believe that a bugle from Saint-Cyr [un clairon de SaintshyCyr ie from Francersquos prestigious military academy] could turn into Diderotrsquos harpsichord [le clavecin de Diderot the title of a famous 1932 surrealist text by reneacute Crevel] or a sweepstake general [un geacuteneacuteral de tombola] into a Ganymede [Ganymede was the handsome prince carried up Mount Olympus by Zeus and granted immortality] even in the eyes of visionary witnessesrsquo






45 Blanchotrsquos lsquoLa Perversion essentiellersquo was published in Le 14 Juillet 3 18 June 1959 it is collected in Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques


1958ndash1993 (Paris Leacuteo Scheer 2003) 13ndash25 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 translated by Zakir Paul (New York Fordham University Press 2010) 8ndash14 I return to the text in Chapter Three For Charrsquos lsquoNote agrave propos drsquoune deuxiegraveme lecture de ldquoLa Perversion essentiellerdquo in Le 14 Juillet 1959 [Note on re-reading ldquoEssential Perversionrdquo]rsquo see Char Œuvres complegravetes 744ndash5 For Blanchotrsquos response which differs slightly from the 1968 version of the essay see LrsquoEntretien infini 455 The Infinite Conversation 310 translation modified Blanchotrsquos parting remark about the gods lsquonever having comersquo reworks or reverses another text by Char the poem lsquoLes dieux sont de retour [The Gods Have returned]rsquo from La Parole en archipel in Œuvres complegravetes 386 Blanchotrsquos qualification may also be read as an admonishment addressed to Charrsquos effusively uncritical response to Heidegger

46 Here is not the place to examine in detail Blanchotrsquos prewar journalistic output I have done so elsewhere notably in my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary (London routledge 1997) 1ndash52 lsquoLa Penseacutee politiquersquo Le Magazine litteacuteraire 424 October 2003 35ndash8 and lsquoldquoNot In Our Namerdquo Blanchot Politics the Neuterrsquo Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 141ndash59 I return to some of these questions in Chapter Three For the writerrsquos own retrospective account of his political past see Jean-Luc Nancy Maurice Blanchot Passion politique lettreshyreacutecit de 1984 suivie drsquoune lettre de Dionys Mascolo (Paris Galileacutee 2011) On the writerrsquos return to Paris in 1958 see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 373ndash5

47 Blanchot Les Intellectuels en question (Tours Farrago 2000) 36 lsquoIntellectuals Under Scrutinyrsquo translated by Michael Holland The Blanchot Reader 217 translation modified

48 On Mascolorsquos political association with Blanchot see Mascolo lsquoUn itineacuteraire politiquersquo Le Magazine litteacuteraire 278 June 1990 36ndash40 and Blanchot Pour lrsquoamitieacute (Paris Fourbis 1996) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 134ndash43 lsquoFor Friendshiprsquo translated by Leslie Hill The Oxford Literary Review 22 2000 25ndash38

49 See lsquoDeacuteclaration sur le droit agrave lrsquoinsoumission dans la guerre drsquoAlgeacuteriersquo in Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 27ndash31 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 15ndash17 It was in relation to this text that Blanchot gave his first and only interview with the press (which never appeared) see Le Droit agrave lrsquoinsoumission lsquoLe dossier des 121rsquo (Paris Maspero Cahiers libres (14) 1961) 90ndash3 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 33ndash5 On French resistance to the war see Herveacute Hamon and Patrick rotman Les Porteurs de valise la reacutesistance

A turnInG 77

franccedilaise agrave la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie (Paris Seuil revised edition 1982) On Blanchotrsquos part in these events see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 391ndash402 On the drafting and redrafting of the text of the Deacuteclaration see Jeacuterocircme Duwa lsquoLa Deacuteclaration des 121 un manifeste eacutecrit par tous et non par unrsquo Blanchot dans son siegravecle edited by Monique Antelme Gisegravele Berkman Christophe Bident Jonathan Degenegraveve Leslie Hill Michael Holland Olivier Le Trocquer Jeacutereacutemie Majorel and Parham Shahrjerdi (Lyon Parangon 2009) 274ndash88

50 Numerous documents relating to the project can be found in a special issue of the journal Lignes 11 September 1990 160ndash301 For an overview of Blanchotrsquos involvement in the Revue and the reasons for its failure see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 403ndash17 for a detailed account of the various exchanges between the French German and Italian groups see roman Schmidt Die Unmoumlgliche Gemeinschaft Maurice Blanchot die Gruppe der rue SaintshyBenoicirct und die Idee einer internationalen Zeitschrift um 1960 (Berlin Kadmos 2009) and for an assessment of the enduring untimely contemporaneity of the project see Christopher Fynsk lsquoBlanchot in The International Reviewrsquo Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 104ndash20

51 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 61ndash9 (pp 62ndash3) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 62ndash6 (p 63)

52 Friedrich Schlegel Kritische Schriften und Fragmente edited by Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner 6 vols (Paderborn Ferdinand Schoumlningh 1988) 2 107 Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms translated by Ernst Behler and roman Struc (University Park Pennsylvania State University Press 1968) 134 translation modified

53 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAthenaeumrsquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 140 August 1964 301ndash13 the essay is republished in LrsquoEntretien infini 515ndash27 The Infinite Conversation 351ndash9 A few months earlier Blanchot published an essay entitled lsquoLrsquoInterruptionrsquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 137 May 1964 869ndash81 part of which reappears in LrsquoEntretien infini 106ndash12 The Infinite Conversation 75ndash9 it was followed soon after by lsquoLa Voix narrative [The Narrative Voice]rsquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 142 October 1964 675ndash85 to which reference was made earlier On the significance of the Athenaeum in German romanticism see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy LrsquoAbsolu litteacuteraire (Paris Seuil 1978) The Literary Absolute translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany SUNY 1988) and Ernst Behler German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1993)


54 See for instance Gerald Bruns Maurice Blanchot The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 1997) 148ndash9 On Blanchotrsquos relationship with romanticism more generally see Blanchot romantique A Collection of Essays edited by John McKeane and Hannes Opelz (Bern Peter Lang 2010)

55 It is worth recalling here Blanchotrsquos long-standing enthusiasm for the novels of Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich richter) whom he cites in a much quoted passage as one of only three non-classical authors with whom as a beginning writer he was familiar see Blanchot Apregraves coup (Paris Minuit 1983) 92 lsquoAfter the Factrsquo translated by Paul Auster The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 491 In 1964 Blanchot concluded his essay lsquoLrsquoAthenaeumrsquo with a footnote welcoming a recent (French) translation of Jean Paulrsquos Siebenkaumls and urging publishers to bring out other major works by the writer On the presence of Jean Paul in Blanchotrsquos fiction see Dimitris Vardoulakis lsquo ldquoWhat terrifying complicityrdquo Jean Paul as Collocutor in Death Sentencersquo in After Blanchot Literature Criticism Philosophy edited by Leslie Hill Brian Nelson and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Delaware University of Delaware Press 2005) 168ndash88

56 For a succinct account of Schlegelrsquos varied career see Ernst Behler Friedrich Schlegel (Hamburg rowohlt 1966)

57 Schlegel Kritische Schriften und Fragmente II 123 Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms 143 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 78 The Writing of the Disaster 46 lsquouml Another word on the fragment [Je reviens sur le fragment] being never single [unique] it nevertheless has no outer limit ndash the outside towards which it falls is not a threshold [son limen] ndash but nor does it have any inner limitation (it is not like the hedgehog closed upon itself) and yet something strict not because of its brevity (it can be as prolonged as a slow death) but through tightening [le resserrement] constriction to breaking point [lrsquoeacutetranglement jusqursquoagrave la rupture] links in the chain are always broken (there is no shortage of them)rsquo translation modified

58 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 526ndash7 The Infinite Conversation 359 emphasis in the original translation modified

59 See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy LrsquoAbsolu litteacuteraire 79ndash80 The Literary Absolute 57ndash8

60 See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy lsquoNoli me frangerersquo Revue des sciences humaines 185 1982 83ndash92 For Blanchotrsquos obliquely proleptic response see LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 98ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 60

A turnInG 79

61 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave (Paris Gallimard 1973) 61ndash3 The Step Not Beyond translated by Lycette Nelson (Albany SUNY Press 1992) 42ndash3 translation modified

62 Blanchot cites Klingemannrsquos 1805 satirical apocalyptic novel in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 54ndash5 The Writing of the Disaster 31ndash2 Unfortunately the index provided in the revised edition of Ann Smockrsquos English translation misidentifies Blanchotrsquos source as the celebrated thirteenth-century Italian saint of that name

63 For an overview of French reception of Nietzsche during the early and mid-twentieth century see Douglas Smith Transvaluations Nietzsche in France 1872ndash1972 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1996) and Jacques Le rider Nietzsche en France (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1999) Between Nietzsche and Blanchot there was also a further biographical or better bio-graphical connection to which Blanchotrsquos 1951 story Au moment voulu bears cryptic witness For as Nietzsche recounts in Ecce homo in Nietzsche Kritische Studienausgabe edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari 15 vols second edition (Berlin de Gruyerdtv 1988) 6 341 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings edited by Aaron ridley translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2005) 128 in the Winter of 1883 he composed the chapter entitled lsquoVon alten und neuen Tafeln [Old and New Tablets]rsquo in Also sprach Zarathustra lsquoduring the most arduous climb from the station up to the glorious Moorish eyrie of Egravezersquo [translation slightly modified] As Christophe Bident reports in Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 279ndash81 it was in that same small town some seven miles along the Mediterranean coast from Nice to which Blanchot withdrew in 1946 and where amidst frequent return visits to Paris he would spend the next twelve years of his life writing

64 As readers of Faux Pas (Paris Gallimard 1943) Faux Pas translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford Stanford University Press 2001) and of Chroniques litteacuteraires du Journal des deacutebats edited by Christophe Bident (Paris Gallimard 2007) can verify there are numerous brief references to Nietzsche in Blanchotrsquos work prior to 1945 His first substantial essay however was lsquoDu cocircteacute de Nietzsche [On Nietzschersquos Side]rsquo which first appeared in LrsquoArche 12 December 1945-January 1946 103ndash12 and is collected in La Part du feu 278ndash89 The Work of Fire 287ndash99 The 1958 essay first appeared as lsquoNietzsche aujourdrsquohuirsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 68 August 1958 284ndash95 and is republished with revisions as lsquoreacuteflexions sur le nihilisme 1 Nietzsche aujourdrsquohui


[reflections on Nihilism 1 Nietzsche Today]rsquo in LrsquoEntretien infini 201ndash15 The Infinite Conversation 136ndash43

65 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 208ndash10 The Infinite Conversation 449ndash51 In this note Blanchot not only makes a series of points directly inspired by Heideggerrsquos two Nietzsche volumes but also in concluding gives his personal verdict (which was to change little in subsequent years) on Heideggerrsquos political past as recently documented by Guido Schneeberger in his Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern Suhr 1962) Heideggerrsquos Nietzsche only appeared in French translation till 1971 though its contents anticipated by earlier lectures and essays by Heidegger were quickly known in French philosophical circles Many like Blanchot will have read them in the original German On reactions to Heidegger in France during the period see Dominique Janicaud Heidegger en France 2 vols (Paris Albin Michel 2001)

66 Karl Jaspers Nietzsche Einfuumlhrung in das Verstaumlndnis seines Philosophierens (Berlin de Gruyter [1935] 1981) 396 Nietzsche Introduction agrave sa philosophie translated by Henri Niel (Paris Gallimard 1950) 401

67 For the original quotation see Jaspers Nietzsche Einfuumlhrung in das Verstaumlndnis seines Philosophierens 18 Nietzsche Introduction agrave sa philosophie 19 For the changes made to Blanchotrsquos text compare lsquoNietzsche aujourdrsquohuirsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 288 289 and 291 and LrsquoEntretien infini 205 206 211 The Infinite Conversation 138 139 141 translation modified Blanchot had already drawn on the work of Jaspers (which he may well have read in the original German) for a 1945 essay on Nietzsche included in La Part du feu 278ndash89 The Work of Fire 287ndash99 It is also worth noting that in an essay entitled lsquoreprisesrsquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 93 September 1960 475ndash83 devoted in part to Walter Benjamin and in part to various considerations on notes and aphorisms inspired by the work of Georges Perros Blanchot still felt able to argue that lsquoaphoristic form with all its dangers and its potential [was] represented in superior fashion by Nietzschersquo (p 481) Interestingly however this part of the September 1960 essay was not republished by Blanchot though he did extract from it the discussion on Benjamin which reappeared with minor changes in LrsquoAmitieacute 69ndash73 Friendship 57ndash61 and two further passages on formal discontinuity which prefaced with a redoubled were partially redeployed as the opening section of the essay on Brecht in LrsquoEntretien infini 528ndash9 The Infinite Conversation 360ndash1 as though to underwrite the fact that from this point on what had so far been addressed not only in Nietzsche as belonging

A turnInG 81

to the genre of the aphorism but also in Blanchotrsquos own discourse had fallen subject to what the latter would go on to call the fragmentary the neuter

68 See Blanchot lsquoPassage de la lignersquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 69 September 1958 468ndash79 the essay is republished as lsquoreacuteflexions sur le nihilisme 2 Passage de la ligne [Crossing the Line]rsquo LrsquoEntretien infini 215ndash27 The Infinite Conversation 143ndash51 Heideggerrsquos lsquoZur Seinsfrage [On the Question of Being]rsquo is republished in Wegmarken (Frankfurt Klostermann 1976) 385ndash426 Pathmarks edited by William McNeill (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1998) 291ndash322 I have examined Blanchotrsquos reading of these texts in relation to the question of nihilism in my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit 235ndash43

69 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 226ndash7 The Infinite Conversation 150ndash1 emphasis in the original translation modified

70 See Blanchot lsquoNietzsche et lrsquoeacutecriture fragmentairersquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 168 December 1966 967ndash83 La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 169 January 1967 19ndash32 The essay is republished in LrsquoEntretien infini 227ndash55 The Infinite Conversation 151ndash70 There is here a clear echo of what in an article published a year earlier later incorporated into De la grammatologie Derrida called the lsquonecessary double belonging [la double appartenance neacutecessaire]rsquo of Nietzschersquos thinking see Jacques Derrida lsquoDe la grammatologie Irsquo Critique 22 December 1965 1016ndash42 (p 1029)

71 On Blanchotrsquos earlier thinking of the il y a see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 110ndash3

72 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 211 The Infinite Conversation 141 The reference is to Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer [1954] 1984) 68 What is Called Thinking translated by Fred D Wieck and J Glenn Gray (New York Harper amp row 1968) 70

73 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 245 The Infinite Conversation 163ndash4 emphasis in the original translation modified For the remark from Heidegger see Heidegger Nietzsche 2 vols (Pfullingen Neske 1961) II 59 Nietzsche translated by Joan Stambaugh David Farrell Krell and Frank A Capuzzi 4 vols (San Francisco Harper amp row 1979ndash87) IV 27 Contrast the commentary on the same fragment put forward by Eugen Fink in La Philosophie de Nietzsche translated by Hans Hildenberg and Alex Lindenberg (Paris Minuit 1965) 226ndash8 Nietzschersquos Philosophy translated by Goetz richter (London Continuum 2003) 161ndash3 to which


Blanchot is obliquely replying For the translated fragment itself (which Blanchot rewords slightly) see Nietzsche La Volonteacute de puissance edited by Friedrich Wuumlrzbach translated by Geneviegraveve Bianquis 2 vols (Paris Gallimard [1935ndash37] 1995) I 235ndash6 The idea of thought thinking lsquomore than it is capable of thinkingrsquo is one to which Blanchot has recourse elsewhere notably in a 1962 essay on Bataille See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 312 The Infinite Conversation 210 translation modified It is also a key emphasis in the account of infinity developed by Levinas in Totaliteacute et infini an infinity that by its very transcendence necessarily lsquooverflows [deacuteborde] the thought that thinks itrsquo See Levinas Totaliteacute et infini (Paris Le Livre de poche [1961] 1990) 10 Totality and Infinity translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht Nijhoff 1991) 25

74 Compare Jaspers Nietzsche Einfuumlhrung in das Verstaumlndnis seines Philosophierens 17 Nietzsche Introduction agrave sa philosophie 18ndash19

75 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 68ndash9 The Infinite Conversation 48

76 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 158ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 101ndash2 emphasis in the original translation modified

77 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 6ndash7 What is Called Thinking 10 Compare Friedrich Houmllderlin Saumlmtliche Gedichte edited by Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 2005) 1033 Hymns and Fragments translated by richard Sieburth (Princeton Princeton University Press 1984) 117

78 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 11 What is Called Thinking 29ndash30 Compare Nietzsche KSA 4 380 Thus Spoke Zarathustra translated by r J Hollingdale (Harmondsworth Penguin 1961) 315 translation modified A later altered version of the poem was included in the DionysosshyDithyramben one of the very last texts prepared by Nietzsche for publication before his breakdown in January 1889 in KSA 6 381ndash7

79 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 11 What is Called Thinking 28 translation modified

80 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 11 What is Called Thinking 29ndash30 translation modified

81 See Blanchot lsquoLe Tournant [The Turning]rsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 25 January 1955 110ndash20 The essay mainly an account of Beda Allemannrsquos study Houmllderlin und Heidegger (Zurich Atlantis Verlag 1954) is taken up in part under the different title of lsquoLrsquoItineacuteraire de Houmllderlin [Houmllderlinrsquos Itinerary]rsquo in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 283ndash92 The Space of Literature 269ndash76 On Houmllderlin

A turnInG 83

as a poet of the turning see Heidegger Holzwege 265ndash9 Off the Beaten Track 200ndash3 During the postwar period as Blanchot was no doubt aware Houmllderlinrsquos work was disputed territory between the conservative right and the progressive left as robert Savage recalls in his excellent Houmllderlin After the Catastrophe HeideggershyAdornoshyBrecht (rochester Camden House 2008) On the motif of vaterlaumlndische Umkehr or retournement natal as Blanchot translates it purposely eliding for self-evident political reasons any mention of a Vaterland see Houmllderlin Hyperion Empedokles Aufsaumltze Uumlbersetzungen edited by Jochen Schmidt in collaboration with Katharina Graumltz (Frankfurt Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 2008) 919ndash20 As Franccediloise Dastur suggests in Houmllderlin le retournement natal (La Versanne Encre marine 1997) 15 Blanchotrsquos version of the expression has achieved canonic status it was used for instance by the orthodox Heideggerian Franccedilois Feacutedier in his French translation of Allemannrsquos Houmllderlin et Heidegger (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1959) Lacoue-Labarthe on the other hand in his later French rendition of Houmllderlinrsquos version of Sophoclesrsquo Antigone (Paris Christian Bourgois 1998) gives the phrase more accurately as retournement patriotique (p 173) noting however in his Meacutetaphrasis suivi de Le theacuteacirctre de Houmllderlin (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1998) 33n1 that for Houmllderlinrsquos contemporaries (the reference is to Wilhelm von Humboldt) the term Umkehr (or Umkehrung) was commonly used to refer to the (French) revolution as Jochen Schmidt also points out in Houmllderlin Hyperion Empedokles Aufsaumltze Uumlbersetzungen 1483ndash4 1494 adding merely that in Houmllderlinrsquos eyes the upheaval in question was not only political but cultural and religious too

82 Blanchot lsquoLe Tournant [The Turning]rsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 25 January 1955 110 these opening paragraphs were deleted from the version included some months later in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire On the shifting history of the motif of the turn or turning in Blanchot see Michael Holland lsquoDrsquoun retour au tournantrsquo Blanchot dans son siegravecle 317ndash30



85 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 396 The Infinite Conversation 265ndash6 translation modified Heidegger had begun addressing the issue of technology or Technik again with the aid of Houmllderlin in lsquoDie Frage nach der Technik [The Question Concerning Technology]rsquo


from Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze (Pfullingen Neske 1954) 9ndash40 Basic Writings edited by David Farrell Krell (London routledge 1993) 311ndash41 Today we might be tempted to give this process a different name (which would also be the same) globalisation

86 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 239 The Infinite Conversation 159ndash60 translation modified The phrase from Zarathustra is deployed as a motto elsewhere by Blanchot on each occasion in order to invoke the relationship without relationship that is friendship with the unknown See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 256 273 The Infinite Conversation 171 183 The translation given by Blanchot is most likely the writerrsquos own Geneviegraveve Bianquisrsquos standard French version Ainsi parlait Zarathustra (Paris Gallimard 1947) 274 has for instance lsquoLe deacutesert grandit malheur agrave celui qui recegravele un deacutesertrsquo On the relationship between speech and the wilderness compare Blanchotrsquos remarks from 1957 on the language of prophecy in Le Livre agrave venir 98ndash9 The Book To Come 79 lsquoWhen speech becomes prophecyrsquo he writes lsquoit is not the future that is given but the present that is withdrawn alongside any possibility of firm stable durable presence Even the Eternal City and the indestructible Temple are suddenly ndash unbelievably ndash destroyed It is like the wilderness once again and speech too is a wilderness [deacutesertique desertic or desert-like] a voice needing the wilderness in order that it may cry out and continually reviving in us dread [lrsquoeffroi] understanding [lrsquoentente] and the memory of wildernessrsquo translation modified


88 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 240 The Infinite Conversation 160 translation modified As Blanchot was only too aware this silent exchange with Heidegger about the status of the wilderness was not without more radical historical or religious implications It was not for nothing that Levinas in 1952 objecting to the antisemitism of Simone Weil was to insist as Blanchot plainly agreed that lsquoall speech is uprootedness [toute parole est deacuteracinement] and every institution founded on reason uprootednessrsquo See Levinas Difficile Liberteacute (Paris Albin Michel 1963) 165 Difficult Freedom translated by Seaacuten Hand (London Athlone 1990) 137 translation modified

89 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 105 115 What is Called Thinking 168 188 On the enigma of crὴ see Derrida Donner le temps (Paris Galileacutee 1991) 201ndash4 Given Time translated by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1992) 159ndash61

A turnInG 85

90 Heidegger Wegmarken 334 Pathmarks 254ndash5

91 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoeacutetrange et lrsquoeacutetrangerrsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 70 October 1958 673ndash83 (p 681 note) La Condition critique articles 1945ndash1998 edited by Christophe Bident (Paris Gallimard 2010) 278ndash88 (p 287n1) This is one of only a few essays of the period not taken up by Blanchot in a subsequent volume interestingly though as Bident points out in lsquoThe Movements of the Neuterrsquo in After Blanchot Literature Philosophy Criticism 13ndash34 (p 33n15) it contains the first recorded usage of the term neutre as a substantivised adjective in Blanchotrsquos work

92 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 225 The Infinite Conversation 149ndash50 I discuss this extraordinary move on Blanchotrsquos part in Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit 241ndash3

93 On the Schritt zuruumlck see Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 178

94 See robert Antelme LrsquoEspegravece humaine (Paris Gallimard [1947] 1957) The Human Race translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston The Marlboro PressNorthwestern 1998) On Blanchotrsquos important later friendship with Antelme see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 368ndash72 It would be misleading to assume that Heidegger was unaware of the political implications of the camps As Blanchot recalls in a letter to Salomon Malka in May 1988 (in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 165ndash74 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 124ndash9) Heidegger prefaced his lecture of 20 June 1952 with the recommendation that his audience display an attitude of lsquothoughtful remembrance [Andenken]rsquo towards the lsquosilent voice [lautlose Stimme]rsquo of German prisoners of war to whom at that moment in Freiburg a newly opened exhibition was paying tribute see Was heiszligt Denken 159 (the passage in question is oddly omitted from the 1968 English translation) It was of course also Heideggerrsquos view expressed the preceding winter that the war as a whole had decided little except in terms of its fateful consequences for the fatherland notably its division into East and West see Was heiszligt Denken 65 What is Called Thinking 66ndash7 lsquoPolitico-social and moral categoriesrsquo he remarked lsquowere in all respects too narrow and faint-heartedrsquo in helping to understand these events But as Blanchot points out in his letter Heideggerrsquos public recognition of the victims of war though no doubt sincere was shockingly selective

95 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 192 The Infinite Conversation 130 translation modified It is possible that in writing lsquolrsquoindestructiblersquo Blanchot was familiar with Kafkarsquos use of the word similarly in the neuter (lsquodas Unzerstoumlrbarersquo) in several aphorisms written in


Zuumlrau between Autumn 1917 and Spring 1918 See for instance Franz Kafka Gesammelte Werke in zwoumllf Baumlnden edited by Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt Fischer 1994) VI 183 189 190 Dearest Father Stories and Other Writings translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York Schocken 1954) 39 41 42 lsquoThe indestructible [Das Unzerstoumlrbare] is one [eines]rsquo writes Kafka lsquoeach individual human is that and at the same time it is common to all Whence the incomparably indivisible bond [die beispiellos untrennbare Verbindung] between humansrsquo translation modified On the indestructible in Kafka see ritchie robertson Kafka Judaism Politics and Literature (Oxford Oxford University Press 1985) 200ndash2 As Blanchot was only too aware the quarter-century following Kafkarsquos death was to place a rather different gloss on these remarks

96 See Heidegger Wegmarken 313ndash64 Pathmarks 239ndash76 Writing in October and November 1967 in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise (collected in LrsquoEntretien infini 392ndash3 The Infinite Conversation 262ndash3) Blanchot for his part also saw little difference between traditional humanism and nihilism Admittedly he still saw a use for the word humanism but it was a radically reconfigured sense of the term more akin wrote Blanchot silently quoting Nietzsche to that which is lsquowithout humanity and almost without language [sans humaniteacute et presque sans langage]rsquo For a sympathetic contemporary reaction to these remarks see Emmanuel Levinas Humanisme de lrsquoautre homme (Paris Le Livre de poche 1990) 96 Humanism of the Other translated by Nidra Poller (Urbana University of Illinois Press 2006) 58ndash9

97 See Giorgio Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz the Witness and the Archive translated by Daniel Heller-roazen (New York Zone Books 1999) 55 It should be noted that autrui though commonly translated as lsquothe other [person]rsquo is in reality an impersonal expression a rare instance of the oblique case in modern French a remnant of a previously inflected noun system It is both singular and plural masculine and feminine human and non-human ie what Blanchot describes as the neuter though the credit for reintroducing it into philosophical discourse mainly falls to Levinas For further examination of the issues at stake see Christopher Fynsk lsquoBlanchotrsquos ldquoThe Indestructiblerdquorsquo After Blanchot 100ndash22

98 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 195 199 196 The Infinite Conversation 132 135 133 translation modified Antelmersquos much-cited formula appears in two slightly different versions towards the end of his 1947 preface see Antelme LrsquoEspegravece humaine 11

A turnInG 87

The Human Race 5ndash6 Blanchot quotes the first and simpler of the two lsquoAll those familiar heroes from history or literature whether they cried love solitude the anguish of being or not being or vengeance or protested against injustice or humiliation we do not believe they were ever driven to express as their only and final demand [comme seule et derniegravere revendication] an abiding sense of belonging to humankind [un sentiment ultime drsquoappartenance agrave lrsquoespegravece]rsquo translation modified The second follows a paragraph later as Antelme probes the nature of this demand He explains that lsquothe challenge to the status of being human [la mise en question de la qualiteacute drsquohomme] provokes an almost biological demand of belonging to humankind [une revendication presque biologique drsquoappartenance agrave lrsquoespegravece humaine]rsquo translation modified But what is it that is lsquoalmost biologicalrsquo Not life itself which is biological through and through yet nothing more or less than life as though the trait of belonging were already given enigmatically as part of life but also as something other than life as a trace that is necessarily both capable and incapable of death therefore both human and non-human a response to a questioning more primary more fundamental as Antelme clearly argues than the values and emotions enshrined in history literature ethics or morals Surprisingly in Remnants of Auschwitz (pp 58ndash9) commenting on Antelmersquos unusual turn of phrase Agamben shows little sensitivity to the implications of Antelmersquos qualifier (lsquoalmost biologicalrsquo) which he dismisses as merely lsquoa euphemism of sorts a slight scruple before the unimaginedrsquo More attentive to the nuances of Antelmersquos writing is the commentary offered by Martin Crowley who in his Robert Antelme (Oxford Legenda 2003) glossing the words cited above makes the point that for Antelme lsquothe unbreakable unity of humanity is [ ] grounded in a biology beyond qualification ndash not as exclusionary confidence but as an encounter with a boundary which cannot be crossed precisely because it is a point of absolute exposurersquo (p 7) It is however worth noting that when Antelme considers the divide that separates the prisoners in the camp from the animals plants and trees that surround them and is drawn to testify to the lsquosolidityrsquo (and solitude) of the undivided and indivisible human species he characterises what humans have in common not as defiant residual subjectivity embodied in weakness and destitution (what Crowley calls a lsquodialectic of vulnerabilityrsquo [p 8]) but beyond pathos as a kind of limitless constitutive impossibility which belonging to no-one and separating each from him- or herself is radically irreducible to all humanism and all (dialectical) power in general and as such lsquoWell herersquo Antelme writes lsquothe beast is


luxurious [la becircte est luxueuse] and the tree divine [lrsquoarbre est la diviniteacute] and we cannot [nous ne pouvons] become either one or the other [ni la becircte ni lrsquoarbre] We cannot [ne pouvons pas] do that and the SS cannot [ne peuvent pas] reduce us to it And precisely when it has taken on the most hideous shape and is about to become our own face so the mask fallsrsquo lsquoAnd if we then think this [cette chose]rsquo he famously continues lsquowhich from here is assuredly the weightiest thing [la chose la plus consideacuterable] it is possible to think ldquoThe SS are men no different from ourselvesrdquo if between the SS and us ndash ie at the very point when the distance between humans is at its greatest when the limit reached by the subjugation of some and the limit reached by the power of others seem by rights to have become fixed in some unworldly hierarchy ndash we cannot [nous ne pouvons] see any substantial difference in the face of nature and death so we are bound to say that there is only one humankind [qursquoil nrsquoy a qursquoune espegravece humaine] that everything which masks this unity in the world everything that places people in the situation of being exploited and oppressed and which might be thought to imply the existence of different kinds of humanity is thereby wrong and mad [faux et fou] and that here we have the proof of this the most irrefutable proof since the most wretched of victims cannot do otherwise [ne peut faire autrement] than take due note of the fact that however vile the power wielded by the executioner cannot [ne peut ecirctre] be other than one belonging to man the power to murder He can [peut] kill a human [un homme] but he cannot [il ne peut pas] change him into anything else [en autre chose]rsquo (LrsquoEspegravece humaine 229ndash30 The Human Race 219ndash20 emphasis mine translation modified) The claim is a simple but radical one more resistant to the fact and reality of oppression exploitation and murder than any principle embodied in human national political cultural ethnic religious or other kind of identity All the more surprising then is the bizarre (and oddly worded) claim put forward by robert Eaglestone in The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford Oxford University Press 2004) according to which lsquo[r]emaining human seems to be for Antelme the sense of belonging to a nation at war with the Germansrsquo (p 336) True as Eaglestone correctly records Antelme was not a Jew was not dispatched to an extermination camp (his sister Marie-Louise to whom LrsquoEspegravece humaine is dedicated nevertheless died in ravensbruumlck) and had communist sympathies ndash but these are scarcely grounds for dismissing his testimony as that of an unthinking nationalist


A turnInG 89

100 Antelme LrsquoEspegravece humaine 9 The Human Race 3 translation modified Antelme continues lsquoThis disproportion between the experience we had lived through and the story it was possible to tell would only be confirmed by subsequent events It was clear we were dealing with one of those realities which force you to say that they beggar the imagination [qursquoelles deacutepassent lrsquoimagination] From that point on there was no doubt it was only by choice that is by renewed use of the imagination that we might attempt to say something about itrsquo (translation modified) Antelme returns to this question of the unimaginable towards the end of his text in order to emphasise the treacherous complacency lurking within it lsquoUnimaginable [Inimaginable]rsquo he notes lsquois a word that does not divide does not restrain It is the most practical word Wandering around with it as a protective shield [Se promener avec ce mot en bouclier] signifying emptiness your steps become more assured more confident and conscience reasserts itselfrsquo (LrsquoEspegravece humaine 302 The Human Race 289ndash90) lsquoUnimaginablersquo then should not be taken absolutely for as Antelme suggests an event can be experienced as unimaginable only in so far as an effort is made to imagine it (and vice versa) it thereby becomes a place of both radical impossibility and irreducible necessity as Sarah Kofman suggests in Paroles suffoqueacutees (Paris Galileacutee 1987) 45ndash6 Smothered Words translated by Madeleine Dobie (Evanston Northwestern University Press 1998) 38ndash9 and as Georges Didi-Huberman goes on to argue in Images malgreacute tout (Paris Minuit 2003) 106ndash7 On Antelmersquos use of the word lsquounimaginablersquo see also Crowley Robert Antelme 79ndash80

101 It is this that prompts the following comment on the part of one of the interlocutors in Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 102 The Infinite Conversation 72 lsquondash And we need to add all alterity already presupposes man as other [comme autrui other as neuter] and not the other way round Only what results from this is that for me the Other man [lrsquohomme Autre] who is ldquothe otherrdquo [laquo autrui raquo] is likely [risque] also to be always Other than man [lrsquoAutre que lrsquohomme] close to what cannot be close to me close to death close to the night and admittedly as repulsive [repoussant] as anything that comes to me from these regions without horizonrsquo translation modified lsquoAlways Other than manrsquo this then is the risk a risk that Blanchotrsquos writing knows to be unavoidable ndash and therefore a chance



103 See for instance the political texts of the late 1950s and 1960s collected in Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 Political Writings 1953ndash93 Blanchotrsquos insistence on this double rapport is crucial It explains why Agamben goes awry when he claims in Remnants of Auschwitz 134ndash5 contra Blanchot that the initial proposition (lsquolrsquohomme est lrsquoindestructible qui peut ecirctre deacutetruitrsquo) cannot properly entail lsquohuman relation in its primacy [la relation humaine dans sa primauteacute]rsquo (LrsquoEntretien infini 199 The Infinite Conversation 135) Admittedly Agamben is not entirely wrong but he omits crucially the second of the two movements that Blanchot explores its relation without relation with the first and fails to notice the status of the first as infinite demand Elsewhere too in his contribution to the 1998 film Maurice Blanchot by Christophe Bident and Hugo Santiago Agamben proves an expeditious and reductive reader of Blanchot claiming for instance that the key issue traversing all Blanchotrsquos writing of the late 1940s and after was the question lsquoHow is literature possible [sic] after Auschwitzrsquo as though Blanchot had not precisely begun in 1942 in his Comment la litteacuterature estshyelle possible by raising the very question of literaturersquos possibility in order precisely to interrogate the limits of the possible as such and as though in later texts Blanchot had not been scrupulous in his respect for the singularity of that or those named by the word Auschwitz And it is relevant too to note that when Agamben had occasion to refer to Blanchotrsquos proposition two years later he misquoted it claiming in The Time that Remains translated by Patricia Dailey (Stanford Stanford University Press 2005) 53 that lsquoin referring to a book by robert Antelme Blanchot once wrote that man is the indestructible that can be infinitely [sic] destroyedrsquo This casual misrepresentation of Blanchotrsquos thinking has serious implications Among others it allows Agamben to argue that lsquoif man is that which may be infinitely [Agambenrsquos emphasis] destroyed this also means that something other than this destruction and within this destruction remains and that man is this remnantrsquo which is of course in turn to impose on Blanchot precisely the humanism his thinking sets aside Agambenrsquos failure to read is revealing in other ways too Where Blanchot in LrsquoEntretien infini interprets lsquobare life [la vie nue]rsquo under the aegis of the outside the impersonal and the demand of the neuter (LrsquoEntretien infini 196 The Infinite Conversation 133 translation modified) and in that sense as a ground without ground of impossibility Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz (p 69) does the opposite taking it to provide evidence of absolute immanence as embodied in the figure of the Muselmann This explains Agambenrsquos hasty superficial

A turnInG 91

and ultimately dogmatic reference to Blanchot in his book Also questionable for its precipitate recourse to dialectics is Crowleyrsquos assertion that lsquo[f]rom the abolition of the self to its return in the instance and as the gift of the just ldquoMoi-Sujetrdquo [ldquoSubject-Selfrdquo] Blanchot [ ] moves [ ] from the destitution of the victim to the collective refusal of this oppressionrsquo (Robert Antelme 30 emphasis mine) But Blanchotrsquos double discourse does not move it stands firm gathered and dispersed by dint of its multiple voicing in order to refuse all synthesising unity and to insist that the trace of the indestructible and the dialectic of power must both be affirmed simultaneously which is also to say that they should be disjoined separated the one from the other without the former being subordinated to the dictates of the latter or vice versa Other readers too have proven deaf to the complexity of this strategy To argue for instance that Blanchot lsquodehistoricises the camps in the name of some untheorised transcendental reduction conducted in a rhetoric of truths essences and ldquola relation humaine dans sa primauteacuterdquorsquo as Colin Davis contends is to show little sensitivity to the logic and nuance of Blanchotrsquos argument and it is revealing that in his own account of the ethical implications of LrsquoEspegravece humaine Davis transforms Antelmersquos discreetly modest third-person quasi-biological affirmation into an oddly heroic assertion of the power of the self and is left as a result with no alternative than to appeal limply to humanist platitudes as when in an effort to counter Blanchotrsquos reading forgetting that Antelmersquos memoir is precisely and necessarily a belated retrospective suffocating suffocated haunted narrative he claims that lsquoin Antelmersquos book [ ] the narrator clings doggedly to his use of the first personrsquo lsquoIndeedrsquo Davis adds lsquothe text can be read as the triumph of the first person over the forces which aim to alienate it from itselfrsquo [emphasis mine] LrsquoEspegravece humaine he concludes lsquogives voice to a much more conventional mid-century Marxist humanism than the ethics of alterity [sic] sketched by Blanchotrsquo See Colin Davis Ethical Issues in TwentiethshyCentury French Fiction Killing the Other (London Macmillan 2000) 139ndash41 In this were so there would be no apparent limit to humankindrsquos ability to overcome oppression politics would be about the survival of the fittest and as Blanchot suggests in closing the only outcome would be that sinister doublet of self-confident humanist belief nihilism The ethical relation with the Other as Levinas had long argued far from relying on a dialectical trial of strength culminating in the triumph of the One over the Other (or the Other over the One) turns precisely on the Otherrsquos exteriority to my power even though (or


rather because) it is within my power always to seek to annihilate the Other Transcendence for Levinas is not superior (moral) force but the radical inaccessibility of the infinite that places the always vulnerable mortal Other beyond power and possibility lsquoThe infinite [lrsquoinfini]rsquo he explains lsquoparalyses power [le pouvoir] by its infinite resistance to murder which hard and insurmountable gleams in the face of the Other [autrui] in the total nudity of the Otherrsquos defenceless eyes in the nudity of the absolute openness of the Transcendent There is here a relation not with very great resistance but with something absolutely Other [Autre] the resistance of what has no resistance ndash ethical resistancersquo See Emmanuel Levinas Totaliteacute et infini 217 Totality and Infinity 199 For Blanchotrsquos own commentary on this passage see LrsquoEntretien infini 78 The Infinite Conversation 54 Whether the term ethics (conspicuous by its absence from Blanchotrsquos discussion of Antelme) is still an adequate description of this relation without relation with the Other is a question that Blanchot not for the first time (or the last) explicitly raises in the discussion between his two speakers

104 Blanchot lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo LrsquoArc 22 Summer 1963 9ndash14 (pp 11ndash12) The quotation is from the Argument to lsquoLe Poegraveme pulveacuteriseacutersquo (1945ndash7) in Char Œuvres complegravetes 247 According to the translation given by G S Kirk J E raven and M Schofield in The Presocratic Philosophers second edition (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1983) 209 Heraclitus Fr 93 states lsquoThe lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks out [lέgei] nor conceals [krύptei] but gives a sign [shmaίnei]rsquo Blanchot cites the fragment elsewhere in lsquoLa Becircte de Lascauxrsquo in Une voix venue drsquoailleurs 56 A Voice from Elsewhere 40 and in LrsquoEntretien infini 44 The Infinite Conversation 31 I also discuss this example in Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 128ndash34 It is worth noting that in the closing session of his Summer 1943 lecture course on Heraclitus with which Blanchot is unlikely to have been familiar Heidegger argues rather differently in a manner which is nevertheless powerfully emblematic of the divergences between the pair that Heraclitusrsquo third term should be read in more originary fashion as already incorporating the alternative that precedes lsquoto give a signrsquo he argues lsquomeans to reveal [entbergen Heideggerrsquos rendering of lέgei] something which in that it appears points to something hidden [ein Verborgenes] which it therefore conceals [verbirgt Heideggerrsquos translation of krύptei] and shelters [birgt] and thus lets that which shelters [das Bergende] emerge as such The essence of the sign is revealing concealment [die entbergende Verbergung] The essence of the sign is not however juxtaposed

A turnInG 93

and patched together from these two functions but the showing of the sign is the originary way in which that which is separated out subsequently and otherwise for itself that is revealing [Entbergen] for itself and concealing [Verbergen] for itself still prevails undivided [unzertrennt]rsquo See Heidegger Heraklit Gesamtausgabe 55 (Frankfurt Klostermann 1979) 179 On presence in Blanchot as that which being in-between is paradoxically irreducible to the present see LrsquoEntretien infini 315 The Infinite Conversation 212 where one reads as follows in words that as we shall see are reminiscent of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli published some eighteen months earlier lsquoWhat is present in this presence of speech as soon as it is affirmed is precisely what never lets itself be seen or be grasped something is there out of reach (of whoever speaks it as of whoever hears it) it is between us [entre nous] it holds itself between [cela se tient entre] and the conversation [lrsquoentretien] is an approach on the basis of this between-two [cet entreshydeux] an irreducible distance it is necessary to preserve if the relation with the unknown which is the sole gift of speech [le don unique de la parole] is to be maintainedrsquo translation modified

105 In this respect Blanchotian lsquopreacutesencersquo [sic] or nonshypreacutesence [sic] exhibits something of the same logic or anti-logic as say Levinasrsquos use of the face or visage to name that in Autrui which does not in fact appear as such At the same time that Blanchot was publishing the first version of lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo Levinas brought out the essay lsquoLa Trace de lrsquoautre [The Trace of the Other]rsquo with which it may usefully be compared see Levinas En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris Vrin 2001) 261ndash82 lsquoThe Trace of the Otherrsquo translated by Alphonso Lingis Deconstruction in Context edited by Mark C Taylor (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1986) 345ndash59 lsquoThe trace [La trace]rsquo writes Levinas lsquomight be seen as the very indelibility of being [lrsquoindeacuteleacutebiliteacute mecircme de lrsquoecirctre] its omnipotence with respect to all negativity its vastness [son immensiteacute] incapable of closing upon itself and in any way too great for discretion interiority or a Self [un Soi] Indeed we have insisted that the trace does not create a relation [ne met pas en relation] with what might be thought to be less than being but that it obliges with regard to the Infinite [lrsquoInfini] to the absolutely Other [lrsquoabsolument Autre]rsquo (280 357 translation modified) But if so as Levinas goes on to argue the trace is irreducible to ontology which is also to say that the trace is primarily the trace of the transcendent and what Levinas calls God (which he maintains is anything but the God of ontotheology) For Blanchot however things were more complicated and many


of his subsequent dealings with the thought of Levinas to which he remained singularly receptive till the end have to do with his effort constantly renewed to neutralise so to speak the transcendence named as lsquoGodrsquo I discuss the philosophical dialogue between the two friends in Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 158ndash84 and examine their divergences on this question of transcendence in lsquoldquoDistrust of Poetryrdquo Levinas Blanchot Celanrsquo MLN 120 5 Winter 2005 986ndash1008


107 Blanchot lsquoNrsquooubliez pasrsquo La Quinzaine litteacuteraire 459 16ndash31 March 1986 11ndash12 lsquoDo Not Forgetrsquo translated by Leslie Hill Paragraph 30 3 2007 34ndash7 The turning points Blanchot identifies in the article are three in number the Declaration of the 121 the events of May 1968 and on an entirely other level the Shoah to which I return in Chapter Four

108 Blanchot LrsquoAmitieacute (Paris Gallimard 1971) 128ndash9 Friendship translated by Elizabeth rottenberg (Stanford Stanford University Press 1997) 109ndash10 The article was first written for an unnamed Polish journal The expression lsquowhat happenedrsquo in this passage is most probably borrowed from the poem of that name (lsquoWas geschahrsquo) by Celan whom Blanchot is known to have been reading at the time See Paul Celan Gesammelte Werke edited by Beda Alleman and Stefan reichert 7 vols (Frankfurt Suhrkamp [1983] 2000) I 269 Some years later in Apregraves coup (Paris Minuit 1983) 100 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 495 having perhaps in the interim read Margarete Buber-Neumannrsquos memoir Kafkas Freundin Milena (Munich Gotthold Muumlller 1963) which tells of the friendship between the two women in ravensbruumlck concentration camp where Milena died in May 1944 Blanchot does however yield to the temptation to offer a single name and comments lsquoSo [Kafka] died and what then happened [qursquoarrivashytshyil] He did not have to wait long almost all his loved ones met their end in the camps that however different their names all bear the same name Auschwitzrsquo

109 Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes II 178ndash9 lsquoMimiquersquo the brief text from which this passage is taken is best known to contemporary readers from the commentary given by Derrida in La Disseacutemination (Paris Seuil 1972) 201ndash317 Dissemination translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1981) 173ndash285 Derrida also deploys the lsquofigurersquo (figure without figure) of the glass citationality and the neuter in his reading of Blanchot notably the

A turnInG 95

essay lsquoSurvivre [Living On]rsquo in Parages 110ndash203 Parages 103ndash91 It is worth noting not only how far Derridarsquos analysis of Mallarmeacute is in general terms indebted to Blanchot but also the extent to which in Blanchotrsquos own text the crucial phrase lsquounder the false appearance of a present [sous une apparence fausse de preacutesent]rsquo had already become the object of critical attention See Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 278 294 The Book to Come 230 241 translation slightly modified As though to answer Derrida in his turn Blanchot cites the phrase again in Le Pas aushydelagrave 22 The Step Not Beyond 12

110 Salomon Malka Leacutevinas la vie et la trace (Paris Albin Michel 2005) 45ndash6 On the friendship between Levinas and Blanchot at the University of Strasbourg see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 43ndash8

111 It was while returning from the Sorbonne where as a guest of the Institut drsquoeacutetudes germaniques and the Socieacuteteacute franccedilaise de philosophie on 23 and 25 February 1929 Husserl had given two two-hour presentations subsequently published as his Paris Lectures that the philosopher also paid a four-day visit to the University of Strasbourg where he delivered a modified version of the two lectures to a lively and interested audience of 50 or 60 students in theology and philosophy mainly invited by Jean Hering (a former student of Husserl) as Malvina Husserl the philosopherrsquos wife duly records in a letter to roman Ingarden of 24 March cited by S Strasser in the introduction to his edition of the Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortraumlge (The Hague Nijhoff 1963) xxv In these Strasbourg lectures Husserl spoke in German it seems mainly on the topic of the transcendental reduction and intersubjectivity readers of Christophe Bidentrsquos biography will remember that a rare series of photographs show Blanchot and Levinas together with various friends enjoying the hospitality of one of their professors in Strasbourg Charles Blondel on 4 May the same year and it is more than likely the two friends had also attended Husserlrsquos lectures together two months earlier Having revised and expanded the text of his lectures Husserl forwarded the completed typescript to Jean Hering in Strasbourg on 17 May Hering then entrusted the text for translation to Levinas who knew Husserl well and in preparation for the trip to Paris had been asked to give the philosopherrsquos wife French lessons (more as a tactful way of offering him financial support Levinas later recalled than to assist his student in improving her vocabulary) This inaugural French version appeared two years later under the title Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes translated by Emmanuel Levinas and Gabrielle Pfeiffer (Paris [Armand Colin 1931] Vrin 1986)


predating the posthumous publication of the original German by some eighteen years When the translation appeared it followed hard on the heels of Levinasrsquos 1930 doctoral thesis Theacuteorie de lrsquointuition dans la pheacutenomeacutenologie de Husserl (Paris Vrin 1930) The Theory of Intuition in Husserlrsquos Phenomenology translated by Andreacute Orianne (Evanston Northwestern University Press 1973) which was instrumental in introducing Husserlrsquos thinking to a whole generation of French philosophers and intellectuals Levinas provides a belated echo of Husserlrsquos Strasbourg visit (and of his wifersquos shopping trip complete with embarrassing antisemitic remark) in a 1959 tribute to the philosopher in En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 174n1 Discovering Existence with Husserl 189ndash90n1

112 Edmund Husserl Ideen zu einer reinen Phaumlnomenologie und phaumlnomenologischen Philosophie (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer [1913] 2002) 8 Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy First Book translated by F Kersten (Dordrecht Kluwer 1998) 5ndash6

113 Husserl Ideen 53 Ideas 58


115 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen (Hamburg Felix Meiner 1995) 29 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 23 Cartesian Meditations translated by Dorion Cairns (The Hague Nijhoff 1973) 27 For an accessible introduction to Husserlrsquos lectures see A D Smith Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London routledge 2003)

116 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 22 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 17ndash18 Cartesian Meditations 20ndash1

117 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 27 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 22 Cartesian Meditations 26 emphasis in original

118 Levinas Theacuteorie de lrsquointuition dans la pheacutenomeacutenologie de Husserl 213 The Theory of Intuition in Husserlrsquos Phenomenology 149 translation modified

119 Levinas En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 52ndash3 Discovering Existence with Husserl 72ndash3

120 Compare Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 161 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 134 Cartesian Meditations 157 lsquoMan muszlig erst die Welt durch έpocή verlierenrsquo concludes Husserl lsquoum sie in universaler Selbstbesinnung wiederzugewinnenrsquo lsquoIl faut drsquoabord perdre le monde par lrsquoέpocήrsquo Levinas-Pfeiffer translate lsquopour le retrouver ensuite dans une prise de conscience universelle de soi-mecircmersquo Dorion Cairns in comparison is more pedestrian and

A turnInG 97

writes lsquoI must lose the world by epocheacute in order to regain it by a universal self-examinationrsquo It is worth noting that Husserlrsquos Paris lectures end with the same expression and it is quite likely his Strasbourg presentation did so too

121 For Levinasrsquos reading of Thomas lrsquoObscur see Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant (Paris Vrin [1947] 1990) 103 Existence and Existents translated by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague Nijhoff 1978) 63 Blanchotrsquos long-standing interest in the thinking of Husserl and Heidegger during the 1930s raises another question that of the relationship between his philosophical interests and the nationalist political cultural standpoint defended by him during those years in the conservative and extremist press Suffice it to say perhaps at this stage that the crucial problematic that traverses all Blanchotrsquos political literary and philosophical thinking at that time (and continued to do so in subsequent years) is the question of the law and its constitution to which I return in Chapter Three

122 The bibliography provided by Dominique Janicaud in his Heidegger en France I 544 indicates that Heideggerrsquos lecture in a translation by Henry Corbin first appeared in French in Mesures 3 15 July 1937 119ndash44 It is most likely here that Blanchot first encountered it According to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (in conversation with the author) Blanchot was however somewhat unconvinced by Corbinrsquos translation and was prompted to obtain a copy of the original German no mean achievement at the time since Heideggerrsquos text had been published only discreetly in the periodical Das Innere Reich in December 1936 and reissued the following year only as a Sonderdruck or off-print

123 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoeacutebauche drsquoun romanrsquo Aux eacutecoutes 30 July 1938 31 lsquoThe Beginnings of a Novelrsquo translated by Michael Holland The Blanchot Reader 33ndash4 (p 34)

124 Detailed comparison between the wording of Blanchotrsquos original articles and the versions given in 1943 in Faux Pas nevertheless reveals some cooling of interest on Blanchotrsquos part for phenomenological approaches to literature though this may be the result of the political climate at the time whatever the markedly divergent political leanings of its proponents phenomenology in France at the height of the Occupation still remained in the eyes of some a German science By 1945 however the situation had again changed allowing Blanchot somewhat surprisingly in a text that appears in La Part du feu 91 The Work of Fire 86 to commend the Surrealism of Andreacute Breton with its emphasis on the immediacy of poetic experience for its rediscovery of the Husserlian cogito


125 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 9 The Step Not Beyond 2 translation modified In a letter from 27 May 1940 to Jean Paulhan one of the very first readers of Thomas lrsquoObscur quoted by Bernard Baillaud in the third volume of Paulhanrsquos Œuvres complegravetes (Paris Gallimard 2011) 22 Blanchot offers his correspondent a more graphic less philosophical account of the experience of writing the novel lsquoIt allowed mersquo he wrote lsquopersonally to advance to where there is no longer any path to separate myself from the world of psychology and analysis and understand that feelings and existences can be felt deeply only in a place where in the words of the Upanishads there is neither water light air spatial infinity [infini de lrsquoespace] or rational infinity [infini de la raison] nor a total absence of all things neither this world nor anotherrsquo

126 Compare for instance Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 48ndash9 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 20 Cartesian Meditations 46ndash7

127 Husserl Ideen 56 Ideas 60 The phenomenological epocheacute Husserl explains is necessarily subject to a methodological restriction lsquoWe could nowrsquo he remarks lsquolet the universal έpocή in our sharply determinate and novel sense of the term take the place of the Cartesian attempt to doubt universally But with good reason we limit [begrenzen] the universality of that Since we are completely free to modify every positing and every judging [Urteil] and to parenthesise [einklammern] every objectivity which can be judged about as if it were as comprehensive as possible then no province would be left for unmodified judgements to say nothing of a province for science But our purpose is to discover a new scientific domain one that is to be gained by the method of parenthesising [durch die Methode der Einklammerung] which therefore must be a definitely restricted onersquo

128 Husserl Ideen 94 Ideas 113 emphasis in the original translation modified

129 See Blanchot Faux Pas 9ndash23 Faux Pas 1ndash16 translation slightly modified On the differences between Husserl and Heidegger as they appeared at the time to Levinas (and arguably Blanchot too) see Levinas En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 69 Discovering Existence with Husserl 84 lsquoAnxiety [Lrsquoangoisse]rsquo writes Levinas glossing Sein und Zeit in a 1932 essay not included in the English edition lsquois a way of being in which the unimportance insignificance and nothingness [neacuteant] of all innerworldly objects [tous les objets intrashymondains] become accessible to Daseinrsquo (p 106)

130 On Blanchotrsquos Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger during this period see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 77ndash91

A turnInG 99

131 See Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1967) 6 Speech and Phenomena translated by David B Allison (Evanston Northwestern University Press 1973) 7ndash8

132 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 24 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 19 Cartesian Meditations 22ndash3

133 Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 89 Speech and Phenomena 80

134 Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 39 Speech and Phenomena 36 translation modified

135 Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 95 Speech and Phenomena 85 translation modified Blanchot too in LrsquoArrecirct de mort shows that the living present is never given in simple fullsome presence but always already deferred and traversed by death and it is only because of the latter that the former is itself possible as Derrida shows in his turn in his essay on the story in Parages 110ndash203 Parages 103ndash91


137 See Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 98ndash117 Speech and Phenomena 88ndash104

138 Indeed to claim ontological status for the neuter in Blanchot is arguably one of the chief misconceptions perpetrated by Marlegravene Zarader in LrsquoEcirctre et le neutre agrave partir de Maurice Blanchot (Lagrasse Verdier 2001) and derives from Zaraderrsquos hasty decision to read Blanchot as an unrepentant phenomenologist

139 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 448ndash9 The Infinite Conversation 304 emphasis in the original translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos rethinking of phenomenology in Chapter Four

140 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 394ndash418 The Infinite Conversation 264ndash81 translation modified Unfortunately Susan Hansonrsquos version of the title (lsquoOn A Change of Epoch the Exigency of returnrsquo) loses the syllabic symmetry and doubleness of the original It may also be noted that (excepting the initial unnumbered and untitled narrative) LrsquoEntretien infini as a whole is composed of three sections containing nine thirteen and eighteen texts respectively ie forty in all lsquoSur un changement drsquoeacutepoquersquo is the twenty-second in this sequence falling like a poetic caesura at the end of the second section and just after the mid-point in the book

141 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 404ndash5 The Infinite Conversation 271 Compare Nietzsche KSA 3 528 The Gay Science edited by Bernard Williams translated by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge


Cambridge University Press 2001) 162 translation modified Blanchot himself is quoting from Nietzsche Œuvres philosophiques complegravetes V Le Gai Savoir suivi de Fragments posthumes eacuteteacute 1881shyeacuteteacute 1882 edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari translated by Pierre Klossowski revised by Marc de Launay (Paris Gallimard [1967] 1982) 195 As the editors point out in this republication of the 1967 volume the order of certain fragments dealing with the thought of eternal return has been revised the references provided by Blanchot in 1969 therefore no longer tally exactly with the revised 1982 text Some pages later (in LrsquoEntretien infini 417 The Infinite Conversation 280) Blanchot quotes the alternative reading of the passage found in Nietzschersquos posthumous papers (KSA 9 606 Le Gai Savoir 475)

142 Bataille first quotes the passage in a footnote to an article on lsquoNietzsche and the fascistsrsquo from Aceacutephale (1937) affirming in his main text that lsquothe future the unknown wonder of the future is the sole object of Nietzschersquos festival [lrsquoavenir le merveilleux inconnu de lrsquoavenir est le seul objet de la fecircte nietzscheacuteenne]rsquo he next cites it in Le Coupable in 1944 where he writes that lsquoUnwissenheit loved ecstatic ignorance becomes at this moment the expression of a wisdom without hope [lrsquoUnwissenheit lrsquoignorance aimeacutee extatique devient agrave ce moment lrsquoexpression drsquoune sagesse sans espoir]rsquo See Bataille Œuvres complegravetes 12 vols (Paris Gallimard 1970ndash88) I 463 and V 260ndash2 Visions of Excess Selected Writings 1927ndash39 translated by Allan Stoekl Carl r Lovitt and Donald M Leslie (Manchester Manchester University Press 1985) 193 and Guilty translated by Bruce Boone (Venice San Francisco The Lapis Press 1988) 25ndash6

143 Ernst Bertram Nietzsche Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin G Bondi 1918) 11ndash12 178 Nietzsche Attempt at a Mythology translated by robert E Norton (Urbana University of Illinois Press 2009) 12 151 For the passage quoted in LrsquoEntretien infini 407 The Infinite Conversation 273 see Nietzsche Versuch einer Mythologie 362 Nietzsche Attempt at a Mythology 306 It is likely that Blanchot first encountered Bertramrsquos study in robert Pitroursquos much earlier French translation Nietzsche essai de mythologie (Paris rieder 1932)

144 Karl Loumlwith Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Stuttgart Kohlhammer [1935] 1956) 29 Nietzschersquos Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same translated by J Harvey Lomax (Berkeley University of California Press 1997) 25 translation modified

A turnInG 101


146 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 407 The Infinite Conversation 273 translation modified Though Blanchot does not mention it explicitly it is almost certain he was writing these words in the margins so to speak of Derridarsquos essay lsquoOusia et Grammegrave note sur une note de Sein und Zeit [Ousia and Grammegrave Note on a Note from Being and Time]rsquo first published in 1968 in the volume LrsquoEndurance de la penseacutee (to which Blanchot contributed lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo) and collected in Marges de la philosophie (Paris Minuit 1972) 33ndash78 Margins of Philosophy translated by Alan Bass (Chicago University of Chicago Press) 31ndash67

147 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 408 The Infinite Conversation 273 translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos reading of Klossowskirsquos Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux revised edition (Paris Mercure de France [1969] 1991) Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle translated by Daniel W Smith (London Athlone 1997) to which these remarks are addressed in Chapter Three

148 Nietzsche Saumlmtliche Briefe edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari 8 vols (Berlin de Gruyerdtv 1984) 8 577ndash9 The letter is cited in Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 341ndash2 The key sentence in Klossowskirsquos translation reads lsquoCe qui est deacutesagreacuteable et gecircne ma modestie crsquoest qursquoau fond chaque nom de lrsquohistoire crsquoest moirsquo (p 341) lsquoWhat is unpleasant and offensive to my modesty is that deep down every name in history is mersquo

149 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 410 416 The Infinite Conversation 275 279


151 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 418 The Infinite Conversation 281 translation modified Blanchotrsquos source text is Nietzsche Le Gai Savoir 421 Compare Nietzsche KSA 9 555ndash6 Blanchotrsquos motives in quoting these lines become clearer from the fragment as a whole which reads lsquoGo on and on becoming who you are ndash the teacher and tutor of yourself You are no writer you only write for yourself That is how you keep the memory of your good moments and find what links them the gold chain of your self That is how you prepare for the time when you have to speak Perhaps then you will be ashamed to speak as sometimes you have been ashamed to write and because it is still necessary to interpret oneself because whatever you do or do not do is not enough to communicate what you are Yes you


want to communicate One day in genteel society reading much will be seen as uncouth then you will no longer need to feel ashamed at being read whereas now whoever addresses you as a writer offends you and whoever praises you for your writing reveals his lack of tact opens up a chasm between you both ndash he has no idea how much he is humiliating himself by believing he can edify you in that way I know the state of of people today when they read Ugh To want to be concerned and create for this state of affairsrsquo

2

the demand of the fragmentary

I

A gift

[ ] Waiting is always a waiting for waiting withdrawing the beginning suspending the ending and within this interval opening the interval of another waiting The night in which one waits for nothing [dans laquelle il nrsquoest rien attendu] represents this movement of waiting

The impossibility of waiting is an essential part of waiting [appartient essentiellement agrave lrsquoattente]

BLANCHOT lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo1

In 1959 alongside such long-standing admirers of Heidegger as Jean Beaufret and such recent acquaintances of the philosopher as reneacute Char and Georges Braque Blanchot was invited to contribute to a celebratory volume in honour of Heideggerrsquos seventieth birthday2 The proposal fell as we have seen at a significant time for Blanchot one that in all senses marked an epoch in his thinking and writing

That Blanchot agreed to contribute to the book was the result of various factors First it was an opportunity to pay tribute Heidegger at the time remained for Blanchot the pre-eminent contemporary thinker whose work had accompanied him more closely than any other perhaps with the exception of Emmanuel Levinas together with whom in 1927 or 1928 shortly after it was published he had


in any case first read Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and who in the decades that followed remained a key partner in Blanchotrsquos continuing engagement with Heideggerrsquos thinking Sixty years on Blanchot was still able to recall the lsquointellectual shockrsquo of that first encounter and it was this he explained in 1987 that lay behind his decision to contribute to the 1959 Festschift lsquoan event of first magnitude [un eacuteveacutenement de premiegravere grandeur] had just taken placersquo he wrote lsquoimpossible to attenuate even today even in my memoryrsquo3 But Blanchotrsquos enthusiasm for Heidegger was never unqualified As early as December 1946 in an essay on the poems of Houmllderlin published in Critique Blanchot had written admiringly but with discriminating severity about Heideggerrsquos appropriation of the poetrsquos work4 The strength of Blanchotrsquos interest remained however undiminished and as we have seen there is ample evidence from his published work that he carried on reading Heidegger throughout the 1950s usually in the original German engaging with a succession of texts as they appeared from Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track) in 1950 to Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language) nine years later not forgetting the two 1961 Nietzsche volumes and various other subsequent publications too

Blanchotrsquos relationship to Heideggerrsquos thought during that period bore another contingent or anecdotal trait In 1950 when it fell to Heidegger to express in turn his admiration for an article on Houmllderlin published in Critique (almost certainly the 1946 essay mentioned above of which he may have been made aware by Beaufret but which he must only have perused in cursory fashion) he did so by inadvertently attributing it not to Blanchot but to Bataille Blanchotrsquos friend not realising that Bataillersquos role had simply been to commission it or more accurately to propose it to Blanchot in his capacity as journal editor5 But whatever the reason for this embarrassing failure of attention or lapse of memory on Heideggerrsquos part and for the ensuing misunderstanding this flattering if wayward response to the writer whom Heidegger declared (by proxy) to be lsquothe best mind in France [la meilleure tecircte pensante franccedilaise]rsquo evidently deserved a considered reply and this was no doubt another reason for Blanchotrsquos decision to contribute to the seventieth-birthday volume for it gave him the chance to respond directly ndash which is to say in the circumstances indirectly ndash to Heidegger in his own ndash improper ndash name

Blanchotrsquos contribution to the Festschrift was therefore under-standably oblique both in manner and in content It consisted of a

thE DEMAnD oF thE FrAGMEntAry 105

short five-page extract entitled lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo which shared its title and some of its material as indicated earlier with a related yet separate piece carried by the journal Botteghe Oscure the previous Summer Like its eponymous doublet Blanchotrsquos Festschrift contribution belonged to the generically undecidable work in progress midway between intermittent narrative and essayistic meditation published as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli three years later But although the work contained in the 1959 homage largely reappears in the 1962 book it does so as we shall see in significantly altered form In this sense Blanchotrsquos Festschrift contribution was no haphazard occasional offering More than simply a page from LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (which is how Blanchot describes it in his 1987 letter to Catherine David) it asked to be read more as a writerrsquos response to a specific given context celebrating both an epoch in thought and a thought of the present epoch each marked by Heideggerrsquos signature to the importance of which Blanchot was willing to bear witness even as he took care to couch his testimony in an idiom that despite appearances to the contrary owed more to the French guest than it did to his German host

In an effort to reflect the range and implications of Heideggerrsquos thinking the 1959 Festschrift was divided into five sections Philosophy Theology Art and Literary Criticism Medicine and Physics and Poetry Sculpture and Painting with Blanchotrsquos text appearing under the third of these rubrics But whatever the impression of the volumersquos editors Blanchotrsquos contribution was transparently not literary criticism nor was it in any precise sense philosophical commentary or literary narrative either though it arguably contained elements compatible with both Its singularity as a piece of writing lay instead in its concerted interruption of the requirements of each of these canonic discourses This suspension of generic affiliation was itself closely attuned to Blanchotrsquos title For without being reducible as such to anything remotely resembling transcendental consciousness waiting much like anxiety in Sein und Zeit nevertheless offered the possibility of an experience of parenthetic disclosure in which the norms and constraints of worldly expectation were paradoxically put in abeyance and existence or being allowed as it were to speak for itself In this sense Blanchotrsquos interest in the topic of waiting was perhaps nothing new At any event it gave him the opportunity to prolong his earlier fictional and critical work and to continue to explore the legacy and the limitations of at least a certain kind of phenomenology


Waiting was not however simply one phenomenological theme among others Without being alone in this as Blanchot goes on to show in both Le Pas aushydelagrave and LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre it was a prime instance of the radical inadequacy of that metaphysics of the subject which Heidegger throughout the 1940s and 1950s had denounced so insistently as one of the crucial pillars of technological modernity In attending to the question of waiting in his Festschrift piece then there is little doubt that Blanchot in his own way was knowingly retracing Heideggerrsquos footsteps acknowledging and paying tribute to one of the abiding concerns of his predecessorrsquos thinking For in Heidegger too waiting was not an isolated topic It was inseparable from a series of fundamental questions touching on the past and the future the task of thinking and the claims of the unthought the closure of metaphysics and its possible overcoming These were questions Heidegger in the 1950s had made his own Faced with the challenge of thinking beyond the ravages of the present and with the requirement issuing from thought itself to attend to the unforeseen still unthought future the only fitting response Heidegger put it in 1952 writing in the margins of Houmllderlinrsquos poem lsquoSocrates und Alcibiades [Socrates and Alcibiades]rsquo was to wait warten But to wait he explained did not mean a deferral of thinking On the contrary it meant lsquoto remain on the look-out [Ausschau halten] within the already thought [des schon Gedachten] for the unthought [dem Ungedachten] which still lies concealed in the already thought [das sich im schon Gedachten noch verbirgt]rsquo lsquoThrough such waitingrsquo he explained lsquowe are already engaged in thinking on a path towards that which is to be thought [das zushyDenkende]rsquo6 lsquoAt issue herersquo he went on five years later turning to the threat posed by modern rationalism lsquois whether as attendants [Waumlrter those who wait] and guardians [Waumlchter those who wake] we may ensure that the silence of the appeal in the word of Being [die Stille des Zuspruches im Wort vom Sein] prevails over the noise of the claim of the principle of sufficient reason [principium rationis] to be the basis of all propositional thinking [Vorstellen]rsquo7

Waiting then was not procrastination For Heidegger and Blanchot alike it disclosed an experience of time irreducible to the representational structures of Western metaphysical thinking for which both writers agreed futurity was first and foremost a thing to be grasped a deferred present measured according to an economic calculus of investment and return expenditure and


profit subordination and appropriation This had been Heideggerrsquos lesson to Blanchot from the outset and it is what enabled him in his early critical essays to question in his turn the metaphysical understanding of the artwork as an aesthetic object posited and contemplated as such by a subject of quotidian experience and in the wake of Houmllderlin and Mallarmeacute to begin thinking of the poem as playing a primary foundational role rather than a secondary mimetic one But Blanchotrsquos debt to Heidegger also reached beyond a shared attention to specific philosophical themes It arguably also had something to do with an approach to words In this respect lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo marked a noticeable shift in Blanchotrsquos work It was one of the first of the writerrsquos texts to have extensive recourse to paronomasia as a mode of thinking The tendency is one that would become ever more prominent as we shall see in Le Pas aushydelagrave and LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre But in 1959 as far as some readers were concerned it was already reminiscent of Heideggerrsquos later writings notably the essays on language collected in Unterwegs zur Sprache and it is no doubt true that to follow Blanchotrsquos exploration of the similarities and differences between such cognate terms or near-homophones as attendre atteindre attente or attention stands some comparison with the experience of reading Heidegger when he muses on the etymologies of individual words and on the connotations of certain idiomatic German expressions8

In theme and treatment then Blanchotrsquos Festschrift contribution gathered together a number of the key concerns that by the late 1950s bore the unmistakeable signature of Heideggerrsquos thought to which it was in that respect a generous and fitting tribute

But there was something else in Blanchotrsquos text almost entirely unprecedented in the authorrsquos writing and of particular relevance as we shall see to the recipient of Blanchotrsquos tribute this birthday gift to Heidegger was in the form of a series of fragments

Thirty-five to be precise of radically differing extents the shortest consisting merely of a few words while the longest covered nearly a page as though to mark discreetly (and discretely) that the measure of any life even one lived as in this case to the biblical limit of three-score-and-ten was immeasurable as such to the necessary degree as Heidegger had long maintained that Dasein was inseparable from the inherent possibility of an unforeseeable future Thirty-five fragments then might seem to evoke only half a life But what is half a life if not necessarily and in principle already the possibility of the


whole of a life And what is the possibility of the whole of a life if not the necessary prospect of its imminent ending

Birthdays then as Blanchot was aware are by implication always deathdays In this respect it was not without significance that Heideggerrsquos birthday 26 September fell only four days after Blanchotrsquos own and that his seventieth coincided almost exactly with the second anniversary of the death of Blanchotrsquos mother9 In such circumstances what more appropriate birthday present might Blanchot send to Heidegger than a meditation on waiting on time death and the future

This is not to say Blanchotrsquos gift did not require to be opened with some care For it was soon apparent that Blanchotrsquos present was also in the form of a challenge To some of the Festschriftrsquos readers this may have seemed ungracious but as every birthday boy or girl knows the best gifts are those that are unexpected and which rather than encouraging complacency provoke the recipient to think anew of the past the present and the impending future In any case how better to thank a thinker who had made so much of the intimate bond between thinking (Denken) and thanking (Danken) as had Heidegger in Was heiszligt Denken than by inviting him to think again into the future Such it may be argued was the gesture implied by Blanchotrsquos gift to Heidegger a gift that acknowledged the otherrsquos achievement but promised more than dutiful ceremony Like any present it belonged to an economy of exchange and reciprocity but to be a gift at all if such were possible as Derrida would often put it it had also to interrupt this circle of respect or familiarity10

This asymmetry between recipient and donor by which the one is contested rather than merely acknowledged by the other is legible in a number of different ways throughout lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo First in so far as the piece incorporates a thinking about time and was offered as such to the philosopher at a significant moment in his lifersquos course it seems clear that one of Blanchotrsquos main concerns itself the fruit of many earlier exchanges with Levinas was to reflect and reflect upon his own long-standing engagement or Auseinandersetzung (ie explication as both scrutiny and dispute) with Heideggerrsquos famous remarks on death in Division Two Chapter 1 of Sein und Zeit for it is there in sect53 towards the end of Heideggerrsquos discussion of Sein zum Tode or Being-towards-death that the account of dying is decisively bound to an analysis of waiting in the form


of a description of expectation or waiting for (Erwarten)11 At this point in his exposition Heideggerrsquos purpose is clear enough It was to gain an ontological understanding of Dasein in respect of its relationship with the end (Ende) and with its own totality or wholeness (Ganzheit) Death Heidegger famously contends lsquois the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein [die Moumlglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmoumlglichkeit]rsquo lsquo[D]eath as the end of Daseinrsquo he explains lsquois Daseinrsquos ownmost possibility ndash non-relational certain and as such indefinite not to be outstripped [die eigenste unbezuumlgliche gewisse und als solche unbestimmte unuumlberholbare Moumlglichkeit des Daseins]rsquo12 But there is of course more than one way to face this imminent prospect of dying more than one way to respond to the impossible A persistent feature of anonymous everyday life claims Heidegger is that death this most proper of possibilities is experienced as a banal event merely affecting others The standard response to death he argues is for Dasein to take refuge in idle chatter (Gerede) As a result nobody it would seem really dies only a nameless impersonal substitute lsquoman stirbtrsquo lsquoon meurtrsquo lsquoone diesrsquo Dying is done in other words or better not done For Heidegger this lapse into anonymity is both a temptation and a form of blindness The everyday experience of death he terms lsquoevasive concealment [verdeckende Ausweichen]rsquo a lsquoconstant fleeing [staumlndige Flucht]rsquo before deathrsquos imminence all of which according to Heidegger is confirmation of the extent to which Dasein is so often destined to be a hapless victim of the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) that is the hallmark of the fallenness or falling (Verfallenheit) of Being

For Heidegger such failures are not contingent occurrences They are an unavoidable consequence of the withdrawal and forgetting of Being As such they imply that an authentic properly proper relationship with the possibility of impossibility presented to me by my dying is nevertheless possible Such a relationship (with that which suffers no relationship) cannot be in the form of an expecting (Erwarten) since to expect is precisely to seek to establish a transitive relationship with death and to swap for the possibility of my impossibility the calculable and impersonal possibility of worldly realisation It is however possible says Heidegger with rather different implications to anticipate (vorlaufen) the possibility of dying Indeed without such anticipation one would not be able to conceive of death as possibility at all lsquoBeing-towards-death


as anticipation of possibility [als Vorlaufen in die Moumlglichkeit]rsquo Heidegger remarks lsquois what first makes this possibility possible [ermoumlglicht allererst diese Moumlglichkeit] and sets it free as suchrsquo13 In all this the distinction between the transitivity of expecting (Erwarten) and the intransitivity of anticipation (Vorlaufen) is paramount and it is no surprise to find in Division Two Chapter 4 of Sein und Zeit that Heidegger again has recourse to the contrast between anticipation (vorlaufen) on the one hand and awaiting (erwarten) waiting for (warten auf ) or expecting (gewaumlrtigen) on the other in order to secure the crucial difference between proper and improper authentic and inauthentic personal and impersonal lsquoThe inauthentic future [Die uneigentliche Zukunft]rsquo he writes in sect68 lsquohas the character of awaiting [des Gewaumlrtigens]rsquo whereas lsquoin anticipation [im Vorlaufen] lies a more primordial Being-towards-death [ein urspruumlnglicheres Sein zum Tode] than in the concernful expecting of it [im besorgten Erwarten seiner]rsquo14

Anticipation of deathrsquos proper possibility then is what separates an authentic future from an inauthentic one But what if the opposition between expectation and anticipation between waiting for something and just waiting between transitive and intransitive with everything it serves to support in Heideggerrsquos analysis were somehow more fragile than Heideggerrsquos language appears to allow What if it were not possible to divide the future from itself on the basis of that opposition What if it were not possible to make the death that is necessarily mine the site of a decision division or determination between personal and impersonal proper and improper authentic and inauthentic eigentlich and uneigentlich What if what announced itself as the horizon of deathrsquos possibility were the impossibility of dying in which case I or better the anonymous non-person withdrawn from possibility who has henceforth taken my place would be forced to conclude that it was necessarily part of the possibility of that horizon for it to be suspended interrupted effaced

What then if the anonymity of death and my anonymity in the face of death as Blanchot argues at length in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire were the only possible ndash ie in these circumstances impossible ndash response to the imminence or futurity of death And what if the infinite indecision of this relationship without relationship with the necessary impossibility of death this comeacutedie or sham as Bataille called it in a famous essay of 195515 were the place without place


where literature neither true nor false authentic nor inauthentic complete nor incomplete became unavoidable

The question lsquoWhat if rsquo suggests Blanchot is one that lsquoliteraturersquo in its constitutive indecision its constant reinscription and effacement of the horizon its epochal resistance to ontological positioning perpetually asks of philosophy without receiving an answer

Blanchot nevertheless agreed that there was an important distinction to be made between the waiting that is a transitive expecting and the waiting that is intransitive anticipation and it was in exactly those terms his Festschrift tribute began

acute To wait merely to wait [Attendre seulement attendre]Since when had he been waiting Since he had made himself

available [libre] for waiting by losing the desire for particular things and even the desire for the end to things Waiting [lrsquoattente] begins when there is nothing left to wait for [attendre] not even the end of waiting [la fin de cette attente] Waiting does not know [ignore] and leaves aside what it is waiting for Waiting waits for nothing16

In writing these words Blanchot was perhaps mindful that some ten years earlier Beckett (who would later testify to his own affinity with LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli)17 had at one point hesitated whether to call his celebrated 1953 play En attendant Godot or simply En attendant Beckettrsquos indecision is telling It reveals a fundamental doubleness about the syntax of the word attendre which Blanchot in turn exploits to vertiginous effect in lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Attendre (meaning both to wait in the absolute and to await in determinate manner) together with the noun lrsquoattente (meaning according to context any one or more of waiting waiting for or expecting) is indifferently both transitive and intransitive as a word it hesitates between such possibles according to an irreducible undecidability As translators from the French are only too aware a perpetual ambiguity attaches to the word which context is not always sufficient to resolve Whenever the word attendre is used then the word itself waits and forces its reader to do likewise Whatever the outcome of that wait the ghostly aura of one meaning will always have been present alongside the other Indeed what manifests itself par excellence in waiting (but often precisely by not manifesting itself) is precisely


this indecision lsquoWhatever the importance of the object of waiting [lrsquoobjet de lrsquoattente both purpose and thing]rsquo Blanchot writes lsquoit is always infinitely exceeded [infiniment deacutepasseacute] by the movement of waitingrsquo18 What is at stake here for Blanchot however as he unfolds the verbal structure of waiting is not the meaning of the word in so far as it may be held to contain an original truth or truthful origin but the plural hesitation of a syntax19

In such sentences it is as though the distinction between (transitive) expectation and (intransitive) anticipation is both maintained and suspended inscribed and effaced with the result that the word attente is marked or remarked with a neutrality that defies or resists the opposition between them and leaves in limbo all that is dependent upon it lsquoWhen there is waitingrsquo LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli remarks

one waits for nothing [il nrsquoy a attente de rien] In the movement of waiting death ceases to be something for which it is possible to wait [cesse de pouvoir ecirctre attendue] Waiting in the intimate calm [tranquilliteacute intime] at the heart of which everything that occurs is turned aside [deacutetourneacute] by waiting does not let death occur as that which might satisfy waiting [suffire agrave lrsquoattente] but holds it in suspense in dissolution and at every moment exceeded by the empty monotony [lrsquoeacutegaliteacute vide] of waiting

lsquoWhat a strange opposition between waiting and deathrsquo the fragment went on apropos of the bookrsquos anonymous and impersonal protagonist lsquoHe waits for death [il attend la mort] in a state of waiting [dans une attente] indifferent to death And in the same way death does not let itself be awaited [ne se laisse pas attendre]rsquo20 To anticipate death in other words is necessarily to remain unconcerned by it while death itself only ever occurs as an exposure to the inaccessible and the interminable

Whatever its philosophical necessity then Heideggerrsquos distinction between expectation and anticipation is no sooner transposed into Blanchotrsquos French than it loses its foundational stability It is traversed by an indecision it can neither control nor avoid Indeed all that is required for Heideggerrsquos distinction to be problematised even in its own idiom is for waiting to become affected by an internal abyssal fold What happens for instance asks Blanchotrsquos text when we wait for waiting Do we tend expectantly towards the future or are we suspended in a repetitive imminence irreducible


to temporal progression To wait for waiting is not however an external adjunct to waiting It is writes Blanchot and as En attendant Godot confirms an essential part of all waiting which installs at the heart of waiting a distance or difference which separates it from itself gathers it up only in order to disperse it again in such a way that it is now both itself and not yet itself and more powerfully in evidence as the one when it is already the other A waiting that waits for waiting in so far as it is not yet a waiting is arguably no longer properly a waiting at all and yet precisely in so far as it is not yet a waiting it is arguably already more of a waiting than it will ever be The less it is itself so the more it is itself the looser the tighter the weaker the stronger the less acute the more acute As lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo puts it also referring to itself lsquoAbortive [steacuterile] waiting ever poorer and ever emptier Pregnant [pleine] waiting ever the richer for waitingrsquo And it adds lsquoThe one is the otherrsquo21 Time reverses all including itself

In such recursive moments the reflexive redoubling of experience staged by Blanchot does not operate to the benefit of absolute subjectivity as it did for instance for the Jena romantics under the influence of their reading of Fichte What intervenes instead under the auspices of an internal fold is an exposure to the outside In the movement of waiting for waiting no sooner is the act of waiting folded back upon itself than it loses its object forfeits its self-identity and is denied the possibility with which it began excluded from all projective temporality waiting becomes an exposure to an absence of foundation that may be approached only as an endless question which cannot even be properly formulated lsquoHe says he is searchingrsquo one reads lsquohe is not searching and if he asks a question [srsquoil interroge] this is perhaps already to be unfaithful to waiting which neither affirms nor questions but waits [nrsquoaffirme ni nrsquointerroge mais attend]rsquo lsquoWaiting bears a question which cannot be asked [qui ne se pose pas] Common to both the one and the other is the infinity [lrsquoinfini] which is in the merest question [la moindre question] and the faintest waiting [la plus faible attente] As soon as there is questioning no answer comes that might exhaust the questionrsquo22

Blanchotrsquos objective was not to propose a phenomenology of waiting But nor was it to subordinate waiting to a thinking of Being Beyond all prescriptive reference to the proper or improper the authentic or inauthentic it was rather to respond in writing


to the demand of the future which speaks in the indecision and impossibility of dying in so far as both eluded all characterisation The future as Blanchotrsquos account of waiting shows cannot be approached except in as much as it is always already interrupted deferred and effaced Which is no doubt why as we have seen what arrives as an event in Blanchotrsquos writing in the 1950s in response to the uncertain promise or threat of an epochal turning is the demand of the fragmentary Indeed in so far as fragmentary writing or writing according to the fragmentary is necessarily marked by interminability and incompletion any fragmentary text even any text at all is always already a waiting for what has yet to occur But what speaks in fragmentary writing for Blanchot is not only the anticipation of the future what exerts its demand over Blanchot in the fragmentary went much further for it was the impossible infinity of the unthinkable lsquoThe thought of waitingrsquo explains one of Blanchotrsquos Festschrift fragments lsquothe thought that is the waiting for that which does not let itself be thought [ce qui ne se laisse pas penser] the thought that is borne by waiting and adjourned in that waitingrsquo23

What lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo says in fragmentary form about waiting necessarily then also says something about the fragmentary For just like waiting the fragmentary appeals to a future that cannot be given cannot be made present and resists all presentation

Here too Blanchot engages obliquely with Heidegger For in lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo this birthday gift to the thinker Blanchot signals the detached fragmentary status of his textrsquos component elements by attaching to them a cross acute In lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo this acute motif has at least two functions First it is a citation Written into the margins of a homage to Heidegger on his seventieth birthday it remembers a passage from Heideggerrsquos 1951 lecture lsquoBauen Wohnen Denken [Building Dwelling Thinking]rsquo where the place of the thing in Western metaphysics is identified by the thinker as being like lsquoan unknown X [ein unbekanntes X] to which perceptible properties are attachedrsquo24 Heideggerrsquos proposed alternative based on the heavily overdetermined (and Houmllderlinian) counter-example of the bridge connecting or gathering together the two banks of a river is to go on to think the thing das Ding as embodied in the bridge in what he claims to be more originary fashion according to the figure of the fourfold (das Geviert) The fourfold crosses heaven and earth mortals and immortals At its centre its literal crux lies death Death Heidegger


reminds us means lsquohaving the capacity for death as death [den Tod als Tod vermoumlgen]rsquo25 In thinking the fourfold despite the figurersquos potential for dispersion to each of its four corners as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre will later show Heidegger overwhelmingly privileges that original unity prior to dispersion or collection as such for which he summons up the term Vershysammlung (lsquothis wonderful word [dieses wunderbare Wort]rsquo26 he calls it in Summer 1944) meaning gathering that is both the action and its outcome As readers of Heidegger will know this was no isolated trouvaille The motif of Versammlung for essential reasons permeates much if not indeed all Heideggerrsquos later thinking including his treatment of such enduring questions as that of space or place poetry thinking remembering language logos and of course Being itself27

Blanchot knows this but his writing remains unconvinced For Blanchotrsquos citation of Heideggerrsquos 1951 lecture is also necessarily an erasure if it gathers up a fragment of Heideggerrsquos abiding thoughts on the rootedness of Being it also disperses it to the four corners of the Babelian library This is the second function of the that attaches itself thirty-five times over to Blanchotrsquos gift like a necessary memento of the eternal imminence of the impossibility of dying (readers of LrsquoArrecirct de mort will also recall the doctorrsquos prognosis regarding the narrator lsquo lsquolsquoX My dear sir you can cross him off [il faut faire une croix dessus]rsquorsquo rsquo28) But if Blanchotrsquos citation of Heidegger is an erasure this is because that erasure is itself also a citation It will be remembered how in lsquoZur Seinsfragersquo first published in 1955 under an earlier title as a sixtieth-birthday homage to Ernst Juumlnger Heidegger himself adopts the motif of the St Andrewrsquos cross as a kind of emblematic erasure29 In that text its use is however restricted to the word Sein (Being) which it serves to preserve and protect against metaphysical reduction or misappropriation As such it marked the possibility of that strategic Schritt zuruumlck from metaphysical thinking mentioned earlier by recourse to which Heidegger aimed to uncover and recover a more originary and truthful understanding of Being

That the word Being or for Being was obliged to appeal to an erasure to safeguard it against another form of erasure or that the linguistic device of a St Andrewrsquos cross was charged with resisting the deleterious effects of language itself none of this oddly enough seems to have given Heidegger pause for thought and his commit-ment to the originary gathering of Being remained undiminished


Blanchot however was less certain From his perspective it was precisely the possibility of erasure as a thinking of infinite fragmentation that with a scepticism born of an attention to language not as a series of fundamental words but as a space of difference (or diffeacuterance) required him to suspect the privilege conferred on Being in Heideggerrsquos writing Blanchotrsquos alternative was not to aim to restore thinking to a regathering of the origin but rather according to the bifurcating neutrality of writing as a step (pas) that was not (pas) a step (pas) to bear witness to a thinking of effacement and reinscription irreducible to Being If lsquobeing [lrsquoecirctre]rsquo was lsquostill another name for forgetting [encore un nom pour lrsquooubli]rsquo as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli later had it this was anything but proof of the notion that forgetting was a name for Being30 It was rather the reverse a sign so to speak that writing was more originary ndash originary without originarity ndash than Being lsquoWriting as a question of writingrsquo Blanchotrsquos experience told him lsquoa question that bears the writing that bears the question denies you this relationship with being ndash understood primarily as tradition order certainty truth all forms of rootedness [enracinement] ndash that you once received from the past history of the world that domain you were called upon to manage [geacuterer] in order to fortify your ldquoEgordquo [ton laquo Moi raquo] despite the fact it had seemingly been split asunder [fissureacute] from that first day when the sky opened to reveal its emptiness [ougrave le ciel srsquoouvrit sur son vide]rsquo31

For Blanchot as far as writing was concerned there was no primordial gathering without the possibility the necessity even of dispersion More than this it was apparent for Blanchot that all gathering was already a dispersing and all dispersing already a gathering The one was always already the other prior to all ontological or dialectical unity As lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo reminded its readers prefacing the remark with a looking towards the future as what resisted positionality and sounding its most emblematic and circular refrain as proof of the principle of reversibility attendant on its composition lsquoForgetting waiting [Lrsquooubli lrsquoattente] The waiting that gathers [rassemble] disperses [disperse] the forgetting that disperses [disperse] gathers [rassemble] Waiting forgetting [Lrsquoattente lrsquooubli]rsquo32

Notwithstanding the admiration and respect each showed the other then as Blanchotrsquos and Heideggerrsquos paths crossed they also diverged Each went his separate way in other words and embarked on a different turning This much had long been plain from their


differing response to such figures of the turn as Houmllderlin and Nietzsche But there was also another ancient yet still futural figure of the turn of prime significance for Heidegger whose thinking known only in fragments was also silently quoted by Blanchotrsquos chiastic epigram Heraclitus lsquoUpon those that step into the same riverrsquo it seems the Greek thinker may once have written lsquodifferent and different waters flow They disperse [skίdnhsi] and gather [sunάgei] come together [sunίstatai] and flow away [ἀpoleίpei] approach [proseisi] and depart [ἄpeisi]rsquo33 True the authenticity of much of this fragment attested by Aristotle and Plutarch is far from certain For most commentators it appears however that the first the third and in some cases even the second of the pairs of verbs used in the fragment stem from a lost source text Citing these rhetorical doublets in French in her 1959 doctoral thesis which Blanchot would welcome in an enthusiastic review published soon after Cleacutemence ramnoux noted the impossibility of identifying any original grammatical subject (a feature whose significance would not be lost on Blanchot) and offered this version of the fragmentrsquos main proposition as Blanchot would have carefully noted lsquo(unknown subject) disperses and gathers [disperse et rassemble] (unknown subject) holds together and leaves [tient ensemble et srsquoen va] (unknown subject) advances and withdraws [srsquoavance et se retire]rsquo34

lsquoFrom Heraclitus onwardsrsquo Blanchot commented still largely following ramnoux lsquoeverything changes because with him everything beginsrsquo35 Heraclitus in other words marked a decisive turning point in what had not yet become separated into philosophy and poetry and though his fragments spoke of distant origins Heraclitus the Obscure as he was dubbed by his contemporaries (as the author of a 1941 novel then a 1950 narrative that owed at least half of its given name to that illustrious forbear was no doubt well aware) was also the enigmatic source of a body of work that spoke of the impossibility of origins The paradox was an essential one and it would have come as no surprise to Blanchot that Levinas in 1946 seeking a precursor to that beginning without beginning announced in the thought of the il y a which had long occupied the thoughts of both men should turn to Heraclitus lsquoIf one had to draw a comparison between the notion of the il y a and a major theme in ancient philosophyrsquo Levinas told his postwar audience at the Collegravege philosophique lsquoI would think of Heraclitus ndash not the myth of the


river into which one cannot step twice but in the version given in the Cratylus of a river into which one cannot step even once in which the very fixity of unity which is the form of any existent cannot constitute itself of a river into which the last element of fixity (in terms of which becoming is understood) disappearsrsquo36 ndash a parallel which the second part of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli would silently remember in this exchange between its unnamed interlocutors lsquo ldquoYou will not step twice into this placerdquo ndash ldquoI will step into it but not even oncerdquorsquo37

For Heidegger too Heraclitus marked a turning albeit of a different kind lsquoIn the thinking of Heraclitusrsquo he put it in 1951 in an essay derived from the last official lecture series he delivered in Freiburg in the Summer of 1944 a time itself marked by a historical sea-change (and not only for the reasons adduced by Heidegger) lsquothe Being (presencing [Anwesen]) of beings appears as ό LόgsV as the Laying that gathers [die lesende Lege] But this lightning flash of Being [dieser Aufblitz des Seins] remains forgotten And this oblivion [Vergessenheit] in turn also remains hidden [verborgen] by the fact that the conception of LόgsV was immediately transformed Initially therefore and for a long time after it was impossible to suppose that in the word ό LόgsV the Being of beings could have brought itself to speaking [zur Sprache]rsquo38 lsquoThe presencing of present beings [Das Anwesen des Anwesenden]rsquo he explained lsquothe Greeks call tό έόn that is tό eίnai tώn όntwn in Latin esse entium we say the Being of beingsrsquo lsquoSince the beginning of Western thoughtrsquo he went on

the Being of beings unfolds [entfaltet sich] as that which is alone worthy of thought [das einzig Denkwuumlrdige] If we think this realisation from history in a historical way [geschichtlich] only then does that in which the beginning of Western thought lies show itself that in the age of the Greeks the Being of beings becomes worthy of thought is the beginning of the West is the hidden fount [der verborgene Quell] of its destiny [seines Geschicks] Had this beginning not safeguarded what had been ie the gathering of what still lasts [die Versammlung des noch Waumlhrenden] then the Being of beings would not now hold sway out of the essence of modern technology It is as a result of this that today the whole globe finds itself encircled and held by a Western experience of Being as represented in the truth forms of European metaphysics and science39


But though the Greeks Heidegger added lsquodwelt [wohnten]rsquo in an essential determination of language as a saying of Being this was not to say that the essence of language was ever explicitly thought as such by the Greeks even by Heraclitus Though LόgsV in Heraclitus preserves this essential intimacy between Being and speaking it was therefore not long before the two were finally divorced and language turned into that instrument of expression consisting merely of sound and meaning as which it has been configured ever since lsquoOne time however [Einmal jedoch] in the beginning of Western thinkingrsquo Heidegger nevertheless concluded in prophetic tones lsquothe essence of language was lit up with the light of Being [blitzte im Lichte des Seins auf] One time when Heraclitus thought the LόgsV as a guiding thread [Leitwort leading word] so as in this word to think the Being of beings But the lightning was abruptly extinguished [verlosch jaumlh] Nobody grasped its shaft of light [seinen Strahl] and the proximity [Naumlhe] of what it illuminatedrsquo40

Three years later in 1954 Heidegger extracted from his 1943ndash44 lecture course material for a further presentation to which he gave the solemn even portentous title lsquoAletheiarsquo truth not as correspondence as Heidegger insisted but in more originary fashion as un-forgetting In his discussion Heidegger subjects one particular Heraclitean fragment Fr 72 to painstaking often tortuous philological and philosophical scrutiny In a recent English rendering T M robinson proposes simply enough lsquoThey are separated from that with which they are in the most continuous contactrsquo Heidegger however basing his text on the longer (and in part contested) version contained in the canonic Diels-Kranz edition offers the following lsquoDenn sie am meisten von ihm durchgaumlngig getragen zugekehrt sind dem LόgsV mit dem bringen sie sich auseinander und so zeigt sich denn das worauf sie taumlglich treffen dies bleibt ihnen (in seinem Anwesen) fremdrsquo Frank Capuzzi translates Heideggerrsquos version into English thus lsquoFrom that to which for the most part they are bound and by which they are thoroughly sustained the LόgsV from that they separate themselves and it becomes manifest whatever they daily encounter remains foreign (in its presencing) to themrsquo41 Glossing his reading further Heidegger paraphrases it thus lsquoMortals are irrevocably bound to the revealing-concealing gathering [dem entbergendshybergenden Versammeln zugekehrt] which lights everything present in its presencing [das alles Anwesende in sein Anwesen lichtet] But they turn [kehren sich ab] from the lighting


[von der Lichtung] and turn [kehren sich] only towards what is present [an das Anwesende] which is what immediately concerns them in their everyday dealings [im alltaumlglichen Verkehr] with each other They believe that these dealings [Verkehr] by themselves create sufficient familiarity with what is present But still it remains foreign to them For they have no inkling of that to which they have been entrusted ie of presencing [Anwesen] which only ever in its lighting has what is present come to appearance [zum Vorschein] LόgsV in whose lighting they go and stand remains concealed [verborgen] from them and for them is forgottenrsquo42

It is perhaps remarkable that publishing an article on Heraclitus only months after his Festschrift contribution Blanchot nowhere explicitly mentions Heideggerrsquos long-standing interest in the Greek thinkerrsquos fragmentary legacy True Blanchot in his essay draws mainly on ramnouxrsquos otherwise relatively traditional mythico-poetic interpretation which dutifully acknowledges Heideggerrsquos readings without necessarily endorsing them In the course of his discussion Blanchot like Heidegger before him does however attend closely to Fr 72 which following ramnoux he quotes as follows lsquoFrom the logos with which they live in most constant communication they turn aside and the things they encounter everyday seem foreign to them [Le logos avec lequel ils vivent dans le commerce le plus constant ils srsquoen eacutecartent et les choses qursquoils rencontrent tous les jours elles leur semblent eacutetrangegraveres]rsquo43 What is crucial here Blanchot contends is not the turning aside from Being and the fall into the ignorance and oblivion of the everyday a movement that for Heidegger coincides exactly with the ontico-ontological difference that joins and disjoins beings and Being What is more forcefully countersigned for Blanchot in Heraclitusrsquo fragmentary writing is rather the reversible mobility of Difference itself as a double movement of proximity and distance gathering and dispersion And to underline the point Blanchot once more had recourse to that most proverbial of Heraclitean figures celebrated in ramnouxrsquos thesis that of the ever-changing river lsquoIf Heraclitus speaks of the river whose waters never the same overwhelm us [nous tombent dessus]rsquo Blanchot wrote lsquothis is no mere didactic example [un exemple de professeur]rsquo On the contrary

[t]he river teaches us itself in immemorial fashion by the call to enter the secret of its presence to enter it never twice and not even once as one does a saying [une sentence] which has


always already closed upon itself [srsquoest toujours dejagrave refermeacutee] whenever we claim to stand within it and hold it back [nous y tenir et la retenir] The teaching of the river the teaching of fire and of the lowliest and loftiest of things Almost every one of these pronouncements is thus written in proximity to things all around engaging [srsquoexpliquant] with them in a movement that goes from things to words then from words to things according to a new relation of contrariety [contrarieacuteteacute] which it is not within our power to control once and for all but which gives us to understand mdash concretely mdash the mysterious relation existing between writing and the logos [entre lrsquoeacutecriture et le logos a phrase added in 1969] then between the logos and humans [le logos et les hommes] a relation following the double direction of lsquonearing-straying [se rapprochershysrsquoeacutecarter]rsquo when they near it they stray from it44

Citing Fr 72 by way of illustration Blanchot in 1960 then began a new paragraph in which he examined further the double contrariety of lsquogrowing closer-growing distant [se rapprochershysrsquoeacuteloigner]rsquo and of lsquoit gathers-it disperses [il rassembleshyil disperse]rsquo Nine years later revising his essay for LrsquoEntretien infini he again paused for a moment and glossed his quotation from Fr 72 with an additional sentence which read lsquoA formula in which distance [lrsquoeacutecart] is inscribed in the logos itself as that which always already destined it [lrsquoa toujours preacutealablement destineacute] for the disjunction of writingrsquo And elsewhere too similar stress is laid on the dispersion inherent in the fragmentary such that what in 1960 was described as lsquoa very lofty play of words [un tregraves haut jeu de mots]rsquo was in 1969 more firmly designated lsquoa very lofty play of writing [un tregraves haut jeu drsquoeacutecriture]rsquo45

What these textual adjustments reaffirmed while also accentuating them further was Heraclitusrsquo status as poet and writer as well as a thinker This had already been in evidence in Blanchotrsquos original text where it acted as a reminder that there could be no opposition between the fragmentary status of Heraclitusrsquo text and the thinking to which it bore witness For Blanchot the fragmentary form of Heraclitusrsquo writing remained decisive This however was far from the case for Heidegger The 1943 lecture course as summarised in the opening pages of his 1954 presentation holds to an almost entirely conventional account of the fragment according to which


the lacunary state of the Heraclitean corpus is viewed as a kind of regrettable historical accident True Heidegger takes this not as an entirely negative state of affairs but rather as a challenge to future thinking The fact remains that the essential object [das Wesentliche] of Heideggerrsquos interpretation is not the necessity or possibility of the fragmentary in Heraclitus but lsquothe definitive all-articulating unity [die alles gliedernde und maszliggebende Einheit] of the inner structure of Heraclitusrsquo writingrsquo which for Heidegger it was the task of thinking to retrieve afresh46

Blanchotrsquos Heraclitus then was a very different proposition to the thinker appropriated and represented by Heidegger Where in Fr 72 for instance Heidegger found originary confirmation of the hierarchical twofold of the ontico-ontological difference Blanchot found radical horizontality reversible movement irreducible disjunction lsquoBasically [Au fond]rsquo he wrote seemingly agreeing with Heidegger but only to underline all the more powerfully the gulf between them lsquothat which is language that which speaks in essential manner for Heraclitus in things in words and in the thwarted or harmonious passage from the one to the other and finally in all that manifests and all that conceals itself is none other than Difference itself which is mysterious because always different from whatever expresses it and such that there is nothing which does not say it and relate itself to it in saying but such too that everything speaks because of it even as itself remains unspeakablersquo47 In this unmasterable movement of language was it possible to glimpse the unconcealment of Being and attend to the unforgetting of truth Heidegger obviously believed so Blanchot however while acknowledging his debt to Heidegger thought otherwise Language he maintained was not the guardian or abode of Being but a response to the unquiet demand of the outside And it was this that for Blanchot found most eloquent expression in the language of Heraclitus this language he wrote lsquothat speaks by virtue of an enigma the enigma of Difference [lrsquoeacutenigmatique Diffeacuterence] but without complacency [sans srsquoy complaire] and without apeasement [sans lrsquoapaiser] on the contrary by making it speak and even before it becomes a word already denouncing it as logos this highly singular name in which is held the non-speaking origin of that which calls to speaking and which at its highest level where everything is silence ldquoneither speaks nor conceals but gives a signrdquorsquo48


Which was also to say that borne by the enigma of originary non-original difference the demand of the fragmentary now turned meaning history being towards the outside towards that which could no longer be named or addressed as such The challenge for Blanchot was to seek to meet that demand and to do so within the idiom of what provisionally at least might still be called literary fiction

II

A double voice

lsquoMake it possible for me to speak to you [Faites en sorte que je puisse vous parler]rsquo ndash lsquoYes but have you any idea of what I should do for thatrsquo ndash lsquoPersuade me that you are hearing me [que vous mrsquoentendez ie hearing and understanding]rsquo ndash lsquoWell then begin speak to me [parleshymoi]rsquo ndash lsquoHow might I begin to speak if you are not hearing mersquo ndash lsquoI donrsquot know It seems to me I am hearing you [que je trsquoentends]rsquo ndash lsquoWhy this familiarity [ce tutoiement ie the use of the intimate second-person singular] You never address anyone this wayrsquo ndash lsquoIt just proves that I am talking to you and no-one elsersquo ndash lsquoI am not asking you to speak to hear only to hearrsquo ndash To hear you or hear in generalrsquo ndash lsquoNot me you know that To hear only to hearrsquo ndash lsquoIn that case let it not be you speaking when you do speakrsquo

And thus in any single language [un seul langage] always sound the double voice [faire entendre la double parole]

It was a kind of struggle she was pursuing with him a silent argument [une explication silencieuse] in which she both demanded satisfaction and did him justice [lui demandait et lui rendait raison]

BLANCHOT LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli49

lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo was not long in keeping the promise announced in its title But when it reappeared three years later as part of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli it did so not in any recognisable form as a relatively autonomous set of fragments incorporated within a larger inclusive whole Instead contrary to expectation it found itself dismembered and


dispersed across several different textual locations Individual items recurred in changed sequence while others underwent deletions or were prolonged by the addition of already existing or newly found portions of text The result was an extensive reconfiguration of the words initially offered to Heidegger with for instance the passage cited as an epigraph at the head of this chapter (lsquoWaiting is always a waiting for waiting rsquo) which in 1959 had formed the final third of Blanchotrsquos opening fragment now finding itself separated from most of the rest of the fragment and joined to new material in order to create for the purposes of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli an altogether different segment of writing occurring some forty-three pages into the volume50 The prepublication extract given to Botteghe Oscure in 1958 was likewise the object of a process of calculated or uncalculated redistribution51 LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli did not then limit itself to gathering up previously published or unpublished material it sought to reaffirm the essential dispersion that had already characterised its two precursor extracts As it did so however this strategy of dissemination did not imply on the part of Blanchotrsquos 1962 text any ironic melancholy or solely ludic faith in the virtues of randomness nor any rebellious commitment to the transgression of established norms governing the continuity of literary or philosophical texts nor conversely any particular confidence in the compendiousness of post-romantic textuality all of which elsewhere and in other hands have been cited in justification of fragmentary writing On the contrary in its recourse to the fragment in its awareness that the fragmentary is inseparable from an affirmative attention to the singular event of its own writing LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was nothing if not carefully concerted

This much is already clear from the complex architectonics of the book which consists of 262 relatively short sometimes plausibly sequential sometimes apparently disconnected sometimes silently recurring fragments of text some written in the past tense some in the present some without explicit temporal marker at all ranging from relatively sustained semi-narrative developments several pages long to indeterminate snatches of unattributed dialogue between two or more voices given for the most part (though not always) in quotation marks or enigmatically truncated single-line entries seemingly independent of all narrative progression not to mention the many variations on this initial repertoire introduced in the course of the text True to its strangely double-headed title the work itself


part post-phenomenological investigation part deferred narrative part dramatic poem part love story is divided into two roughly equal halves comprising however an unequal number of component fragments 156 in the first 106 in the second each of which with the exception of the very first in each of the two numbered sections and the very last of all set apart from the preceding text and printed in italics throughout opens with an emblematic floral or diamond-shaped device () partially framing each textual remnant with an asemantic scriptural or graphic marker detaching it from the blank or silent background that surrounds it and placing it at a distance from itself as though it were no more than a possible (or impossible) quotation borrowed from some unavailable or non-existent source

Notwithstanding its promised recourse to the fragmentary LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli starts with what is one of the longest continuous or undivided passages in the book extending over some five or so pages in which contemporary readers may also have recognised with minor deletions the opening words from that first prepublication extract in Botteghe Oscure in 1958 which it is therefore tempting to view as offering a kind of introductory protocol specifying how best to approach Blanchotrsquos text In that light it is arguably not surprising that this introductory section should evoke a scene which is simultaneously a scene of reading and of writing taking place or so it would appear between two unnamed characters one in the masculine and one in the feminine suggesting the presence of two sexually differentiated humans (though even this much is far from certain) No sooner does the scene begin however than it interrupts itself lsquoHerersquo the reader is told lsquoand at [or with or upon] this phrase [or sentence] that was perhaps also addressed to him [or her or it gender is reserved at this stage] he was forced to halt [Ici et sur cette phrase qui lui eacutetait peutshyecirctre aussi destineacutee il fut contraint de srsquoarrecircter]rsquo52 Much here affecting both the story opening and the words unfolding is left in suspense The very first word ici is a case in point As it reaches out towards a singular and unique place ndash ecce hic it says from the late Latin look here now ndash the actuality of that location remains necessarily in abeyance as a consequence of the referential structure of deictics (and in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOublirsquos very first sentence there are no fewer than four such deictics)53 Other elements in Blanchotrsquos opening sentence are similarly subject to hesitation What or which for instance is the phrase or sentence


to which the incipit refers and which the protagonist is reading or writing Who is responsible for it Why and in what way does it force the protagonist to pause Who are its other intended or unintended recipients And where and when does the scene take place

It would be easy enough to answer one or all of these questions by resorting to the figure of textual mise en abyme On this account Blanchotrsquos lsquothis phrasersquo would simply be this phrase itself as it appears at the head of Blanchotrsquos page lsquoHerersquo would likewise mean this place here in the text at the start of a book called LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli And lsquohersquo the grammatical subject of the sentence would be the writer or reader of that sentence both of whom have no alternative for obvious reasons than to stop momentarily at least as the sentence reaches its end In modern novels such self-reflexive or mirroring effects are of course commonplace They occur however only in so far as there is forcibly something in a text that itself cannot be reflected or mirrored by it which is the activity of reflection itself Self-reflexivity then can only ever be partial As Derrida argues apropos of Mallarmeacute rather than testifying to a textrsquos magisterial certainty about itself it is more clearly a function of an irreducible excess of enunciation over the enunciated or of saying over the said (as Blanchot making Levinasrsquos terminology his own will later sometimes call it) which resists capture within any communicational or thematic horizon54 It is rather the horizon itself which is interrupted or suspended as a result opening language and writing to the outside to that unpredictable mobile otherness marked here as it were by the unremarkable (but always already re-marked) word lsquoherersquo as though by an iterative ie an irreplace-able but repeated and always other signature In the beginning may be the word but the beginning is always more than a word since no word is ever in itself a beginning only ever an abyssal response to another word coming before or after lsquoHerersquo then is no single point but as the fragmentary implies always already a multiplicity Whatever is gathered up in writing for the sake of reading in other words is always already dispersed by the very possibility of reading and writing55

Without breaking off now interrupting its own interruption LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli continues

It was almost by listening to her speak that he had drawn up these notes He could still hear her voice as he wrote He showed them to her She did not want to read She read only a few


passages and because he asked her gently lsquoWho is speakingrsquo she kept saying lsquoWho is speaking thenrsquo She sensed there was some mistake [erreur] but could not say what it was lsquoCross out [Effacez erase] anything that seems to you to be not rightrsquo But she could not cross anything out [effacer] either Dismally she discarded the pages he had handed her Though he had assured her he would believe everything she said she was under the impression he did not believe her enough with the force that would have made the truth palpable [preacutesente] lsquoAnd now you have taken from me something I no longer have and that you do not even have eitherrsquo Were there no words she was more willing to accept than others Or none closer than others to what she was thinking But everything was whirling [tournait] before her eyes she had lost the centre from which events radiated outwards and which till now had remained so firmly in her grasp She said in order perhaps to salvage something or perhaps because first words say everything that the first paragraph seemed to her to be the most accurate [fidegravele] and similarly some of the second especially at the end56

As Blanchotrsquos page continues it is still possible up to a point to read it as a kind of narrativised commentary on itself Just as some readers reaching the end of the paragraph duly noting the comment that lsquoperhaps first words say everythingrsquo will have tracked back to the beginning to reread the very first words in the text only to be confronted again not with a point of origin but a gesture towards the outside so some may be tempted to look ahead to see how Blanchotrsquos next paragraph ends which it does with an accurate if suitably minimal summary of the bookrsquos already minimal plot dimly reminiscent of the opening scene of Aminadab which similarly turns on an ambiguous gesture of understanding or misunderstanding communication or miscommunication between a woman and a man perhaps pointing to some incipient relationship (or absence of relationship) between them without it being possible to determine whether this relationship if it exists is the result of pure contingency or some deeper necessity whether it is the effect of some inaccessible secret shared by the pair or simply the consequence of some equally impenetrable coincidence57 This at any event is what the reader


of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli is given to understand in some of the second paragraph especially at the end

Was it mere chance [le hasard] because the room he had been given was precisely this room that had brought them so close together [mis si intimement en rapport] Others in the meantime had lived in the room and she said she avoided them on the contrary Her own room was at the end of the same corridor slightly further on where the building began to turn [se mettait agrave tourner] He could see her when she was reclining on the wide balcony and he had waved [fait des signes] to her shortly after arriving58

But as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOublirsquos opening scene unfolds it is not long before it again interrupts itself at least momentarily and in a different manner than before For it falls silent this time with or upon the strangely unattributed assertion not explained by the text that what the protagonist has just written about or in response to his partner lsquowas something she was not meant to hear [ne devait pas entendre] and that they were not meant to hear [ne devaient pas entendre] togetherrsquo59 Admittedly the gulf of understanding between the pair implied by these words is nothing new From the outset the woman is reluctant to read what she has been shown by her companion who claims however to have written largely under her dictation and she is plainly dissatisfied with those words This leads her to criticise him for having insufficient confidence in her In turn the protagonist is aware of having failed in some way attributing it to some error or lapse on his part As the narrative explains

To see her to hear her was to be bound by a premonition [pressentiment] he was eager not to betray [auquel il deacutesirait ne pas manquer] What then was the reason for his failure Why did she repudiate so dismally what she had said Was she repudiating herself He thought that at a certain moment he had done something wrong [commis une faute] He had questioned her too brutally He did not remember questioning her but that was no justification he had questioned her more insistently by his silence his expectation [attente] and the signs he had made to her He had caused her to speak the truth too openly a truth that was direct disarmed and irrevocable60


The protagonist it seems has been unduly precipitate lsquoTo be faithful [fidegravele]rsquo the reader is told lsquothis is what was asked of him to hold this chill hand [cette main un peu froide] that would take him by a series of singular twists and turns to a place where it would disappear and leave him alone But it was difficult for him not to seek out the person whose hand this was [agrave qui appartenait cette main] He had always been like this It was the hand he would think about and the woman [celle] who had held it out to him and not the course it had travelled [lrsquoitineacuteraire] There no doubt was the mistake [la faute]rsquo61 This abiding sense of failure is not however an end to it Failure too creates a bond lsquoAs he gathered up the sheets of paper (it was now her turn to observe him with curiosity)rsquo adds the story lsquohe could not help feeling that he was tied to her by that failurersquo62 Matters may have seemed to be at a close but this end is just the beginning ndash of a lengthy wait and an ever lengthier forgetting

Over the next hundred and fifty pages according to a recursive Heraclitean rhythm of flux and reflux this is what happens in the story or rather what fails or refuses to happen For if LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli is a story it is like many of Blanchotrsquos stories a story of resistance to story LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli says as much again by way of an anonymous signature by recalling a sentence on which the author of Au moment voulu in 1951 already had occasion to pause lsquoFrom the outsidersquo reports one of Blanchotrsquos 1962 fragments lsquohe would have liked it to be clearer how things stood in place of a beginning a kind of initial void an energetic refusal to allow the story to get startedrsquo lsquoStory [histoire] what does she mean by thatrsquo the next paragraph rejoins and adds lsquoHe remembers the words that had one day burst into his life ldquoNo one here desires to be bound to a story [Personne ici ne deacutesire se lier agrave une histoire]rdquo The memory is almost burnt out [eacuteteint] yet overwhelms him stillrsquo63 To resist story or history (in French the word is the same) is not however to attempt to pass beyond it but to remember it precisely by forgetting it in so far as forgetting is a condition of possibility of all memory and to attend to its unpresentable future as the time without time that conditions story or history albeit only in so far as it remains radically inaccessible to it

By suspending the past and the future as modes of presence the resistance to story opens however an interval a vacant deferral or deferred vacancy in which what appears is neither something nor


nothing but which as it withdraws from manifestation nevertheless gives a space and time for waiting ndash and for writing which is also to say space and time as waiting and as writing Occurring under the auspices of a kind of epochal interruption this opening possesses however neither origin nor term neither foundation nor purpose It cannot therefore become the object of any logic of negativity and let itself be bound to the production of a work but neither can it become a site of truthful disclosure whether as adequation or as unconcealment since its only allegiance is to the void of its own inscription Its only recourse in other words is to the fragmentary as what radically precedes positioning as such and separating time or space from itself in paradoxical but no less affirmative fashion shuttles back and forth by dint of its shifting rhythmic configuration (as Heraclitus according to Benveniste64 might have said) between the finite and the infinite the transitive and the intransitive the time-bound and the timeless Witness for instance the lsquomotionless movement [mouvement immobile]rsquo65 as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli at one stage calls it traced that is gathered up only to be dispersed again in the following fragment elements of which in slightly different form had previously been offered to Heidegger

Waiting occurs [Crsquoest lrsquoattente] when time is always superfluous [de trop] and yet when time lacks time [le temps manque au temps] This overabundant lack of time is the duration of waiting

In waiting the time which allows him to wait is wasted [se perd] so as to respond better to waiting

Waiting which takes place in time opens time to the absence of time in which there are no grounds for waiting [il nrsquoy a pas lieu drsquoattendre]

The absence of time is what lets him waitTime is what gives him something to wait forIn waiting the absence of time rules in which waiting is the

impossibility of waitingTime makes possible the impossible waiting in which the

pressure of the absence of time affirms itselfIn time waiting comes to an end without an end being put

to waitingHe knows that when time comes to an end the absence of time

also dissipates or withdraws [se dissipe aussi ou se deacuterobe] But


in waiting if time always gives him something to wait for if only his own end or the end of things he is already meant [destineacute] for the absence of time which has always released waiting from this end and from every end66

In reprising this passage it was not simply for Blanchot a matter of neutralising the opposition between the intransitivity of waiting and the transitivity of expectation and countersigning once again his exchange with Heidegger There was a more pressing task which was to uncover in waiting this blankly unassuming yet deeply elusive everyday activity or absence of activity the extent and implications of what elsewhere at the time notably in an essay devoted to Bataille in October 1962 shortly after LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was published Blanchot described as a lsquolimit-experiencersquo an experience that is which without being in any way exceptional (lsquolimit-experience is experience itself [lrsquoexpeacuterience mecircme]rsquo he maintained) exceeded the authority interiority and identity of any personal self and drove whoever was subject to it towards what might only be called an lsquoexperience of non-experience [expeacuterience de la nonshyexpeacuterience]rsquo in which existence according to a formula that had already figured in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was the site of lsquoa turning aside from all that was visible and all that was invisible [deacutetour de tout visible et de tout invisible]rsquo67

Waiting according to LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli by dint of its irremediable weakness rather than by virtue of any transgressive force was one such limit-experience It is not hard to see why Waiting by definition is neither active nor passive Its object whether a person thing word or event is likewise neither properly present nor properly absent firstly because it is possible to wait for something only if it cannot be obtained in the present (for if it were to be made present there would be no waiting) and secondly because that for which one waits being withdrawn from the here and now cannot in fact be made present as itself (and if it were to present itself it would merely prove the old adage that one never receives what one expects) In that its object is perpetually suspended like some ghostly revenant between a presence it cannot deliver and an absence it cannot overcome waiting is to that extent interminable and inescapable without culmination nor redemption its pressure as urgent in its dilatoriness as it is dilatory in its urgency In this regard as in so many others Vladimir and Estragon are exemplary figures


For characters such as these living like dying this continuation of the same is already waiting waiting for something which even when it appears to be coming like Godot necessarily always fails to do so and which if it does come like Pozzo and Lucky only serves to make the waiting more burdensome And if waiting is endless it follows that it far outstrips any object Its lack is its excess and its excess its lack Its possibility in other words seems little different from its impossibility For if Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot and Godot destined never to come in what sense might it be said they are waiting at all Is it not rather that to wait is always to be confronted with the impossibility of doing so In that case is not the impossibility of waiting rather than providing any relief from waiting not simply a more acute hyperbolic form of waiting itself

If the structure of waiting is such that it changes its putative object into a figment of itself the consequences for whoever is the subject of waiting are no less severe Vladimir and Estragon are again eloquent on the subject For if waiting is both ineluctable and without purpose beyond positivity and negativity alike the effect is paradoxically to deprive whoever is in the position of having to wait of any stable identifiable position in which to do so To wait is not to be placed in either an active or passive role it is to hang undecidably between the one and the other exposed to a kind of passivity beyond passivity as Blanchot following Levinas will later call it prior to both activity and passivity in the conventional sense The experience of deferral in other words is also a deferral of experience And if waiting were a name for such delay this also meant that time and space instead of being properly circumscribed were likewise always already their own backwards reflection time was synonymous with an absence of time in the same way that each and every place was also no place at all In waiting then the possibility of experience and the experience of possibility find themselves traversed at every turn by the impossible an impossible which is not secondary but constitutive and can be neither eliminated nor accommodated but remains both outside and inside with the result that nothing in waiting retains its proper identity but is always already interrupted compromised and contaminated by its belated spectral twin

responding to this tortuous yet imperious logic LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli abounds in all manner of bewildering inversions or reversals each testifying to the essential difference from itself of all


the various structural motifs set in motionless motion by the bookrsquos fragmentary idiom Among them populating the text in infinite number and without any claim to exhaustivity one might list for example from the outset the waiting which turns aside from itself (lsquoAs soon as one waited for something one waited a little lessrsquo) and comes into its own so to speak only when it is other than what it is (lsquoWaiting begins when there is nothing more to wait for not even the end of waiting Waiting does not know and destroys what it waits for Waiting waits for nothingrsquo) and in the end only succeeds when it fails (lsquoTo wait was to wait for the opportunity And the opportunity came only at the moment stolen from waiting the moment when it is no longer a matter of waiting at allrsquo)68 Under pressure from waiting there is also the speaking which is not yet a speaking (lsquoHe had often had the impression she was speaking but that she was not yet speaking So he waited He was trapped alongside her in the great shifting circle of waitingrsquo) and likewise the beginning which strange to tell is not yet a beginning (lsquoAnd yet had he not cautioned her from the first day that day which was not yet quite the first when she had seemed to him so embarrassed to be there surprised and almost annoyed waiting for him to justify himself while justifying herrsquo) not to forget the impending moment of the pairrsquos inevitable demise to talk about which risks however detaining them for ever (lsquoThey conversed always about the moment when they would no longer be there and though they knew they would always be there to converse upon such a moment they thought there was nothing more worthy of their eternity than to spend it evoking its endrsquo)69

In like fashion there is also the memory that words slowly erase but which nevertheless remains replete with many distressing experiences that can paradoxically no longer be called to memory (lsquoWords erode in her the memory they help her to express In her memory nothing but suffering that cannot be rememberedrsquo) not to mention the blankness of oblivion of which nothing can be said that is not contradictory as though to prove that memory and forgetting are each the deferred relay of the other (lsquoForgetting forgotten ldquoIf I forget you will you remember yourselfrdquo ndash ldquoMyself in your forgetting of merdquo ndash ldquoBut will it be me that forgets you will it be you who remembersrdquo ndash ldquoNot you not I forgetting will forget me in you and impersonal memory will efface me from whatever remembersrdquorsquo) So if memory is a kind of forgetting forgetting in turn is but a kind


of anonymous memory (lsquoWhoever forgetting draws away into forgetting also draws from us the personal power of memory at which point impersonal memory arises the memory without anyone that stands in for our forgettingrsquo) a memory or a forgetting in other words whose intimate term is deathrsquos impossibility (lsquoldquoMight it be that to forget death is really to remember it And that the only memory capable of measuring up to death is forgettingrdquondash ldquoAn impossible forgetting Each time you forget it is death that you remember in forgettingrdquorsquo)70

In the course of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli these and numerous other self-displacing motifs either singly or in combination are reiterated and rehearsed many times over Paronomasia ellipsis oxymoron chiasmus paradox all loom large in their articulation Phrases or passages that appear in seemingly abbreviated or truncated form at one moment recur in expanded or amplified fashion at the next and vice versa releasing reading from the teleological expectation that it is necessary to begin at the beginning and end at the ending the fragmentary structure of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli makes it possible to begin or end almost anywhere with the result that every fragment in the text is simultaneously both a beginning and an ending and anything but a beginning and an ending sited on the edge and at the core of a configuration that admits of neither At the same time no single fragment stands alone but is always a postponed response ndash a waiting and a forgetting ndash not only to every other fragment in the volume whether alongside or at a short or long distance from it but also to the silence or the unspoken void marked by the graphic floral or four-quartered trace () surrounding each fragment and detaching it from one context in order to attach it to another and vice versa And even as it speaks indifferently to all the other fragments in the text each recurring phrase is itself always singular irreducibly different from what it was a moment ago or from what it might be on its return In this way the fragmentary composition of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli both underwrites the necessity of chance and ensures that no single reading is ever all or even enough The interruption of the fragmentary in other words is paradoxical proof of its futural infinity Little wonder then as we have seen that implicitly and explicitly LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli should continue to reference Heraclitus

repetition not only proliferates difference it emphasises too as mentioned before the extent to which under the pull of the


fragmentary thinking is somehow able always to think more than it thinks71 This same thought thought without thought thought beyond thought is prominent too in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli where lsquo[w]aiting and forgetting ignorance and thoughtrsquo the reader is told lsquoaffirmed that which did not let itself be awaited in waiting which did not let itself be forgotten in forgetting of which ignorance was not ignorant which was not thought in thoughtrsquo72 The fragmentary here like repetition captures simultaneously both the absent and the excessive (what LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli at one stage calls lsquothe innumerable population of the void [le peuplement innombrable du vide]rsquo73) and this in turn is reflected in abyssal fashion in the protagonistrsquos empty hotel room which is empty precisely because it is occupied and now occupied by him is therefore more hospitable to his familiar-unfamiliar female guest74 such that the togetherness that at certain moments binds them to one another is more the result of separation than established intimacy lsquoldquoAre we together Not entirely are we Only if we could be separatedrdquo ndash ldquoWe are separated Irsquom afraid to say by everything you are unwilling to say about yourselfrdquo ndash ldquoBut also joined as resultrdquo ndash ldquoJoined separated [Reacuteunis seacutepareacutes]rdquorsquo75 lsquoTheir voices echo in the vast emptinessrsquo remarks the narrator lsquothe emptiness of the voices and the emptiness of this empty placersquo76 Space even when voided then or especially when voided is not closed on itself but open to the outside infinite therefore in its irredeemable finitude not unlike the nameless city in which LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli is located or perhaps better dis-located lsquothinspThe pressure of the city from every direction [de toutes parts]rsquo Blanchot puts it lsquoHouses are not there to be dwelt in [pour qursquoon y demeure] but for there to be streets and in the streets the relentless movement of the cityrsquo77

In this Blanchotrsquos concerns are anything but purely aesthetic Waiting we are told by turning everything into a question puts everything into question including itself in the exact same way as the fragmentary78 In so far as it is a treatise on waiting therefore LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli is also a treatise on the fragmentary and on the ineluctability of the questioning that traverses the one and the other as proof of the radical non-coincidence of each with itself its otherness from what it is or might appear to be And likewise echoing through LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli as though to underline both the exigency and the fragility of words there is one particularly urgent plaintive or defiant request heavy with waiting and forgetting and


couched in the form of a prayer demand or challenge recurring several times over albeit more often in the first part of the text than in the second first in formal language then later in more familiar or intimate terms now within quotation marks like a snatch of direct speech now outside the confines of reported words as a standalone phrase printed in italics mainly spoken by the female protagonist to her partner perhaps even on occasion by him to her though it is sometimes impossible to tell and announcing what seems as though it cannot be anything other than a contradiction in terms not to say an irresolvable aporia ndash which is this lsquoMake it possible for me to speak to you [Faites en sorte que je puisse vous parler]rsquo As the speaker waits for an answer not knowing whether it can ever measure up to the injunction proffered she forgets that she has already succeeded in what she was asking her partner to ensure Twice over then her request seems to be little short of impossible

True her inquiry might be taken to suggest that rather than just one manner of speaking there are always two the one already inherited from the past (lsquoI can only understand [entendre] what I have already understood [entendu]rsquo concedes LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli) and the other turning in hope and anticipation towards an as yet unspoken perhaps unspeakable future (lsquoThe secret ndash what a clumsy word [quel mot grossier] ndashrsquo the reader is later told lsquowas nothing other than the fact that she was speaking and putting off speaking [parlait et diffeacuterait de parler]rsquo)79 But how to tell these two ways of speaking apart how to separate the one from the other Might it not be as the fragmentary configuration of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli implies that all speaking is always at least double always already its own deferred or ghostly companion and that if addressing another is premised on an aporia it is precisely because of the impossibility of relation between one protagonist and the other (or conversely the possibility of relation without relation as Blanchot describes it after Levinas in other essays of the period80) that words and words alone in their fragmentary indecision offer the chance ndash fragile uncertain and irreducibly futural ndash of reaching across the unbridgeable divide that separates them And to prove the point the womanrsquos entreaty in its final avatar in the last pages of the text reverting to the formality of the second-person plural with which it began also undergoes a decisive if barely perceptible reversal lsquoldquoYesrdquorsquo the womanrsquos companion tells her ldquoyou spoke to me a lot you showed infinite generosityrdquo ndash ldquoIs that true Could you


affirm it [lrsquoaffirmer]rdquo ndash ldquoI affirm it [Je lrsquoaffirme] I will affirm it [je lrsquoaffirmerai] as much as you wishrdquo ndash ldquoThat cannot be Just think It would be worse than everything Make it possible for me not to speak to you [Faites en sorte que je ne puisse vous parler]rdquorsquo81

Notwithstanding the urgency of the womanrsquos plea it is accom-panied throughout LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli both close by and at a distance by a series of other modest but insistent remarks displacing it or displaced by it in turn The result is a complex counterpoint of recurrent and often elliptical motifs that significantly complicate relations between the pair Even from the outset the passivity implied by the womanrsquos supplication is deceptive Her own first words given three times over as lsquoldquoI should like to speak to you [Je voudrais vous parler]rdquorsquo are at any event more assertive authoritative even vehement (as the narrative describes them at one point) than may have at first appeared which is not to say speaking does not leave her vulnerable and exposed82 At other moments both in and outside the story it is she as her companion acknowledges who far from being reduced to silence is given to speak without cease83 Both traits serve perhaps to characterise Blanchotrsquos female protagonist who is never properly identified as such less as a woman than as a kind of allegory less an individualised self that is than like her male counterpart a recalcitrant verbal presence in which case the low murmur famously evoked in one oft-quoted fragment might be hers and it might even be she therefore lsquothis equal speaking [cette parole eacutegale] spaced without space affirming beneath all affirmation impossible to negate too weak to be silenced too docile to be constrained not saying something only speaking speaking without life without voice in a voice fainter than any voice living amidst the dead dead amidst the living calling (him) to die to come back to life to die calling without any callrsquo84 This might mean Blanchotrsquos female protagonist was thereby deprived of human presence were it not that to be heard at last as an equal voice ndash lsquothis equal speaking [cette parole eacutegale] he hears the equality which if it were light in the daylight [lumiegravere dans le jour] attention in attending [attention dans lrsquoattente] would be justice in deathrsquo85 we read a few lines earlier ndash is arguably more vital proof of enduring singularity than any conventional physical or psychological portrait Fourteen years earlier this much had of course already been the burden of the closing lines of LrsquoArrecirct de mort with their celebrated equivocation between the female character(s) who feature(s) in its pages and that thought in the feminine invoked at


the end to which (or to whom) having for his part also forfeited all subjective certainty or autonomy the bookrsquos male narrator delivers this powerful parting encomium

As for myself I was not the unfortunate messenger of a thought more forceful than I was neither its plaything nor its victim for that thought [cette penseacutee] if it vanquished me only did so through me and in the end was always the measure of me I loved it [ie also her and so on to the end] and loved only it and everything that happened [est arriveacute] I wanted to happen and having had regard only for it wherever it was or wherever I may have been in absence in unhappiness in the fatality of dead things in the necessity of living things in the fatigue of work in the faces born of my curiosity in my false words in my deceitful vows in the silence and in the night I gave it all my force and it gave me all its own so that this force being too great incapable of being ruined by anything condemns us perhaps to immeasurable unhappiness but if that is so I take this unhappiness on myself and I rejoice in it immeasurably and say to it eternally lsquoCome [Viens]rsquo and eternally it is there86

The word lsquoViensrsquo which now (almost) closes LrsquoArrecirct de mort or better as Derrida puts it in its capacity as a quasi-transcendental address already divided from itself forever opens and reopens Blanchotrsquos text with all the intensity of a resurrection has of course its counterpart in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli87 There too it intervenes with the force (or weakness) of a mere word that is far more than a word More often found in the courteous plural rather than the intimate singular as venez rather than viens Blanchotrsquos word belongs equally it seems to whoever speaks it or whoever is addressed by it which is also to say it is the prerogative of neither one nor the other The first occurrence is a case in point lsquo ldquoCome [Venez]rdquorsquo one reads and the text goes on lsquoShe drew nearer slowly not in spite of herself but with a kind of deep distractedness that made him marvellously attentive [avec une sorte de profonde distraction qui le rendait lui merveilleusement attentif]rsquo Opening a new paragraph it adds lsquoShe had spoken but he was not listening to her He was listening to her only in order to attract her to him by his attentivenessrsquo88 Who then utters the invitation He or she Three pages later the question is partially answered albeit at the cost of a further complication


lsquoShe appeared to me in a real wayrsquo says the text not pausing to explain the sudden shift into the first person lsquoshe was a tall young woman upon whom I marvelled at being able to gaze although I was not capable of describing her and when I said to her ldquoCome [Venez]rdquo she immediately drew nearer with a deep distractedness that made me extremely attentive [avec une profonde distraction qui me rendait extrecircmement attentif]rsquo89 Soon after lsquoVenezrsquo is said in turn to have been the male protagonistrsquos first word perhaps at the very beginning when he came to inhabit the empty hotel room90 As such it marks both the opening of the text and its suspension both the brusque incisiveness of the one and the lingering passivity of the other lsquoWhen he had said to her ldquoCome [Venez]rdquorsquo we read in yet another variation on the scene lsquondash and she immediately draws nearer slowly not in spite of herself but with a simplicity that does not bring her presence any closer ndash ought he not to have gone to meet her instead of issuing this imperious invitationrsquo The text pauses and remarks lsquoIt is an authoritative word then ndash But also an intimate one ndash A violent word ndash But bearing only the violence of a word ndash Bearing it into the distance ndash reaching into the distance without doing it harm ndash With that word is he not plucking her from that distance ndash He left her there ndash She is therefore still as distant as can be ndash But what is far is also what is nearrsquo91

lsquoVenezrsquo as these words confirm is anything but a solitary founding word For one thing as Blanchotrsquos narrative points out immediately after it is already a fragmentary translation already a partial or provisional putting into words of an unspoken gesture which preceded or accompanied it and with which LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli in so far as it did so in fact began Moreover in that it enacts as we have seen a repeated twofold call dispatched into the distance and received from a distance and by definition always addressed to more than one it belongs to that series of words ndash which includes all words ndash which are never an origin in themselves but only ever a response to another Nobody comes in other words on his or her own As Derrida argues apropos of Joyce the structure is one that affects in particular that unassuming always repeated yet always affirmative radically ineliminable word yes which like a further supplementary quasi-transcendental signature traverses all speaking and is presupposed by it92 Yes argues Derrida is never a single point but always a redoubled response never a gathering whether originary or final but always already a


dispersed fragmentary trail and so it is in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli also For it is not surprising that throughout Blanchotrsquos text one of the words that most insistently doubles or ghosts the word lsquoVenezrsquo is indeed the word yes oui It too first appears in Blanchotrsquos text without qualification and without explanatory context other than the unexpected place of its singular emergence lsquo ldquoYes [Oui]rdquorsquo says LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli almost as soon as its narrative begins to unfold lsquoldquoYesrdquo Does she truly say this word It is so transparent that it lets through what she says including the word itselfrsquo93 There are of course throughout LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli numerous other occurrences of the word uttered by the storyrsquos male and female protagonists alike and Blanchot too in his October 1962 essay on Bataille emphasised its importance by referring twice over to lsquothe decisive Yes [le Oui deacutecisif]rsquoof affirmation94 which he glossed in the following terms also deeply indebted as we shall see to LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli lsquoThis is the decisive Yes Presence without anything present [Preacutesence sans rien de preacutesent] In this affirmation which has been released from all negation (and consequently from all meaning) which has relegated and deposed the world of values which does not consist in affirming ndash ie bearing and sustaining ndash that which is [ce qui est] but rather stands beyond it outside of being [en dehors de lrsquoecirctre] and no more belongs to ontology than it does to dialectics man [lrsquohomme humans in general] sees himself assigned between being and nothingness and starting from the infinity of this in-between [agrave partir de lrsquoinfini de cet entreshydeux] accepted as relation [accueilli comme rapport] the status of his new sovereignty the sovereignty of a being without being in the becoming without end of a death impossible to diersquo95

As LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli slowly reaches its end it gathers up several motifs encountered in dispersed fashion earlier including for instance the close intimacy as familiar as it is unfamiliar of their two voices lsquotwo ways of speaking [deux paroles] tightly clasping each other like two living bodies but with indeterminate boundariesrsquo96 the proximity between the two lsquoeach lying alongside the other tightly held by the other and when she withdraws caught again while withdrawn embracing him again at a distance without distance touching her not touching himrsquo97 and the sound of her talking endlessly through the night as displaced testimony to their physical congress But if it does so however it is not in order to complete what hitherto had remained partial but by accentuating


the fragmentary to effect a kind of spectral reversal or resurrection of the scene of failure with which the text began and to affirm the in-between as the secret without secret of the possibility and impossibility of relation What comes towards the end of Blanchotrsquos text then is nothing negative nor positive but thanks to the always changing configuration of fragmentary writing a mortal-immortal neuter pact time-bound but also timeless shared between the two protagonists countersigned by a repeated and affirmative yes yes yes as witnessed among others by the following fragment

She sat up slightly propping herself up with her hand She found herself next to the party-wall and seemed to rise up over their two reclining bodies looking at them both and saying in a voice that surprised him with its chill clarity lsquoI should like to speak to you When might I do thatrsquo ndash lsquoCan you spend the night herersquo ndash lsquoYes [Oui]rsquo ndash lsquoCan you stay here nowrsquo ndash lsquoYes [Oui]rsquo

As he is listening to this lsquoyesrsquo [ce laquo oui raquo] wondering if she truly said it (it is so transparent that it lets through what she says including the word itself) she leans back as though already unburdened and taking care not to put any distance between them

He attracts her is attracted by the attraction in her still uncompleted movement But while she lifts herself up into the one he is touching and although he knows she is sliding away falling a motionless figure he does not stop blazing a trail for her and leading her driving on with her tightly holding him in a movement that makes them indistinguishable

She speaks spoken rather than speaking as though her own speech was passing through her while she lived painfully transforming her into the space of another speaking always interrupted and without life

And certainly when in the light of morning ndash most likely they have just woken up together ndash he hears her asking with enthusiasm lsquoIs it true I went on speaking without stoppingrsquo he is sure he is being invited to take possession in this single sentence of everything she said to him during the night98

Just as it had refused properly to begin LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli with the help of a fragmentary postscript printed in italics also refuses


properly to end reprising the word with which it once seemed to open so in appearing to close the text overwrites it with another which once more recalls the legacy of Heraclitus lsquoldquoNot here [ici] where she is and here [ici] where he is but between them [entre eux]rdquo ndash ldquoBetween them [Entre eux] like this place with its great air of fixity the restraint of things in their latent staterdquorsquo99

But how then to name that which refused positioning but secretly silently in the space between words and between all other things nevertheless left a trace

III

Presence without present

lsquoIs that happening [Estshyce que cela arrive]rsquo ndash lsquoNo that is not happening [cela nrsquoarrive pas]rsquo ndash lsquoSomething is coming however [Quelque chose vient cependant]rsquo


Towards the end of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli or perhaps even towards the beginning something happens An amorous encounter a meeting of minds a paradoxical misunderstanding an experience of language a disclosure of presence or merely a casual assignation in an empty hotel room One of the earliest fragments in the book in which an event of some kind is evoked or announced which was already in place from August 1958 explains as follows

It is not a fiction [Ce nrsquoest pas une fiction] although he is unable [bien qursquoil ne soit pas capable] to use the word truth to refer to it all [agrave propos de tout cela] Something happened to him [Quelque chose lui est arriveacute] and he cannot say that it was true nor the opposite Later [Plus tard] he thought the event [lrsquoeacuteveacutenement] consisted in the way in which it was neither true [vrai] nor false [faux]101

Though it is sometimes taken to be an authoritative metatextual statement on the part of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (or sometimes even its author) regarding the fictional or non-fictional complexion of the text as a whole the status of this fragment is far from certain


First in so far as it advances a proposition about the truth untruth or non-truth of this unnamed event it is impossible to tell whether the fragment is itself part of that event or not Is it an instantiation of the rule it is describing or in describing that rule is it somehow able to step outside it in which case the rule might be deemed in fact to be anything but a rule If the fragment is true in other words it would appear to contradict what it says (or be contradicted by it) in which case its status might be deemed to be imponderable at best In turn if the fragment is already subject to a rule of undecidability being neither true nor untrue but something else and in that regard already an event it would seem empty of metatextual reliability in which case it would after all be an instantiation of what it describes And so on

Writing in Blanchot as Foucault observed in lsquoLa Penseacutee du dehorsrsquo a fortiori when it encounters the fragmentary is often traversed by such Cretan liar effects Whenever in a text there is mention of truth or untruth it seems writing invariably withdraws from itself to cast doubt on its own thinking or inherited terms of reference The effect is accentuated further by the untotalisable structure of the fragmentary And it is complicated here by the language used in Blanchotrsquos tantalising fragment For it is impossible to identify with confidence the actual referent of the first of its three sentences What is it that the words ce and cela (it this that) actually name Like other deictics and like Blanchotrsquos very first opening word (ici) they point beyond the borders of the text while also pointing to themselves in either case however in the absence of any finite context owing to the fragmentary configuration of the text reference is left hanging Matters are exacerbated by the expression quelque chose which is something of a minor anomaly in modern French grammar Though the noun chose (thing) is in the feminine the compound quelque chose (something) in so far as it names something indeterminate is treated as a neuter that is since French has no third gender as such as a word in the masculine Something happened the reader learns but the language of that something defies binary categorisation and resists properness property and meaning102

Blanchotrsquos use of tense has similar implications The fragment begins in the present but then changes to the French past historic or passeacute simple With the help of the expression plus tard (with which it will be remembered Le Dernier Homme had formerly ended without ending to vertiginous effect) the shift in time introduces a


minimal degree of narrative sequentiality Paradoxically however and by recourse to a disorientating chiasmus it is this later time forcibly closer to the living present that is described in the passeacute simple while the earlier time now relegated to time past remains in the present What was is left in the present and what now is is given in the past historic Despite appearances to the contrary then rather than privileging lived immediacy the present becomes a function of undecidable repetition an effect of that which no longer occurring in the present belongs to time only in so far as it is simultaneously outside of time and manifests an origin only in so far as the origin is a radical impossibility of origin Temporal deferral expressed in the fragment becomes an expression of deferred temporality In this respect it is no surprise to learn that in 1958 when these lines first appeared in print the verbs in Blanchotrsquos first two sentences were in the imperfect or pluperfect and the present entirely lacking lsquoIt was not a fiction [Ce nrsquoeacutetait pas une fiction]rsquo the fragment initially read lsquoalthough he was unable [bien qursquoil ne fucirct pas capable] to use the word truth to refer to it all Something had happened to him [lui eacutetait arriveacute] and he could not [ne pouvait] say that it was true nor the oppositersquo103

If this early fragment seems confident that at least something has happened later in the book the language of that arriving is placed under greater scrutiny not to say withdrawn entirely This occurs in a sequence of four dispersed fragments slowly growing in length and in complexity as they are repeated and reprised over some seven or so pages The most extensive iteration is the last It runs

That unvarying speech [Cette parole eacutegale] he hears single without unity [unique sans uniteacute] the murmur of one alone as of a multitude bearing forgetting hiding forgetting

An affirmation that by turning them aside attracts all wordslsquoIs that happening [Estshyce que cela arrive]rsquo ndash lsquoNo that

is not happening [cela nrsquoarrive pas]rsquo ndash lsquoSomething is coming however [Quelque chose vient cependant]rsquo ndash lsquoIn the waiting that immobilises [arrecircte] and allows [laisse] all comingrsquo ndash lsquoSomething is coming coming outside of waiting [venant hors de lrsquoattente]rsquo ndash lsquoWaiting is the calm trail [la calme laisseacutee] that leaves in the future [laisse en son avenir] everything that comesrsquo104

What is the difference a reader might ask between an unnamed unspecified event that prompts the question but then does not


arrive and one that similarly repeating the question is nevertheless said still to be coming Blanchotrsquos fourth fragment goes some way towards explaining the enigma To arrive obviously implies a destination a point in time or space at which it is possible to decide whether or not something has indeed arrived To come on the other hand suggests an imminence or immobility that cannot be resolved completed or identified as such For something to arrive or not in other words it must in some sense be expected whereas to come suggests that whatever comes if it comes is always and forever futural irreducible to possibility or to presence accessible to words only in so far as it remains inaccessible to them and only ever in evidence if at all as a trace trail or erasure remembering only its own forgetting announcing neither something nor nothing and leaving in its wake only an unfulfilled promise No property or propriety attaches itself therefore in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli to the event that comes if it comes no concealed or unconcealed truth in other words and no final appeal to the visible or invisible

To think or experience in this way the (fragmentary) event of (fragmentary) writing that was LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was inevitably to renew Blanchotrsquos already long-standing engagement with Heidegger and with the latterrsquos thought of Ereignis or event of appropriation as explored in the years immediately preceding LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli in such texts as Identitaumlt und Differenz and Unterwegs zur Sprache105 Indeed when Blanchot returned to Heidegger in 1980 and considered anew what was gathered under the heading of Ereignis it was to query and challenge albeit not for the first time the privileged relationship between Being and light or luminosity in Heideggerrsquos thinking and the reference to the proper that for Heidegger lay hidden in the very possibility of (the word for) the event and that for Blanchot far from the fragmentary was more akin to a kind of metaphysical nostalgia for the origin lsquoWhat is the justificationrsquo he asked lsquofor the relationship Heidegger posits between Ereignis the usual meaning of which is ldquoevent [eacuteveacutenement]rdquo Eraumlugnis to which he links it (in a decision sanctioned by Duden the famous German dictionary Eraumlugnis is an archaic term in which one can readily make out the word Auge eye which therefore appeals to the gaze [regard] and suggests being may be thought to have regard for us [lrsquoecirctre nous regarderait] and which once again relates being and light) and Ereignis analysed in such a way that the word eigen ldquoproperrdquo is separated from it so much so that ldquothe eventrdquo becomes


that which is responsible for the advent of our ldquomost properrdquo being (Duden rejects however the etymological connection between eigen propre and Ereignis)rsquo lsquoWhat is surprising herersquo Blanchot concluded in an unusually stern rebuke lsquois not the arbitrariness but on the contrary the work of mimesis the semblance of analogy and the appeal to unreliable knowledge making us the dupes of a kind of transhistorical necessityrsquo106

Blanchotrsquos treatment of the event which mysteriously-unmysteri-ously and without arriving nevertheless comes to LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli gives further proof of the singularity of his thinking and its divergence from that of Heidegger With regard to waiting it will be remembered it was enough in order to complicate Heideggerrsquos presentation for Blanchot to insist on the necessary possibility of that quasi-reflexive recursive or repetitive fold according to which implicit in all waiting was a waiting for waiting and as a result of which all possibility was haunted that is both maintained and overwritten by impossibility And what was true of waiting Blanchot went on to show was equally the case in respect of forgetting For what was it that happened when it was the turn of forgetting to be forgotten The following exchange between unnamed voices provides a clue

lsquoDo you believe they remember [qursquoils se souviennent]rsquo ndash lsquoNo they forget [ils oublient]rsquo ndash lsquoDo you believe that forgetting [lrsquooubli] is the way they rememberrsquo ndash lsquoNo they forget [ils oublient] and retain nothing in that forgetting [ils ne gardent rien dans lrsquooubli]rsquo ndash lsquoDo you believe what is lost in forgetting may be preserved in the forgetting of forgetting [que ce qui est perdu dans lrsquooubli soit preacuteserveacute dans lrsquooubli de lrsquooubli]rsquo ndash lsquoNo forgetting is indifferent to forgetting [lrsquooubli est indiffeacuterent agrave lrsquooubli]rsquo ndash lsquoIn that case we shall be miraculously deeply eternally forgottenrsquo ndash lsquoForgotten without miracle without depth without eternityrsquo107

In defending the need for a Ruumlckschritt from metaphysical thinking to a more intimate or originary relation to Being Heidegger was necessarily reliant on the proposition that metaphysics from the outset was a consequence of the withdrawal and forgetting of Being to the benefit of beings and of the forgetting of that forgetting In order to embark on this step back it was necessary obviously enough


to begin by forgetting this original forgetting in order then to retrieve originary pre-metaphysical thought from the oblivion of more than two millennia But how far was it possible to forget forgetting and forget the forgetting of forgetting and in so doing uncover in memory a memory of the origin The task was anything but straightforward Heideggerrsquos answer to the question was however simple enough Spinning a fresh etymological web by way of the archaic Gedanc he gathered up together with their various cognates the words denken to think danken to thank and Gedaumlchtnis memory in order to affirm their primordial originary unity lsquoIn Gedancrsquo he wrote

rest both memory [Gedaumlchtnis] and thanks [Dank] and have their being [Wesen] Initially lsquomemoryrsquo [Gedaumlchtnis] did not at all mean the power of retention [Erinnerungsvermoumlgen the capacity for memory as interiorisation within the self] The word names a whole mental disposition [Gemuumlt] in the sense of a constant intimate gathering [Versammlung] upon that which speaks essentially to all thoughtfulness Memory originally means something rather like devotion [Anshydacht Heideggerrsquos spelling reinforces the kinship with the expression denken an to think of ] the unremitting concentrated abiding with [Bleiben bei ] and not just with that which is past [beim Vergangenen] but likewise with that which is present [beim Gegenwaumlrtigen] and with that which may come [was kommen kann] That which is past present and to come appears in the unity of an always proper pre-sencing [in der Einheit eines je eigenen Anshywesens Heidegger detaches and emphasises the preposition]108

Thinking then was anamnesis just as truth for Heidegger on the conjectural evidence of Heraclitus was ashyletheia un-forgetting an attentive regathering of that which in the past in the present and in the future under the auspices of presencing had always already gathered itself109 Once again this was to assume that originary gathering necessarily took precedence over fragmentary dispersion and that having been forgotten (and its forgetting forgotten) the origin nevertheless somehow remained secretly intact and might therefore emerge anew as the ground on which to readdress the truth of Being110 The belief in other words was that forgetting was not only a form of memory but one that might be circumscribed within given limits and boundaries But from the perspective of


LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli this much was far from clear For Blanchot to forget forgetting was not to accede by dint of the positivity born of a double negative to the foundational durability of memory It was much rather to be exposed twice over to an erasure But this erasure of an erasure did not culminate in anything present but in the radicality of a redoubled deletion which if it forcibly left a trace was irreducible either to being or to non-being and might be addressed only under the auspices of what Blanchot from 1958 onwards as we have seen largely in response to the experience of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli had begun calling the neuter Forgetting argues Blanchot was necessarily without term For if it had a term either a beginning or an ending archegrave or telos it would not be forgetting at all but merely a partial or provisional lapse of memory lsquo You will not find the limits of forgettingrsquo says one brief abyssally detached fragment lsquohowever far you may be able to forgetrsquo111 Forgetting was in principle endless and far exceeded whatever it might be possible to remember or forget but which as such was radically irretrievable Its allegiance was not to its own possibility therefore but to the impossible not to the origin but to the dispersion that resisted all origin There was however nothing negative about forgetting It was a radically neutral infinitely powerful infinitely weak blankly infinite or infinitely blank movement of effacement that could not be negated restricted or put to work but only ever affirmed and reaffirmed in its perpetual withdrawal as an erasure of every trace and the trace of that erasure lsquoForgettingrsquo says LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli at its chiasmic mid-point lsquothe latent gift [le don latent]rsquo112

Time and again LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli makes the point that all writing as it reaches its limits is traversed that is both sustained and dispersed by something which is neither something nor nothing neither visible nor invisible neither hidden nor manifest and thus neither true nor untrue but inseparable from the demand of the fragmentary To say this however Blanchotrsquos text has recourse to a surprising term one which acquires in the process the provocative status of a nonce-word always already displaced by what it seems to exclude and which Blanchotrsquos writing infuses with singular intensity both strength and weakness That word is preacutesence presence not presence however as joined-disjoined hierarchically to the present as maintained by the Heideggerian ontological difference113 but presence in so far as it exceeds overwrites and interrupts any present which explains how on occasion and in affirmative manner as we


have seen Blanchot can write lsquopresence without present [preacutesence sans preacutesent]rsquo how returning to the motif of the latent gift he can refer to lsquothe present [le preacutesent] that forgetting might be said to give them presence free of any present [la preacutesence libre de tout preacutesent] without relation to being [sans rapport agrave lrsquoecirctre] turned aside from all that was possible and all that was impossiblersquo or how elsewhere as noted earlier the word presence can contrive to suspend or erase itself with the aid of a privative prefix or a pair of quotation marks114 ndash all of which suggests that essential to Blanchotrsquos use of the word far from the living immediacy customarily attributed to it was somehow the reverse ie that presence releasing itself from present being inscribed itself in writing only in so far as it was always already effaced and bearing as its signature the mark of that disappearance was now the absent memory of itself not as enduring proximity but as evanescent erasure

This ghostly neutralisation of presence its suspension displace-ment and affirmative reinscription haunts LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli as might be expected in the manner of a spectral presence Take for instance the following passage concluding one of the longest fragments in Blanchotrsquos text restaging the deferred or interrupted scene of its protagonistsrsquo encounter in the course of which what comes to be invoked as that which requires waiting and forgetting alike is the secret without secret of presence

[ ] An instant later however pulling up short and looking lsquoBut this presencersquo

Going towards presence towards which they cannot go And yet put in relation [rapporteacutes] with all that comes by presence and thereby turned towards it Always more turned aside in this turning aside [deacutetourneacutes en ce deacutetour]

lsquoWhy do you [tu] want to wake from this presence of which I hear you speakingrsquo ndash lsquoPerhaps in order to fall asleep in that waking Moreover I do not know if I want it and you [vous] do not want it either perhapsrsquo ndash lsquoHow should I want it Where I stand there is nothing I can want I am waiting that is my role inside of waiting going towards waitingrsquo ndash lsquoWaiting waiting what a strange wordrsquo

lsquoWhere are they waiting Here or outside of here ndash lsquoHere that delays them outside herersquo ndash lsquoIn the place where they are speaking or the place of which they are speakingrsquo ndash lsquoThat is the force of


waiting maintained in its truth to lead wherever one waits to the place of waitingrsquo ndash lsquoIn secrecy without secrecyrsquo ndash lsquoIn secrecy in plain view of allrsquo

lsquoAnd did death [la mort] come quicklyrsquo ndash lsquoVery quickly But dying [mourir] is longrsquo

Speaking in place of dying [mourir]Immortal in the instant of dying [lrsquoinstant de mourir]

because closer to death [la mort] than mortals present to death [la mort]

lsquoThey cannot die for want of a futurersquo ndash lsquoPerhaps so but nor can they be presentrsquo ndash lsquoThey are not present all there is of them is the presence into which they are disappearing slowly timelesslyrsquo ndash lsquoAn impersonal presence [une preacutesence sans personne] perhapsrsquo ndash lsquoA presence in which they are effaced the presence of effacementrsquo ndash lsquoForgetting forgottenrsquo ndash Forgetting has no purchase on presencersquo ndash lsquoWhich does not belong to remembering [Laquelle nrsquoappartient pas au souvenir]rsquo115

Presence in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli being neither something nor nothing and belonging neither to being nor to non-being remains paradoxically inaccessible As Blanchot insists it far exceeds whatever might be deemed to be present or absent The formulation is a provocative one it was however not alone in Blanchotrsquos writing Elsewhere too as we have seen the writer took care to insist on the radical dissymmetry between presence and the present A key resource in allowing this thought to take shape Blanchot suggested in LrsquoEntretien infini was to be found in a celebrated fragment from Pindar (Fr 169) as translated by Houmllderlin around 1805 and given by the poet the prophetically Blanchotian title lsquoDas Houmlchste [The Most High]rsquo Houmllderlinrsquos version of Pindarrsquos text not published till more than a century after it was first written read as follows lsquoDas Gesez [nomos] Von allen der Koumlnig [basileus] Sterblichen und Unsterblichen das fuumlhrt eben Darum gewaltig Das gerechteste recht mit allerhoumlchster Hand [The Law Of everyone the King mortals and Immortals which is just why It mightily guides The rightest right with the most highest hand]rsquo In a densely suggestive commentary attached to his translation in lines Heidegger would later cite in a famous essay on Houmllderlinrsquos unfinished Pindaric hymn lsquoWie wenn am Feiertage [As when on a holiday ]rsquo that very


essay that Blanchot was ostensibly reviewing in his 1946 Critique article the poet offered the following gloss

The immediate [Das Unmittelbare] strictly speaking is impossible for mortals as it is for the immortals a God must distinguish different worlds according to his nature since heavenly goodness because of itself must be sacred unalloyed Man as a knowing creature must also distinguish different worlds because knowledge is only possible through opposition For this reason the immediate [das Unmittelbare] is strictly speaking impossible for mortals as for immortals

Strict mediacy [Die strenge Mittelbarkeit] is however the law116

returning in 1969 to an essay on the work of Yves Bonnefoy first published ten years earlier Blanchot added a long page of text in which he in turn explicated Houmllderlinrsquos gloss

lsquoThe immediate excluding all that is immediate as well as all mediationrsquo this tells us something about presence itself Immediate presence is the presence of what cannot in any way be present the presence of the non-accessible presence excluding or overwhelming [deacutebordant] all present Which is also to say the immediate overwhelming all present possibility infinitely by dint of its very presence is the infinite presence of what remains radically absent a presence always infinitely other in its presence presence of the other in its alterity non-presence What can we conclude from these propositions Nothing for the moment Except that (1) when inquiry is made into immediate presence in the attempt to retain in thought the immediate as fundamental upheaval [eacutebranlement fondamental] the aim is not to privilege direct relation whether as mystical or sensuous contact vision or effusion (2) if lsquothe immediate strictly speaking is impossible for mortals as it is for the immortalsrsquo it is perhaps that impossibility mdash a relation escaping power or possibility [pouvoir] mdash is the form of all relation with the immediate (3) lastly mdash and here we are approaching the decisive issue mdash if the immediate is presence of that which overwhelming excluding all present is infinitely absent the only relation with the immediate may be thought to be a relation reserving an infinite absence an interval which would however not mediate (ought never to serve as intermediary)117


recalling several similar formulations from the early 1960s this later commentary explains how the only relation to what Blanchot calls presence is a relation without relation in the form of a turning aside and how it is from presence that come (without ever arriving) the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of waiting and forgetting in their quality as parallel encounters with the spectral future and the inaccessible past And in so far as it is necessarily an experience of the limits of language as Blanchotrsquos writing insists throughout presence is also an exposure to death and dying since dying is that for which one always waits and death that which one has always already forgotten But if death as a result is that to which one is always already present it is also what deprives one of any present which is why in the terms of Pindarrsquos fragment revisited by Houmllderlin it is like a founding law equally inaccessible to gods and to men alike to the first because being immortal they are condemned never properly to die and the second because being mortal they are condemned never properly to die either

It is here that the crucial fault-line between Blanchotrsquos and Heideggerrsquos understanding of language may perhaps best be situated It will be remembered that for the latter lsquoto reflect on language means [heiszligt signifies and requires] to arrive [gelangen] at the speaking of speech in such a way that it occurs [sich ereignet] as that which grants an abode [Aufenthalt] to the essential being of mortals [dem Wesen der Sterblichen]rsquo118 For the former on the other hand just as there can be no abiding in death so there is no abiding in language The event that comes if it comes born by presence in so far as presence escapes the present and disperses all property propriety or appropriation belongs neither to manifestation nor to concealment It neither enacts nor corresponds to any truth or untruth lsquoWhat is hidden opens itself to waitingrsquo LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli explained lsquonot in order to be disclosed [deacutecouvert] but to remain hidden within itrsquo lsquoWaitingrsquo it went on lsquodoes not open does not close An entering into a relation that neither welcomes nor excludes Waiting is foreign to the self-concealingself-revealing movement of things [au mouvement se cachershyse montrer des choses]rsquo And it added lsquoTo whoever waits nothing is hidden He is not close to the things that show themselves In waiting all things are turned back towards their latent statersquo119

In saying this Blanchotrsquos writing once more found itself drawing on Heraclitus not a Heraclitus from whom a fully formed


concept of the fragmentary might be derived but a Heraclitus who nevertheless announced a thinking of the fragmentary as that which interrupting being and non-being alike made it possible Blanchot put it in 1969 countersigning and extending his original July 1960 text to approach lsquothe absence of work [lrsquoabsence drsquoœuvre] in which discourse ceases so that there may come [pour que vienne] outside speech [hors parole] outside language [hors langage] the movement of writing under the attraction of the outsidersquo120

As with these words Blanchot prepared to step beyond even the tenuous narrative idiom of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli what then was this writing that came from the outside and how might it be explored and affirmed

notes

1 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 217 translation mine Compare Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 50ndash1 Awaiting Oblivion 24

2 There were thirty-three contributors in all including in addition to those mentioned Hans-Georg Gadamer Beda Allemann Walter Jens Werner Heisenberg Ilse Aichinger Hans Arp Guumlnter Eich Helmut Heissenbuumlttel and Ernst Juumlnger All three French texts (by Beaufret Blanchot and Char) were given in the original French without accompanying translation Charrsquos was printed in facsimile and Braque supplied an artwork reproduced in the volume On reception of Heidegger in France during the postwar period see Janicaud Heidegger en France I 81ndash184 Beaufret first met Heidegger in Freiburg in September 1946 and when Heidegger visited France for the first time at his invitation in 1955 Char and Braque were among those the philosopher expressed a particular desire to meet

3 See Blanchot lsquoPenser lrsquoapocalypsersquo letter addressed to Catherine David (10 November 1987) Le Nouvel Observateur 22ndash28 January 1988 77ndash9 Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 155ndash63 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 119ndash23 Blanchot adds in the letter prompted by the controversy surrounding French publication of Victor Fariasrsquos Heidegger and Nazism (1987) that it was only on receipt of Guido Schneebergerrsquos Nachlese zu Heidegger in 1962 that (like others) he became aware of the full extent of Heideggerrsquos prewar involvement with the Nazi party


4 See Blanchot lsquoLa Parole ldquosacreacuteerdquo de Houmllderlinrsquo Critique 7 December 1946 579ndash96 with slight modifications the essay reappears in La Part du feu 115ndash32 The Work of Fire 111ndash31 I examine Blanchotrsquos reading of Heidegger on Houmllderlin in my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 77ndash91

5 raymond Queneau in a diary entry for December 1950 reports as follows lsquoHeidegger says he found Bataillersquos article on Houmllderlin very striking and feels great affinity with him [qursquoil se sent tregraves pregraves de lui] Sonia [sc Orwell who knew Bataille well] wires Bataille to congratulate him But the article was by Blanchotrsquo See Queneau Journaux 1914ndash1965 edited by Anne Isabelle Queneau (Paris Gallimard 1996) 737 Oddly the volume editor glosses the anecdote by referring the reader not to the 1946 article but to Blanchotrsquos essay lsquoLa Folie par excellence [Madness par excellence]rsquo which did not appear in Critique till February 1951 Bataille recalls the misunderstanding in a letter to Jeacuterocircme Lindon shortly before his death in Bataille Choix de lettres 1917ndash1962 edited by Michel Surya (Paris Gallimard 1997) 582ndash3 Blanchotrsquos response to the news of this mistaken identity which he also received from Queneau was one of sheer delight at what the misunderstanding said about friendship in particular his own friendship with Bataille and about the essential anonymity of writing On Blanchotrsquos reaction see Monique Antelmersquos testimony lsquoIl comprenait tout et jamais nrsquoaccusaitrsquo Le Magazine litteacuteraire 424 October 2003 32 on Blanchotrsquos friendship with Sonia Orwell see Blanchot Lettres agrave Vadim Kozovoiuml (Houilles eacuteditions Manucius 2009) 113ndash4 (letter dated 27 January 1984)

6 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 133 translation mine

7 Heidegger Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen Neske 1957) 209 The Principle of Reason translated by reginald Lilly (Bloomington Indiana University Press 1991) 128 translation modified

8 This has led some critics perhaps most notably Timothy Clark in his Derrida Heidegger Blanchot (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1992) to go so far as to claim that lsquosome of [Blanchotrsquos] reacutecit [LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli] is practically a French translation of fragments from Heideggerrsquo (91) Clark points in particular to the apparent similarities between Blanchotrsquos Festschrift contribution and Heideggerrsquos dialogue lsquoZur Eroumlrterung der Gelassenheit [Conversation on a Country Path]rsquo first written in 1944ndash45 but not published till 1959 almost a year after the appearance of Blanchotrsquos first text entitled lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo in Botteghe Oscure and in all likelihood therefore some time after the writing of the Festschrift piece He also


suggests that Blanchotrsquos fragment lsquo In waiting all speech having become slow and solitary [Dans lrsquoattente toute parole devenue lente et solitaire]rsquo found both in the 1958 Botteghe Oscure text and in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli in 1962 (but not in the Festschrift piece) contains a conscious echo of Heideggerrsquos statement lsquoIn thinking each thing becomes solitary and slow [Im Denken wird jeglich Ding einsam und langsam]rsquo from lsquoAus der Erfahrung des Denkens [The Thinker as Poet]rsquo first published in 1954 though one might with equal justification point to the striking differences between the two texts Dominique Janicaud for his part in Heidegger en France I 206ndash7 maintains that such resemblances that may exist between Blanchotrsquos lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo and Heideggerrsquos own semi-fictional dialogues are at best superficial arguing instead that lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo is much rather a lsquodisconcerting expropriation of the thinkerrsquos [ie Heideggerrsquos] fondest words and on his own ground rsquo

9 Blanchot born in 1907 was almost precisely eighteen years Heideggerrsquos junior On these dates and their importance in general for Blanchot see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 373ndash4 and lsquoLrsquoanniversaire ndash la chancersquo Revue des sciences humaines 253 1 1999 173ndash82 The author of these lines I may add was born ndash on 21 September

10 LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli would be much exercised in turn by the question of the possibility or impossibility of the gift See for instance Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 112 Awaiting Oblivion 58 where the following exchange takes place lsquoldquoGive me thatrdquo ndash ldquoI cannot give you what I do not haverdquo ndash ldquoGive me thatrdquo ndash ldquoI cannot give you what is not in my power If need be my life but this thing rdquo ndash ldquoGive me thatrdquo ldquoThere is no other giftrdquo ndash ldquoHow might I manage to do itrdquo ndash ldquoI donrsquot know All I know is that I am asking you for it and will ask you for it till the endrdquorsquo translation modified

11 See Martin Heidegger Sein und Zeit (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer 1986) 261ndash2 Being and Time translated by John Macquarrie and Edward robinson (Oxford Blackwell 1962) 306

12 Heidegger Sein und Zeit 250 258ndash9 Being and Time 294 303

13 Heidegger Sein und Zeit 262 Being and Time 307 emphasis in the original

14 Heidegger Sein und Zeit 337 Being and Time 386ndash7 Together with numerous other commentators Blanchot acknowledges that the words authentic and inauthentic (as used by Macquarrie and robinson) do not properly map onto Heideggerrsquos use of eigentlich and uneigentlich I have nevertheless retained them here for reasons of consistency That translation remains however a lsquosuperficialrsquo one


as Blanchot puts it Elsewhere he goes further with more radical effect claiming that lsquoIf ever in the whole of language there is a word that is inauthentic it is surely the word ldquoauthenticrdquorsquo See LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 153 180 98 The Writing of the Disaster 98 117 60 translation modified

15 See Bataille lsquoHegel la mort et le sacrificersquo Œuvres complegravetes XII 326ndash45 lsquoHegel Death and Sacrificersquo translated by Jonathan Strauss Yale French Studies 78 1990 9ndash28 I discuss the interplay between the philosophical and the fictional in this essay in my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit 63ndash9

16 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 217 translation mine Compare LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 50ndash1 Awaiting Oblivion 24ndash5

17 See Blanchot La Condition critique 457ndash9 lsquoOh All to Endrsquo translated by Leslie Hill The Blanchot Reader 298ndash300 Beckettrsquos LrsquoInnommable (The Unnamable) it may be remembered is one of the last texts discussed in Blanchotrsquos Le Livre agrave venir 256ndash64 The Book to Come 210ndash17

18 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 217 translation mine Compare LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 51 Awaiting Oblivion 25

19 Almost two years earlier dealing with this very question in a footnote to an essay on Mallarmeacute first published in November 1957 Blanchot had discreetly voiced his reservations regarding Heideggerrsquos privileging of the self-contained Grundwort lsquoIt could be noted herersquo he wrote lsquothat the attention [attention] paid to language by Heidegger which is of an extreme urgency is an attention [attention] to words considered on their own [agrave part] and concentrated in themselves to various words taken to be fundamental [fondamentaux] and tormented to the point that the history of their formation is made to disclose the history of Being ndash but never to relations between words and even less to the prior space these relations imply the originary movement of which alone makes it possible for language to be deployedrsquo Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 286 The Book To Come 265ndash6 translation modified In writing lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Blanchot was no doubt particularly attentive one might say to this movement of language that was otherwise and more radical than Being

20 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 56 Awaiting Oblivion 28 translation modified



22 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 217 218 translation mine Compare LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 96 Awaiting Oblivion 50

23 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 224 translation mine

24 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 148 Basic Writings 355

25 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 171 Poetry Language Thought translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York Harper amp row 1971) 176 translation slightly modified

26 Heidegger Heraklit 268

27 On the interpretation of LόgsV (in Heraclitus) as lsquothe original assemblage of the primordial gathering from the primordial Laying [die urspruumlngliche Versammlung der anfaumlnglichen Lese aus der anfaumlnglichen Lege]rsquo see Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 207ndash8 Early Greek Thinking translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A Capuzzi (New York Harper amp row 1975) 66 On the difficulties posed by the motif of Versammlung in Heidegger see Derrida Spectres de Marx (Paris Galileacutee 1993) 56ndash7 Specters of Marx translated by Peggy Kamuf (London routledge 1994) 34 and the interview with Derrida by Dominique Janicaud Heidegger en France II 116ndash19 An important role in Derridarsquos (re-)thinking of Heidegger may be attributed to Blanchot as Michel Lisse suggests in his LrsquoExpeacuterience de la lecture 2 Le glissement (Paris Galileacutee 2001) 79ndash87

28 Blanchot LrsquoArrecirct de mort 78 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 163 translation modified

29 Heidegger Wegmarken 411ndash12 Pathmarks 310ndash11 Blanchot recalls Heideggerrsquos suggested recourse to this device in his September 1958 Nietzsche essay and indeed amplifies the point in LrsquoEntretien infini 226 The Infinite Conversation 150 On both occasions Blanchot was strictly speaking mistaken in claiming that Heidegger uses the St Andrewrsquos cross for both lsquothe word being [ecirctre]rsquo and lsquothe word nothingness [neacuteant]rsquo True having employed it for the first Heidegger then suggests that lsquonothingness [das Nichts] would have to be written and thought in that way toorsquo Blanchotrsquos error is nevertheless revealing what it shows is that having been adopted in the one instance there was no compelling reason following the thought of the neuter why the device could not be generalised to all other possible cases

30 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 69 Awaiting Oblivion 35 translation modified Derrida comments on this fragment in Parages 92ndash3 Parages 85ndash6


31 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 9 The Step Not Beyond 2 translation modified

32 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 223 translation mine This fragment is one of a small number reprised in both texts entitled lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo as well as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli itself Compare lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Botteghe Oscure XXII August 1958 30 and LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 64 Awaiting Oblivion 32

33 Heraclitus Fr 91 as given by G S Kirk J E raven and M Schofield The Presocratic Philosophers 195 translation slightly modified for consistency For further discussion on the fragment see G S Kirk Heraclitus The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1962) 381ndash4 T M robinson in his edition of Heraclitus Fragments (Toronto University of Toronto Press 1987) 55 proposes the following version (all interpolations the translatorrsquos) lsquo[For according to Heraclitus] it is not possible to step twice into the same river nor is it possible to touch a mortal substance twice in so far as its state is concerned But thanks to (the) swiftness and speed of change it scatters (things) and brings (them) together again [(or rather it brings together and lets go neither lsquoagainrsquo nor lsquolaterrsquo but simultaneously)] (it) forms and (it) dissolves and (it) approaches and departsrsquo

34 Cleacutemence ramnoux Heacuteraclite ou lrsquohomme entre les choses et les mots (Paris Les Belles Lettres 1959) 221ndash2 Blanchotrsquos article paying tribute to ramnoux which first appeared in January 1960 is reprinted with minor changes in LrsquoEntretien infini 119ndash31 The Infinite Conversation 85ndash92 There had of course been several earlier French translations of Heraclitus with which Blanchot may have been familiar including the version by Yves Battistini prefaced by Char in 1948 as well as the more recent rendition of Les Fragments drsquoHeacuteraclite drsquoEacutephegravese (Paris Estienne 1958) by Kostas Axelos one of the editors of the journal Arguments which had published Blanchotrsquos lsquoQursquoen est-il de la critiquersquo in the early part of 1959 and who in Heacuteraclite et la philosophie (Paris Minuit 1962) 50ndash1 offers the following more explicitly dialectical version of Fr 91 lsquoOn ne peut pas entrer deux fois dans le mecircme fleuve Elle se disperse et se reacuteunit de nouveau [toute chose mortelle] srsquoapproche et srsquoeacuteloignersquo

35 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 127 The Infinite Conversation 89 translation modified Compare ramnoux Heacuteraclite 22ndash4

36 Levinas Le Temps et lrsquoautre (Paris Presses universitaires de France [1948] 1983) 28 Time and the Other translated by richard A Cohen (Pittsburgh Duquesne University Press 1987) 49


The reference to Plato is to Cratylus 402a though Levinas is evidently also thinking of Aristotle Metaphysics Book G 1010a where Cratylus a follower of Heraclitus is reported to have criticised the latter lsquofor saying that it is not possible to step into the same river twice for he himself [Cratylus] considered that it is not possible even oncersquo See Aristotle Metaphysics Books G Δ and Ε translated by Christopher Kirwan (Oxford Oxford University Press 1993) 19

37 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 89 Awaiting Oblivion 46 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 124 The Infinite Conversation 88 In Ecce homo Nietzsche too was minded to find in Heraclitus a likely precursor ndash of Zarathustrarsquos doctrine of eternal return see Nietzsche KSA 6 313 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings 110

38 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 219 Early Greek Thinking 76 translation modified

39 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 219 Early Greek Thinking 76 translation modified A year earlier already lecturing on Heraclitus (in Heraklit 122ndash3) Heidegger had been more explicit in addressing the politics of this epochal turn lsquoldquoWerdquo ndash but then who are wersquo he asked lsquoHow do ldquowerdquo manage to have history at our disposal and gain access to the beginning of the essential destiny of our history How do we manage at all even to lay claim to this history as our ownrsquo A few lines later he offered this answer lsquoThe planet lies in flames The essence of man is out of joint Only the Germans assuming that they can locate and preserve ldquowhat is Germanrdquo can provide an awareness of world history This is not presumptuousness rather a knowledge of the need to resolve a fundamental distress [von der Notwendigkeit des Austrages einer anfaumlnglichen Not]rsquo


41 T M robinson Heraclitus Fragments 45 Hermann Diels Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker edited by Walther Kranz 3 vols (Berlin Weidmann 1951) I 167 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 272 Early Greek Thinking 121ndash2


43 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 125 The Infinite Conversation 88 translation modified compare ramnoux Heacuteraclite ou lrsquohomme entre les choses et les mots 213



45 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 125 122 The Infinite Conversation 88 87 translation modified

46 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 249 Early Greek Thinking 102 Heidegger gives a more detailed account of the question of fragmentation in Heraklit 35ndash9


48 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 131 The Infinite Conversation 92 translation modified As noted in Chapter One Blanchotrsquos quotation is from Heraclitus Fr 93

49 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 14ndash15 Awaiting Oblivion 5 translation modified

50 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 50ndash1 Awaiting Oblivion 24 where the portion of text cited in my epigraph reappears preceded by the sentence lsquoSince when had he been waitingrsquo and with the following not insignificant codicil lsquoHe realised the only reason he had written was to respond to the impossibility of waiting What was said had therefore to do with waiting [avait donc rapport agrave lrsquoattente] This insight [Cette lumiegravere] crossed his mind [le traversa] but did no more than cross itrsquo translation modified A detailed inventory of the fragments given in Blanchotrsquos tribute to Heidegger shows that they return sometimes in modified form in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli on the following pages 51 50 96 97 97ndash8 95 98 99 100 47ndash8 45 108 108ndash9 85 107 52ndash6 53 78 60 84 52 93 51ndash2 77 68 67 90 81 83

51 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Botteghe Oscure XXII August 1958 22ndash33 Fragments derived from this version reappear in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli on the following pages 7ndash13 16ndash18 19ndash21 26ndash7 31ndash4 38 44ndash5 47ndash8 49 50ndash1 52ndash3

52 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 7 Awaiting Oblivion 1 translation modified The implications of Blanchotrsquos opening have attracted much attention on the part of critics See for instance Daniel Wilhem Maurice Blanchot la voix narrative (Paris Union geacuteneacuterale drsquoeacuteditions 1974) 147ndash61 Brian T Fitch Lire les reacutecits de Maurice Blanchot (Amsterdam rodopi 1992) 74ndash85 and John Gregg Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton Princeton University Press 1994) 132ndash8

53 On the shifting structure of deictics see roman Jakobson Selected Writings vol 2 (The Hague Mouton 1971) 130ndash147 and Emile


Benveniste Problegravemes de linguistique geacuteneacuterale (Paris Gallimard 1966) 252ndash3 Problems in General Linguistics translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables University of Miami Press 1971) 218ndash9 As Benveniste shows such expressions acquire properly specific meaning only within the performative context of their utterance Since no fictional text can root itself without remainder in any given existential context a doubt or uncertainty will always affect their referential status

54 On mise-en-abyme as endless process of referral without arrival or truth see Derrida La Disseacutemination 257ndash317 Dissemination 227ndash85 and on the necessarily untotalisable movement of reflexivity as such rodolphe Gascheacute The Tain of the Mirror Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 1986)

55 On Blanchotrsquos use of a similar strategy elsewhere in his reacutecits see Wilhem Maurice Blanchot la voix narrative 139 In insisting on this multiplicity of textual place it may be that Blanchot still had Heidegger in mind at any rate Heideggerrsquos claim made in the course of a long essay on the poet Georg Trakl which Blanchot is almost certain to have read when it first appeared in 1953 to the effect that the task of thinking in response to the poem is to ask after the locality of the place (Ortschaft des Ortes) in which and from which the poem speaks and speaks (of) Being But in these circumstances what is it Heidegger asks to think the place lsquoOriginallyrsquo he replies lsquothe word ldquoplacerdquo [Ort] refers to the point of a spear Everything converges at this point The place gathers everything together at its highest its most extreme [versammelt zu sich ins Houmlchste und Aumluszligerste] That which gathers [Das Versammelnde] penetrates [durchdringt] and permeates [durchwest] everything The place that which gathers [das Versammelnde] collects [holt zu sich ein] and preserves what it has collected [verwahrt das Eingeholte] not in the way of a closed container but in such a manner that it [ie the place] shines through and illuminates that which has been gathered [das Versammelte] and only thus releases it into its own essence [in sein Wesen entlaumlszligt]rsquo See Heidegger Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen Neske 1959) 37 On The Way to Language translated by Peter D Hertz (New York Harper amp row 1971) 159ndash60 translation modified


57 See Blanchot Aminadab (Paris Gallimard 1942) 9 Aminadab translated by Jeff Fort (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press


2002) 1ndash2 In the opening pages of the novel the protagonist Thomas catches sight of a young woman in a house opposite The text continues lsquoThe young woman as though she had realised he was waiting for something [comme si elle se fucirct rendu compte de cette attente] made a small sign with her hand which was like an invitation immediately afterwards closed the window and the room fell dark againrsquo translation modified After a paragraph break the story picks up once more lsquoThomas was most perplexed Was it possible to consider this gesture as a true appeal to him [un appel veacuteritable] It was a friendly wave rather than an invitation It was also a kind of gesture of dismissal [congeacutediement]rsquo translation modified There is similar speculation about the pairrsquos relationship in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 117ndash20 Awaiting Oblivion 61ndash3

58 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 8 Awaiting Oblivion 2 translation modified readers of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli familiar with Le Dernier Homme may also be prone to a sense of deacutejagrave vu or more accurately deacuteja lu In the earlier story too alongside many other similar textual echoes the female protagonist occupies a room lsquowhere the corridor began to turn [ougrave tournait le couloir]rsquo (Le Dernier Homme 78 105 The Last Man 46 62 translation modified)

59 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 11ndash12 Awaiting Oblivion 3 translation modified The words the man writes are these lsquoldquoItrsquos the voice that has been entrusted to you [qui trsquoest confieacutee] not what it says What it says all the secrets you are gathering up and transcribing to give them their due [les faire valoir] these you must gently lead despite their attempts at seduction back towards the silence you first drew from themrdquorsquo




63 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 22 Awaiting Oblivion 9 translation modified Compare Blanchot Au moment voulu 108 lsquoWhen The Time Comesrsquo translated by Lydia Davis The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 239 where the narrator observes lsquoThis sentence made a great impression on me It was as though I could see a light spurting from it I had touched a point of startling luminosity A sentence more a slippage a picture not yet framed a movement of sparkling brightness that shone in quick dazzling bursts and this was no calm


light but a sumptuous and capricious chance the moodiness of light itselfrsquo translation modified

64 See Benveniste Problegravemes de linguistique geacuteneacuterale 333 Problems in General Linguistics 286 Benvenistersquos essay lsquoLa Notion de laquo rythme raquo dans son expression linguistique [The Notion of ldquorhythmrdquo in its Linguistic Expression]rsquo suggests that Greek ruqmόV as derived from Heraclitus was lsquothe most appropriate term to describe ldquodispositionsrdquo or ldquoconfigurationsrdquo without fixity or natural necessity and arising from an arrangement always subject to changersquo It is cited to this effect by ramnoux who proposes in her turn the phrase lsquoshifting configuration [configuration changeante]rsquo in her Heacuteraclite ou lrsquohomme entre les choses et les mots 456 It was no doubt there that it was first encountered by Blanchot who draws on the essay citing ramnouxrsquos paraphrase in LrsquoEntretien infini 127 The Infinite Conversation 89 and LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 172ndash3 The Writing of the Disaster 150n19


66 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 98ndash9 Awaiting Oblivion 51ndash2 translation modified Compare lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 219 Between 1959 and 1962 Blanchot makes both deletions and additions and replaces the first-person plural (lsquowersquo) originally found in several of the fragments with an anonymous third person (lsquohersquo)

67 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 310ndash11 The Infinite Conversation 209ndash10 Compare Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 145 162 Awaiting Oblivion 77 85

68 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 21 51 69 Awaiting Oblivion 9 24ndash5 35 translations modified

69 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 14 15 35 Awaiting Oblivion 5 16 translations modified

70 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 19 75ndash6 76 89 Awaiting Oblivion 7 38 38 46 translations modified

71 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 310ndash11 The Infinite Conversation 209 lsquoLimit-experiencersquo Blanchot writes lsquois experience itself thought thinks that which does not allow itself to be thought thought thinks more than it is capable of thinking in an affirmation that affirms more than can be affirmed This more is experience affirming only by an excess of affirmation and in this excess affirming without anything being affirmed finally affirming nothing An affirmation in which everything escapes and which


itself escapes and escapes unity This is even all one can say about it it does not unify nor allow itself to be unifiedrsquo emphasis in original translation modified



74 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 13ndash14 120 Awaiting Oblivion 4ndash5 62ndash3




78 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 96 Awaiting Oblivion 50 lsquoWaitingrsquo says LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli lsquoimperceptibly changed words [paroles] into questionsrsquo translation modified The same pronouncement in rather different form had already appeared in the version of lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo given to Heidegger in Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 217

79 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 27 111 Awaiting Oblivion 12 58 translations modified

80 See for instance Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 73 The Infinite Conversation 51 lsquondash A strange relation [rapport] that consists in there being [en ce qursquoil nrsquoy a pas] no relationrsquo as one of Blanchotrsquos interlocutors puts it lsquondash Which therefore consistsrsquo rejoins the other lsquoin preserving the terms in relation from what would adulterate [alteacutererait ie change for the worse] them in that relation which therefore excludes ecstatic identification [la confusion extatique] (that of fear) mystical participation but equally appropriation all forms of conquest and even the taking [prise] which in the end is what comprehension always isrsquo translation modified Though Blanchotrsquos account of relation without relation is strongly inflected by his reading of Totaliteacute et infini in the early 1960s it is worth acknowledging that the paradoxical status of relations between the sexes it implies had long been a feature of Blanchotrsquos critical thinking witness his interpretation of Benjamin Constantrsquos Adolphe in La Part du feu 221ndash37 The Work of Fire 226ndash43 and of Marguerite Durasrsquos Le Square in Le Livre agrave venir 185ndash94 The Book To Come 150ndash8 For Levinasrsquos own rather summary


reading of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli see Levinas Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier Fata Morgana 1975) 29ndash42 Proper Names translated by Michael B Smith (London Athlone 1996) 140ndash9

81 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 155 Awaiting Oblivion 81ndash2 emphasis mine translation modified

82 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 45 132 149 Awaiting Oblivion 21 132 79 translation slightly modified For lsquothe vehement movement that allowed her to be an impassioned voice [une voix passionneacutee] even as she remained a motionless and impassive body [un corps immobile et impassible]rsquo see LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 57 Awaiting Oblivion 28 Some pages earlier she admits that lsquoldquoWhen I speak to you it is as though the whole part of me which covers and protects me were to have abandoned me and left me exposed and very weakrdquorsquo See LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 23 Awaiting Oblivion 10 translation modified

83 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 12 37 150 Awaiting Oblivion 4 17 79

84 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 155ndash6 Awaiting Oblivion 82 translation modified This is the phrase used by Blanchot to acknowledge Beckettrsquos admiration for the book see Blanchot La Condition critique 458ndash9 (p 458) The Blanchot Reader 298ndash300 (p 299) On the link Blanchot makes elsewhere between women and affirmation see Derrida Parages 258ndash65 Parages 241ndash8

85 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 155 Awaiting Oblivion 82 translation modified The fragment as a whole so to speak serves as a perhaps timely reminder that the political issues with which Blanchot was manifestly concerned in the late 1950s and early 1960s were not without leaving a trace on LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli which as mentioned earlier would have appeared in bookshops at precisely the same time as Blanchotrsquos essay lsquoLrsquoIndestructiblersquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise

86 Blanchot LrsquoArrecirct de mort 127 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 186 emphasis in the original translation modified English having to choose between the personal and the impersonal cannot adequately render the ambiguity of elle (meaning both she and it) in these lines On this double meaning of Blanchotrsquos use of the feminine pronoun see Derrida Parages 74ndash5 Parages 66ndash7 The closing pages of Le Dernier Homme explore much the same ambiguity extending it now to the male narrator and the female protagonist alike both of whom come to language and thinking as radical singularities exceeding all anthropomorphic (and anthropocentric) embodiment


87 On the quasi-transcendental status of lsquoViensrsquo and lsquoVenezrsquo in LrsquoArrecirct de mort and elsewhere see Derrida Parages 19ndash24 Parages 11ndash16 Drsquoun ton apocalyptique adopteacute naguegravere en philosophie (Paris Galileacutee 1983) 91ndash8 lsquoOf an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophyrsquo translated by John P Leavey Jr in Derrida and Negative Theology edited by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany SUNY Press 1992) 64ndash7 The motif as we shall see in the next chapter is repeated in Le Pas aushydelagrave 185 The Step Not Beyond 135


89 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 63ndash4 Awaiting Oblivion 31ndash2 translation modified



92 See Derrida Ulysse grammophone (Paris Galileacutee 1987) 123ndash43 Acts of Literature edited by Derek Attridge (London routledge 1992) 296ndash309 Compare Parages 21 Parages 13


94 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 310 311 The Infinite Conversation 209 210



97 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 49 Awaiting Oblivion 23ndash4 translation modified


99 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 162 Awaiting Oblivion 85 translation modified Compare Heraclitus Fr 123 as rendered by G S Kirk J E raven and M Schofield The Presocratic Philosophers 192 lsquoThe real constitution is accustomed to hide itself [fύsiV krύptesqai fileϊ]rsquo For Heideggerrsquos rather different translation and commentary with which Blanchot was no doubt familiar see Heidegger Einfuumlhrung in die Metaphysik (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer 1953) 87 Introduction to Metaphysics translated by


Gregory Fried and richard Polt (New Haven Yale University Press 2000) 121 It was not for nothing that ramnouxrsquos study which is principally concerned with the unity of opposites in Heraclitus (that lsquothings taken together are wholes and not wholes something which is being brought together and brought apart which is in tune and out of tunersquo and that lsquoout of all things there comes a unity and out of a unity all thingsrsquo as Fr 10 had it in the version given by Kirk raven and Schofield 190) was also subtitled LrsquoHomme entre les choses et les mots Man Between Things and Words



102 Compare Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 440 The Infinite Conversation 299 on the perverse advantages resulting from the lack of a proper neuter gender in French

103 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Botteghe Oscure XXII August 1958 25

104 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 158 Awaiting Oblivion 83 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 151 152 153 Awaiting Oblivion 80 (twice) 81

105 See for instance Heidegger Identitaumlt und Differenz (Stuttgart Neske 1957) 24ndash5 Identity and Difference translated by Joan Stambaugh (New York Harper amp row 1974) 36ndash7 and Unterwegs zur Sprache 256ndash68 On The Way to Language 125ndash36 Ereignis here is rendered into English as Appropriation

106 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 152ndash3 The Writing of the Disaster 97ndash8 translation modified On the larger polemic against the long-standing philosophical privilege of vision which hinges in part on what Blanchot took to be the irreducibility of Heraclitus to that tradition see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 35ndash45 The Infinite Conversation 25ndash32


108 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 92 What is Called Thinking 140 emphasis in the original translation modified

109 In LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 147ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 94ndash5 Blanchot would again signal his deep reservations regarding what he describes as Heideggerrsquos lsquonaiversquo recourse to cod etymology (not unlike that of Hegel added Blanchot with more than a hint of mischief) pointing out that Plato in the Cratylus (421b) had already proposed reading the word not as ashyletheia or


unhiddenness as Heidegger in Sein und Zeit 219 Being and Time 262 famously does with the help of Heraclitus Fr 1 (lsquoFor although all things happen according to this Logos men are like people of no experience even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleeprsquo after Kirk raven and Schofield 187) but as aletheia or lsquodivine errancy [errance divine]rsquo

110 As William S Allen puts it in Ellipsis Of Poetry and the Experience of Language After Heidegger Houmllderlin and Blanchot (Albany SUNY Press 2009) 39 lsquoWhat is forgotten [according to Heidegger] may not be available to be recalled but this lack punctuates thought and thus leaves a mark of forgetting which itself cannot be forgotten even if it cannot be recalledrsquo emphasis in the original


112 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 87 Awaiting Oblivion 45

113 Compare for instance Heidegger Unterwegs zur Sprache 122 On The Way to Language 30 lsquoThe purposersquo says Heideggerrsquos Inquirer (a thinly veiled version of himself in the guise of questioning thinker) in his 1953 lsquoDialogue on Languagersquo lsquowas and is to bring to light [zum Vorschein zu bringen] the Being of beings [das Sein des Seienden] admittedly no longer in the manner of metaphysics but such that Being itself comes into the light [zum Scheinen kommt] Being itself ndash that is the presence of the present [das Anwesen des Anwesenden] ie the twofold [Zwiefalt] of the two by virtue of their simple oneness [aus ihrer Einfalt] This is what makes its claim on man calling him to its essential beingrsquo translation modified

114 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 98 103 Awaiting Oblivion 51 54 translations modified Already in 1957 in Le Dernier Homme 50ndash1 The Last Man 28 the narrator set down his impressions of the eponymous protagonist in similar terms lsquoas though all there had been of him were his presence [preacutesence] which did not let him be present [ecirctre preacutesent] a vast presence that he himself appeared unable to fill as though he had disappeared into it and it had absorbed him slowly eternally [lentement eacuteternellement] ndash an impersonal presence [preacutesence sans personne] perhapsrsquo translation modified

115 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 139ndash40 Awaiting Oblivion 73ndash4 translation modified In this fragment there are again numerous


explicit echoes of Le Dernier Homme compare for instance Le Dernier Homme 51 52 58 141 The Last Man 28 29 33 85

116 Houmllderlin Hyperion Empedokles Aufsaumltze Uumlbersetzungen 769ndash70 lsquoHoumllderlinrsquos lsquolsquoPindar Fragmentsrsquorsquo rsquo translated by Jeremy Adler Comparative Criticism 6 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1984) 43 Houmllderlinrsquos commentary is cited by Heidegger in his Erlaumluterungen zu Houmllderlins Dichtung Gesamtausgabe 4 (Frankfurt Klostermann 1981) 61ndash2 Elucidations of Houmllderlinrsquos Poetry translated by Keith Hoeller (Amherst Humanity Books 2000) 83ndash4 For further discussion of Houmllderlinrsquos version see Thomas Schestag lsquoThe Highestrsquo translated by Georgia Albert in The Solid Letter Readings of Friedrich Houmllderlin edited by Aris Fioretos (Stanford Stanford University Press 1999) 375ndash411 I examine Blanchotrsquos use of Pindarrsquos fragment in my lsquoldquoNot In Our Namerdquo Blanchot Politics the Neuterrsquo Paragraph 30 3 141ndash59


118 Heidegger Unterwegs zur Sprache 14 Poetry Language Thought 190 translation modified


120 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 45 The Infinite Conversation 32 translation modified In revising the last page or so of this dialogue first published as lsquoLa Marche de lrsquoeacutecrevissersquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise for July 1960 some three months after lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoepoquersquo Blanchot significantly reworked its language Where in 1960 for instance he spoke of a turn of language which lsquois not foreign to this turning which is the turning of history and which is essentially taking place nowrsquo so in 1969 he changed his text to refer to lsquothe turning of ldquohistoryrdquo [lrsquolaquo histoire raquo] and which is essentially taking place now aside from any present [agrave lrsquoeacutecart de tout preacutesent]rsquo In 1960 similarly he first wrote that lsquothis ldquonot yetrdquo does not refer back to an ideal language that superior Word of which our human words may be thought to be an imperfect imitation but constitutes the very presence [preacutesence] of speaking this to come [agrave venir] that is every truly present word [toute parole vraiment preacutesente] and which is all the more present [preacutesente] in that it designates and commits the future [le futur] which is also a future to be spoken rsquo Nine years later the passage was revised to read as follows lsquothis ldquonot yetrdquo does not refer back to an ideal language that superior Word of which our human words may be thought to be an imperfect imitation but constitutes the


very decision [deacutecision] of speaking in its non-presence [en sa nonshypreacutesence] this to come [agrave venir] that is every word held to be present [tenue pour preacutesente] and which is all the more insistent [insistante] in that it designates and commits the future [le futur] which is also a future to be spoken rsquo What Blanchot was doing in making such far-reaching changes to his text it may be argued rather than changing his mind or keeping up with fashion was to readjust his philosophical or critical language to the experience of writing explored in and by LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli and in response to a demand that beyond any particular or given vocabulary was already futurally present so to speak in that writing

3

An interruption

I

From threshold to threshold

uml [ ] How indiscreet and heavy-handed it would be to speak of the threshold as though it were death itself After a fashion and from the outset we have always known death to be only a metaphor designed to help us achieve some crude representation of the idea of a limit when in fact the limit excludes all representation all lsquoidearsquo of a limit

BLANCHOT Le Pas aushydelagrave1

Le Pas aushydelagrave opens with a brief one-line preamble carefully detached from the rest of the text and consisting of a solitary exhortation In courteous yet uncompromising terms it enjoins as follows lsquoLet us enter into this relation [Entrons dans ce rapport]rsquo2 But like other opening sentences in Blanchotrsquos work this seemingly forthright ceremonial flourish rapidly proves imponderable Its interruptive force is soon undermined by its recursive weakness For who or what is the first-person voice which proposes that he she or it (and those for whom it claims to speak) should enter into this enigmatic relation if not a voice already fully implicated in that relation If so and given that one can enter into a relation only by not yet being party to it the address would appear at worst redundant at best impossible And likewise for whom is the invitation intended if not those readers of Le Pas aushydelagrave whoever they may be who by virtue of having just read this brief opening phrase are similarly already engaged in this relation to which they are being called


If so Blanchotrsquos beginning would appear to defeat itself and lapse into circularity not once but twice over The present moment in which the injunction may be thought to be issued or received is elided and effaced overwritten by an event or an encounter ndash an entry into relation with words ndash which belonging to the future has nevertheless already occurred and belonging to the past is yet somehow still to come The reader may not yet have properly entered into relation with Le Pas aushydelagrave but at the same time it is already too late reading is a task that speaks only to the future but it does so with langage that is always already past

Not unlike the opening of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli then the beginning of Le Pas aushydelagrave is anything but a beginning It is already a fait accompli The scene evoked by the text in so far as it is a scene is not a point of origin but already the spectral effect of a movement of repetition and return extending back into the past and forwards into the future (Later Le Pas aushydelagrave will speak of a house haunting its ghosts lsquohere and therersquo it adds lsquoa threshold for want of solid ground [un seuil agrave deacutefaut de sol]rsquo3) Little wonder then that turning aside from indicative temporality and putting itself beyond the jurisdiction of truth or untruth Blanchotrsquos preamble should express itself in the imperative in response to some earlier query or challenge from which it derives its necessity but which is nowhere explicitly voiced True by doing what it says and saying what it does by instituting relation by the very gesture of invoking it Blanchotrsquos opening may be thought to offer a prime example of a performative utterance endowed with illocutionary force As such however the only performance to which it gives rise is the (absent) event of its own occurrence rather than properly framing the work as a work Blanchotrsquos preamble leaves it suspended on its threshold with the surplus necessity of the literary text its lsquoneacutecessiteacute de surplusrsquo as Le Pas aushydelagrave calls it more than a hundred pages later leading to nothing stable determinable with confidence as either literature or philosophy but only to the fractured indecision of the fragmentary lsquoWhence the appeal to a disintegrating repetitive demand [une exigence morcelante reacutepeacutetitive]rsquo the text explains lsquothe three blows [les trois coups] in traditional theatre that claim to announce something is about to happen whereas more likely they echo down the eternal empty tomb [alors qursquoils retentiraient dans lrsquoeacuteternelle tombe vide]rsquo4

If Blanchotrsquos opening withdraws its status as a beginning by dint of its aporetic recursiveness it complicates its self-presentation (and

An IntErruPtIon 173

the presentation of all that follows) in another way too For like any threshold literal or metaphoric Blanchotrsquos initial injunction is both part of the space to which it urges access and yet necessarily distinct from it It is not simple but double not self-identical but internally divided In Le Pas aushydelagrave this dual Janus-like status (Janus is the god of thresholds presiding over all entrances and exits) is signalled and reinforced by a further singular if oddly absent trait which is that Blanchotrsquos incipit is the only fragment in the whole of the book (which by that token is arguably less or more than the whole it appears to be) not to be preceded by the characteristic diamond-shaped icon (uml) detaching each of the other fragments in the volume from their surrounding context In other words of the 416 (or perhaps better the 1 415) uneven and unequal passages of text making up Le Pas aushydelagrave which range in length from a few words to five and a quarter pages only one the very first (and also the shortest) is set aside from the others by virtue of not being separated from them by any explicit typographical device (other than a slightly more generous use of line spacing) which has the paradoxical effect of rendering it absolutely unique while also making it radically indiscernible It is marked so to speak to the precise extent that it is un-marked remarkable for being unremarkable different by dint of being indifferent

To this unusual set of affairs a number of responses are possible On the one hand like any heading title or subtitle Blanchotrsquos opening injunction may be thought to enjoy some kind of hierarchical even transcendental precedence over the 415 fragments that come in its wake as though it were in itself a kind of paraphrase or translation of the diamond motif consistently used elsewhere in the book thus inviting the reader to treat the remaining 180 pages of Blanchotrsquos book as a lengthy commentary on that opening address In that case if one wanted to sum up Blanchotrsquos text it would be enough that is both more and less than enough to cite or quote (in so far as it is possible) the repetitive differentiated yet radically unpronounceable scriptural icon that like some iterative signature appears 415 times in the book On the other hand in all relevant respects Blanchotrsquos opening fragment would seem to differ little if at all from the 415 others alongside which it is summoned to appear implying that any presumed hierarchy separating the one from the many is at best a lure and that between the apparent absence and presence of a typographical mark or marker the difference is


negligeable insignificant non-existent even not least because these two possibilities are versions of the same resulting from the fact that to write as Le Pas aushydelagrave puts it is to proceed by erasure as much as by inscription lsquo Effaced [Effaceacute] before being writtenrsquo the reader is told in words that are not without recalling LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli lsquoIf the word trace can be accepted [accueilli received welcomed] by us it is as the index [index index forefinger] that may be said to indicate as erased [ratureacute] what was however never traced All our writing ndash belonging to us all and were it ever the writing of everyone ndash would be thus the concern [souci] for what was never written in the present but in a past to come [un passeacute agrave venir]rsquo lsquo Writingrsquo the text later adds lsquois not designed to leave traces behind [laisser des traces] but to efface by traces all traces to disappear into the fragmentary space of writing more definitively than one disappears into the tomb or put another way to destroy destroy invisibly without the din [vacarme] of destructionrsquo5

There is further evidence of this constitutive evanescence of the trace elsewhere in Le Pas aushydelagrave too This is clear from the treatment given not to the exhortation that opens the book but to the plea that brings it to an end which is also in the imperative albeit this time in the second person singular the phrase lsquoDeliver me from the overlong burden of speech [Libegravereshymoi de la trop longue parole]rsquo Like the opening preamble this closing rejoinder had also appeared earlier in print in a much shorter version of both beginning and ending of Blanchotrsquos text alongside a selection of eighteen other fragments the majority of which in a different order reappeared in Le Pas aushydelagrave three years later6 But while the phrase lsquoEntrons dans ce rapportrsquo appears at the head of both texts without the customary diamond-shaped icon the opposite was the case with this strangely self-defeating lsquoLibera mersquo In 1970 given the task of signing off Blanchotrsquos prepublication tribute to Klossowski it likewise appeared without any typographical marker Three years later however finalising the text for Le Pas aushydelagrave Blanchot now added (or restored) the diamond-shaped icon giving the bookrsquos valedictory threshold the same status as the 414 fragments preceding it While in 1970 this final fragment had stepped beyond the boundaries of Blanchotrsquos text delimiting it in much the same way as the opening preamble had endeavoured to do so in 1973 that parting shaft was withdrawn into the book which as a result now began to overspill its own margins

An IntErruPtIon 175

Indeed as though in recognition of the bookrsquos strange exteriority to itself this final plea had already appeared once before in Le Pas aushydelagrave roughly a third of the way through the text7 But as it announced the end in this way before its appointed time more than a hundred pages before it was properly due Blanchotrsquos clausula presented itself not in roman type as it had in 1970 and continued to do so at the foot of the last page of Le Pas aushydelagrave but in italics as though it were already aware of its status as a quotation an entreaty already disabled by its aporetic frailty in so far as it is a secret to nobody that to ask in words to be released from the burden of speaking is manifestly not to put an end to words but to testify instead at one and the same time to their supreme authority and irredeemable impotence Just as the beginning of Le Pas aushydelagrave is not a proper beginning then for at least two reasons so the same goes for its purported ending which not only arrives prematurely but in the end when it does arrive arrives without arriving To begin to end is to encounter a threshold but to step beyond that threshold as one must Le Pas aushydelagrave suggests is to face the prospect of being perpetually immobilised arrested or frozen ndash stopped dead ndash in onersquos tracks Not for nothing does the book therefore spend many pages exploring what it calls lsquothe circle of the lawrsquo that paradoxical structure inseparable from writing itself which holds that lsquothere must be crossing [franchissement] for there to be a limit but only the limit in as much as it is uncrossable [infranchissable] prompts one to cross it [appelle agrave franchir] affirms the desire (the false step [le faux pas]) which in its unpredictable movement has always already crossed [franchi] the linersquo8

It may be then that the fragmentary implies finality finality itself however says Le Pas aushydelagrave is inseparable from infinite incompletion This much is already audible in the closing entreaty itself which as readers familiar with Catholic liturgy or with such well-known choral works as Gabriel Faureacutersquos D Minor Requiem of 1887ndash90 will know is indeed a quotation at least in part For it contains unmistakeable echoes of the Office of the Dead that service of prayers recited immediately after the requiem Mass in the voice of the deceased (on whose behalf the choir enters a plea for mercy upon the Last Day) which in the original Latin begins lsquoLibera me Domine de morte aeternarsquo lsquoDeliver me O Lord from death eternalrsquo To this canonic text Le Pas aushydelagrave makes at least two significant changes First all mention of God or other transcendent power is


pointedly removed Its address is therefore radically suspended and in the absence of divine presence emphasis is displaced from the transcendent to the immanent such that it can now fall only to words to deliver the speaker from the burden of speaking were it not that they are the source of the speakerrsquos distress in the first place This is the second shift brought about by Blanchotrsquos recasting of the liturgical text In place of the religious predicament of everlasting death now stands the secular burden of overlong speech endlessly prolonged The contrast is a powerful one But this is more than just a potentially contentious reversal of Catholicism into atheism it is rather that what is found to precede the one and the other enabling and disabling each in turn is language that repetitive tracing which being neither present nor absent simultaneously both offers and withdraws the possibility of endings and ends

Many years earlier accompanying Hegel at least some of the way Blanchot had drawn attention to the inextricable bond between language and death It was not only that words in order to function at all need to be able to exist in the absence of what they name more fundamentally it was that language in general is necessarily synonymous with a capacity to negate that is to destroy and abolish in their flesh and facticity those very entities things beasts people which it was the task of language to render intelligible which it could do only by converting them into conceptual abstractions and thereby ironically annihilating them lsquoIt is thus entirely accuratersquo Blanchot concluded in 1947 lsquoto say that when I speak death speaks in me [la mort parle en moi]rsquo And he went on

The fact that I speak [Ma parole] gives notice that death at this very moment is let loose in the world that between me who am speaking and the person [lrsquoecirctre] I am addressing death is suddenly there [a brusquement surgi] it is between us as the distance that separates us even as that distance prevents us from being separated too since contained in it is the condition for all mutual understanding [entente] Only death allows me to grasp [saisir] that which I want to reach within words it is the sole possibility of their meaning [sens] Without death everything would collapse into absurdity and nothingness9

But if language made death possible Blanchot continued now cleaving to the side of Levinas by that very same logic it also made

An IntErruPtIon 177

it impossible lsquoSuchrsquo he wrote lsquois the paradox of the final hour [lrsquoheure derniegravere]rsquo a reversal he detailed as follows

Death works with us in the world as the power that humanises nature that raises [eacutelegraveve] existence up into being it is that part of us that makes us most human it is death only in the world man [lrsquohomme ie homo not vir] knows it only because he is human and he is human only because death is his destiny [parce qursquoil est la mort en devenir] But to die is to shatter [briser] the world it is to ruin [perdre] humanity and annihilate being it is thus also to ruin [perdre] death and ruin that which in death and for me [pour moi] made it into death So long as I am alive I am a mortal human [un homme mortel] but when I die ceasing to be human I am no longer mortal I am no longer capable of dying and the prospect of death [la mort qui srsquoannonce] horrifies me because I can see it for what it is no longer death but the impossibility of dying10

What occurs then or perhaps better refuses to occur in death Blanchot argues is not the end as such but the endlessness of the end time outside time deferral without term repetition without presence In a sense this was nothing new Humans have always known this which is why according to Blanchot the theme of deathrsquos impossibility in the form of an obstinate belief in rebirth reincarnation or resurrection already occupies a prominent place in different religions Kafka through his knowledge of the Kabbala and other mid- or far-Eastern sources was one notable beneficiary of this tradition which found expression in such narratives as Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) Der Jaumlger Gracchus (The Hunter Gracchus) Das Schloszlig (The Castle) Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared) or Der Prozeszlig (The Trial) As Blanchot went on to elaborate

A man enters the night but the night culminates in waking and lo he has been turned into vermin [le voilagrave vermine] Or else the man dies but in reality he is alive he goes from town to town borne on rivers recognised by some helped by none with the error of ancient death sniggering [ricanant] at his bedside his is a strange condition he forgot to die [il a oublieacute de mourir] But another believes himself to be alive but only because he forgot he was dead [il a oublieacute sa mort] and yet another knowing himself


to be dead struggles in vain in order to die death is somewhere else [lagraveshybas] the great castle that cannot be reached and life was somewhere else too that native land abandoned on the basis of a malicious rumour [sur un faux appel] and now there is nothing left to do but to struggle to work in order to die completely but to struggle is still to be alive and everything that brings one closer to the goal makes the goal unreachable11

Between the implicit Judaism of Kafkarsquos literary protagonists and the explicit Catholicism of those souls in limbo on whose behalf the Libera me is proffered the differences are obviously many In Blanchotrsquos treatment of them there is however a shared realisation Both here and there as each journeys interminably towards the day of judgement (lsquoThat day the day of wrath calamity and misery that terrible and exceedingly bitter dayrsquo the Libera me calls it) it is to words that the task of securing or confirming that term is entrusted in the knowledge however that just as words possess no beginning so they are without end In either case as among others Beckettrsquos LrsquoInnommable contended there remains no alternative but to go on time after time beyond possibility beyond death itself in the forlorn endeavour to reach a final destination As it reprises the Libera me then Le Pas aushydelagrave reclaims the canonic liturgical text for something other than a desire for divine intercession Its tactic is double For even as it overturns the traditional formula and effaces by omission the appeal to transcendence it also reaffirms the prayer and reinscribes within the liturgical text the impossibility of dying upon which in its hopes for resurrection knowingly or unknowingly Christianity always already depends And roughly a quarter of the way through the book dispensing with any main verb suspending itself as it advances while refusing to accredit any teleological literary philosophical or religious frame once more saying what it does as it does what it says thereby describing itself as well as all other literary pronouncements Le Pas aushydelagrave observes thus lsquo Speech [Une parole] without presence the perpetuity of dying [mourir] the death eternal [la mort drsquoeacuteterniteacute] from which the requiem Mass [le chant drsquoEacuteglise] calls powerfully for us to be delivered acknowledging in it the space or speech always bereft of God that is delivered from presencersquo12

To read Le Pas aushydelagrave is to be confronted throughout in this way with the perverse Janal logic of the threshold Blanchotrsquos incipit

An IntErruPtIon 179

and explicit are not however the bookrsquos only thresholds upon which reading is forced to linger even as it takes a step beyond Indeed as far as Le Pas aushydelagrave is concerned and just like LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli each and every fragment already constitutes a threshold where reading repeatedly both begins and ends according to the reiterative infinity of continual interruption And even before it properly opens the book already announces itself to its reader as convention dictates by marking another threshold in the form of the authorrsquos name and the bookrsquos title The function of the bio-bibliographical information grudgingly provided in this way (Maurice Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave) is not hard to understand Combining a supposedly singular title with a supposedly verifiable signature it supplies the volume in principle at least with the unity and identity it requires in order to be recognised by law and to be attributed to the author as his or her intellectual property for which he or she is legally responsible and in which he or she expresses heart-felt opinions views or ideas13 In this sense the mention of author and title on a bookrsquos cover already constitutes something of a pre-emptive reading The bookrsquos contents are quickly presumed to be an extension of the living presence identified on the title page and this more than anything explains perhaps why Le Pas aushydelagrave like LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre in its turn is so often approached by interpreters as a relatively disordered eminently quotable collection of thoughts and reflections emanating from its prestigious and renowned author But if Blanchot is right that language is inseparable from death and dying and if it is true that the writerrsquos concern for the incommensurable duplicity of lifersquos ending is his most compelling preoccupation his abiding signature if one will to whom or to what may the signature at the head of Le Pas aushydelagrave be in fact thought to belong

Within a page or two of its opening after three unequal fragments touching on the dissymmetrical proximity between thinking and dying and the strangely epochal temporality of writing (lsquooutside of time within time [hors temps dans le temps]rsquo)14 Le Pas aushydelagrave begins sketching an answer to the question It does so in the first instance by marking another threshold in the text one that has often been taken by critics to represent a rare moment of retrospective autobiography on Blanchotrsquos part To an extent as we have already seen these early fragments are given over to a critical restaging of Husserlrsquos bracketing of worldly experience by means of the phenomenological epocheacute But Blanchotrsquos revisiting of his past intellectual itinerary does


not confine itself to that philosophical gesture It steps beyond the horizon of phenomenology to address a rather different experience given as follows

uml Where does it come from [Drsquoougrave vient cela] that wrenching power [cette puissance drsquoarrachement] of destruction or change [de destruction ou de changement] in those first words written facing the sky in the solitude of the sky words by themselves without future and without expectation lsquohe ndash the searsquo [laquo il ndash la mer raquo]

It is assuredly satisfying (too satisfying) to think that by the mere fact that something resembling the words lsquohe ndash the searsquo comes to be written [srsquoeacutecrit] with the exigency resulting from them and of which they are the result there somewhere comes to be inscribed [srsquoinscrit] the possibility of a radical transformation be it for a single individual that is of his or her abolition [suppression] as a personal existence The possibility nothing more

Do not draw [Ne tire] any conclusion from these words written one day (which were or at the same time might just as easily have been other words) nor even from the demand of writing [lrsquoexigence drsquoeacutecrire] supposing that you were entrusted with it as you persuade and sometimes dissuade yourself that you were all that you might be thought to remember about it would only serve to unify in presumptuous fashion an insignificant existence but one nevertheless somewhat withdrawn (by the proposition of this demand of writing itself) from all unity Do not hope if that is what you are hoping (there are reasons for doubting it) to unify your existence and introduce some coherence into it in the past through writing that disunifies [qui deacutesunifie]15

Now throughout modernity as personal diary occasional essay working draft commonplace book or undeveloped anecdote fragmentary writing has long been associated as it is say in the fragmentary texts of roland Barthes with confessional introspection and self-reflexivity16 In the passage just quoted Blanchot might easily be thought to be continuing in similar vein and few are the readers who will not have recognised in the words lsquoil ndash la merrsquo given twice over in the passage a memory of the opening sentence of Thomas lrsquoObscur that very first book which in 1941 launched Blanchotrsquos career as a writer of fiction and no longer solely as a

An IntErruPtIon 181

political or literary commentator and which in both the roman of 1941 and the abbreviated reacutecit of 1950 begins lsquoThomas sat down and gazed at the sea [Thomas srsquoassit et regarda la mer]rsquo17 Admittedly that inaugural sentence is not rendered as itself but rather as an interrupted vestigial trace from which the protagonistrsquos name and all temporally specific verbal activity have been removed overwritten by an unpronounceable supplementary dash or stroke of the pen implying both an erasure and a reinscription So as this first significant threshold in Blanchotrsquos writing career is remembered it is immediately followed by another threshold that challenges the confidence invested in the first and opens as a question the relationship between writing and (auto)biography on which the earlier memory appeared to rest True enough in Blanchotrsquos recasting of that earliest incipit there is a remainder the now anonymous personal (or perhaps better impersonal) pronoun il incorporating both the masculine he and as the text goes on to argue the fanto-matic neuter it not available as such in the French gender system and la mer the sea (with its homophonic maternal shadow la megravere) that liquid amniotic medium into which Thomas in the original novel lets himself slip as though into the limitless waters of a new-found artistic idiom But as it revisits its authorrsquos literary rebeginnings or rebirth in this way Le Pas aushydelagrave is at pains to dramatise that early conversion less as a defining personal choice than as a moment of radical expropriation at no point in this particular fragment for instance does the text turn to the first-person pronoun preferring instead to address itself or its author in the second-person singular (as tu a word that for Mallarmeacute as we have seen carried with it the spectral alternative of that which was consigned to silence ie tu) and it takes particular care in modestly self-deprecating terms to qualify all that might suggest that what occurred (or did not occur) was anything more than a contingent even trivial if indisputably all-consuming experience

It could of course be objected that in signing his own text even in this admittedly self-effacing manner Blanchot is nonetheless guilty of contradicting and fatally undermining the doctrine of authorial impersonality of which he was elsewhere a notable exponent To do so however would be to misunderstand the structure of signatures in general Any writer even one committed to maintaining total fidelity to autobiographical experience and intent on signing as forcefully as possible the text that appears under his or her name is


from the outset necessarily expropriated by the activity of writing But far from constituting an obstacle to autobiographical writing this structure of ex-appropriation as Derrida calls it is its necessary precondition18 Autobiography in other words is only possible in so far as like the Hunter Gracchus as she or he writes the writer is in the position of one already dead bereft of presence excluded from the world exposed to the impossibility of dying This was already the lesson that Blanchot in 1947 took from a reading of Michel Leirisrsquos autobiography LrsquoAcircge drsquohomme What Leirisrsquos confessional text demonstrated he observed was lsquohow in the depths of the I [au fond du Je] and constantly inseparable from it in the very fear it inspires and the anguish it produces the He of death [le Il de la mort] offers itself with its marble-like eternity and chill impassivityrsquo19 A quarter of a century later radicalised and condensed the thought remained the same and reappears on the threshold of Le Pas aushydelagrave as follows

uml Death being that to which we are not accustomed [habitueacutes] we approach it either as the unaccustomed [lrsquoinhabituel] that fills us with wonder [qui eacutemerveille] or as the non-familiar [le nonshyfamilier] that fills us with horror [qui fait horreur] The thought of death does not help us think death does not give us death as something to think Death thinking [la penseacutee] so close to each other that thinking we die if dying we are dispensed from thinking [nous nous dispensons de penser] every thought would then be mortal each thought a last thought20

Death then which presides over all thinking is nevertheless in-accessible to thinking and to endeavour to think death is to be confronted with intimate extremity ultimate possibility and impossibility alike Thinking too as it reaches towards its constitutive limits and encounters the limitlessness of what cannot be thought falls subject to the same aporia each thought too is suspended on the limit double proof of not only deathrsquos simultaneous possibility and impossibility but of that of thinking too And what goes for thinking plainly also goes for writing lsquoTo die to sleep ndash To sleep ndash perchance to dreamrsquo

The name of an author that appears on the cover of a book just like the implicit or explicit signature that appears within the text authorised by that name does not guarantee presence power or

An IntErruPtIon 183

even responsibility It supplies the reader with a singular distinctive name but the name is empty and is always already traversed by the prior namelessness that making the name both possible and necessary disables it as a sign of identity My name may be deeply personal to me but it always already belongs to others who may equally well use it to name a person who is somebody other than me entirely ndash but who at the same time may also be myself All names in this sense are no more than fitful fleeting traces and they are a deferred tribute to the anonymity of those whose living and dying they announce or recall So when Blanchot inscribes Le Pas aushydelagrave with his name and offers in the body of the text a cryptic vestige of his writing career it is not to lay proprietorial claim to the text but to bear witness to an impending death that has always already occurred The covert reference to Thomas lrsquoObscur may lend Le Pas aushydelagrave the status of a partial autobiography as both Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe suggest apropos of LrsquoInstant de ma mort (which the text entitled Le Pas aushydelagrave in a sense already contains while being contained by it)21 a more fitting appellation however would be autothanatography22

If language then is a graveyard it is a graveyard peopled with phantoms ghosts and revenants And more radical than any name which it simultaneously withdraws and supplements is the parenthetic and parenthesising movement of what standing in for the neuter Blanchot in rewriting the opening line of Thomas lrsquoObscur calls the (il) translatable only with difficulty into English as (it) or (he) the laconic emptiness and impersonality of which even as it exceeds all naming as such is presupposed by each and every name To write at all in this sense as Beckettrsquos work again bears witness is to confront that which remains forever nameless and unnamable As a later fragment in Le Pas aushydelagrave explains

uml Anonymity after the name is not anonymity without a name Anonymity does not consist in objecting to the name while relinquishing it Anonymity posits the name leaves it empty as if the name were only there to let itself be traversed by what the name does not name the non-unity and non-presence of the nameless (it) which designates nothing but awaits what lies forgotten in the name is some help in inquiring into this requirement for anonymity [cette exigence drsquoanonymat] Would it however be enough simply to say that (it) without having value or meaning


in itself might be thought to allow everything that is inscribed in the name to be affirmed in an always different determination Or put another way to attribute to the name the function of an lsquoanalogonrsquo a mode of absence in which all images might be held the emptiness of a symbol always ready to be filled with various possible meanings and itself always in abeyance (it) is not such that it might only receive the indeterminacy of its proper meaning by allowing itself to be determined by whatever in addition to it might be said through using it (in the same way perhaps that the word being is illuminated by the light of emergent meaning when it is uttered but only if something that is or might or might not be ndash this always happens but might not happen ndash comes to meet it in language and thereby obscures and recovers it without covering it up) (it) welcomes the enigma of being which is unable however to appease its own enigma (it) is spoken without there being any position or deposition of existence without presence or absence affirming it without the unity of the word coming to release it from the in-between where it is disseminated (it) is not lsquothatrsquo [laquo cela raquo] but the neuter which marks it (just as (it) calls upon the neuter) returns it to the displacement without place that deprives it of any grammatical place a kind of progressive lack [sorte de manque en devenir] between two several and all words thanks to which they interrupt each other and without which they would signify nothing but which disturbs them constantly even into the silence in which they fade Anonymity is borne by (it) that always speaks the name forgotten in advance23

If anonymity is the only proof of a name in other words it is because each and every name is simultaneously proof of its essential anonymity

II

A step further

uml Taking three steps stopping falling and immediately regaining his balance in this fragile fall


An IntErruPtIon 185

If one of the key resources of Le Pas aushydelagrave is to subject its explicit or implicit authorial signature to the critical effects of the neuter the treatment it reserves for its own title and accordingly for its own thematic stability is no less radical Already from the outset Blanchotrsquos title exhibits an abyssal turn Any title in order to identify the book it names must be part of that book and yet step beyond its borders In this sense any title would merit being called a step beyond ndash albeit that by that very token it would necessarily not yet be a step beyond but remain suspended on the edge as a necessary but always deferred threshold perpetually to be crossed in reading were it not that any reading before moving beyond a text is bound always to falter The name Le Pas aushydelagrave then in so far as it is a title is necessarily a step beyond in so far as it is a title however it is also anything but a step beyond only a threshold that closing the book also opens it The notorious double meaning of the word pas confirms this for what is here a step (pas from Latin passus meaning step) is there a not (pas from Latin passus meaning barely a step at all) Either way no step is ever simple achieved on one foot alone but always the result of a double movement here and there forwards and back right and left the one with the other the other with the one

In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that the syntagm le pas aushydelagrave in the course of this book entitled Le Pas aushydelagrave appears not once nor even twice but seven times over making eight in all the symbol or cipher for infinity And each of those successive occurrences displays something of the same unequal gait that one of Blanchotrsquos fictional interlocutors in 1960 called as we have seen la marche de lrsquoeacutecrevisse referring to the way crayfish according to La Fontainersquos famous Fable advance only by retreating lsquondash Here againrsquo says Blanchotrsquos essay lsquowe have the oddity [bizarrerie] of this turning towards [tour vers ] that is a turning aside [deacutetour] Who wishes to go forwards must go sidewaysrsquo25

Throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave as its title is repeated cited invoked or displaced the movement of reading or writing then is neither progressive nor regressive but lateral and oblique This much is apparent from each of the singular iterative occurrences of the phrase in Blanchotrsquos text First up towards the beginning of Le Pas aushydelagrave in the guise of a supplementary opening threshold comes something resembling a definition albeit a conjectural one written largely in the conditional and addressing the step beyond as a kind of


eventless event that interrupting time does not negate temporality but irreducible to its presence and absence both enigmatically sets it aside even as it penetrates to the epochal core of temporality in general

uml Time time the step beyond [le pas aushydelagrave] that does not occur within time may be said to take us [conduirait] outside time [hors du temps] without this outside [dehors] being timeless [intemporel] but where time may be said to fall in a fragile fall [chute fragile] in accordance with this lsquooutside of time within timersquo towards which writing would draw us were we allowed having disappeared from ourselves to write in the secrecy of ancient fear [sous le secret de la peur ancienne]26

Some twenty pages later in the course of a series of fragments devoted to the paradoxically temporal-atemporal status of the thought of eternal return Blanchot provides a second gloss He does so however indirectly and almost as an afterthought by way of a parenthetic interjection and the uncertain grammar of a phrase placed in apposition with the result that the step beyond is shorn of its commanding authority as a title and bound instead to a tortuous sequence of alternative at times paronomastic formulations

uml In a certain sense the law of return ndash the Eternal return of the Same ndash immediately one has drawn nearer to it by way of the movement that comes from it and which would be the time of writing if one did not also have to say and before all else that writing holds the exigency of return this law then ndash outside law ndash may be thought to lead us to accept [assumer] (that is suffer by dint of the most passive passivity the step beyond [de par la passiviteacute la plus passive le pas aushydelagrave]) the temporality of time in such a way that suspending or causing to disappear all present and all presence it would also cause to disappear or suspend the authority or foundation on the basis of which it is expressed Such would be the movement of irreversibility that as such is always reversible (the labyrinth)27

Having perhaps already lost their way in this dizzying verbal maze readers then have to wait more than 100 pages (in this book which in its French edition numbers less than 200) to encounter a

An IntErruPtIon 187

third avatar of the volumersquos guiding motif Once more however it comes in the form of a digressive aside with the supplementary insertion of a pair of quotation marks the effect of which is to set the expression at a distance from itself thereby disabling it so to speak and allowing the fragment in which it figures to contest it even withdraw it entirely At issue is the question of the possibility or impossibility of suicide a topic explored at length by Blanchot in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire but given fresh urgency in the wake of Paul Celanrsquos death by drowning (and presumed suicide) in April 1970

uml Suicide a temptation of defiance so far-reaching and so clear (too clear) that it seems difficult ndash almost embarrassing ndash to resist it An act of transgression a prohibition not declared by any law or by lsquonaturersquo but by the mortal indecision of the act itself a prohibition breached even as affirmed a transgression effected even as abolished and the passage of transgression ndash the lsquostep beyondrsquo [le laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo] in which there is however no stepping beyond [lagrave ougrave cependant lrsquoon ne passe pas] ndash symbolised dangerously offered by way of lsquopersonal representationrsquo the one who has passed away [le treacutepasseacute the departed] as the phrase goes28

If the step beyond in respect of the temptation of suicide proves a strangely inappropriate misnomer no sooner advanced than withdrawn this is also because the step beyond is always improper does not and cannot occur as such but has always already suspended itself in its non-occurrence In this sense the step beyond is a name for what Blanchot here calls the strangely lsquonormal anomaly [une anomalie normale]rsquo of death and dying in general so to speak and it is in this connection that Blanchot has recourse to the term for a fourth time in the book It is again written within quotation marks that is at once proposed and withdrawn and on this occasion doubly reserved by a verb put in the conditional

Even when dying [mourir] seems to engulf being [remplir lrsquoecirctre] so much so that we declare a person not without awkwardness to be dying we do not know faced with the strangeness of what is still undecided what fate is reserved for those of us who remain there unable to do anything [deacutesœuvreacutes] near to this


place where chance plays itself out witnessing non-presence and deeply affected in our most intimate fidelity our relation in ourselves to a subject And as convention dictates we busy ourselves doing nothing we help the living [le vivant] and help them to die [nous lrsquoaidons agrave mourir] but do not help with dying [nous nrsquoaidons pas le mourir] something there occurs in the absence of all else and by default something that does not occur which might be termed the lsquostep beyondrsquo [qui serait le laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo] which does not belong to duration repeats itself without end and separates us ourselves (as witnesses to what eludes all witnessing) from any appropriateness [convenance] or any relation with a Self [un Moi] as the subject of a Law29

This pattern of withdrawal and suspension of the step beyond (as barely a lsquostep beyondrsquo at all) having now been established Blanchotrsquos fifth use of the term is able to countersign its neutralisation once more which it does precisely by evoking the intervention of the neuter as that which precedes in affirmative manner both assertion and negation alike lsquouml What might be thought to respond or correspond to the neuterrsquo we read

is the fragility of what is already breaking [la fragiliteacute de ce qui deacutejagrave se brise] a passion more passive than any passivity [passion plus passive que tout ce qursquoil y aurait de passif] a yes that has said yes [oui qui a dit oui] prior to all affirmation as if the passage of dying [le passage de mourir] had always already passed preceding consent To the neuter mdash this name without name mdash nothing responds or corresponds [reacutepond] except a faltering response [la reacuteponse qui deacutefaille] that has always been on the point of responding [a toujours failli reacutepondre] and always failed in its response [failli agrave la reacuteponse] never patient enough to lsquostep beyondrsquo [laquo passer aushydelagrave raquo] without this lsquostep beyondrsquo [ce laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo] taking place30

Throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave as this last quotation emphasises Blanchot plays insistently on the paronomastic or homophonic doubling of pas (as step together with the negative not) with the words passeacute (past time) passif or passive (passive) passiviteacute (passivity) passage (passage) and passion (passion) The next sixth instance of the appearance of le pas aushydelagrave in Le Pas aushydelagrave is a

An IntErruPtIon 189

case in point with Blanchot now also adding a question mark to the parenthesis and quotation marks employed earlier

The lsquopassrsquo of the entirely passive [le laquo pas raquo du tout agrave fait passif] mdash the lsquostep beyondrsquo [le laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo ] mdash is more the folding back [repliement retreat withdrawal] as it unfolds [se deacuteployant] of a relation of strangeness neither suffered [subie] nor accepted [assumeacutee] A transgressive passivity a dying [mourir] in which nothing is suffered nothing acted upon which does not concern [ne concerne pas] and takes on a name only in its neglect of the dying of others [que par le deacutelaissement du mourir drsquoautrui]31

The last occurrence in the book appearing some thirteen pages before the end reprises much of what has gone before It again names the step beyond as a movement that incapable of being experienced as such necessarily suspends itself

uml Misfortune [Le malheur] perhaps we would suffer [subirions] it if it were to strike us on our own but it always affects the other in us and affecting us in others [en autrui] sets us aside [nous eacutecarte] to the point of that most passive passion in which our identity now lost no longer allows us to suffer it but only to identify with it albeit there is nothing identical with it and to go without identity and without any possibility of acting towards the other who is always the one affected by misfortune just as whoever is affected by misfortune is always the other a movement that is never complete [qui nrsquoaboutit pas] but like the lsquostep beyondrsquo of the entirely passive [le laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo du tout agrave fait passif] to which we may be said to respond in dying [en mourant] offers itself as its own transgression as though dying [mourir] outside of us [hors de nous] dedicated us [nous consacrait] to the other even as it gives us the slip and makes certain we do not find our way back again [tout en nous perdant en chemin et en nous retenant en cette perte]32

Seven times over then in the course of Le Pas aushydelagrave the title of the book this identifying threshold of reading and writing in which the fabric of the work would usually be gathered together in accordance with the law that dictates such things is subjected to a repetitive movement of qualification displacement


and effacement the effect of which far from promoting developing and thus imposing the step beyond as the volumersquos preferred conceptual horizon is to weaken it set it aside and suspend it even as it is maintained in the text like the forgotten memory of its own erasure In this way rather than conceptualising the step beyond Blanchotrsquos sevenfold recitation traces and retraces the movement of marking and re-marking interruption and dispersion addressed by the strange formula of the lsquostep beyondrsquo itself In this respect no special privilege attaches to the step beyond In so far as it marks the epochal interruption that necessarily occurs ndash occurs without occurring ndash in the article of death it is one signal case among many of the neutralising effects of the fragmentary What it demonstrates is how the step beyond (and Le Pas aushydelagrave) can neither aspire to transcendence nor remain content with immanence for it is that very division that very opposition which has for so long dominated thinking that the neuter arrests and puts into question As it does so under the auspices of the fragmentary it affirms the irresistible weakness of a kind of inescapable epochal exigency the implications of which Blanchot describes as follows in part of what is not by chance the longest fragment in the book

The Neuter a paradoxical name it barely speaks is a mute word simple yet always veiling itself always displacing itself outside its meaning operating invisibly on itself without ceasing to unravel in the immobility of its position that repudiates depth It neutralises neutralises (itself) thereby evoking (but no more than evoking) the movement of Aufhebung but in so far as it suspends and retains retains only the movement of suspending that is the distance it creates by virtue of the fact that in occupying the terrain it makes it disappear The Neuter then designates difference in indifference opacity in transparency the negative scansion of the other that cannot reproduce itself except through the attraction of the one duly turned aside [conjureacute] ie omitted Even the negation of the Neuter is removed [deacuterobeacutee]33

The step beyond this figure of the impossibility of transcendence and immanence alike in what it says and in what it does is neither a dialectic nor an anti-dialectic but a demand to think otherwise Which is not to say that it is more hospitable to a thinking of Being For if the neuter shadows and interrupts speculative dialectics it also

An IntErruPtIon 191

ghosts and sets aside ontology including Heideggerian fundamental ontology with similarly corrosive and far-reaching consequences As Blanchot continues

The neuter that may be thought to mark lsquobeingrsquo [lrsquoecirctre] does not therefore return it to the crudity of non-being [la grossiegravereteacute du nonshyecirctre] but has always already dispersed being itself [lrsquoecirctre mecircme] as that which never pretending to be either this or that also refuses to present itself in simple presence graspable only in apophatic fashion under the protective veil of the negative For if being [lrsquoecirctre ie Heideggerian Being or Sein which Blanchot here does not capitalise] is read or written in the neuter it is not however that the neuter takes precedence over being [prime lrsquoecirctre] nor only that being [lrsquoecirctre] may be said to be given [se donnerait] beneath the veil of the difference between being [ecirctre] and beings [eacutetant] being neither being nor beings (rather the further side of both [lrsquoaushydelagrave des deux] or the hither side of the space between [lrsquoen deccedila de lrsquoentreshydeux]) but rather that the neuter exorcises it [le conjure] by gently dissuading it from all presence even negative presence neutralising it to the point of preventing it from calling itself the being of the neuter [lrsquoecirctre du neutre] even as it plunges it [tout en lrsquoentraicircnant] into the infinite erosion of negative repetition34

What is affirmed here with respect to the Neuter or neuter as Blanchot writes it now dropping now reinstating the capital letter is not the transcendental prerogative of any single name or conceptual figure For what was also announced in the neuter was the repetitive dispersion irrepressible multiplicity and nomadic dissidence of the fragmentary its kinship therefore with one of the most elusive and intractable of all past and future thoughts interrupting philosophy and literature alike the thought of eternal return

III

the law of return

uml Nietzsche (if his name serves to name the law of Eternal return) and Hegel (if his name invites us to think presence as all and the all as presence) allow us to sketch out a mythology Nietzsche


can only come after Hegel but it is always before and always after Hegel that he comes and keeps coming Before because even thought as the absolute presence has never gathered within itself the completed totality of knowledge presence knows itself to be absolute but its knowledge remains relative knowledge since it has not realised itself practically and it therefore knows itself only as a present unfulfilled in practice unreconciled with presence as all in that sense Hegel is still only a pseudo-Hegel And Nietzsche always comes after because the law of which he is the bearer supposes the completion of time as present and in this completion its absolute destruction such that Eternal return now affirming the future and the past as the only instances of time and as identical and unrelated instances thus liberating the future from all present and the past from all presence shatters thought to the point of this infinite affirmation what will return infinitely in the future will be that which could never in any form be present just as what returned infinitely in the past was that which in the past never in any form belonged to the present either Such henceforth for Nietzsche is the exigency to be lived and thought And writing alone can respond to such an exigency on condition that discourse as logos having completed itself deny it any foundation on the basis of which it might declare or sustain itself and expose it to the threat and vain prestige of what nobody would henceforth dare call the madness of writing [eacutecriture folle]


As it stepped back and forth over its various thresholds it was perhaps not surprising that Le Pas aushydelagrave should find itself returning once again seemingly for the very first time to a singular predecessor for whom the philosophical as thought and as text was always more or less than what it seemed and was at any event more incisively embodied not as concept but as dance Nietzsche36 As we have seen Nietzsche had long been a significant presence for Blanchot But from 1967 onwards as the closing chapters of LrsquoEntretien infini testified further impetus was given to French rediscovery of Nietzsche by the appearance of new translations now based on the authoritative Colli and Montinari text and incorporating extensive amounts of previously unpublished fragmentary material Of particular interest to Blanchot as he put the finishing touches to LrsquoEntretien infini

An IntErruPtIon 193

were Nietzschersquos hitherto unavailable 1881 Froumlhliche Wissenschaft notebooks recently translated by Klossowski which recorded the thinkerrsquos own immediate response to the ecstatic experience in Sils-Maria in August 1881 (lsquo6000 feet above sea level and at a much greater height above all human thingsrsquo) on which Blanchot drew for much of his own account likewise written in fragmentary form of Nietzschersquos thought of eternal return37

Though Blanchotrsquos responsiveness to Nietzsche was at its most intense in Le Pas aushydelagrave published four years after LrsquoEntretien infini his engagement with Nietzschersquos writing carried on through the 1970s culminating in particular in two sequences of fragments in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre based on extracts not only from relatively well-known works such as Morgenroumlte (Daybreak) Jenseits von Gut und Boumlse (Beyond Good and Evil) and Die Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morality) but also from Nietzschersquos Autumn 1887 notebooks that had at last also appeared in French mid-way through the decade in a version for which Klossowski was again responsible38 revisiting these texts or encountering them for the first time and well aware of past and present controversies affecting reception of Nietzsche Blanchot was especially attentive to those aspects of Nietzschersquos writing that were felt by him to make a timely-untimely ethico-political intervention These included the thinkerrsquos still potent attacks on Christianity his deep-seated hostility to all forms of transcendence his denunciation of religious enthusiasm and arguably less well known to contemporary readers his polemic in favour of the Jews as well as against them As this last point suggests notwithstanding Nietzschersquos uncompromising assault on the moral self which Blanchot elsewhere largely endorses the question of his ndash hyperbolic ndash responsibility for his heirsrsquo use or abuse of his thinking remained an important issue39 Adding his own name to an already long-running debate Blanchot aligned himself with the view that the thinkerrsquos invective against the Jews the result of an uncritical reliance on nineteenth-century Christian propaganda was primarily directed less at Judaism itself than at Christianity as a kind of Pauline perversion of Judaism Some of the opinions voiced by Nietzsche were nevertheless deeply questionable At the same time it was also the case Blanchot maintained now coming to the thinkerrsquos defence that Nietzschersquos many lsquodubious remarks [remarques douteuses]rsquo fell far short of the notorious politicised antisemitism professed notably by the philosopherrsquos


sister and brother-in-law lsquoWhenever antisemitism turns into some-thing systematic or an organised movementrsquo Blanchot explained lsquo[Nietzsche] rejects it with horrorrsquo and he added rhetorically lsquoWho does not know thisrsquo40

Without pausing to comment explicitly on the strength or relevance of this last qualification Blanchot in the fragments that immediately precede took care to delimit Nietzschersquos comments on the Jews This he did by inserting just before the second of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastrersquos two clusters of textual material dealing with Nietzsche a series of seemingly unrelated other fragments The first of these is in the form of an elliptical commentary on a remark by rabbi Pinchas (or Pinhas) of Koretz (1726ndash91) one of the closest disciples of the Baal Shem Tov taken from Buberrsquos Tales of the Hasidim and asserting the need to show lsquomore loversquo towards whoever was wicked or full of hate in order writes Blanchot now paraphrasing Buber lsquoto compensate with our love for the lack of love for which that person is responsible and which causes a ldquoriftrdquo [ein Riszlig says Buber a tear or split in the Shekhinah or Divine Presence] in the powers of Love which it is necessary to repair on his behalfrsquo But what might this mean in concrete terms Blanchotrsquos answer is Levinasian in language though it is also decidedly critical of that stereotypical overly pious respect for undifferentiated others mistakenly attributed to Levinas by some of his commentators It is that lsquo[w]ickedness hatred [ ] are not characteristics of the Other [Autrui] who is precisely the destitute the abandoned and the helpless If one can speak of hatred or wickedness it is in so far as it is through them that evil [le mal] also affects others [des tiers third persons] which is why justice demands refusal resistance and even the use of violence designed to combat [repousser] violencersquo41 Justice then was paramount and in resisting evil politics took priority over ethics To reinforce the point Blanchot followed it up with a quotation from Lenin credited by Henri Guillemin the left-wing Catholic popular historian and literary critic with the proposition (amply confirmed with catastrophic consequences by subsequent Soviet developments) that even lsquothe slightest hint of antisemitism professed by any group or individual proves the reactionary nature of that group or individualrsquo This in turn was followed by a further apparently unconnected fragment announcing that lsquo[t]o keep silent [Garder le silence] is what without realising we all wish for in writingrsquo after which Blanchot then transcribed

An IntErruPtIon 195

a brief extract from the famous words of the prophet Job forced to humble himself before God to whom he confesses lsquoBehold I am vile what shall I answer thee I will lay mine hand upon my mouth Once I have spoken but I will not answer yea twice but I will proceed no furtherrsquo drawing from Blanchot who quotes only the second half of Jobrsquos response the remark lsquoThis is perhaps what is meant by the repetition of writing repeating what is extreme [lrsquoextrecircme] to which there is nothing to addrsquo42

By way of these elliptical and sometimes enigmatic fragments (many more of which might be adduced) a complex strategy of reading comes into view It was in four key parts First crucial to Blanchotrsquos return to Nietzsche was the belief that nothing in the thinkerrsquos writings could or should be taken away but equally nothing added rejected then was any attempt to systematise Nietzschersquos writing any attempt on the part of commentators of either right or left to subordinate it to any political religious or other ideology and similarly any desire to minimise its many contradictions or ambiguities Second it therefore followed that Nietzschersquos words were such that they might be thought already to speak for themselves which was also to say as Nietzsche was at pains to argue not only that they resisted reduction to any single perspective but also that by that very token they were themselves infinitely interpretable Third as Blanchotrsquos elision of Jobrsquos reply to God implied it was essential to remember that no word stood alone and that to interpret any fragmentary writing meant paying equal attention both to the text and context of what was written and to the silence inseparable from writing to which as Blanchot observes the latter was secretly dedicated43 Finally just as writing was subject to no guarantees so reading had to accept it was without safeguards either Both represented infinite tasks incapable of securing ultimate or definitive conclusions And as he went on to review a selection of largely admiring unpublished remarks about the Jews from 1887 just over a year before Nietzschersquos final breakdown Blanchot cautiously opening a parenthesis summed matters up as follows lsquo(Nietzschersquos thinking is not without its dangers that is true Before all else this is what he tells us whenever we think we should expect no rest [si nous pensons pas de repos])rsquo44

Though not formulated as such at the time the implications of such restlessness (affirmation of the fragmentary probing disbelief tireless questioning hyperbolic responsibility) were already at


the heart of Blanchotrsquos engagement with Nietzsche in the period following LrsquoEntretien infini As we have seen some of the first sections of Le Pas aushydelagrave to appear did so in 1970 in a special issue of the journal LrsquoArc in honour of Klossowski to whose Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux bringing together essays and translations completed during the previous six years Blanchotrsquos contribution paid homage In presenting these early fragments in LrsquoArc Blanchot was able to recycle the dedication used a short while before in LrsquoEntretien infini suggesting that the two tributes were written at much the same time45 In other ways too Le Pas aushydelagrave picked up where LrsquoEntretien infini had left off and Blanchot returned to several aspects of Nietzschersquos thought which he had begun to broach four years earlier notably in response to Heidegger These included perhaps most importantly of all the complex relationship between philosophy art literature and the fragmentary in Nietzsche and by extension in Blanchotrsquos own writing Then there was the far-reaching question of the status and meaning of Nietzschersquos experience and doctrine of eternal return which Heidegger while declaring it inseparable from the concept of will to power had nevertheless relegated to a final chapter in the history of metaphysics yet which for Blanchot as we have seen bore importantly not only on the epochal question of the fragmentary but also on that thought of the neuter which had been a major concern of the writerrsquos thinking for a decade and more And not far behind given particular urgency by the political situation of the French Fifth republic in the early 1970s to which Blanchot was far from indifferent was the question of nihilism ndash the question of the future and of the past of history responsibility and alterity ndash that Nietzsche had bequeathed to all who came after and in which Blanchot as a reader of Loumlwith Heidegger and numerous others had long recognised the burden or address of eternal return albeit that following a promise made in LrsquoEntretien infini he now took care to suspend then abandon the belated latinate word itself judging it to be a misleading lure an obstacle to the task of thinking46

Having set aside its more explicitly metaphysical philosophical ambitions in 1966 and passing in silence over much that was still part of Nietzschersquos intellectual legacy including the will to power the figure of the overman or the transvaluation of all values it was here most particularly with the thought of eternal return itself that the rereading of Nietzschersquos work in Le Pas aushydelagrave may be

An IntErruPtIon 197

said to begin or perhaps better begin again In the whole of Le Pas aushydelagrave however Nietzschersquos name is explicitly mentioned in only nine of the bookrsquos 416 fragments occurring principally in the opening third of the volume and nowhere unlike LrsquoEntretien infini or LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre are any specific texts by Nietzsche actually quoted47 On the other hand in a slightly greater number of fragments reference is made to lsquoEternal return [LrsquoEacuteternel Retour]rsquo or lsquoThe Eternal return of the Same [LrsquoEternel Retour du Mecircme]rsquo duly capitalised as though it were in itself a proper name and as though the thought therefore had subtly taken the place of the thinker whose only claim to that recurrent signature after all was on the basis of its anonymity an anonymity that in Blanchotrsquos words as we have seen was already given in the name itself lsquoWhen we sign our namersquo he explained lsquoaffirming our identity we become responsible far beyond this sign to the point that this responsibility has always already set us aside [depuis toujours eacutecarteacutes] signing to disappropriate us like a forger who rather than passing himself off as genuine [vrai] reveals the genuine to be a forgery itself [ferait eacuteclater le vrai en faux]rsquo48 In this sense the Nietzsche at stake in Le Pas aushydelagrave was less the singular historical individual bearing that onomastic marker than already the nameless expropriated cipher radically synonymous with the experience of return revealed at Surlej for which he nevertheless stood absolute warranty becoming as he did so the modest but ineluctable understudy (and hostage) of lsquoevery name in historyrsquo as he put it in that celebrated January 1889 letter to Jakob Burckhardt

Explication of the thought of eternal return in Nietzschersquos published writings is notoriously elusive and its elucidation often veiled and indirect Like other readers Blanchot had no doubt long been familiar with aphorism sect341 from Die Froumlhliche Wissenschaft one of the best-known and most explicit passages in which in cautiously guarded and pointedly hypothetical terms Nietzsche staged the challenge of this lsquoheaviest of weightsrsquo (lsquoDo I talk like someone who has had a revelationrsquo he bluffly remarks in an unpublished fragment cited by Blanchot in 1969 lsquoIf so despise me and pay me no heedrsquo49) It famously runs as follows

What if some day or night a demon [Daumlmon] were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you lsquoThis life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and


innumerable times again and there will be nothing new in it but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you all in the same succession and sequence mdash even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment [dieser Augenblick cet instantshyci translates Klossowski] and I myself [ich selber moishymecircme] The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again and you with it speck of dustrsquo Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment [einen ungeheuren Augenblick un instant formidable] when you would have answered him lsquoYou are a god and never have I heard anything more divinersquo If this thought gained power over you as you are it would transform and possibly crush you the question in each and every thing lsquoDo you want this again and innumerable times againrsquo would lie on your actions as the heaviest of weights Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life in order to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal mdash 50

There is no doubting the fervour and intensity of these words and few readers can have been surprised to find Nietzsche seven years later in Ecce homo reaffirming the thought of eternal return as lsquothe absolutely highest formula of affirmation [diese houmlchste Formel der Bejahung] it is possible to attainrsquo51 Blanchot in turn seems to have concurred lsquoThe ldquorerdquo of returnrsquo he noted in Le Pas aushydelagrave lsquoinscribed like the ldquoexrdquo the opening of all exteriority as if return far from bringing exile to a close marked it [marquait lrsquoexil] the beginning in its rebeginning of exodus To come back would be to come anew [de nouveau] to ex-centre oneself [srsquoexshycentrer] to wander [errer also means to err] What alone remains is nomadic affirmationrsquo52 Admittedly this much was far from self-evident For perhaps the most vertiginous feature of eternal return captured in the figure of the circle (lsquoannulus aeternitatisrsquo Blanchot wrote in 1969 again drawing on Nietzschersquos 1881 notebooks)53 was its ineradicable reversibility that from one moment to the next presence might give way to absence and the wild intensity of the mountains to the bleak devastation of the abyss ndash and vice versa Already for Nietzsche this was no doubt why eternal return was premised

An IntErruPtIon 199

simultaneously on the exacerbation of nihilism and the prospect of its overcoming Between the nihilism it purported to combat and the redemption it seemed to promise the gap was accordingly a narrow one lsquoThe thought of eternal return of the samersquo Heidegger put it in 1937 lsquois only as this overcoming thought [ist nur als dieser uumlberwindende Gedanke] The overcoming [Uumlberwindung] has to cross this seemingly narrow gulf since it connects things that being the same in one way thus appear identical [denn sie besteht zwischen solchem was sich auf eine Weise gleicht daszlig es als dasselbe erscheint] On the one side stands all is nothing all is indifferent so that nothing is worthwhile everything is the same [alles ist gleich] On the other side stands everything returns each moment matters everything matters everything is the same [alles ist gleich]rsquo54

Absolutely crucial here is the possibility or constitution of the moment of that Nietzschean Augenblick which is also the blink of an eye which therefore opens (infinitely explains Nietzsche) only in order to close again almost immediately after and repeat itself opening and closing again and again In that movement all selfhood is lost undone by the gyrations of an uncontrollable wheel and the moment in its brevity its infinity its essential wandering rules supreme were it not that the moment itself is anything but self-identical or self-present as the future author of LrsquoInstant de ma mort was only too aware For there are unmistakeable similarities between that still discreet or clandestine experience and Blanchotrsquos writing or rewriting of Nietzschersquos dark illumination similarities that echo perceptibly throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave confirming perhaps as LrsquoInstant de ma mort suggests how the one is the impossible memory or anticipation of the other Nietzsche for his part in drawing the more explicitly philosophical consequences of the experience at Surlej began by reminding himself and any future readers of the dubious conformist and essentialist assumptions of science society and metaphysics He went on

The species is the coarser error the individual [das Individuum Nietzschersquos term is not gender-specific] the subtler error who comes later It struggles for its existence for its new taste and for its relatively singular relationship to all things mdash it considers these better than common taste and despises it It is bent on domination But then it discovers that it too is something ever


changing and possesses an ever changing taste its subtlety uncovers the secret that there is no individual that in each briefest moment [im kleinsten Augenblick dans le moindre instant writes Klossowski] it is something different than in the next and that its conditions of existence are those of a multiplicity of individuals the infinitely brief moment [der unendlich kleine Augenblick lrsquoinstant infiniteacutesimal] is the higher reality and truth a lightning flash emerging from the eternal flow So it learns how all pleasurable knowledge relies on the coarse error of the species the more subtle errors of the individual and the most subtle error of the creative moment [dem feinsten Irrthum des schoumlpferischen Augenblicks la plus subtile de toutes les erreurs celle de lrsquoinstant creacuteateur]55

No wonder then that in order to explicate eternal return some commentators have been drawn to emphasise the essential presence of eternal returnrsquos abiding protagonist the self lsquoWith this thought [of eternal return]rsquo says Heidegger lsquowhat is to be thought [was zu denken ist] by virtue of the way it is to be thought [durch die Weise wie es zu denken ist] recoils onto the thinker and assails him only however in order to draw him into that which is to be thought To think eternity requires to think the moment [Augenblick] that is to reposition oneself in the moment of selfhood [in den Augenblick des Selbstseins the moment of being-self] To think the return of the same demands a confrontation [Auseinandersetzung a settling of differences] with the ldquoeverything is the same [alles ist gleich]rdquo the ldquoit is not worthwhile [es lohnt sich nicht]rdquo with nihilismrsquo56 To contend with nihilism then it was necessary to decide on the basis of an experience of self But what this also meant from Heideggerrsquos perspective was that eternal return however much it sought otherwise was irrevocably wedded to a (metaphysical) proposition regarding beings in general (and premised on a forgetting of Being) However much it claimed to be an overcoming of nihilism it remained tightly held within its orbit lsquoThe fact that in thinking the thought of the eternal return of the same what is to be thought recoils onto the thinker and draws him into the thoughtrsquo Heidegger added lsquois not primarily because the eternal return of the same is being thought [gedacht wird] but because this thought thinks being[s] as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen] A thought of this type is called a ldquometaphysicalrdquo thoughtrsquo57 And in so far as it

An IntErruPtIon 201

was a metaphysical thought Heidegger argued it was dependent on a forgetting of Being and as such deeply complicit with what Nietzsche himself termed nihilism lsquoNihilism there is no purpose no answer to the question ldquowhyrdquorsquo the latter wrote in Autumn 1887 So lsquowhat is the meaning of nihilismrsquo he went on in a phrase Heidegger was fond of quoting lsquondash that the highest values are being debased [raquo daszlig die obersten Werte sich entwerten laquo]rsquo58 This was not to say nihilism was simple it had several forms active as well as passive according to whether it was an embodiment of strength or weakness authority or submissiveness both of which however had in common their status as acts of will to power

This in a sense did not matter or in another sense mattered above all else For as far as Heidegger was concerned the thought of eternal return in its attempt to overcome nihilism was fatally compromised If on the one hand it was a bold attempt to reverse Platonism and to put an end to metaphysics by reconciling being with becoming Parmenides with Heraclitus it was only able to do this unwittingly or not within a philosophical framework deriving from Aristotle and grounded on an identification of the Being of beings with ousia Anwesenheit or presence Nietzschersquos step beyond metaphysics in other words was anything but a step beyond more a vertiginous balancing act relying on the very ground it believed it was destroying As Heidegger explained

Because Nietzsche approached the essence of Greek thought more immediately than any previous metaphysical thinker and because at the same time from start to finish and with the most unforgiving logic he thinks as a modern [neuzeitlich] it might appear that his thinking accomplishes a confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with the beginning of Western thought However in so far as it is still modern it is not the confrontation previously mentioned it turns instead inevitably into a mere inversion of Greek thought [zu einer bloszligen Umkehrung des griechischen Denkens] As a result of that inversion [Umkehrung] Nietzsche becomes all the more inextricably entangled in what is being inverted [das Umgekehrte] There is no confrontation no grounding of any fundamental position which steps beyond the original [aus der anfaumlnglichen Grundstellung heraustritt] so that it does not discard it but lets it stand in its singularity and solidity in order then with its help to draw itself up alongside59


Heideggerrsquos delimitation of Nietzschersquos thought was nothing if not decisive For his part however as we have seen Blanchot from the mid-1960s was increasingly attentive to that in Nietzschersquos text which escaped theme concept or discourse His treatment of the word or concept of nihilism already placed under erasure in LrsquoEntretien infini was a case in point For only once and without any explicit connection to Nietzsche Heidegger or other lsquogrand namersquo60 does the word even appear in the whole of Le Pas aushydelagrave It does so admittedly at a strategically important juncture midway through the volume in the course of a quizzical but telling passage in the third person poised undecidably between literary narrative and phenomenological description between the personal and the impersonal and carefully calculated to challenge canonic assumptions regarding the opposition between scepticism and hope or between hope as positive expectation and nihilism as proof of the nullity of hope But more is at stake here than decorative paradox or self-defeating dialectic for what Blanchotrsquos fragment undertakes to do is to dramatise or perhaps better de-dramatise thinking like the pas aushydelagrave itself as prior to transcendence and immanence alike that is determinable neither in respect of a teleological future nor in terms of abiding self-presence Blanchot puts it thus

uml He is too lacking in scepticism to hope [trop peu sceptique pour espeacuterer] He is not hopeful enough to settle for nihilism [srsquoarrecircter au nihilisme] The unknown without hope Anxiety [lrsquoangoisse] the non-guarantee [la nonshysucircreteacute that which is neither sure nor safe] that excludes the uncertainty of doubt that measure of decisiveness doubt still retains in order for it to be exercised

Inattentive as though in the power of constant attention A thought wakes [veille] which he cannot identify even knowing it well One could say it is there to disallow [interdire] mortal surprise being that surprise itself61

Hope then in so far as it corresponds to impatient desire and always already thinks it knows what to expect is its own worst enemy in order properly to hope in other words it is necessary to suspend all hope Nihilism too is likewise deceptive and in the guise of absence without value soon reveals itself to be a moment of substantified negativity and ontological stasis its reports on the death of God soon turning into deep nostalgia for His return

An IntErruPtIon 203

This temptation of nihilism is one to which Le Pas aushydelagrave refuses to succumb not least by turning aside the facility it represents There is no truth therefore in the rumour that Le Pas aushydelagrave is a melancholy rumination on nothingness ndash or on being The only ground available in fact to welcome the unknown Blanchotrsquos fragment suggests is anxiety but only because anxiety here is a radical absence of ground irreducible even to that hyperbolic doubt which as Descartes professed to show is the securest ground of all And if the fragile transcendence of the future already resists itself and demands to be resisted so the same is true of the apparent immanence of the present This too refuses to coincide with itself Mortal surprise in other words ndash surprise at being alive at dying at the possibility of the one and the impossibility of the other ndash necessarily withdraws from itself Only in so far as it remains outside itself can it be affirmed as what it is (or by that token is not) Such too by abyssal implication as this fragment itself suggests in its twofold response to hopes of the future and thoughts of the present is the fragmentary a suspension of transcendence and immanence alike in so far as both appeal to a living present in the future or in the past an erasure therefore that leaves by way of remainder a mere vestigial trace of itself determinable neither as something nor as nothing exceeding both being and non-being in its anonymity poverty and discretion

From Blanchotrsquos perspective despite its explicit questioning of the figure of the thinker as protagonist what Heideggerrsquos account failed to address was the possibility (or impossibility) of the writing of the thought of eternal return For everything hinged on that briefest of all present moments when thinking writing speaking might occur (or not) and it was this that Blanchot in much of Le Pas aushydelagrave sought to investigate For it was not true he argued that eternal return was reliant on that possibility of self or selfhood which for Heidegger was proof of the metaphysical status of eternal return as a proposition about beings in general and of its deep solidarity with the concept of will to power For Blanchot it was much rather the opposite ie that the Nietzschean self or subject even will to power was precisely what was suspended volatilised excluded by the experience of return The presence of the present moment in other words was radically compromised by return as such not least because the very concept of return lsquoas suchrsquo was already ruined in the impossible movement of return


In thinking the present moment otherwise in this way Blanchot was not alone He was aided and abetted in the early 1970s by two divergent but equally indispensable interlocutors The first was Derrida who in 1968 by way of provisional conclusion to an analysis of the ontological difference in Heidegger and by a bold radicalisation of all that was at stake in Heideggerrsquos formulation including the latterrsquos interpretation of Nietzsche suggested that lsquothere might be said to be a difference even more unthought [plus impenseacutee encore] than the difference between Being and beings [lrsquoecirctre et lrsquoeacutetant] Almost certainly it cannot be named as such any further in our language Beyond Being and beings this difference ceaselessly deferring (itself) would (itself) trace (itself) and this diffeacuterance would be the first or last trace if it were still possible here to refer to any origin and endrsquo lsquoSuch diffeacuterancersquo Derrida went on

might then make it possible and necessary already still to conceive [nous donnerait deacutejagrave encore agrave penser] of a writing without presence and without absence without history without cause without authority [sans archie] without telos and absolutely disruptive of all dialectics all theology all teleology and all ontology A writing exceeding everything the history of metaphysics has included in the form of Aristotelian grammegrave in its point its line its circle its time and its space62

The impact of these words on Blanchotrsquos own thinking when they were probably first read in the Autumn of 1968 is hard to overestimate They added significantly at any event to Blanchotrsquos appreciation of a second line of argument that would also bear importantly on his reading of Nietzsche For at the celebrated 1964 royaumont conference on Nietzsche breaking off from his work translating sections of Nietzschersquos Nachlaszlig and having already begun to prepare his French version of Heideggerrsquos two 1961 Nietzsche volumes Klossowski had launched a new and challenging reinterpretation of his own by emphasising how in its very articulation eternal return necessarily suspended dissolved and erased the present moment on the very repetition of which it appeared to rely63 Was there not therefore he asked lsquoan antinomy implicit in Nietzschersquos lived experience between the content revealed and the lesson of that content (as ethical doctrine) when formulated as follows act as if you had to relive your life [revivre] innumerable

An IntErruPtIon 205

times and will to relive your life innumerable times ndash since in any case you will have [il te faudra] to relive it and begin all over againrsquo64 If it was henceforth the task of the will to will necessity this could only culminate in a perverse self-abolition of the will itself that is not in its supreme transcending of necessity but in its absolute destruction at the hands of necessity And if necessity ruled unopposed it followed that it was also necessary to forget the revelation of eternal return itself which otherwise would hardly constitute a revelation and which imposed itself therefore on the thinker as a necessity by requiring its own forgetting its deletion or effacement lsquoHow does return not bring back forgettingrsquo Klossowski asked lsquoI not only learn that I (Nietzsche) find myself having come back to that crucial moment in which the eternity of the circle culminates just as the truth of necessary return is revealed to me but by that token I also learn that I was other than I now am by dint of having forgotten it and therefore that I have become another by learning it will I change once more and forget that I shall necessarily change during an eternity ndash until I relearn this revelation afreshrsquo65

lsquoThe emphasisrsquo concluded Klossowski lsquohas to be placed on the loss of given identity [la perte de lrsquoidentiteacute donneacutee]rsquo66 In this sense the death of God proclaimed by and in Nietzsche did not announce an epoch dominated by debilitating nihilism but instead according to Klossowski opened experience to an infinite series of possible ie virtual histrionic personas each of which had to be assumed exhausted declined the one after the other perpetually and without end following the logic of circulation dictated by eternal return And when revelation came as it was required to do Klossowski argued it therefore fell not to the one but to the proliferating many

At the moment [agrave lrsquoinstant] when Eternal return is revealed to me I cease being myself [moishymecircme] hic et nunc and am liable to become innumerable others knowing that I shall forget this revelation once outside of the memory of myself this forgetting forms the object of my present willing [mon preacutesent vouloir] since any such forgetting will be equivalent to a memory beyond my own limits and my current consciousness will be established only in the forgetting of my other possible identities

What memory is this The necessary circular movement to which I give myself [auquel je me livre] delivering myself


[me deacutelivrant] from myself If now I assert that I will it and that necessarily willing it I will have re-willed it I will only be extending my consciousness to this circular movement even if I identify myself with the Circle I will however never leave this representation behind on the basis of being myself in fact already I am no longer in the moment when the sudden revelation of Eternal return affected me67

In the experience of return then there was after all no moment no instant no Augenblick and thus no selfhood that was not always already traversed multiplied and expropriated as a fortuitous sequence Far from the present moment being the centre on which the circle turned Klossowski insisted was it not forgetting ndash as interruption erasure the trace of a trace ndash that was at once lsquothe source and indispensable condition for Eternal return to reveal itself and in one fell swoop transform everything including the identity of whoever it is revealed torsquo68 lsquoForgetting [Lrsquooubli]rsquo remarked Blanchot in reply in some of the last pages of LrsquoEntretien infini to be written radicalising Klossowskirsquos thought in the light of Derridarsquos recent work and not without recalling his own thinking some six short years earlier

releases the future [lrsquoavenir] from time itself [ ] Forgetting is the way in which lsquochaos sive naturarsquo opens that lsquochaos of everythingrsquo of which Nietzsche says that it does not contradict the thought of the circular path [la penseacutee du cours circulaire dem Gedanken des Kreislaufs in Nietzschersquos original text] But what more does he say lsquoExcept for return there is nothing identical [Abstraction faite du retour il nrsquoy a rien drsquoidentique Blanchot is condensing and forcing Klossowskirsquos more accurate rendering Quant agrave savoir si jamais abstraction faite de ce retour quelque chose drsquoidentique [irgend etwas Gleiches] a deacutejagrave eacuteteacute lagrave voilagrave qui est absolument indeacutemontrable]rsquo There is nothing identical except for the fact that everything returns

lsquoldquoEverything returns [Tout revient]rdquorsquo Blanchot concluded delivering a final rebuff to Heidegger lsquodoes not belong to the temporality of time It has to be thought outside of time [hors du temps] outside of Being [hors de lrsquoEcirctre] and as the Outside [comme le Dehors] itself which is why it can be called ldquoeternalrdquo or aevumrsquo69

An IntErruPtIon 207

But if the thought of eternal return this lsquosimulacrum of a doctrinersquo as Klossowski also calls it necessarily entails its own withdrawal how then to think it at all How to speak or write it But equally in its deferral its suspension its absolute futurity how not to be always already thinking it speaking it writing it

In spite ndash or more plausibly because ndash of this intractability these are the questions to which time and again Le Pas aushydelagrave forcibly returns explicitly and implicitly persistently entangling itself in abyssal fashion in the aporetics it strains to address Here testing translatability to the limit is the volumersquos first approach to the self-cancelling logic of return

uml The Eternal return of the Same the same [le mecircme] that is myself as the same [le moishymecircme what Nietzsche calls ich selber] in so far as the selfsame sums up the rule of identity that is my present self [le moi preacutesent] But the exigency of return excluding from time any mode of the present would never release [ne libeacuterait jamais Blanchotrsquos text probably in error has this in the imperfect not the conditional] a now [un maintenant] when the same [le mecircme] would revert to the same [au mecircme] to myself as the selfsame [au moishymecircme]70

Eternal return in other words makes sense if at all only if what returns is some kind of present allowing the same to be identified as the same ndash but what returns insists Blanchot in so far as it returns from the past or from the future cannot by definition ever be present In the fragment that follows Blanchot explores further the paralogical puzzle which then arises He therefore begins or repeats himself again

uml The Eternal return of the Same as if return [le retour] proposed ironically as a law of the Same [loi du Mecircme] in which the Same would rule supreme did not necessarily make time into an infinite game [un jeu infini] with two modes of entry [agrave deux entreacutees] (given as one and yet never unified) a future always already past a past always still to come from which the third instance the instant of presence excluding itself would exclude all possibility of identity

Under the law of return where between past and future nothing is conjugated [se conjugue] how then to leap [sauter] from the


one to the other when the rule is for there to be no passage even including a leap What is past it is said is the same as what is future In that case there would be only one modality or a double modality functioning in such a way that identity deferred [diffeacutereacutee] would regulate difference But that is what the exigency of return suggests it is lsquounder the false appearance of a presentrsquo that the ambiguity pastndashfuture may be said to separate invisibly the future from the past71

Notwithstanding the reference to Mallarmeacute now reread in the light of Derridarsquos lsquoLa Double Seacuteancersquo nothing here is certain Accordingly only two fragments later Le Pas aushydelagrave returns again as it obviously must to the enigma of this absent present

uml Assume a past assume a future with nothing that might allow passage from one to the other in such a way that the line of demarcation would demarcate them all the more clearly for remaining invisible expectations of a past [espeacuterance drsquoun passeacute] acceptance of a future [reacutevolu drsquoun avenir] All that would therefore remain of time would be this line to be crossed which has always already been crossed while yet remaining uncrossable [cette ligne agrave franchir toujours deacutejagrave franchie cependant infranchissable] and in relation to lsquomersquo nowhere to be found [non situable] The impossibility of situating that line this alone is perhaps what we may be said to call the lsquopresentrsquo

The law of return which supposes that lsquoeverythingrsquo is due to return seems to conceive of time as something completed the circle beyond circulation of all circles but in so far as it snaps [rompt] the ring at its mid-point it suggests a time not incomplete but on the contrary finite except in respect of the point which is now [ce point actuel] the only one which we believe we possess [que nous croyons deacutetenir] and which when missing [manquant] introduces an infinite breach [la rupture drsquoinfiniteacute] obliging us to live as though in a state of perpetual death72

It is here that the displacement effected by eternal return becomes perhaps easier to understand For numerous earlier commentators eternal return in Nietzsche corresponded to a desire on the thinkerrsquos part to redeem both the past and the future by restoring to them the present they necessarily excluded and thus to restage lifersquos many

An IntErruPtIon 209

problematic decisions as though they were recurring here and now in a kind of perpetual present as a radical challenge to the existence responsible for those decisions which according to Nietzschersquos hypothesis now found itself required to relive them again and again as though for the first time the better to differentiate between the active and the reactive and the better to nullify the second by reaffirming the first Not so however for Blanchot who offers a very different account of Nietzschersquos thinking He begins by detailing this initial canonic interpretation which runs as follows

When in a devastating revelation the affirmation of the Eternal return of the Same imposes itself upon Nietzsche it first of all seems that by giving it all the qualities [couleurs] of the past and all the qualities of the future it can but privilege the temporal demand of the present what I am living [ce que je vis what I am experiencing] today opens time into its furthest recesses [jusqursquoau fond] delivering it to me in this sole present as the double infinity that is thought to meet within it if I have lived it an infinite number of times if I am required to relive it an infinite number of times I am here at my desk for all eternity and in order to write it eternally all is present in this single repetitive moment without there being anything other than this repetition of Being in its Same [cette reacutepeacutetition de lrsquoEcirctre en son Mecircme]73

But if past and future excluded the present objected Blanchot it followed that eternal return could not then be accommodated within the present And what this implied was that far from being secured by eternal return it was Being in its Sameness that was in fact radically excluded by it As Blanchot immediately continued

Very quickly however Nietzsche entered into the thought [entra dans la penseacutee] that there was nobody at his desk nor any present in the Being of the Same [lrsquoEcirctre du Mecircme] nor any Being [Ecirctre] in its repetition The affirmation of Eternal return had resulted either in ruining time [la ruine temporelle] leaving him nothing else to think but dispersion as thought (the wide-eyed silence of the prostrate man in a white shirt) or perhaps even more decisively in the ruin of the present alone [la ruine du


preacutesent seul] now no longer available [frappeacute drsquointerdit banned or prohibited] and along with it the unitary root of the whole torn away [arracheacutee la racine unitaire de lrsquoensemble]74

But it was not that past and future were rendered indistinguishable and the present somehow annihilated making action decision or affirmation impossible Just like the doctrine of the ubiquitous all-consuming present nothing would be more conducive to nihilism An unthematised and unthematisable interruption remained suggesting that the present while no longer a moment of presence (or absence the effect of which would be the same) nevertheless corresponded to a disjunction or interval a finite trace traversed by the infinite and an ungraspable limit opening onto the limitless in much the same way that death this always imminent and always certain finality might give way to the interminable suspension of dying which no experience in the present can comprehend As another fragment has it again withdrawing from presence that which it advances by the ironic (and ironically ironic) expedient of a parenthesis lsquo(Even in the law of Eternal return the past cannot repeat the future as [comme] the future would repeat the past The repetition of the past as future releases it for a quite different modality ndash which may be termed prophetic In the past what is given as a repetition of the future does not give the future as a repetition of the past Dissymmetry is at work within repetition itself How to think dissymmetry on the basis of Eternal return That is perhaps the most enigmatic of all)rsquo75

But why is it that unlike Nietzsche for whom it was an abyssal thought fateful revelation and existential challenge Blanchot in glossing those selfsame texts albeit partly following Klossowski attributes repeatedly to eternal return the status of law76 The term is admittedly ambiguous and could be taken to refer either to inescapable natural necessity as in the case of the law of gravity or to some more specific cultural or social norm like say the law on murder In the present context given the necessarily incontrovertible (albeit unverifiable) character of Nietzschersquos thought of return few readers if any are likely to opt for the second of these possibilities And yet momentarily at least if only as an improbable fleeting alternative Blanchotrsquos recourse to legislative language cannot do other than evoke the spectral figure of some eternally present sovereign legislator responsible for enacting and guaranteeing the

An IntErruPtIon 211

law of return True enough from Nietzschersquos perspective any such hypothesis would be fanciful at best little more than a discredited vestige of Christian theology and there is no evidence to suggest Le Pas aushydelagrave might have thought differently77 But if assigning legal status to eternal return did not necessarily subordinate it to some transcendent origin it nevertheless and for that very reason still raised the question of the nature and extent of its authority and as in the case of all laws in general notwithstanding its apparent impossibility brought attention to bear on the further question of its prospective interruption suspension or transgression

Another aspect of Blanchotrsquos reformulation of Zarathustrarsquos teaching is also relevant In the expression lsquolaw of returnrsquo what is the grammatical hierarchy between the two constituent nouns Is it a case of return being governed by law or alternatively of law being governed by return Law as return or return as law In this equivocation lies the crux of the matter and the cause of that enigmatic dissymmetry between the past as repetition of the future and the future as repetition of the past repetition of course is not self-identical It always serves at least two masters Wearing the colours of the one it creates the possibility of recognition sense and regularity dressed in the livery of the other it produces otherness difference and irregularity And what is true of repetition must also apply to the law of return In other words if there can be no law without return in that the return of the law is what provides the stability required for the validity of any statute the reverse does not necessarily hold in that it is precisely the burden of return in so far as it always already precedes the law to undermine the stability of any statute Paradoxically then or perhaps not so paradoxically since what it prescribes is not sameness but difference not itself but that which is always other than itself not regularity but irregularity the law of return is inseparable from the necessary possibility of the suspension or interruption of all law In this sense it is barely a law at all or more accurately it is a law only in so far as it is re-marked by the necessary possibility of its own fragility In returning and in fulfilling itself the law of return is required to set aside all laws including itself The law then is always at least double able to affirm itself as authority only because authority has always already been breached If the ultimate sanction of law is death Blanchot later suggests and if it follows from this that death itself is the law then it is essential to remember that the law like death is nothing


present but always already an empty caesura an ultimate power of decision paradoxically dependent on the infinite indecision of what is beyond all power More radical and more imperative than any law it seems is the interruption of all law an interruption which as Derrida puts it apropros of La Folie du jour that 1949 story reissued under its new title only months before Le Pas aushydelagrave appeared (not for the first but already the second time) is the law or counterlaw of law itself78

This rethinking of the law of return as an interruption of all law has implications that extend far beyond a reading of Nietzsche Some of these as far as Blanchot was concerned as we shall see were political This explains alongside the general growth of interest in Nietzsche at the time why the theme figure motif or problematic of eternal return came to play such an important part in Le Pas aushydelagrave which was published at least in Blanchotrsquos estimation at a particularly decisive conjuncture in French postwar history The reason is not hard to understand For it was only in so far as there remained irreducible dissymmetry between past and future that it was possible at all to envisage a politics ndash a politics that is in Blanchotrsquos formulation turned not towards the future as a self-identical repetition of the past but towards the past as a transformative repetition of the future and premised not on the pursuit of power at all costs but on the promise of that which here and now remained forever to come Implicit within the law of return therefore as Blanchot frames it is the knowledge that without repetition there can be no past but that more importantly still without repetition there could be no future And the best proof of this he suggested was to be found not in the history of the world but in that vast archive of literary texts almost invariably written in the past in the deferral of all presence and yet for that very reason always available for that futural reading or rewriting Blanchot calls prophetic And what was true of writing in general added Blanchot was doubly true of the fragmentary ndash that writing that arising from the past never belonged to any present and which by interrupting the present was only ever to be encountered in the future

In these circumstances it is not surprising that by way of an answer to Blanchotrsquos own question as to how to reconcile eternal return with the dissymmetry of timersquos flow the fragment that immediately follows (it is the first so to speak in Le Pas aushydelagrave explicitly to do

An IntErruPtIon 213

so) is given over to a consideration of the fragmentary since what is most insistently at stake under the auspices of the fragmentary in the volume is the possibility (or impossibility) of its occurrence (or recurrence) as a kind of prophetic event in thinking and writing that in repeating the past was secretly engaged in announcing the future Whence the following radically aporetical pseudo-definition of the fragmentary under which Blanchot puts it lsquowriting falls [ ] when everything has been saidrsquo79 But this was not to suggest the fragmentary should be understood negatively as a remnant of some lost or promised totality A few pages later another fragment on the fragmentary reiterated the point repeating itself twice over in the process once more reaffirming that return far from endorsing identity always already implied departure from it

uml The demand of the fragmentary not being the sign of the limit [limite] as a limitation [limitation] of ourselves or of language in relation to life or of life in relation to language nevertheless offers itself withdrawing as it does so [srsquoy deacuterobant] as a play of limits a play that is not yet in relation with any kind of limitation The demand of the fragmentary a play of limits in which no limitation is in play the fragmentary a dissociation of limit and limitation in the same way that it marks a deviation [eacutecart] from the law such that this deviation is not captured [repris] or pre-empted [compris] by the law itself understood however as deviation80

Irreducible to phenomenality and to presence a radical exigency turned to the future but which had always already taken place a sign of finitude that was also an appeal to the infinite the fragmentary just like the doctrine without doctrine of eternal return was nothing if not an intervention into the philosophical It was however much more than this and throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave Blanchot sought to demonstrate as much by developing or better not developing but deploying fragmentarily in the wake of eternal return a kind of parallel philosophical discourse dedicated to what for over a decade he had been addressing in his writing as the neuter and which like eternal return inhabited traditional conceptuality to the precise extent it exceeded it lsquo It is always possible to inquire into the neuter [Nous pouvons toujours nous interroger sur le neutre]rsquo began the longest fragment of all in Le Pas aushydelagrave reprising words


commenced then abandoned some pages earlier and repeated again fifty pages further on strategically placed at the centre of the book extending over five and a half pages and offering itself to reading in the form of a brief essay or explanatory note It went on

The neuter is attested [affirmeacute] first of all by certain grammars As far as our own tradition is concerned Greek to is perhaps the first intervention surprising in its modesty [son peu drsquoeacuteclat its lack of brilliance] that marks with a sign admittedly only one among others the decision as to a new language a language later claimed [reacuteclameacute] by philosophy but at the expense of the neuter that introduces it81

The neuter then both in and beyond language in so far as it corresponds to that which makes philosophy possible is both essential to philosophy yet irreducible to it while philosophy in turn in so far as it requires the neuter in order to exist cannot but unfold as a sequence of failed attempts to appropriate the neuter for itself If philosophy then is a series of thwarted conceptual overtures to the neuter for its part inside and outside philosophy the neuter is what by definition cannot but elude the seductive wiles of conceptuality On this simple but provocative theme Blanchot offers in what follows a series of studied variations Philosophy is of course the domain of recognisable names and verifiable concepts lsquoThe neuter in the singularrsquo he remarks

names something that escapes all naming but without making any fuss [sans faire de bruit] without even the fuss of an enigma Modestly rashly we call it the thing [la chose Blanchot deliberately uses the most unspecific noun in the language not to be confused with objet object] The thing [la chose] because things evidently enough belong to another order and because they are what is most familiar allowing us to live in an environment of things but without them being transparent Things exist in the light [sont eacuteclaireacutees] but do not let light through were they themselves to consist of particles of light which they thereby reduce to opacity The thing like the it [le il the third-person masculine or neuter pronoun] like the neuter or the outside indicates a plurality that has as its distinctive feature [trait] that it singularises itself and as defect [deacutefaut] that it appears to reside in the indeterminate82

An IntErruPtIon 215

In so far as it is a name albeit a name for the nameless the neuter cannot coincide with itself as a concept In that sense it corresponds more to a kind of imperceptible self-resistance a thing or non-thing that has always already denounced any concession it may have made to the law of naming83 The neuter is accordingly perhaps better understood (though necessarily misunderstood) as a discreetly discrete familiar-unfamiliar mark a trace that cannot present itself lsquoas suchrsquo since by definition so to speak the neuter is neither one thing nor another neither lsquothisrsquo nor lsquothatrsquo neither itself nor another Its singularity (its remarkable difficulty too) is manifested most clearly (while remaining irreducible to all manifestation) by its capacity to re-mark (ie bring to the fore and push to one side to qualify and disqualify to displace and replace) each and every word utilised in its own exposition and by implication each and every word in this or any other language by means of a pair of parenthetic or paren-thesising quotation marks that putting them simultaneously inside and outside place words at an invisible distance from themselves making them apparent as though lsquobehind a window pane [derriegravere la vitre]rsquo as Blanchot puts it only two fragments earlier84 In this respect the neuter is not a regional property that applies to certain words only but a condition that is inseparable from the differential fabric of lsquolanguage ldquoin generalrdquorsquo as Blanchot calls it using inverted commas himself in so far as it extends beyond the already vast arsenal of words in the dictionary which it supplements with an always other now past now future trace lsquo Grafted on to every word the neuter [Greffeacute sur toute parole le neutre]rsquo explains Le Pas aushydelagrave oddly refraining whether by accident or design from providing a full stop or period and drawing on Derridarsquos remarks on textual and other grafts in La Disseacutemination where they serve as proof of the always other-than-same implicated in the same as a condition of possibility but by that token a condition of impossibility too and the reason why paradoxically as in the case of eternal return lsquothe Samersquo is never the same85

Beyond philosophical discourse to which it belongs only by not belonging what the neuter also implied was that no fragment could be allocated without remainder to any single genre Any word discourse or text might be (and forcibly always already was) a quotation presented as such but thereby turned aside from itself which was also to say that underlying each and every fragment in Le Pas aushydelagrave separating it from itself surrounding it with blankness


simultaneously erasing and reinscribing it was an inaccessible silence bereft of presence So just as some passages in the volume seemed dominantly philosophical in manner so the book was also traversed by numerous fragments offering themselves to reading according to other protocols too belonging provisionally perhaps to what just as provisionally might be called literature albeit that the word is never used in Le Pas aushydelagrave where its nameless name (in a gesture of abandonment metamorphosis or redemption) is overwritten by another disobedient synonym likewise corresponding to an experience of the limitless limits of language the word eacutecriture

IV

Voice without voice

uml The voice without voice a murmur hearing it no longer he did not know if he could hear it still at times a vibration so acute he was sure of it it was the scratching of chalk [le tracement grinccedilant de la craie] on slate


There was it followed always another way of writing without otherness being determined here in opposition to the same as its would-be transgression or back-handed endorsement nor the same posited in turn as self-identical or properly coincident with itself

For any reader of Le Pas aushydelagrave this much is already clear from the second page For it was there it will be remembered without reproducing them exactly repeating them therefore not as themselves but as always already different from themselves that the book recalled those inaugural words (lsquoil ndash la merrsquo) borrowed from the opening of Thomas lrsquoObscur and which in 1973 reappeared as though once more for the first time not only within silent quotation marks but also in italics In the first instance as French publishing conventions suggest this use of italics simply reinforced the status of the foregrounded text as quotation As far as Le Pas aushydelagrave was concerned however the recourse to italicisation was no localised or easily delimitable phenomenon In the pages that followed detaching themselves from the 240 or so texts predominantly

An IntErruPtIon 217

printed in roman and written for the most part in the present tense or in the conditional mood stood a further 173 or so fragments likewise of varying extent printed in whole or in part in italics and written largely in the imperfect or the pluperfect sometimes the present and frequently comprising lengthy stretches of dialogue between two or more unidentified interlocutors

That there is difference between these two styles or manners is readily apparent The actual principle of differentiation however in so far as one exists is anything but easily identifiable Some readers it is true have been tempted by prevailing intellectual fashion or a stereotypical representation of Blanchotrsquos writing career into the belief that the first lsquoromanrsquo style adopted in Le Pas aushydelagrave equates to something called philosophy or theory while the second lsquoitalicrsquo style belongs to something more akin to literary narrative or reacutecit But no sooner is this attempt at binary categorisation formulated than its inadequacy is plain to see The opposition between philo-sophy and literature theory and fiction is not only impossible to police with authority it is manifestly one-sided having its rationale in the dominant first term within each pairing which then restricts the second to being little more than a negative mirror image of the first In this way to think of the two typographical manners exhibited by Le Pas aushydelagrave roman here italics there as corresponding in turn to the philosophical and to the literary to theory and to fiction is to seek to subordinate the writing of Le Pas aushydelagrave to the hierarchical authority of the concept and to impose upon the text whether explicitly or implicitly a totalising dialectical unity entirely at odds with the radical dispersion affirmed throughout in and by the neuter and the fragmentary

The evidence of Le Pas aushydelagrave is anything but consistent with received binary or dualistic assumptions The relation between the bookrsquos two typographical styles is complex heterogeneous and often imponderable First of all alongside the many fragments that opt throughout for either roman or italic font there are several which have variable but simultaneous recourse to both styles of presentation the effect of which is to open a pocket of the one within the fabric of the other without this change being necessarily reflected in any shift in discursive genre with the result that the apparent contrast between the two styles is often suspended not to say effaced entirely Take for instance the page-long fragment towards the beginning of the volume that starts in italics with the


words lsquo By what right by what usurped power had he intended this meeting and intending it made it inevitable or on the contrary impossiblersquo only then nine lines further on pausing only to embark on a new paragraph without the change in typeface seeming to affect either tone or content to continue in roman as follows lsquoTo speak to desire to meet he realised that playing [jouant] with these three words (and thereby introducing the missing fourth in this zero-sum game [le jeu du manque a roulette term meaning the winning number is in the lower half]) he could not produce the one sooner than or in preference to [plus tocirct ou plutocirct] the two others except if to play it first was not to give it a leading role not even that of a card sacrificed by strategyrsquo87

Second there are numerous fragments in the book of which it appears that having declared their allegiance to one presentational style they might just as well have selected the other with the result that the adoption of any particular typographic convention seems more a result of chance than any generic or discursive necessity Witness among others these two brief fragments printed some three pages apart The first given in roman states lsquo The past (void) the future [le futur the future as being] (void) in the half-light [faux jour literally false light] of the present the only episodes to be inscribed in and by the absence of the book [lrsquoabsence de livre]rsquo to which the second agreeing with the first replies now in italics as follows lsquo The void of the future [futur] there death has whatever we have to come [notre avenir ie our future] The void of the past there death has its tombrsquo88 Italics in themselves moreover though their use is widespread are still not everything and on several occasions in the book Blanchot inserts quotation or speech marks into passages printed in roman and in italics splitting each from itself and again unsettling the boundaries between the two styles What difference in status or effect might there be for instance between a fragment in dialogue form where each exchange is given in quotation marks but printed in roman such as that which begins lsquo ldquoThe always appealing secret of life is that life which holds no secrets for us and has revealed all its possibilities still remains appealingrdquorsquo and continues in similar vein through three more undecidable changes of speaker or that which comes much later and begins by asserting lsquo ldquoI reject these words with which you address me this discourse into which you seek to entice me in assuaging tones the duration of your words one after the other by which you make me linger

An IntErruPtIon 219

in the presence of an affirmation and above all this relation you create between us by the simple fact of speaking to me even in my unresponsive silencerdquorsquo89 and goes on in that fashion again in roman for more than two whole pages ndash and the many admittedly more numerous dialogues of similar length tone and purport also given in quotation marks but printed throughout in italics

This is not to say that in complicating or suspending the contrast between its two typographical manners and resisting the reduction of their relationship to the familiar binary of the philosophical and the literary Le Pas aushydelagrave aims to merge the two within some single undifferentiated continuum On the contrary the differences between the two styles are accentuated without being made any less quizzical by the obstinate presence in the texts given in roman of various philosophical points of reference from Parmenides to Nietzsche albeit more as an object of persistent questioning than a source of authority and in the passages printed in italics by the recurrent deployment of incipient narrative elements involving two or more protagonists in a room or city In addition in so far as each singular fragment retains a differentiated textual mark or re-mark (as Derrida might call it) suggesting its attachment to one or other of the volumersquos typographical series ie as roman or italics (albeit that neither series can be properly categorised other than in terms of that trait of attachment or reshytrait as French has it meaning both its repetition and its withdrawal) so by definition as Derrida argues apropos of La Folie du jour that fragment cannot wholly be part of any category with the result that the textual re-mark ndash ie whether the text is printed in roman or in italics ndash not only separates each fragment from itself but also adds itself to each fragmented fragment as an evanescent supplementary trace as empty of significance as an unclaimed anonymous signature90 All this is readily apparent to any commentator quoting from Le Pas aushydelagrave in that it would appear at one and the same time to be both absolutely indispensable yet entirely superfluous to retain the original typography for while it is true that the only accurate quotation is a faithful one it is also the case that to extract a passage from its context is to render its original typographical presentation meaningless even more so when the significance that attaches itself to the typography used in the source text as in the case of Le Pas aushydelagrave is itself largely undecidable leaving the choice of roman or italics to linger in the readerrsquos mind as an unanswerable question absent memory or empty promise


In so far as each fragment in Le Pas aushydelagrave is marked or re-marked in one way or another then and in so far as the thematic or generic significance attached to that marking is impossible to determine and in so far as the effect of the mark or re-mark by supplying each fragment with a shadowy virtual double is to detach each fragment from itself so the effect of Blanchotrsquos use of roman and italic styles quotation marks and speech marks throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave is not to order the fragments that make up the book according to binary criteria nor conversely to neutralise the differences of language tense person tone syntax or motif between each fragment but to multiply the differences that affect each singular fragment in its relationship to itself and to its companions Just as there is no privileged hierarchy between that which appears in roman or in italics and that which does not so no fragment stands alone entire unto itself but joins in a perpetual movement of referral and deferral according to which each singular fragment of writing is bound to every other yet unbound from it overwriting the totalising logic of all books as such with a proliferating population of singularities lsquotogether and separate [ensemble et seacutepareacutes]rsquo91 as Le Pas aushydelagrave puts it referring in the first instance to the enigmatic figures that cross its pages but describing too the vertiginous turn of the words that evoke them And as repetition occurs between one provisional typographical series and the other as it does and must and as one fragment calls to another or others either in the same or a different typeface in a sequence of mute antiphonic exchanges reminiscent of the requiem Mass to which Le Pas aushydelagrave alludes as it ends without ending the result is not communion but circulation without centre or beginning or end and without the first last or any other occurrence of a motif in this or that manner being ever in a position to trump any subsequent or preceding instance(s) whether in the same style or not In such circumstances as the thought of eternal return had always already intimated repetition becomes radically resistant to any logic of identity or representation and only a foolhardy reader will take Blanchotrsquos fragments printed in italics to be the fictional presentation of discursive topics given in roman or vice versa

The dispersion affecting Le Pas aushydelagrave is not solely a function of its typographical presentation It is at work in other ways too Throughout the volume readers are given to encounter numerous texts both long and short which have as one of their traits the suspension or withdrawal of any determining context other than that

An IntErruPtIon 221

of the fragmentary which serves however not to root each textual entry within its immediate context on the page but rather to affirm the boundless multiplicity of potential and virtual contexts always available to each and every given fragment While each fragment is a finite trace in other words it is by that very token also a point of unforeseeable infinite departure The challenges for reading are accordingly formidable Whole sentences hang uncertainly in the void snatches of unattributed dialogue gesture inconclusively towards scenes or situations that are at best conjectural and a plethora of unfinished incomplete or otherwise interrupted phrases grope for an elusive main clause that might allow them properly to begin or to end There is likewise a frequent paucity of finite verbs and a corresponding proliferation of enigmatic nominative clauses bereft of temporality mood transitivity or syntactic hierarchy Names too are conspicuous by their absence and seem to have been supplanted almost everywhere by a series of mysteriously undefined third-person singular or plural pronouns while elsewhere words collide qualify or disqualify each other or turn back on themselves generating numerous paradoxical formulations at the very limit of intelligibility

There is however nothing negative about this questioning of the boundaries of discourse For what is explored and articulated in Le Pas aushydelagrave is an experience of language necessarily constrained and circumscribed by the limits of words themselves but where those limits in turn are constantly shown to be fragile and porous perpetually displaced and undone by the limitlessness which unavailable in any present nonetheless inhabits them still as an unspoken memory or secret promise Words while being everything it seems are also less than everything and always give way to that which while being inseparable from words is nevertheless irreducible to them and comes to experience as the trace of an always other word arriving from the past or from the future as different from what it is or was or will be This exposure to the limitlessness inherent in the tracing of any limit already in evidence for Blanchot in the doubling of deathrsquos possibility with the impossibility of dying of la mort with le mourir to which time and again the thought of the step beyond that is not a step beyond is addressed is what explains most persuasively perhaps the strangely elliptical and abyssal idiom used in so many of Le Pas aushydelagraversquos fragmentary movements Language here is perpetually double It says what it says so to speak but


also says infinitely more or infinitely less leading writer and reader beyond determinate meaning and requiring from each what one fragment reprising and reformulating LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli describes in italics as lsquo[a] double understanding [une double entente literally a double hearing] the noise of the city with its interpretable riches and always ready to be named then the same noise like the distant ebb and flow of breaking waves [comme une rumeur drsquoeacutecume] monotonous wild and inaudible with sudden and unpredictable crashing sounds [eacuteclats] as part of the monotonyrsquo92

To hear words at least twice over now in response to what they name now in response to the neuter or fragmentary that exceeds them as an otherwise than naming this then is the no longer simple task facing both reader and writer and testifying to the exacting singularity of an unprecedented experience of language Its demands are many Take the following brief tantalising entries again in italics of which it might be said that they provisionally adopt the form of the aphorism all the better to step beyond its closure lsquo He surprised himself [se surprenait caught himself unawares] ndash a melancholy surprise ndash hoping [agrave espeacuterer] fearing [agrave craindre] at the limit of these two wordsrsquo93 one reads In so far as it is impossible to tell who or what the subject of this sentence is or since the act concerned is empty of intent intention or intentionality even whether he she or it can justifiably be described as a subject at all it is apparent that verbs such as hope or fear even as they strain towards an implicit transitive object fall short of their goal which is to name hope and fear precisely because what inspires the greatest hope or the greatest fear cannot in fact without ceasing to be what they are be reduced to being the direct object of any verb Such words as hope and fear then which are ordinary humdrum words in so far as they are inseparable from the possibility of their hyperbolic intensification always exceed the limits of what they say rather than exhausting themselves within their given meaning they testify instead to their own suspension a suspension that even as the words seem in themselves to remain unchanged articulates itself as their simultaneous erasure and reinscription Words are admittedly defined by their limits but no sooner are those limits inscribed than they are necessarily overwhelmed by that which limits and exceeds them and in that sense lies outside language even as it is nowhere to be found except inside language and vice versa This movement in turn is not only what is said or spoken by Blanchotrsquos brief fragment

An IntErruPtIon 223

it is enacted and performed by it also For Blanchotrsquos text also catches itself and its own language unawares it too leaves behind a familiarity for which it might be appropriate to harbour melancholy thoughts were it not that here it is surprise itself that is melancholy surprise itself that is disappointed and surprise itself that fails as it must to take the measure of the limitlessness to which it is possible for Le Pas aushydelagrave to respond only by deploying then suspending the forcibly limited words available to address it And it is in similar fashion now adapted to the relation without relation between words and suffering and attending to the suffering that is simultaneously within words and yet beyond them that some ninety pages later in the continuing absence of any readily identifiable subject one encounters the laconic notation lsquo Listening [eacutecoutant] not to the words but to the suffering that from word to word without end traverses the wordsrsquo94

In such cases what is spoken and what remains unspoken are no longer placed in opposition Each is a function of the other its continuation by other means lsquo Silence I know you by hearsay [par ouiuml-dire]rsquo95 quips Blanchot at one point displaying in this tongue-in-cheek double entendre a wit and humour with which his work is rarely credited Elsewhere the same thought is expounded with a greater sense of deliberation lsquo He entersrsquo one reads in italics apropos of another unidentified protagonist lsquoand speaks with the words that are already there to welcome him experiencing equal difficulty [une peine eacutegale] in speaking and saying nothingrsquo96 There is it seems no path beyond language and silence except the path of language and silence itself If words trace a circle it is a circle that inscribes a limit but which as it returns upon itself evokes the limitless and suspends all truth and untruth Le Pas aushydelagrave says it as follows again refusing to attribute to any grammatical subject this voice which as the fragment insists is already nobodyrsquos voice lsquo Crossing vast distances the only one to hear not to hear voicing a voice the voice of nobody once more ldquoListenrdquo ndash ldquoListenrdquo In the silence something spoke something remained quiet Truth sends no news [ne donne pas de nouvelles]rsquo97

From this it follows too that in its dealings with the limits of language writing in Le Pas aushydelagrave eschews that circular anthropocentric logic of socio-sexual transgression much canvassed during the period immediately preceding its publication in the wake of a certain reading of Bataille as the defining telos of literature


For transgression argues Le Pas aushydelagrave is at best a deferred endorse-ment of the sacrosanct status of the law such that to transgress a law often amounts to little more than replacing it with another more powerful law and so on repeatedly ad infinitum lsquo The hope of transgressing the lawrsquo explains a fragment in italics lsquowas bound to the disappointment [deacuteception] which in this very movement of transgression led him to posit an equal law albeit one endowed with greater power which it was then necessary to transgress once more [agrave nouveau] without hope of achieving this except by positing once more [agrave nouveau] an ever greater law which made this infinite passage from the law to its transgression and from this transgression to another kind of law [une loi autre] the only infringement that might sustain the eternity of his desirersquo98 lsquo Transcendence transgression names too close to one another not to make us suspiciousrsquo comments another fragment some four pages further on this time in roman and asks rhetorically lsquoIs transgression not simply a less compromising way of naming ldquotranscendencerdquo by appearing to separate it from its theological meaningrsquo99 Transgression here is like a kind of melancholy negativity The law however like the law of return as Le Pas aushydelagrave knows is not so easily eluded And it reserves many surprises of its own For driving the hope of transgression suggests Blanchotrsquos fragment is not the virile aggression of sovereign will to power but rather disappointment disappointment that is at what transgression is able or better unable to achieve which in turn points to a failure on the part of the law itself premised on its precarious fragility from which it follows according to Le Pas aushydelagrave that were it not for the gift of grace no law would ever deserve respect Across several pages now in italics now in roman Le Pas aushydelagrave pursues the paradox as follows

The law reveals itself for what it is less the commandment that has death as its sanction but death itself wearing the face of law the death which desire (against the law) far from turning aside adopts as its ultimate aim [ultime viseacutee] desiring to the point of dying [deacutesirant jusqursquoagrave mourir] in order that death be it the death of desire remains the desired death the one that sustains desire just as desire crosses [transit] through death The law kills Death is always the horizon of the law if you do this you will die It kills whoever does not observe it and to observe it is also already to die to die to all possibility but as its observance mdash if

An IntErruPtIon 225

law is the Law mdash is nevertheless impossible and in any case always uncertain always incomplete death remains the only term [eacutecheacuteance a falling due by necessity and by chance] that only the love of death can turn aside for whoever loves death renders the law vain by making it lovable Such one may say is the detour of grace100

lsquoThe law says ldquoin spite of yourdquorsquo the fragment continues lsquoa familiarity of address [tutoiement] which points to nobody Grace says ldquowithout you [sans toi] without you being of any account and as though in your absencerdquo but this familiar address which seems only to designate the lack of anybody restores the intimacy and singularity of the relationrsquo lsquoChance [chance]rsquo it adds lsquoallies these two traitsrsquo101 If it is true then as another fragment has it some pages further on that lsquoto write is to seek out chance and chance is a seeking out of writingrsquo102 it is as though writing even as it falls subject to the law and to death also intervenes as an interruption of death and the law an interruption that far from corresponding to any dialectic of transgression is in the form of a law of interruption of which chance in that like eternal return it reconciles the necessary and the aleatory is but one always provisional name

But if the exposure to language called writing is an encounter with chance what of whoever is given to assume the task of writing Another fragment in dialogue form printed in roman enlisting Luther in support supplies if not an answer at least a further unfolding of the question lsquo ldquoWhy write that [avoir eacutecrit cela this act of writing if it is an act occurs in the past tense]rdquo ndash ldquoI could not do otherwise [je nrsquoai pu faire autrement]rdquo ndash ldquoWhy does this necessity of writing give rise to nothing that does not appear superfluous vain and always excessive [de trop]rdquo ndash ldquoThe necessity was already excessive in the constraint of lsquoI could not do otherwisersquo there is the even more constraining sense that the constraint does not contain its own justificationrdquorsquo103 In responding to chance then writing is little short of radical illegitimacy with even the principle of illegitimacy proving illegitimate in justifying the experience of writing lsquoldquoExperiencerdquorsquo Derrida famously wrote in De la grammatologie lsquohas always referred to a relation with some kind of presence whether that relation was in the form of consciousness or notrsquo104 and this setting aside of the word notwithstanding its significance for much of LrsquoEntretien infini explains its virtual absence from the


lexicon of Le Pas aushydelagrave where it is largely displaced or overwritten by such like-sounding terms as exigence extreacutemiteacute or exteacuterioriteacute This does not mean the term experience is nowhere to be found in Le Pas aushydelagrave It is however used on three occasions only each time so to speak under erasure as when one reads apropos of the fragmentary that lsquothere is no experience of it in the sense that one does not receive experience of it in any present form that experience if it were to take place would remain without a subject and exclude all present and all presence just as it would be excluded by them in turnrsquo105 ndash a formulation that would seem to suggest that it might or ought to be possible as Derrida suggested in 1967 to prise the word experience from its reliance on the present and on presence in which case it might be argued Le Pas aushydelagrave is concerned with little else than experience experience not however as experience of the world as such but of the words that in radically epochal manner are constitutive and excessive of all world It is no surprise then that various kinds of what otherwise might be called experience not far removed from what featured in the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit as moods or Stimmungen play a significant role in the compositional structure of Le Pas aushydelagrave where much space is given over to a lengthy meditation spread across multiple texts migrating back and forth between roman and italics and addressing what for want of a more adequate term might be called the motif of fear la peur

Like much else in Le Pas aushydelagrave fear is portrayed in the first instance less as a feature of Daseinrsquos responsiveness to the world than as an experience of language of words and of what lies behind between beneath or beyond qualifying disqualifying prolonging or exceeding them lsquoJrsquoai peurrsquo literally lsquoI have fearrsquo says French idiom and for Le Pas aushydelagrave the expression is a sign that fear is not an emotion attributable to the subjectivity or selfhood of whoever experiences it but is a case of dispossession (or better linguistic possession) of whoever is afraid with language using the first person to speak this fear even as it remains calmly detached as are all words from what it names lsquouml ldquoI am afraid [Jrsquoai peur]rdquo this is what he had occasion to hear him say barely had he crossed the threshold and what was frightening was the calm language [la parole calme] that seemed to make use of ldquomerdquo only in order for itself to be afraidrsquo106 lsquouml Calm language bearing fearrsquo107 rejoins another fragment two pages further on underlining beyond their apparent dissymmetry the inextricable bond between the pacirctir

An IntErruPtIon 227

(the passivity responsiveness and suffering) of words and the fear they provoke and sustain The predicament is not limited to any singular fragment voice or individual but extends across the gulf between them to which it gives abyssal definition ndash as an abyss Another fragment fifty pages later again in italics and without specifying whether the personal or impersonal pronouns it uses refer to words fragments or individuals reports lsquo Between them fear fear shared in common and through fear the abyss of fear over which they meet without being able to do so [sans le pouvoir] dying each one alone of fearrsquo108 lsquo They did not say ldquoI am afraid [jrsquoai peur]rdquorsquo a slightly later fragment explains lsquobut fear [la peur] Fear immediately afterwards began to fill [emplissait] the universersquo109

As Le Pas aushydelagrave proceeds these initial presentiments of fear quickly give way to an urgent flurry of fragmentary notations multiplying the implications Fear it seems this grounding disposition is less fundament than absence ndash and an absence of all fundament lsquouml He [Il an unspecified pronoun] bears fear fear does not belong to him fear unable to be transported without anyone to experience it denied [destitueacutee] to all fear the lack of fearrsquo110 proffers another fragment confirming that between fear and the lack of fear is no contradiction but the same plunging abyss ndash a trace of oblivion (lsquoFear as if he could remember the word which makes him forget everythingrsquo) a potential gift (lsquothe gift they would make us in the posthumous city the possibility of being afraid for them the fear given in the word fear fear not experiencedrsquo) and both the one and the other in so far as each is a response to the intractable strangeness of death and dying lsquoFear the fear that does not have death as its limit even the infinite death of others [autrui] and yet I am afraid for others who are afraid of dying who will die without me in the distance from this self which in vain might be said to take the place of their ownrsquo111 Fear then is boundless and mourning impossible Such too is the verdict of another entry this time printed in roman which struggles in even more convoluted fashion to articulate the double exigency of a fear of death that is without term and a fear for the otherrsquos death which is likewise premised on impossibility lsquo Fear we call it mortalrsquo it writes lsquowhereas in fact it conceals from us the death towards which it draws us but the fear that exceeds the self [le moi] in which it takes refuge even though the self is absent from whoever bears fear as it is from the language that expresses it turning us into foreigners to


ourselves this is always fear for someone [quelqursquoun] who does not allow anyone to approach them whom death has already turned away from our assistance which is nevertheless called upon and expectedrsquo112

Fear in other words can be neither limited nor contained and soon spreads to language in its entirety Another enigmatically anonymous exchange returning to the dissymmetry between the calm of words and the fear they express makes this clear lsquo ldquoItrsquos true I am afraid [jrsquoai peur]rdquo ndash ldquoYou say this so calmlyrdquo ndash ldquoSaying it however does not alleviate the fear on the contrary it is the word fear henceforth that makes me afraid having said it no longer allows me to say anything elserdquo ndash ldquoBut lsquoI am afraidrsquo too on the basis of this word [agrave partir de ce mot] which is so calm as nobody as though nobody were afraidrdquo ndash ldquoFrom now on it is the whole of language that is afraidrdquorsquo113 Immediately after however another fragment now in roman interjects as follows lsquoThis fear of languagersquo it says

it was incumbent upon him not to see in it anything other than the always available possibility that any word whatsoever belonging to that series of words which exist as such only by dint of belonging to language might turn back upon language to set itself apart and stand above it thereby taking control over it perhaps shattering it at the very least claiming to assign it a limit Fear does not mean that language might be thought to be afraid even metaphorically but fear is a piece [morceau] of language something that language might have lost and which would make it entirely dependent on this dead portion [cette part morte] entirely that is precisely by reconstituting itself without unity piece by piece as something other than a set of meanings Admittedly metaphor intervenes in the end to keep the possibility in suspense albeit by making it inoffensive that language might be something other than a process of meaning By metaphor the fear of language becomes the fear of speaking or the fear which being the essence of all speech would make all use of speech frightening just like any silence The fear of language the fear that strikes language when language loses a word which is then a surplus word a word too many fear God madness Alternatively the lsquoitrsquo [le lsquoilrsquo] displaced from its rank and role as subject114

An IntErruPtIon 229

If fear like God or like madness suggests Blanchot is the trace of an encounter with the uncertainty and danger of the limit where transcendence and exclusion meet the question arises as to the relation between that limit and the word that gestures beyond it How is it possible for one word among others to profit from exceptional ie sovereign or abject status The reason is from the perspective of Le Pas aushydelagrave that transcendence and immanence are likewise precarious fragile and impossible no word can step beyond all others but equally no word ever coincides wholly with itself The borders of language are not easy to trace and even less capable of being controlled or policed Each word is simultaneously too much and too little and what exists at the limit is both a proliferation and a vacancy

The paradox is one that Blanchot addresses elsewhere as arising from the structure of the neuter as a trace that countersigns in every trace the inalienable yet ghostly possibility of the perpetually other word of the perpetual otherness of each word and the perpetual insistence of that which in language and writing escapes all words Words do not name with certainty authority or identity What they do however as time and again they return is to repeat themselves as always different from what they were or are or will be And this is the conclusion without hope of conclusion to which the reader is led by Le Pas aushydelagraversquos intermittent trail of fragments on the intermittence of fear as repetition interruption and questioning lsquo And we do nothing but repeatrsquo we are told lsquoNocturnal repetition the repetition of whoever says is that what dying is what fear isrsquo Or two pages further on lsquo Is that what dying is what fear is Silent dread and the silence like a wordless cry [cri sans mots] mute and yet endlessly crying [criant sans fin]rsquo115 Fear then not coinciding with itself being without term or object corresponds to nothing present It belongs rather to time without time and has always already withdrawn into a distant unavailable and irretrievable past what towards both its beginning and its ending so to speak Le Pas aushydelagrave calls ancient fear lsquola peur anciennersquo intervening here to bear witness not to the plenitude of experience but more incisively and more insistently to an interruption of thought that following a seemingly endless hypothetical detour takes thinking to its limits where it is both constituted and deconstituted as such lsquo If it were enough for him to be fragile patient and passiversquo we read lsquoif fear (fear that nothing provokes) the ancient fear that rules over the city driving


human figures before it and which passes through him like the past of his fear this fear he does not experience if this were enough to make him more fragile still far beyond the awareness of fragility in which always he dallies but just as the sentence interrupting itself gives him only the interruption of a sentence that does not reach an end so fragile patience within the horizon of the fear that besets it speaks only of a recourse to fragility even when it startles thought making it fragile and unthinking [inconsideacutereacutee]rsquo116

The interruption of thought and the thought of interruption there is no better way perhaps of describing the intermittent narrative that often barely perceptible as such winds its way through Le Pas aushydelagrave emerging from time to time only as a tenuous evanescent and always already deferred promise of continuity Much of that fragmentary story or absence of story hinges on the bookrsquos numerous brief exchanges of dialogue between unspecified and anonymous interlocutors Dialogue of course is a theatrical novelistic and literary as well as philosophical manner and much of the intrigue of Blanchotrsquos writing for different voices comes from this impossibility of assigning it any single generic function And even though the dramatic mode and the literary convention adopted in these dialogues seem to locate them in some present tense or present moment of proximity and intimacy the effect in Le Pas aushydelagrave is exactly the reverse The living present of direct speech is suspended and interrupted not only by the distancing force of such devices as quotation marks or italics but also by the abyssal turn of many of Blanchotrsquos snatches of dialogue which referring to themselves necessarily defer their occurrence as though behind a glass with the effect as Blanchot puts it elsewhere not of curtailing the context of what was said but extending it beyond itself Witness the following detached moment taken from the early part of the book

uml lsquoYou will returnrsquo ndash lsquoI will returnrsquo ndash lsquoYou will not returnrsquo ndash lsquoWhen you speak like that I understand what it means I am here by way of return I am therefore not here and I gather that it may be said to have been long ago in a time so ancient that there has never been any present to correspond to it that you were herersquo ndash lsquoBut I am here you can see thatrsquo ndash lsquoYesrsquo he said gravely lsquoI am here so long as I forget it once remembering it once forgetting it and all the same allowing memory forgetfulness to open to close without anyone to remember or to forgetrsquo117

An IntErruPtIon 231

In exchanges such as these without it being possible to say with confidence whether they are anecdotal or essential fictional or non-fictional literary or philosophical dialogue and narrative are doubly exposed implicitly and explicitly to the law of return to which they owe their possibility As a result though they are written in the future the present the future perfect and the present perfect Blanchotrsquos words turn aside from the comforting lure of the living present putting it at a distance from itself and emptying it from within lsquoThere is no Present [il nrsquoest pas de Preacutesent] no ndash a present does not existrsquo118 Mallarmeacute famously put it referring to his own experience of the temporality of writing Le Pas aushydelagrave offers similar testimony Each time singular each time different Blanchotrsquos words carry reading far beyond the closure identity or self-presence of this or any other book Even as it interrupts or suspends the present then writing persists like a promise always coming never arriving always reaching beyond itself never taking up residence as that which is true or untrue

Which is also to say that Blanchotrsquos writing carries reading in another direction too implicit within the experience of language writing and narrative explored throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave towards an engagement with the outside in other words with politics For it is well known that during the time without time in which Le Pas aushydelagrave was being written nothing impinged more urgently on Blanchotrsquos concerns as a writer impossible to divorce from the demands made on thinking by a certain epocheacute than the demands made on thought by a certain socio-historical epoch

V

A politics of the fragmentary

uml In distress both the narrow procession [deacutefileacute] of their fragile common fall dead dying [mort mourant] side by side


Among the several tenuous and elliptical narrative threads crossing the pages of Le Pas aushydelagrave runs one sequence set in an unidentified city that on the evidence of its riverside second-hand bookstalls is


nevertheless easily recognisable as Paris lsquo It was like a perpetual subject of amusement [comme un eacuteternel sujet de plaisanterie] an innocent gamersquo begins one fragmentary exchange conducted in italics and goes on

lsquoDid you meet them in the streetrsquo mdash lsquoNot exactly in the street by the river [pregraves du fleuve] looking at the books [regardant les livres] then leaving or disappearing into the crowdrsquo mdash lsquoObviously enough and mostly young [jeunes] too I expectrsquo mdash lsquoYoungrsquo He was forced to pause on the word which went too far demanded or promised too much he did not concede it willingly until he allowed himself to reply lsquoYes young no other word will do but young without anything to turn their age into a moment of themselves or their youth into a characteristic of age young yet as though belonging to some other time therefore not so young as though youth made them very old [tregraves anciens] or too new [trop nouveaux] to be able to appear only to be youngrsquo mdash lsquoHow closely you observed them when did you have the time was it possible is it possiblersquo mdash lsquoIt wasnrsquot admittedly but nor was it possible to meet themrsquo120

The reference to Paris contained in these words was not simply geographical It was political too For in the minds of Blanchot and his readers Paris in the early 1970s was inseparable from the still vivid memory of the eacuteveacutenements of May 1968 which a mere five years before Le Pas aushydelagrave was published had seen the near collapse of the Gaullist Fifth republic and the emergence or re-emergence of a new or different kind of politics beyond the authority of the State and beyond the control of traditional political parties which found most potent expression in the ten million or so young people of different ages male and female alike workers students and others who for several weeks took possession of the cityrsquos factories and faculties and most symbolically of all its streets lsquobrightly lit animated and not servile [non serviles]rsquo as Blanchotrsquos fragment went on to describe them immediately after121 lsquoSince Mayrsquo the writer put it in a handbill dated 17 July protesting against what he claimed to be the illegal banning of eleven far-left organisations by Presidential decree the previous month but ignoring the more recent legislative elections which had resulted in a landslide victory for the right-wing Gaullist UDr lsquothe street [la rue] has reawoken it

An IntErruPtIon 233

speaks [elle parle] The transformation is a decisive one The street has become alive powerful sovereign [souveraine] again the place of all possible freedomsrsquo122 In that it belonged like the fragmentary to the radicalism of the outside youth according to Blanchotrsquos unidentified interlocutors in Le Pas aushydelagrave was not a symptom of irresponsible and immature extremism (Le Gauchisme maladie infantile du communisme [LeftshyWing Communism an Infantile Disorder] charged the ideologues of the French Communist Party at the time opportunistically recycling Leninrsquos famous 1920 polemic against the British ILP the German Spartacus League and other leftist opponents of the Bolsheviks) It was more like an affirmative absolute detached from all ontology and teleology and demanding to be read under erasure outside of time so to speak as proof of an aboriginal principle of unyielding disobedience to all constituted authority

It is of course now widely known that during the May eacuteveacutenements Blanchot played a fiercely uncompromising if forcibly modest role in his capacity as a member of the Comiteacute drsquoaction eacutetudiants-eacutecrivains on whose behalf he penned anonymously a series of collective declarations interventions and other fragmentary texts subsequently brought together in the broadsheet Comiteacute in October 1968 In one of those texts bearing the abyssal title lsquoTracts affiches bulletin [Handbills Posters Bulletin]rsquo Blanchot insisted that

[i]n May [en Mai] there is no book about May [sur Mai] not for lack of time or for the need lsquoto actrsquo but because of a more decisive obstacle writing is happening elsewhere [cela srsquoeacutecrit ailleurs] in a world without publishing dissemination is taking place [cela se diffuse] in confrontation with the police and in a certain manner with their help violence against violence [violence contre violence] This suspension [arrecirct] of the book is also a suspension [arrecirct] of history which far from returning us to a time prior to culture indicates a point far beyond culture and it is this most of all that provokes authority power the law May this bulletin prolong this suspension [arrecirct] even as it prevents it from being suspended [srsquoarrecircter] No more books [Plus de livre] no more books ever again [plus jamais de livre] as long as we remain in relation with the upheaval of the break [lrsquoeacutebranlement de la rupture]123


To write a book about May then as countless protagonists or observers of the eacuteveacutenements were later to do each competing with the other to provide an authoritative historical account of what had really occurred124 ndash this according to Blanchot was entirely to miss the point to overlook or purposely obscure the status of those events precisely as events whose singularity lay in the extent that they interrupted the predictable course of history and exceeded the totalising logic or logos embodied in the discursive order of the book this lsquoa priori of all knowledgersquo as Blanchot described it dominated by lsquothe continuity of a presence in which present past future are maintained in actuality [srsquoactualisent]rsquo125 The only response capable of meeting the challenge of the May events and reaffirming their contestatory force countered Blanchot was by way of a mode of writing that was avowedly fragmentary whose own status as an interruption of authority might alone take the measure of the always impending and radically ineliminable vacancy of power that for Blanchot was essential for the maintenance and survival of politics at all

As far as Blanchot was concerned May 1968 was not the first time that the demand of the political revealed itself in this fashion as a kind of epochal suspension or putting into parentheses of normative politics The political came into its own in other words only when the constitutional legitimacy of the State was put in question Like many of his contemporaries Blanchot had of course witnessed several such critical moments in postwar French history In the wake of the Liberation for instance as control passed from the collaborationist Vichy State which despite its illegitimacy was nevertheless considered by some to be Francersquos sole legal authority and in one fell swoop power was transferred to the hitherto clandestine resistance movement whose legitimacy conversely was in inverse proportion to its actual legality it was patent that legitimacy and legality were anything but synonymous and that a regime that professed to embody the latter should not necessarily be considered as having its basis in the former in the same way that a movement excluded from the second might nevertheless claim to enjoy the authority that derived from the first Between the one and the other there was therefore a gap a hiatus or a discontinuity liable to provoke numerous unexpected and often bitterly contested ironies of history as Paulhan among others in the period following the Liberation was quick to point out126

An IntErruPtIon 235

In subsequent decades too Blanchotrsquos thinking of the political continued to be informed by this awareness of the radical incommensurability between constitutive legitimacy and constituted legality the corollary of which if there was to be a politics at all was that it was urgent always to defend the former against the abuses perpetrated authorised and justified in the name of the latter The principle was implicit in all Blanchotrsquos political choices during those years It motivated for instance his mordant reaction to de Gaullersquos return to power in May 1958 supported by the right-wing military hostile to Algerian independence in what numerous critics on the left fearing the imposition of a proto-Fascist Franco-style dictatorship denounced as an unconstitutional coup drsquoeacutetat and which in Blanchotrsquos eyes in the words of a famous article in Le 14 Juillet a year later marked an lsquoessential perversionrsquo of the political process The formula took no account of the relative stability produced by the new regime The key argument according to Blanchot irrespective of all pragmatic considerations and no matter whether what was offered by the new administration was preferable or not to the available alternatives was that de Gaullersquos intervention in 1958 henceforth placed at the core of politics not a constitutive vacancy ie an interval interruption or absence which exceeding all constituted authority might alone be a source of constitutive legitimacy and thereby underwrite the possibility of a regime based on freedom equality and democracy but a pleromatic pseudo-sacred or idolatrous presence that of de Gaulle himself as providential saviour Here Blanchot drew the line lsquoProvidential [Providentiel]rsquo he argued lsquomeans designated by some kind of providence and affirming itself as providence The power with which a man of providence [un homme providentiel] is invested is no longer political power it is the power of salvation [une puissance de salut] Its presence as such is salutary effective by virtue of what it is and not what it will dorsquo127

lsquoThe crucial thingrsquo Blanchot went on lsquois this transformation of political power [pouvoir politique] into a power of salvation [une puissance de salut] Destiny is now in power not a historically remarkable man but some indeterminate power [quelque puissance] that is above his person the force of the highest values the sovereignty not of a sovereign person but of sovereignty itself in so far as it is identified with the collective possibilities of a destiny [les possibiliteacutes rassembleacutees drsquoun destin] What destiny For once


the answer is not hard to find it is the august affirmation beyond all historical accidents of a nation as destinyrsquo128 For many of Blanchotrsquos contemporaries including the nearly 82 of voters who chose to endorse de Gaullersquos new constitution in the September 1958 referendum it was of course precisely the man of destiny of June 1940 that they wished to find resurrected in the leader of May 1958 lsquoHistoryrsquo however Blanchot insisted lsquodoes not repeat itselfrsquo129 and more revealing in the writerrsquos view than any apparent similarity between these two dates and the historical political or constitutional crises they named was their profound difference emphasised a contrario so to speak by the appearance of Blanchotrsquos article in the third and final issue of Le 14 Juillet symbolically dated 18 June 1959 exactly nineteen years after de Gaullersquos famous broadcast on the BBC from London Whereas in 1940 modestly and almost impersonally de Gaulle had embodied the void that France in defeat had become offering the prospect of hope to the beleaguered nation so in 1958 according to Blanchot he did the opposite obfuscating the void thereby effecting an end to politics in order to do service instead as the mythic frontman for a far more sinister political turn in which pseudo-religious mystification went hand in hand with authoritarian repression political gangsterism and an increasingly centralised technocratic form of neocapitalist exploitation

As Blanchot took care to remind his readers however shortly after May 1968 and only two years before Le Pas aushydelagrave by including in LrsquoAmitieacute in 1971 an updated version of an intervention first published in the wake of the 1958 referendum there was an alternative130 Its watchword uncompromising and unyielding was refusal le refus lsquoAt a certain momentrsquo Blanchot wrote lsquofaced with public events we know that we must refuse [que nous devons refuser]rsquo lsquorefusalrsquo he went on lsquois absolute categorical It does not negotiate [ne discute pas] nor give its reasons [ni ne fait entendre ses raisons] This is why [Crsquoest en quoi] it is silent and solitary even when it is affirmed as it must [comme il le faut] in the full light of day [au grand jour]rsquo131 refusal for Blanchot then marked a limit But in the name of what overriding principles it might be asked what values what beliefs This is a question Blanchot pointedly does not answer ndash not because refusal was primarily an aesthetic gesture blind to the exigencies of political action nor because it had its origins in an anarchistic denunciation of all political power

An IntErruPtIon 237

in general nor because it corresponded to a purely oppositional rejection of the status quo as critics of Blanchotrsquos politics have sometimes charged Far more importantly it was because the possibility of refusal necessarily preceded any political decisions measures or statements it might be thought judicious to affirm For any constituted legal power to retain legitimacy according to Blanchot it was essential that it always remain possible to challenge defy or repudiate the law The legality of any political system in other words could only ever be provisional and if an administration were to command assent it followed that at a given point in certain circumstances all assent could and should be withdrawn and that without the constitutive necessity of this refusal or interruption of power politics would merely be another word for tyranny

refusal then was anything but a negative self-indulgent voluntaristic gesture As Blanchot was to insist in his defence of the campaign against the Algerian war a few years later it did not appeal to any prior moral or ethical duty enshrining a set of unimpeachable principles on which it could do no other than remain dependent More radically than this refusal was already in itself an affirmative inalienable and sovereign right reliant on nothing other than the interruption it performed and effected Possessing no power or property of its own it corresponded to a constitutive decision in the form of an impersonal interval caesura or legislative void on which all else turned132 In this sense refusal was not bound by any oppositional or confrontational dialectic and had no illusions about overcoming its adversary by superior force In fact it was largely the reverse Compared to the resources of State or police power refusal was modest weak and often mute Disobedience was its most potent resource and its greatest weapons the inviolate innocence of words or the dogged obstinacy of silence133 Paradoxically however as Antelme had come to realise in Buchenwald Gandersheim and Dachau with a radicality Blanchot quickly made his own this was why refusal could not be defeated no matter what repressive violence might be deployed against it Its strength in other words lay precisely in its weakness lsquoWhen we refusersquo Blanchot commented lsquowe refuse with a movement that is without contempt without exaltation and anonymous as far as possible for the power to refuse does not become effective [ne srsquoaccomplit pas] because it starts with us [agrave partir de nousshymecircmes] nor does it do so in our name alone but does so on the basis of a


very poor beginning [agrave partir drsquoun commencement tregraves pauvre] that belongs first of all to those who are unable to speak [ne peuvent pas parler ie are prevented from speaking]rsquo134

That refusal began not in plenitude but in penury and belonged to a time or space that while being political through and through was also not yet political in any normative sense explains why it became so important for Blanchot in 1958 to reject de Gaullersquos new constitution For it was a characteristic of some events he argued referring on the one hand to the Nazi Occupation and on the other to the much more recent putsch drsquoAlger of 13 May (when a cabal of French military leaders in Algiers sought to take power illegally in an attempt to preserve French colonial rule) that they did not need to be refused since they were in any case already part of a wider historical struggle and in that sense already refused themselves Their illegitimacy in other words was already flagrant and required no reflection no act of deliberation no decision on the part of those who found themselves implicated as citizens combatants witnesses or mere bystanders Quite different however were the steps taken by Peacutetain in July 1940 and by de Gaulle in May 1958 not only to help put an illegal non-constitutional end to a legal constitutional administration but also more disturbingly to lend that operation retrospective legitimacy by installing a regime claiming to embody and speak for the national interest closely identified with their own person Faced with these developments which required at least tacit endorsement by the population at large it was all the more essential in Blanchotrsquos eyes to refuse all complicity since this alone provided the basis for effective resistance135

As his response to these various crises testifies politics for Blanchot were not defined in the first instance in terms of economic interests nor with reference to overriding moral or ethical principles nor according to pragmatic criteria of success or failure efficiency or expediency The more fundamental and more urgent political question encountered by Blanchot as a writer (and radically inseparable from his writing) was the question of law of legitimacy and sovereignty or more accurately of legitimacy and sovereignty themselves as abyssal questions that is to say the fundamental question as to what preceded the law and exceeding it constituted and authorised it as such136 In this regard as Etienne Balibar argues there was nothing casual or inconsidered about Blanchotrsquos approach to politics It was a cogent exemplar of that influential

An IntErruPtIon 239

current of antinomian political thought that asserts among others that it is right and just to call the legal system to account in the name of a more demanding compelling original and always prior counterlaw137 This is precisely what Blanchot and his friends maintained in 1958 and it was the position they reiterated two years later in their best-known act of refusal the lsquoDeacuteclaration sur le droit agrave lrsquoinsoumission dans la guerre drsquoAlgeacuteriersquo which rather than urging French conscripts to defy the draft as some sympathisers had wanted chose instead with arguably more radical consequences to affirm not their duty but their absolute right to disobey desert or otherwise resist their subordination to abusive military authority refusal here was not just one political gesture among others It was an absolute last resort that as such was constitutive of politics in general As Blanchot explained in a clarification addressed at the time to the journalist Michel Cournot

At each decisive moment in the history of humanity a small group of people sometimes very numerous have always done what was necessary to safeguard the right to refuse lsquoWe cannotrsquo lsquoHere I stand I cannot do otherwisersquo this is the fundamental recourse regarding that right we must all remain vigilant vigilant that it should not be used loosely vigilant that reaffirmed and maintained it should remain what it is the ultimate recourse as the power to say no [comme pouvoir de dire non]138

It was therefore not simply that in given circumstances civil disobedience might be considered legitimate It was that all respect for the law depended on the necessary possibility of refusal All assent as well as dissent was governed by it lsquoThe gesture of insubordinationrsquo writes Balibar lsquois a return to that initial moment which conditions the very possibility of obedience as free consent There is a fundamental dis-obedience [deacutesshyobeacuteissance] that precedes and makes possible at one and the same time both the submission to authority law and instituted power in so far as it is the action of free men (in the words of the Declaration) and insubordination when it is warranted by the decay or disqualification of the authorities and the perversion of lawrsquo139

That there was inescapable dissymmetry between that which might be deemed properly legitimate and that which was merely legal between the sovereignty embodied in refusal on the one hand


and the tawdry opportunistic not to say corrupt reality of the status quo on the other ndash this for Blanchot as we have seen was nothing new The consequences were not however limited to political debate in France during the postwar period Already in the 1930s it was a regular part of the daily experience of whoever like Blanchot was drawn into the political sphere as journalist commentator or analyst For during that whole troubled decade a proliferating number of diverse political formations belonging to right or left competed with each other often violently and not always successfully in identifying and promoting a more compelling more authentic and more properly sovereign figure of political legitimacy Sometimes in earnest sometimes with calculating cynicism the aim was to refound and reground the political order not by fashioning a new belief in legality but by binding political legitimacy to this or that new figure of sovereign authority For who or what ndash nation party ideology or class ndash was the true agent of politics One after the other Blanchotrsquos contemporaries each made a choice putting their faith now in the consensuality and compromises of parliamentary democracy now in the revolutionary mission of the industrial proletariat under the leadership of the Third International now in the mystified nationalism and racial purity of the Volk gathered under the tutelage of a charismatic leader The variations were of course endless and the differences often huge But what these discourses all had in common in the face of the crisis in legitimacy increasingly inseparable from politics in general was the search for some founding myth that in times of economic and social crisis would dictate political action and might be invoked to justify it

The verbal energy and polemical zeal with which throughout the 1930s and in a variety of different publications Blanchot the political journalist returned to this issue of political legitimacy are remarkable But what is also clear is that during that whole turbulent period none of the so-called solutions mentioned above ever seems to have held much appeal for the writer Vigorously rejecting parliamentary democracy communism fascism and much else besides he turned instead to the only figure of sovereignty remaining still separated from itself however still absent and still mired in abject humiliation but which he fervently hoped might be restored to past greatness reawakened to immediacy and returned to commanding presence not unlike a sublime work of art the nation of France itself For the moment that possibility belonged however to the future as

An IntErruPtIon 241

the title of an article from November 1937 had it lsquoFrance nation agrave venir [France A Nation of the Future]rsquo140 In the meantime as Blanchot had put it in an impassioned article for La Revue franccedilaise four years earlier addressing his remarks at the time to a piece by robert Garric an older more staid representative of Catholic social thinking and having recourse to a formulation to which he would return a quarter of a century later albeit with an essential difference it was urgent to refuse without shrinking from the violence this might entail lsquorefusal brooks no conditionsrsquo he wrote lsquosave that of never recantingrsquo He then went on however to describe refusal not as a pure impersonal or anonymous caesura disjoining and enjoining a vacant space of interruption and impossibility as he would in 1958 but rather as the vehicle for a vaguely defined but unmistakeably theological spiritualistic even aesthetic conception of the human person lsquorebuffing the negations that come with consent and the constraints that come with acceptancersquo he wrote lsquorejecting what nullifies him including even a part of himself the rebellious spirit [lrsquoesprit rebelle] searches obstinately amidst these defeats and deaths for something that is proper to him [qui lui soit propre] and expresses him fully [et qui lrsquoexprime] [ ] His act of refusal casts aside everything that is not his own person [tout ce qui nrsquoest pas sa personne] and manifests him as a personal existence [comme une existence personnelle] the realisation of which is the final object and safeguard of refusal itselfrsquo141

Blanchotrsquos conclusion is revealing It clearly shows the point he had reached in his political thinking in the decisive year of 1933 By the same token it was indicative of the regressive assumptions the internal resistances and unthought obstacles that conditioned his thinking at the time For the Blanchot of 1933 unlike the writer of 1958 it was not refusal that was sovereign but in its stead an image ndash some would call it a myth or fantasy ndash of spiritual subjective transcendence doing service as a principle of political sovereignty to which the act of refusal itself was manifestly subordinate In this of course Blanchot showed himself to be a product of his times But as the decade wore on and as the lsquoanxious days of Munichrsquo (as LrsquoArrecirct de mort called them142) would later prove it became increasingly clear to all concerned that no transcendent self-identical political subject it whatever guise it might appear could arrest the onward rush towards catastrophe The sovereign figure of the people that the youthful Blanchot had sought ndash angrily challenging the


incompetence of its leaders resolutely defying the law on grounds of its paradoxical illegitimacy radically preferring direct involvement in politics to the alienating and manipulative representational principle of parliamentary democracy and the repressive authoritarianism of conventional political parties ndash became ever more unfindable leaving the writer with little option in his attacks on the status quo than to resort to a series of sporadic violently polemical rhetorical gestures (many of which he would no doubt regret in later years) and promote in the words of a subsequently notorious article of December 1937 the vain figure of the countercommunist counternationalist dissident who no longer believing in right or left and challenging the presuppositions of both had the forlorn ambition of reinventing the rules of the political game even as he continued in point of fact to bear witness to its essential failure143

Some twenty years later as the call for Algerian independence became ever more pressing and constitutional crisis was once more on the agenda it was again apparent that politics were too important to be left to politicians This was a sentiment Blanchot was not alone in articulating He acknowledged as much in April 1958 in an article on Mascolorsquos Lettre polonaise sur la misegravere intellectuelle en France anticipating what would soon become an enduring friendship with the bookrsquos author lsquoIt is truersquo he remarked lsquowhen two writers come together they never talk about literature (fortunately) their first words are always about politicsrsquo144 Vital political questions then obstinately remained How to write at such a time under such a regime How to release politics from the opportunism that had usurped its name How to resist abusive laws And how to safeguard political legitimacy when it had everywhere been appropriated by the machinery of State In the epochal suspension of politics what might be heard to speak and what did it demand by way of response

If these questions were in some cases the same as two decades earlier the answers they prompted were nonetheless radically different In the 1930s as Le Pas aushydelagrave would recall as we have seen Blanchotrsquos writing not least by force of circumstance was split into two divergent if parallel discourses each participating in a very different economy The first was journalistic was worked on during the day and sought to address the world as it was and intervene as circumstances or events required The second on the other hand had no fixed purpose took place at night and involved

An IntErruPtIon 243

putting the world into parentheses turning aside from its daytime presence in order to explore and display its constitutive vacancy By the 1950s if not already a decade earlier for perhaps essential as well as contingent reasons this double state of speaking as Mallarmeacute might have called it had long proven unsustainable with the result that the writer and the political commentator in Blanchot even as their texts remained contextually differentiated increasingly spoke with one voice There was difference in other words but no longer contradiction between Blanchotrsquos several idioms In 1984 writing to roger Laporte he would observe that if there was anything for which he might be blamed in the 1930s it was in allowing the divide between his daily journalism and his nocturnal work on Thomas lrsquoObscur to persist unchallenged145 What this suggests is that it was in the end the experience of writing which made it impossible for Blanchot to continue believing in the saving power of some self-identical figure of political sovereignty It made it impossible not to realise not only that sovereignty was without foundation but that the only conceivable sovereignty was precisely the infinite abyss of a lack of foundation And if the only law to which writing was susceptible was the law of its own interruption then the same necessarily held for politics too Twice over in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre now quoting a remark by Bataille probably dating from 1953 but not published till 1976 and dedicating it for his part to the neuter and the Other Blanchot would insist lsquosovereignty is NOTHINGrsquo It no longer corresponded as Bataillersquos original words had it to an object or thing and was irreducible to any form of subjective autonomy or presence It spoke instead wrote Bataille of lsquothe opening of art which always lies but without deceiving those it attractsrsquo146

The effects of the shift in Blanchotrsquos political thinking are readily perceptible albeit often elliptically and obliquely throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave By the late 1950s as we have seen refusal was no longer a vehicle for transcendent values but functioned instead as an impersonal and anonymous caesura It was therefore no longer a matter of seeking to restore sovereignty by founding it anew but of affirming and underwriting its radical absence of foundation In this the intervention of the fragmentary was crucial As the law of return suspended all normative belief in teleological technocratic progress while offering the promise of an always impending future released from nihilism what Blanchotrsquos writing of the fragmentary


now began to address as the abyssal ground without ground of the political far from any mythic figure of self-identical sovereignty was an unnamed differentiated multiplicity of mortal singularities for whom everything was political and politics everything ndash but for whom politics was simultaneously not all but always already exceeded by what no power could appropriate or incorporate as its own For if politics in a word was the administration of human finitude (material needs relations with others mortality) there was in human finitude something that no political order could claim to control which was dying itself that step beyond without step beyond inaccessible to all power or authority beyond the grasp of any subject never available to experience always already an interruption of experience If a citizen was a political subject it was only in so far as something in subjectivity or better irreducible to subjectivisation what Blanchot described as le mourir necessarily refused and resisted subjection by and to the law

Already in 1948 this had been the principal burden of Le TregravesshyHaut which Blanchot had also completed at a time of major constitutional upheaval The novel not only explored the relationship between human community politics and the law but also initiating an argument Le Pas aushydelagrave would radicalise further maintained that politics in so far as it corresponded to the realm of human power and possibility was everything but that it nevertheless had its limit inscribed at the very heart of Blanchotrsquos fiction which was none other than the fissure of impossibility beyond all presence announced in the perpetually imminent always already deferred dying of the novelrsquos first-person narrator and protagonist147 The knowledge of human finitude the recognition of the singularity of each in the face of death the affirmation of that essential vacancy of power from which legitimacy alone derived all this necessarily entailed an uncompromising commitment to the possibility of freedom equality and justice which it was imperative to seek to achieve by all means possible here and now and without delay But this was not all for radically inseparable from finitude as the necessary possibility of death was its other face which was precisely the necessary impossibility of dying This meant that the politics implied by Blanchotrsquos writing were necessary double having to do here with the limits of the possible there with the limit of the impossible148 Politics in other words could be divorced only at their peril from an otherwise-than-politics that excessive of all

An IntErruPtIon 245

representation or delegation was not a negation of the political nor its continuation by other means but marked the necessary displacement suspension or interruption of all political power in general However commanding it might become therefore the political was necessarily always traversed by an excess it could never subordinate to its authority and which was essential if politics this debt owed to the future were itself to have any future

Though they spoke with authority it followed that the tablets of the law were necessarily always already broken lsquoIf the prohibition ldquothou shalt not killrdquo writes itself only on tablets that are already brokenrsquo Le Pas aushydelagrave put it lsquoit is to make the Law suddenly predominate by substituting for the impossible encounter between what is forbidden and transgresssion the affirmation of sequential time (with a before and an after) in which there is first prohibition then acknowledgement of the prohibition then refusal by the guilty breachrsquo lsquoWhat do the broken tablets meanrsquo it asked lsquoPerhapsrsquo came the reply lsquothe fracture of dying [la brisure du mourir] the interruption of the present that dying [mourir] has always in advance introduced into time ldquoThou shalt not killrdquo obviously means ldquodo not kill whosoever in any case will dierdquo and means ldquofor that reason do not harm dying [ne porte pas atteinte au mourir] do not take decisions for what is undecided [ne deacutecide pas de lrsquoindeacutecis] do not say it is done assuming a right over ldquonot yetrdquo do not claim the last word is spoken time brought to an end the Messiah come at lastrdquorsquo149 The radical interruption of politics in other words could only be vouchsafed by a politics of radical interruption

The uncertain collectivity to which Le Pas aushydelagrave from time to time alludes is accordingly distended beyond all recognition Alongside the young of all ages it includes the dying and the dead and numerous strangers too flitting anonymously across Blanchotrsquos pages like so many ghosts from the past or the future not unlike those multiple spectral presences clamouring for justice on whom Derrida acknowledging and affirming an obligation to Blanchot would later insist in Spectres de Marx150 The contours of Blanchotrsquos city overwhelming any opposition between inside and outside are likewise impossible to delimit The book-filled room for instance in which Blanchotrsquos two interlocutors agree to meet is described at one point by a surprising lsquoperspectival disruption [deacuterangement de perspective]rsquo as extensive enough by dint of its vast emptiness for it to contain the whole city together with its


(Heraclitean) river and local inhabitants151 Whatever familiarity is occasionally offered by the text then soon dissolves into unfamiliarity For its part too the volumersquos migrant population is not only multiple detached from all forms of belonging but also essentially nameless as though the only reciprocity or solidarity between existences rendering each inaccessible to the other lay in the shared necessity of the impossibility of the possibility of dying Such it seems is the law without law interrupting itself even as it is deployed on which community to use a term deployed by Le Pas aushydelagrave only sparingly or in fine as though it were already little more than a quotation is not so much grounded as suspended less constituted than dissolved dispersed at its core by a sovereign resistance to all authority including its own and yet albeit for that very reason offering a prospect of solidarity or togetherness perhaps even of community nevertheless unavailable in any present Such is the enigmatic lesson of the closing sequence of Le Pas aushydelagrave which returns both reader and narrator to the scene glimpsed towards the beginning once again evoking those singular young people or youthful singularities without age or identity who had crossed the city in their absence

uml Coming towards us [vers nous] as though they were coming towards each other by virtue of the plurality that united them without manifesting unity their youthful return [leur jeune retour]

He thought saving the we [sauvant le nous] just as he believed he could save thought by identifying it with a fragile fall [la chute fragile] that their youthful return [leur jeune retour] would allow him while ceasing to be together (for a long time he had heard nothing more not even an echo that might have passed for approval or a confirmation of the daily meeting) to fall into community [tomber en communauteacute] A fragile fall ndash a common fall words always side by side [paroles toujours se cocirctoyant]

And he knew with a knowledge that was lost in time [gracircce au savoir trop ancien] worn away by the ages [effaceacute par les acircges] that these youthful names [les jeunes noms] naming twice over an infinity of times the one in the past the other in the future what may only be found on this side [ce qui ne se trouve qursquoen deccedila] and may only be found on the other [ce qui ne se trouve qursquoau delagrave] named hope disappointment Hand in

An IntErruPtIon 247

hand from threshold to threshold like immortals one of whom may be thought to be dying while the other is saying lsquomight I be with whom I shall die [seraisshyje avec qui je meurs]rsquo152

In so far as we are all promised to death so each of us belongs to the community of mortals But in so far as dying is never available as such to any one of us so each of us by dint of being mortal is also immortal traversed by a fissure of impossibility that interrupts all possibility of self-identical community That which we share in other words is what divides us As Blanchot later puts it in La Communauteacute inavouable half-repeating while already radicalising an exchange that had featured in Le Pas aushydelagrave and responding to the debate launched in February 1983 by Jean-Luc Nancy and continued and amplified by him three years later153 lsquo[c]ommunity is not the place of Sovereignty [de la Souveraineteacute] It is what exposes while exposing itself [Elle est ce qui expose en srsquoexposant] It includes the exteriority of being which excludes it an exteriority that cannot be mastered by thought even by giving it diverse names such as death the relation with others or else speech whenever it is not forced back into ways of speaking and thus does not allow any relation (of identity or alterity) with itselfrsquo154 Community then occurs only in so far as it does not occur It is no sooner grasped in words than necessarily lost incontrovertible proof not of the residual self-coincidence of humankind but of the exposure of existence to the abyssal inaccessibility of that which is nameless Community in so far as the word is worth maintaining at all (and Blanchot expresses his reservations on that count from the very opening pages of La Communauteacute inavouable155) is only thinkable by way of the fragmentary which is also to say that if all relation to the political passes by way of the fragmentary it is because the fragmentary in turn cannot do otherwise than pass by way of the political Fragmentary writing was therefore not merely affected by politics it shared with the political a common condition of possibility and impossibility Le Pas aushydelagrave is in this sense not only a volume marked with the memory of May 1968 it is also more importantly a text that sought to probe the political implications of May not however as an event that belonged solely to recent history but one that as Blanchotrsquos reading of Nietzsche had it even as it was perpetually returning from the past nevertheless remained still to come


VI

Burying the dead

uml lsquoDeath [La mort] is a release from death [la mort] ndash Perhaps only from dying [du mourir] ndash Dying is this weightlessness [leacutegegravereteacute] prior to all freedom [en deccedilagrave de toute liberteacute] from which there can be no freedom [dont rien ne peut libeacuterer] ndash That is what is so terrifying in death no doubt contrary to what the ancients used to think death does not have the resources to appease death it is as though it lived beyond itself [survivait agrave elleshymecircme] therefore in the powerlessness to be [lrsquoimpuissance agrave ecirctre] which it dispenses without that powerlessness [impuissance] taking over from the incompletion [inachegravevement] ndash the unfulfilment [inaccomplissement] ndash proper or improper to dying [mourir]rsquo


In his reply to Nancy Blanchot drew several times more on Le Pas aushydelagrave to reaffirm his own thinking (lsquonever interrupted but expressing itself only intermittentlyrsquo)157 on the question of communism not as a given state of affairs but as it already was in Marx as an overriding exigency and unfulfilled promise and its relationship to what in the closing pages of Le Pas aushydelagrave notwithstanding the problem of naming it posed he too like Nancy was willing to call community This is not to say his own thinking was necessarily at one with his interlocutor One of the explicit purposes of La Communauteacute inavouable was to question or at the very least complicate Nancyrsquos critical account of the thematics of sacrifice death and dying in Bataille158 lsquoCommunityrsquo observed Blanchot again silently adapting a fragment published ten years before lsquoin so far as it governs for each one for my benefit and for its own an outside-of-self [un horsshydeshysoi] (its absence) that is its destiny is the place of an undivided and yet necessarily multiple speaking [parole] such that it cannot develop in words [paroles] which is always already lost without use and without work and without glorying in that very loss Speech as a gift then but a gift that is entirely wasted [don en laquo pure raquo perte] and incapable of providing any certainty of its ever being welcomed by the other [par lrsquoautre] albeit that if not speech then at least the supplication to speak which carries

An IntErruPtIon 249

with it the risk of being rejected or neglected or not received is only possible because of the other [autrui]rsquo159 lsquoWhence the feeling [il se pressent]rsquo he concluded lsquothat community in its very failure is bound to a certain kind of writing [a partie lieacutee avec une certaine sorte drsquoeacutecriture] one that has nothing left to look for except the last words ldquoCome [familiar] come [familiar] come [formal] you [formal] or you [familiar] to whom [in the singular] no injunction prayer or expectation might apply [Viens viens venez vous ou toi auquel ne saurait convenir lrsquoinjonction la priegravere lrsquoattente]rdquo160

Measuring the imponderable largely untranslatable distance between the familiar second-person singular and the formal second-person plural exploiting the dissymmetry between a singular coming voiced in the imperative and the jussive language of normative convention or convenience these last words with one minor modification (the addition of the words lsquoou toirsquo) were indeed among some of the last words of Le Pas aushydelagrave in much the same way that in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli they might perhaps have also been among the first As far as La Communauteacute inavouable was concerned they did not however come alone For Blanchotrsquos rewritten fragment was also accompanied in La Communauteacute inavouable by a belated footnote welcoming Derridarsquos Drsquoun ton apocalyptique adopteacute naguegravere en philosophie (On an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy) published only a few months before Blanchotrsquos own slim volume and featuring a series of reflections on the quasi-transcendental status of lsquoComersquo (lsquoViensrsquo) intricately bound among others to a reading of the closing invocation from Le Pas aushydelagrave which Derrida had already cited in 1976 but he refrained from reproducing again in 1983 preferring to ghost it so to speak by reinventing its vocabulary and proposing instead in one of two extracts cited by Blanchot in his turn that lsquo[i]n this affirmative tone ldquoComerdquo marks in itself neither a desire [deacutesir] nor an order [ordre] nor a prayer [priegravere] nor a demand [demande]rsquo161 The effect of these exchanges now patent now secret was to create at the centre of Blanchotrsquos text a kind of shuttling motion between one text and another between text and response citation and recitation between Blanchot and Derrida and between Derrida and Blanchot between Blanchot and Blanchot even in dialogue with Bataille and Nancy not to mention Nietzsche Heidegger Levinas Duras and several others with the result that Blanchot in La Communauteacute inavouable as the bookrsquos title implies can no longer be found citing himself as an authority but returning


words borrowed misplaced turned aside and transformed in their fraternisation with others The only signatures that such fragments allow in other words are always already multiple and anonymous lsquoas thoughrsquo Blanchot had put it many pages earlier in Le Pas aushydelagrave dramatising the invocation inseparable from all writing and from all community lsquothere had rung out in muffled tones this appeal a nevertheless joyful appeal in the cries of children playing in the garden ldquoWho is me todayrdquo ldquoWhorsquos going to be merdquo And the reply joyful endless him him him [lui lui lui]rsquo162

To many readers no doubt the relationship traced by Blanchot between writing the political and the possible impossibility or necessary failure of community will appear rarefied at best In the second part of La Communauteacute inavouable in a context only superficially different from that explored in the first Blanchot endeavoured to meet that objection by evoking alongside a recent text by Duras itself concerned with the impossibility of dying and the relation of non-relation between its female and male protagonists a series of shared memories of political action notably during the eacuteveacutenements of May 68163 In the discussion Blanchot returns to the crucial question of political sovereignty For in what or in whom during the events of May as Le Pas aushydelagrave already had occasion to ask was sovereignty invested Blanchotrsquos response is in many ways surprising not least for its rejection of all conventional constitutive conceptions of political authority For what was held in common by those who participated in the eacuteveacutenements he argues was that they refused the primacy of any calculating prescriptive project and reinvented the political not as an extension of power but rather its decisive interruption As Blanchot explains

lsquoWithout projectrsquo that was the distinguishing feature both agonising [angoissant] and felicitous [fortuneacute] of an incomparable form of society which did not allow itself to be grasped which was not destined to endure or establish itself be it through the numerous lsquoaction committeesrsquo by which a disordered-order in a kind of vague specialisation pretended to itself to be what it was not Contrary to all lsquotraditional revolutionsrsquo the point was not merely to take power in order to replace it with something else nor to take the Bastille the Winter Palace the Elyseacutee or the National Assembly these objectives of little significance and not even to overthrow the old world order but to allow to manifest

An IntErruPtIon 251

itself outside of all utilitarian self-interest a possibility of beingshytogether [drsquoecirctre-ensemble] that restored to all the right to equality in fraternity by the freedom to speak [la liberteacute de parole] that brought everyone to their feet [qui soulevait chacun] Each had something to say sometimes to write (on the walls) whatever it might be mattered little Saying [Le Dire] took precedence over the said [le dit] Poetry was an everyday occurrence164

Writing speaking outside any requirement to be meaningful outside of all established criteria of truth untruth seriousness or lack of seriousness this then for Blanchot in 1968 was politics made present politics rendered innocent

The eacuteveacutenements of May 1968 were singular enough But they were not unique They had been preceded anticipated or announced Blanchot went on on 13 February 1962 by an earlier show of presence ndash presence without present he insisted quoting both Char and Nietzsche ndash that had likewise brought to the streets what the writer now italicising the word now putting it in quotation marks boldly called the people le peuple lsquoThe presence of the peoplersquo he wondered querying the second term just as he had done the first only a few lines earlier even as both seemed nevertheless unavoidable lsquoThere was already something suspect [il y avait deacutejagrave abus] in recourse to this facile word [ce mot complaisant]rsquo he agreed lsquoUnless of coursersquo he now continued lsquoit might be taken to mean not the forces in society as a whole ready for particular political decisions but in its instinctive refusal to assume any power its absolute suspicion of being identified with some governmental authority standing in for it [dans sa meacutefiance absolue agrave se confondre avec un pouvoir auquel il se deacuteleacuteguerait] therefore in its declaration of impotence [sa deacuteclaration drsquoimpuissance]rsquo165 Maintaining the word lsquopeoplersquo under erasure then as a kind of neutralised ndash that is both suspended and reinscribed ndash paleonym for what by dint of anonymity plurality and resistance was no longer a political subject in any received sense Blanchot glossed his recasting of the word by recalling the events of six years before

The presence of the lsquopeoplersquo in its limitless potency [puissance sans limite] which so as not to be limited agrees to do nothing [ne rien faire] I think that in the whole contemporary period there is no clearer example than that which affirmed itself in such sovereign


breadth [dans une ampleur souveraine] when there came together accompanying the funeral cortege of the victims of Charonne that motionless silent multitude on whose size there was no reason to put a figure since nothing could be added nor taken away it was there as a whole [tout entiegravere] not as something to be counted or numbered nor as any closed totality but in an entirety [dans lrsquointeacutegraliteacute] that exceeded any whole [tout ensemble] calmly imposing itself beyond itself [aushydelagrave drsquoelleshymecircme] A supreme potency [puissance suprecircme] because it included without feeling diminished its virtual and absolute impotence [impuissance] as was clearly symbolised by the fact that it was there like an extension of those who could no longer be there (those murdered at Charonne) the infinite that responded to the call of finitude and while opposing it followed in its wake166

In the discussion of Bataille some pages earlier Blanchot had once more drawn on Le Pas aushydelagrave to describe this vertiginous double logic of the finite and the infinite the possible and the impossible as the foundation without foundation of community For if birth and death were its necessary limits he argued this was not to say either margin could be determined as such Each was much more an encounter with the impossible with an essential and unavoidable interruption of presence and power in which community was simultaneously constituted and suspended Death in other words was always the dying of another and as such marked the fragile necessity but also the necessary fragility of community lsquoOne does not die alonersquo Blanchot pointed out adapting and abbreviating his 1973 text lsquoand if it is in human terms so necessary to remain alongside whoever is dying [drsquoecirctre le prochain de celui qui meurt] it is in order to divide up the roles albeit in derisory fashion and by the gentlest of prohibitions to keep from slipping away [retenir sur sa pente] whoever in dying is forced to confront [se heurte] the impossibility of dying in the present Do not die now [maintenant] let there be no now for dying ldquoNot [Ne pas]rdquo a very last word a warning turning to complaint the stuttering negative not [ne pas] ndash you will die [tu mourras]rsquo167 So if community was a possible word for solidarity in the face of death it was only in so far as such togetherness as thereby came to be created was suspended over an abyss as both an affirmation of radical equality to which it was necessary to respond by resisting oppression in every possible way

An IntErruPtIon 253

and an interruption of possibility that necessarily put beyond reach all forms of political identification subjection or communion

To accompany to their final resting-place the victims of State violence is of course a scene that has many impressive historical literary even mythological precedents In 1988 in order to provide perhaps a further interpretative frame to the thinking of politics both implicit and explicit in Le Pas aushydelagrave and La Communauteacute inavouable Blanchot to the surprise of many of his readers turned his attention to another text now forty years old for which he was prompted to write it seems a fresh authorrsquos blurb The text in question was Le TregravesshyHaut which he reintroduced to its audience after four opening paragraphs detailing the implications of a certain uncertain not to say impossible end of history by addressing its reader with a remarkable throwaway injunction less reminiscent of the dialectic of sacrifice placed by Hegel at the centre not to say the origin of speculative thought than of its dissident reversal or rupture as enacted in Houmllderlinrsquos 1804 translations from Sophocles in whose Antigone according to the poetrsquos Translatorrsquos Notes lsquowhat typifies the antitheosrsquo or tragic hero is that lsquoa character behaves in Godrsquos sense [in Gottes Sinne] as though against God [gegen Gott] and acknowledges beyond all law [gesetzlos] the spirit of the Most High [den Geist des Houmlchsten]rsquo168 It recommended as follows lsquoBut you reader forget all that ndash for here too is Antigone the pure virgin joining with her dead brother in order that the taboo against incest henceforth suspended may ruin equally both the ideal law and the natural law Abjection is love just as absolute liberty is absolute servitudersquo169

In deathrsquos extremity in other words all laws are interrupted save the (counter)law of interruption itself following which the sovereignty of refusal culminates in a refusal of all sovereignty and the radical exercise of mortal freedom is in the end inseparable from an intractable obligation to the mortality of all others

notes

1 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 75 The Step Not Beyond 52 translation modified The expression lsquofrom threshold to thresholdrsquo which recurs several times in Blanchotrsquos text forcibly carries with it the memory of Celanrsquos poem collection Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955) to which Blanchot refers in passing in LrsquoAmitieacute 213 Friendship 302


and which also figures importantly in Blanchotrsquos obituary tribute to the poet in Une voix venue drsquoailleurs 71ndash107 A Voice From Elsewhere 55ndash93

2 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 7 The Step Not Beyond 1

3 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 152 The Step Not Beyond 111 translation modified Oddly Lycette Nelson in her English version separates what is a single fragment given in italics into two separate texts one of which appears in roman As a result the English translation contains 417 fragments compared to 416 in the original French


5 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 28 72 The Step Not Beyond 17 50 translation modified

6 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoExigence du retourrsquo LrsquoArc 43 Winter 1970 48ndash53 The fragments contained in this 1970 text offered in homage to Klossowski correspond to passages appearing in Le Pas aushydelagrave 7 10ndash12 13ndash15 21ndash2 23ndash7 33ndash6 73 The Step Not Beyond 1 3ndash4 6 11ndash12 13ndash16 21ndash3 50

7 See Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 73 The Step Not Beyond 50

8 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 38 The Step Not Beyond 24 translation slightly modified

9 Blanchot La Part du feu 313 The Work of Fire 323ndash4 translation modified Contrary to a widespread misconception when Blanchot a few lines earlier quotes from Hegelrsquos 1803ndash4 Jena lecture course (first published in German in 1932) to the effect that lsquothe first act by which Adam gained mastery over the animals [se rendit maicirctre des animaux] was to impose names upon them [leur imposer un nom] that is he annihilated them [les aneacuteantit] in their existence [dans leur existence] (as existents [en tant qursquoexistants])rsquo he was not drawing on Kojegraveversquos famous Introduction agrave la lecture de Hegel edited by raymond Queneau (Paris Gallimard 1947) which he was meant to be reviewing at the time but which he failed even to mention apart from two brief perfunctory footnotes even though as witnessed by Bataillersquos request to Queneau on Blanchotrsquos behalf (in Bataille Choix de lettres 1917ndash1962 256) it is likely he had been given sight of the proofs of the volume nearly two years earlier A more likely source for the quotation is Jean Hyppolitersquos Genegravese et structure de lsquoLa Pheacutenomeacutenologie de lrsquoespritrsquo de Hegel 2 vols (Paris Aubier 1946) to which Blanchot likewise refers in a footnote and where the relevant passage from Hegel is reproduced (I 228) True

An IntErruPtIon 255

enough the translation given by Hyppolite differs significantly from that found in Blanchot Hegelrsquos original text reads lsquoDer erste Akt wodurch Adam seine Herrschaft uumlber die Tiere konstituiert hat ist daszlig er ihnen Namen gab dh sie als Seiende vernichtete und sie zu fuumlr sich Ideellen machtersquo (Hegel Jenaer Systementwuumlrfe 1 Das System der spekulativen Philosophie (Hamburg Felix Meiner 1986) 201) which Hyppolite scrupulously renders as follows lsquoLe premier acte par lequel Adam constitua sa domination sur les animaux est celui par lequel il leur donna un nom les niant comme eacutetant et les faisant ideacuteels pour soirsquo It is possible of course that Blanchot was quoting (loosely) from the original German or even as elsewhere citing from memory It is at any event striking that the wording given in La Part du feu emphasises the violence of Adamrsquos gesture redoubles the reference to animals as existents (rather than inferior creatures) and omits or deletes the crucial moment of idealisation in which Hegelrsquos sentence culminates Neither intervention is of course indifferent to the argument that follows Though there is little doubt that Blanchotrsquos account of Hegel was informed by a reading of Kojegraveve (and no doubt by many conversations with Bataille during the Occupation) it is unduly simplistic to assimilate his thinking during the latter part of the 1940s to that of the charismatic russian It is worth noting in this regard that when in lsquoLa Litteacuterature et le droit agrave la mort [Literature and the right to Death]rsquo he repeats Hegelrsquos famous proposition from the Preface to the Phenomenology that lsquothe life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation but rather the life that endures and maintains itself in it [Aber nicht das Leben das sich vor dem Tode scheut und vor der Verwuumlstung rein bewahrt sondern das ihn ertraumlgt und in ihm sich erhaumllt ist das Leben des Geistes]rsquo the text Blanchot follows (in making the claim that literaturersquos ideal is that historical moment ie the French revolutionary reign of Terror when lsquola vie porte la mort et se maintient dans la mort mecircmersquo) is not the paraphrase offered by Kojegraveve in his Introduction where one reads lsquola ldquovie de lrsquoEspritrdquo nrsquoest pas celle ldquoqui srsquoeffarouche devant la mort et se preacuteserve du ravage mais celle qui supporte la mort et se maintient en ellerdquorsquo but that found in Hyppolitersquos classic translation lsquoCe nrsquoest pas cette vie qui recule drsquohorreur devant la mort et se preacuteserve pure de la destruction mais la vie qui porte la mort et se maintient dans la mort mecircme qui est la vie de lrsquoespritrsquo See Hegel Werke III 36 Phenomenology of Spirit translated by A V Miller (Oxford Clarendon Press 1977) 19 La Pheacutenomeacutenologie de lrsquoesprit translated by Jean Hyppolite 2 vols (Paris Aubier 1939ndash41) I 29


and Kojegraveve Introduction agrave la lecture de Hegel 548 Blanchot La Part du feu 311 The Work of Fire 322

10 Blanchot La Part du feu 324ndash5 The Work of Fire 337 translation modified

11 Blanchot La Part du feu 325 The Work of Fire 338 translation modified Later in Le Pas aushydelagrave 123ndash4 The Step Not Beyond 89 Blanchot was prompted to put a more sceptical self-critical gloss on the ease with which death and writing are put in relation lsquoIf writing dyingrsquo he wrote lsquoare words that may be thought to be close to one another by dint of the distance at which they place themselves both equally incapable of any present it is clear that one cannot make do with simple ready-made statements putting into play simple relations and moreover too immediately full of pathos to maintain their relational character ndash statements such as when you speak it is already death that speaks or else you die writing and dying you write all formulations that end up showing how almost laughable it is to handle unequal terms without due precautions without the medium of silence or the lengthy preparation of a tacit development or better without removing from them their temporal characterrsquo translation modified

12 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 46 The Step Not Beyond 30ndash1 translation modified

13 For a detailed analysis of the legislative function of title and authorial signature see Derrida lsquoPreacutejugeacutes Devant la loirsquo in La Faculteacute de juger (Paris Minuit 1985) 87ndash139 Acts of Literature 183ndash220


15 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 8 The Step Not Beyond 1ndash2 emphasis in the original translation modified

16 On fragmentary writing in Barthes which corresponds to a rather different approach to the neuter than in Blanchot see my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 126ndash31

17 Blanchot Thomas lrsquoObscur (Paris Gallimard 1941) 7 Thomas lrsquoObscur nouvelle version 9 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 55 translation modified On the distinction between the roman and the reacutecit inherited in part from the debate regarding the difference between Roman and Novelle in nineteenth-century German literature or the later redefinition of roman and reacutecit in the work of Andreacute Gide see Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 11ndash17 The Book To Come 5ndash10

An IntErruPtIon 257

18 On ex-appropriation in Derrida see Derrida Marges de la philosophie 367ndash93 Margins of Philosophy 309ndash30 Glas (Paris Galileacutee 1974) Glas translated by John P Leavey Jr and richand rand (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1986) Signeacuteponge (Paris Seuil 1988) 48ndash9 SigneacutepongeSignsponge translated by richard rand (New York Columbia University Press 1984) 56ndash7 and Points de suspension edited by Elisabeth Weber (Paris Galileacutee 1992) 57ndash8 Points translated by Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford Stanford University Press 1995) 52ndash3

19 Blanchot La Part du feu 248 The Work of Fire 254ndash5 translation modified


21 recounting in 1994 his near-experience of death at the hands of a russian-German firing squad some fifty years earlier Blanchot writes lsquoThere remained however at the very moment when the shots were about to be fired [ougrave la fusillade nrsquoeacutetait plus qursquoen attente] the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate liberated from life the infinite which opens Neither fortune nor misfortune Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond [le pas aushydelagrave]rsquo LrsquoInstant de ma mort (Paris Gallimard [1994] 2002) 15 The Instant of My Death 7ndash9 translation modified In this unusual reprise of Blanchotrsquos 1973 title within the fabric of the 1994 narrative it is as though both the one and the other both Le Pas aushydelagrave as a whole and LrsquoInstant de ma mort as a whole are each included within the other even as each in turn breaches all possibility of closure interiority wholeness

22 See Derrida Demeure Maurice Blanchot (Paris Galileacutee 1998) 69 The Instant of My DeathDemeure Fiction and Testimony translated by Elizabeth rottenberg (Stanford Stanford University Press 2000) 55 Lacoue-Labarthe Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable edited by Aristide Bianchi and Leonid Kharlamov (Paris Galileacutee 2011) 101ndash2 lsquoThe Contestation of Deathrsquo translated by Philip Anderson The Power of Contestation 147



25 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 45 The Infinite Conversation 32



27 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 26 The Step Not Beyond 15 emphasis in the original translation modified

28 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 134ndash5 The Step Not Beyond 97 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 94ndash107 The Space of Literature 95ndash107 On Blanchotrsquos response to Celanrsquos death see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 502ndash3 and my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 194ndash213




32 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 173ndash4 The Step Not Beyond 127 translation modified



35 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 34ndash5 The Step Not Beyond 22 translation modified Blanchotrsquos closing phrase is most likely a reference to the famous passage in Platorsquos Phaedrus 275e discussed in Une voix venue drsquoailleurs 51ndash5 A Voice from Elsewhere 35ndash40 and by Derrida in La Disseacutemination 71ndash197 Dissemination 63ndash171

36 On philosophy as dance see Nietzsche KSA 3 635 The Gay Science 246 Le Gai Savoir 291 on Zarathustra as lsquodancerrsquo KSA 6 345 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings 131

37 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 415 416 417 418 The Infinite Conversation 278ndash9 279 280 compare Nietzsche KSA 9 496 496ndash7 519ndash20 523 Le Gai Savoir 364ndash5 365 387 390

38 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 162ndash5 188ndash90 The Writing of the Disaster 104ndash6 122ndash4 Compare Nietzsche KSA 3 53ndash4 83ndash4 117 5 72 218 393 and 12 398 494 521 564ndash5 Œuvres philosophiques complegravetes IV Aurore fragments posthumes deacutebut 1880shyprintemps 1881 translated by Julien Hervier (Paris Gallimard [1970] 1980) 49ndash50 73 104 Œuvres philosophiques complegravetes VII Parshydelagrave bien et mal La Geacuteneacutealogie

An IntErruPtIon 259

de la morale translated by Cornelius Heim Isabelle Hildenbrand and Jean Gratien (Paris Gallimard 1971) 69 190 332 Œuvres philosophiques complegravetes XIII Fragments posthumes automne 1887shymars 1888 translated by Pierre Klossowski (Paris Gallimard 1976) 65 140 161 197 Daybreak edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter translated by r J Hollingdale (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1997) 47 52 126 Beyond Good and Evil edited by rolf-Peter Horstmann translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2002) 48ndash9 160 On the Genealogy of Morality edited by Keith Ansell Pearson translated by Carol Diethe (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1994) 114

39 On Nietzschersquos liability for the falsified text of The Will to Power published after his death under his name for which he was not personally responsible see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 206 The Infinite Conversation 139 It is true that Blanchot first made the comment in August 1958 at a rather different point in the history of Nietzschersquos reception


41 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 186ndash7 The Writing of the Disaster 121 translation modified The reference is to the paragraph entitled lsquoMehr Lieben [More Love]rsquo in Martin Buber Die Erzaumlhlungen der Chassidim (Zuumlrich Manesse Verlag [1949] 2006) 233 Tales of the Hasidim translated by Olga Marx 2 vols (New York Schocken Books 1947ndash8) I 149ndash50 Blanchot reviewed the book in May 1964 in a passage later collected in LrsquoAmitieacute 257 Friendship 304ndash5 It is worth noting that in Buberrsquos original text the one who was deemed to be wicked full of hate and requiring of lsquomore loversquo was the questionerrsquos lsquorenegade sonrsquo Blanchotrsquos implicit objection to rabbi Pinchasrsquos remark seems to derive from an unwillingness to reduce politics to a mere (ethical) family affair It is worth noting too that the priority accorded to justice and the role of the third party or tiers are both deeply informed by Blanchotrsquos reading of Totaliteacute et infini

42 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 187ndash8 The Writing of the Disaster 122 emphasis in the original translation modified The biblical quotation may be found in Job 40 4ndash5 (Blanchot confines himself to quoting verse 5)

43 In this respect Blanchotrsquos approach to Nietzsche follows much the same logic as his interpretation of Sade as I argue in my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 161ndash84


44 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 189 The Writing of the Disaster 123 translation modified On the heterogeneity of the Nietzschean text (and of all texts) see Derrida Eacuteperons les styles de Nietzsche (Paris Flammarion 1978) Spurs Nietzschersquos styles translated by Barbara Harlow (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1979) It may be wondered why in 1980 when the issue of Nietzschersquos alleged antisemitism had been debated at length elsewhere (not least by Bataille who had vigorously rebuffed the charge as early as January 1937 in an issue of Aceacutephale explicitly devoted to the question of lsquoNietzsche and the Fascistsrsquo an extract from which is silently reproduced in LrsquoEntretien infini 204ndash5n1 The Infinite Conversation 448ndash9n2) Blanchot felt it necessary to return to the controversy It is possible however that in conceding and contextualising Nietzschersquos lsquodubiousrsquo remarks Blanchot was using the opportunity to respond obliquely to the damaging if entirely unfounded allegations of prewar antisemitism levelled against him the previous year by Jeffrey Mehlman in an article entitled lsquoBlanchot at Combat Of Literature and Terrorrsquo first published in MLN 95 4 May 1980 808ndash29 which he had been sent by its author and to which he had replied by letter (which Mehlman duly cites in the essay) the previous November But if so why so obliquely Plainly enough despite calls for him to do so by such hostile commentators as Tzvetan Todorov there was no compelling reason for Blanchot to exhume those 1930s political texts of his in order to comment on them in public (which is not to say he did not do so in private as an unpublished letter to roger Laporte from April 1987 referred to by Lacoue-Labarthe in Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable 117 would suggest) The only reason for returning to those prewar texts in order to comment on them publicly would be either to justify them in some way or to apologise for them But both gestures as Blanchot was well aware were equally trivial equally sterile and equally offensive to whoever might be thought to have suffered the consequences of what he may or may not have intended nearly half a century earlier Like Nietzschersquos own dubious remarks Blanchotrsquos early journalistic writings too and the wider archive of which they were part were best left to speak for themselves for good or ill This did not mean Blanchot wished to defend them or thought his early political writings were best left forgotten On the contrary far more crucial for Blanchot (and significant for contemporary readers) was the extent to which in all his subsequent thinking the writer had sought to take responsibility for what had been published under his name before the war by radically rethinking the political ideological and philosophical assumptions on which

An IntErruPtIon 261

those early articles and interventions were founded The evidence of several postwar texts including perhaps most notably Le TregravesshyHaut in 1948 as I argue in Bataille Blanchot Klossowski Writing at the Limit (Oxford Oxford University Press 2001) 181ndash206 is precisely that from the end of the Occupation onwards if not well before that date Blanchot had begun to rearticulate his relationship to the political with implications clearly legible among others as we shall see in Le Pas aushydelagrave LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre and elsewhere

45 Compare Blanchot lsquoLrsquoExigence du retourrsquo LrsquoArc 43 Winter 1970 48 and LrsquoEntretien infini 408 The Infinite Conversation 274

46 In a dialogue first published in January 1963 Blanchot has one of his two interlocutors observe lsquoAs for nihilism this dry and moreover Latin word [ce mot sec et latin par surcroicirct] I think it has ceased to sound in the direction of what it cannot reach So let us therefore cease using it to address what may be said to come to us from literature if indeed what comes from it were not always in some way held back within it and did not hold it back itself as though in abeyance [en retrait]rsquo see LrsquoEntretien infini 591ndash2 The Infinite Conversation 403 translation modified From this point on late in the compositional structure (if not the chronology) of LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchotrsquos usage of the term is sparing at best This is not to say that in eschewing the word nihilism Blanchot loses interest in the questions it raises Indeed as his account of eternal return clearly demonstrates nothing could be further from the truth In this sense there is little warrant for Shane Wellerrsquos claim in his Literature Philosophy Nihilism The Uncanniest of Guests (Houndmills Palgrave 2008) that lsquo[Blanchotrsquos] conception of literature and then of writing remains haunted by a guest [sc nihilism] that is located neither inside nor outside literature or writingrsquo (p 110) This is to imply that lsquonihilismrsquo is somehow a commanding even transcendental entity and not as Blanchot argues an unreliable and questionable because still ontological concept

47 Mentions of Nietzsche occur as follows Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 33ndash4 34ndash5 35ndash6 44ndash5 53ndash6 58ndash9 65ndash6 158 166 The Step Not Beyond 21ndash2 22 22ndash3 29ndash30 36ndash8 40 44ndash6 115ndash6 121 Admittedly this is not atypical of Le Pas aushydelagrave in general which contains very few explicit quotations and where the only proper names mentioned are those of Nietzsche Hegel Confucius Socrates Plato Parmenides Houmllderlin Dionysos Freud and God



49 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 415 The Infinite Conversation 278ndash9 compare Nietzsche KSA 9 496 Le Gai Savoir 364ndash5

50 Nietzsche KSA 3 570 The Gay Science 194ndash5 Le Gai Savoir 232 emphasis in the original translation slightly modified

51 Nietzsche KSA 6 335 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings 123 translation modified


53 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 418 The Infinite Conversation 280 Nietzsche KSA 9 520 Le Gai Savoir 387

54 Heidegger Nietzsche I 445ndash6 Nietzsche II 182 emphasis in the original

55 Nietzsche KSA 9 501ndash2 Le Gai Savoir 370 emphases in the original

56 Heidegger Nietzsche I 447 Nietzsche II 183 emphasis in the original translation modified

57 Heidegger Nietzsche I 448 Nietzsche II 184 translation modified

58 Heidegger Nietzsche II 45 Nietzsche IV 14 translation modified Heidegger comments on the phrase at length in Holzwege 218 Off the Beaten Track 166 Compare Nietzsche KSA 12 350 Blanchot had already quoted the phrase following Heidegger in 1958 in LrsquoEntretien infini 217 The Infinite Conversation 144 where it appears as lsquoQue les valeurs les plus hautes se deacutevaluentrsquo lsquoQue les valeurs suprecircmes se deacutevalorisentrsquo is the version preferred by Klossowski in his 1976 translation of Nietzschersquos Fragments posthumes automne 1887shymars 1888 28

59 Heidegger Nietzsche I 605 Nietzsche III 113 emphasis in the original translation modified



62 Derrida Marges de la philosophie 77ndash8 Margins of Philosophy 67 translation modified

63 Klossowskirsquos royaumont paper presented in July 1964 was first published in Cahiers de Royaumont Philosophie VI (Paris Minuit 1967) 227ndash35 and subsequently incorporated in his Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 93ndash103 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 56ndash66 Its importance was duly noted most particularly by Gilles Deleuze

An IntErruPtIon 263

(to whom Klossowskirsquos 1969 book was dedicated) in Diffeacuterence et reacutepeacutetition (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1968) 81n2 Difference and Repetition translated by Paul Patton (London Athlone 1994) 312n19 Klossowskirsquos translation of Nietzschersquos Le Gai Savoir first appeared in 1956 and he was also responsible as seen earlier for French versions of Nietzschersquos 1881ndash82 and 1887ndash88 Notebooks published in 1967 and 1976 respectively His version of Heideggerrsquos Nietzsche contracted as early as June 1962 finally came out in two volumes in 1971 In the early to mid-1960s the writer also brought out Les Lois de lrsquohospitaliteacute (Paris Gallimard 1965) a revised (ie repeated or returned) version complete with new preface and postface of his novel trilogy Roberte ce soir (1953) La Reacutevocation de lrsquoeacutedit de Nantes (1959) and Le Souffleur ou le theacuteacirctre de socieacuteteacute (1960) This was followed shortly after by Le Baphomet (Paris Mercure de France 1965) a fictional treatment of what in a letter to Jean Decottignies published in the latterrsquos Klossowski notre prochain (Paris Henri Veyrier 1985) 137ndash44 (p 139) the writer described as lsquothe theological consequencesrsquo of the theme of eternal return On the significance of Klossowskirsquos reinterpretation of eternal return for Blanchot witness the footnote added in 1969 to Blanchotrsquos 1958 essay lsquoPassage de la lignersquo in LrsquoEntretien infini 223 The Infinite Conversation 451n8 I described earlier some of the changes made to this essay when it was republished in LrsquoEntretien infini At the precise point where in 1969 he acknowledged the importance of Klossowskirsquos contribution Blanchot had originally reported that lsquo[o]ne of the changes in interpretation of Nietzsche is that this idea [of eternal return] is being taken seriously Karl Loumlwith who has produced a number of important books has done much to make us more aware of it and so too no doubt has the very movement of the present epoch which has prompted us to reflect on time the circularity of meaning the end of history the conception of technology considered as the return of the same in its constant rotation being as rebeginning [lrsquoecirctre comme recommencement]rsquo On republication in LrsquoEntretien infini the second part of the sentence was amended to read as follows lsquo so too no doubt has the very movement of the present epoch which has prompted us to reflect on time the circularity of meaning the end of history the absence of being as rebeginning [lrsquoabsence drsquoecirctre comme recommencement]rsquo

64 Klossowski Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 94 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 57 translation modified




67 Klossowski Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 94ndash5 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 58 emphasis in the original translation modified

68 Klossowski Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 93 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 56 emphasis in the original translation modified

69 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 417ndash8 The Infinite Conversation 280 translation modified For the quotations from Nietzsche see KSA 9 519 528 523 Le Gai Savoir 387 395 390


71 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 21ndash2 The Step Not Beyond 11ndash12 translation modified




75 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 61 The Step Not Beyond 42 translation modified The dissymmetry between the past as a repetition of the future and the future as a repetition of the past might be thought to merit more than parenthetical attention ndash were it not that the parenthesis itself like other interventions of the neuter is itself a function of the dissymmetry it re-marks and without which as Nietzsche sometimes feared eternal return would revert to being a baleful avatar of nihilistic predetermination Blanchot was of course not alone in seeking to avoid that risk Deleuze whose work on Nietzsche Blanchot acknowledges in LrsquoEntretien infini without however engaging with it directly likewise endeavoured to resolve the dissymmetry for his part by claiming that eternal return is necessarily selective in so far as what returns Deleuze puts it is not everything but only that which is strong intense or affirmative enough to bear repetition As Deleuze writes in Diffeacuterence et reacutepeacutetition 381ndash2 Difference and Repetition 298ndash9 lsquo[t]o conceive eternal return as selective thought [la penseacutee seacutelective] and repetition in eternal return as selective being [lrsquoecirctre seacutelectif] this is the greatest test [eacutepreuve proof ordeal] Time has to be lived and conceived out of joint placed in a straight line which ruthlessly eliminates all who embark upon it who thereby appear on stage but repeat only once and for all Selection occurs

An IntErruPtIon 265

between repetitions those who repeat negatively those who repeat identically will be eliminated They repeat only once Eternal return is only for the third time the time of drama [drame] after the comic after the tragic (drama is defined as when the tragic becomes joyous and the comic the comic of the superhuman [du surhumain]) Eternal return is only for the third repetition in the third repetition The circle is at the end of the line Neither the dwarf nor the hero neither Zarathustra sick nor Zarathustra convalescent will return Not only does eternal return not make everything return it destroys [fait peacuterir] those who do not survive the ordeal [ne supportent pas lrsquoeacutepreuve] [ ] The Negative does not return The Identical does not return The Same and the Similar the Analogous and the Opposite do not return Only affirmation returns that is the Different the Dissimilarrsquo translation modified But how to differentiate between repetitions between repetition-as-identity and repetition-as-difference wonders Blanchot (and Derrida in La Disseacutemination will ask the same) Is it not that eternal return alongside so much else disables that opposition and that any recourse to selection is ultimately reliant on that post-Schopenhauerian subjectivity that Heidegger found to underpin Nietzschersquos reversal of Platonism If so it would explain Blanchotrsquos reluctance to follow Deleuze in constructing return as the basis for univocal ontology

76 On the necessity of return lsquoas universal law [comme loi universelle]rsquo see Klossowski Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 94 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 57

77 See for instance Nietzsche KSA 3 600 The Gay Science 219 where one reads lsquoTo look at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and care of a god to interpret history in honour of some divine reason as continual testimony to a moral world order and to ultimate moral purposes to interpret onersquos own experiences as pious people have long interpreted theirs as if everything were providential everything a clue everything ordered and designed for the sake of the salvation of the soul all that is now finished has conscience against it and appears to every refined conscience indecent dishonest a form of mendacity effeminacy weakness and cowardice ndash with such severity as with anything we are simply good Europeans and the heirs of Europersquos longest and most courageous self-overcoming As we reject Christian interpretation in this fashion and condemn its ldquomeaningrdquo as a swindle [Falschmuumlnzerei] Schopenhauerrsquos question immediately comes at us in terrifying manner does existence have any meaning at all ndash a question that will take a few centuries to be heard fully and to its


proper measurersquo translation modified For Blanchot too eternal return was anything but an article of faith lsquoOne cannot believe [On ne peut croire] in Eternal returnrsquo observes one fragment before adding somewhat paradoxically lsquoThat is its sole guarantee its ldquoverificationrdquo Such in this far-off place [lagraveshybas] is the demand of the Law [lrsquoexigence de la Loi]rsquo See Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 25 The Step Not Beyond 14 translation slightly modified

78 On this whole question of law and counterlaw in La Folie du jour and more generally in Blanchotrsquos writing see Derrida Parages 233ndash66 Parages 217ndash49



81 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 101ndash2 The Step Not Beyond 72 translation modified Compare Le Pas aushydelagrave 97 149 The Step Not Beyond 69 109


83 For a brief but nonetheless suggestive philosophical account of Blanchotrsquos neuter see Nancy lsquoLe Neutre la neutralisation du neutrersquo Cahiers Maurice Blanchot 1 2011 21ndash4

84 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 101 The Step Not Beyond 72 translation modified Some pages later in Le Pas aushydelagrave 138 The Step Not Beyond 100 Blanchot repeats the motif again in italics to similar effect lsquo On the thresholdrsquo he writes lsquocoming from the outside perhaps the two young names like two figures of whom we cannot state for certain whether they are behind the window pane [derriegravere la vitre] on the inside on the outside since nobody other than those two who expect everything from us can tell where we arersquo translation modified As Derrida shows in Parages the motif of lsquola vitrersquo is a recurrent one elsewhere in Blanchot We shall encounter it again in Chapter Four

85 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 117 The Step Not Beyond 84 On grafts and grafting see Derrida La Disseacutemination 230 395ndash8 Dissemination 202ndash3 355ndash8


87 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 19 The Step Not Beyond 9ndash10 translation modified As though to prove the point Lycette Nelsonrsquos English version conspires to print the whole of the first paragraph in roman

An IntErruPtIon 267


89 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 68 159ndash61 The Step Not Beyond 46ndash7 116ndash8 translations modified

90 On the strange structure of the trait or re-mark of belonging (which itself does not belong and undermines any separation between the inside and the outside) as it affects Blanchotrsquos writing elsewhere see Derrida Parages 243ndash6 Parages 226ndash9 The use of roman and italics in Le Pas aushydelagrave also exploits the same paradoxical relationship between repetition and difference as Blanchotrsquos 1977 re-presentation of Le Dernier Homme as Le Dernier Homme nouvelle version discussed in Chapter One













103 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 170 The Step Not Beyond 124 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos use of Lutherrsquos watchword elsewhere see Blanchot lsquoCertes la question est traditionnellersquo Libeacuteration hors-seacuterie March 1985 64 lsquoThe question is certainly a traditional onersquo translated by Michael Holland Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 28


104 Derrida De la grammatologie 89 Of Grammatology 60 translation modified










114 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 84ndash5 The Step Not Beyond 59 emphasis in the original translation modified




118 Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes II 217



121 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 18 The Step Not Beyond 8 translation modified It may be wondered why Blanchot refrains from naming the city that features in the book An answer may be found in a letter to Marguerite Duras in Cahiers de lrsquoHerne Marguerite Duras 86 2005 54 giving his reactions to a draft version of her post-1968 apocalyptic novel Abahn Sabana David (Paris Gallimard

An IntErruPtIon 269

1970) subsequently dedicated to Blanchot and Antelme lsquoThere remains another difficultyrsquo Blanchot wrote lsquoabout which I will try to say something the words Prague China Castro others too Not for political reasons but because in a text where the absolute is at stake any immediately historical allusion becomes merely anecdotal and of little significancersquo In finalising her text in this and other respects Duras seems to have followed Blanchotrsquos advice See Marguerite Duras Œuvres complegravetes edited by Gilles Philippe 2 vols (Paris Gallimard 2011) II 1810

122 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 112 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 91 translation modified On the street as an instance of the impersonal the neuter and the outside see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 362ndash4 The Infinite Conversation 242ndash4 Some may be surprised at Blanchotrsquos recourse to the language of legality and law in condemning de Gaullersquos banning orders As we shall see it is however a key strategy on the writerrsquos part and one he uses elsewhere notably in the interview with Madeleine Chapsal in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 37ndash42 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 33ndash35 Despite the claims of some critics it shows that Blanchot was never an anarchist ie never opposed to the law qua law

123 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 119ndash20 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 95 translation modified readers of Blanchot will recognise in this piece the deliberate echo of the famous closing words of La Folie du jour lsquoUn reacutecit Non pas de reacutecit plus jamaisrsquo A year and a half later Blanchot did of course publish another book and several more were to follow But if LrsquoEntretien infini in the Autumn of 1969 concluded by evoking the lsquoabsence of the book [lrsquoabsence de livre]rsquo that Blanchotrsquos essays and articles could but designate in vain it was not only because the book was the lsquoruse by which writing approaches the absence of the bookrsquo (LrsquoEntretien infini 623 The Infinite Conversation 424) it was also because discreetly implicitly futurally the admission of failure was also a profession of hope

124 See Margaret Atack May 68 in French Fiction and Film (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) 7 lsquoMayrsquo writes the author lsquois a monstrous library There were 120 books published on the events by the end of October 1968 and it has never stoppedrsquo

125 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 621 622 The Infinite Conversation 423 translation modified

126 See for instance the fierce polemic surrounding the legacy of the clandestine resistance movement reflected in Paulhanrsquos famous Lettre aux directeurs de la reacutesistance (Paris Minuit 1952) 18ndash23


127 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 17 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 10 translation modified

128 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 18 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 10ndash11 translation modified

129 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 21 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 12 One might add that the reason why history does not repeat itself is that its very possibility turns on the movement of return ndash as that which repeats itself as always other than it was

130 For the original version of the article see Blanchot lsquoLe refusrsquo Le 14 Juillet 2 25 October 1958 3 and Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 11ndash12 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 7 All three issues of Le 14 Juillet are reproduced in facsimile as Le 14 Juillet (Paris Seacuteguier 1990) For the 1971 version of Blanchotrsquos article which comprises a number of minor but nevertheless significant changes see Blanchot LrsquoAmitieacute 130ndash1 Friendship 111ndash2 In his edition of Blanchotrsquos Eacutecrits politiques 1953ndash1993 (Paris Gallimard 2008) Eric Hoppenot reproduces the first manuscript page of the 1958 text in facsimile (p 4) but in the body of the volume (pp 28ndash9) rather misleadingly provides only the later revised text For the purposes of the present discussion reference will be made to the revised version given in LrsquoAmitieacute

131 Blanchot LrsquoAmitieacute 130 Friendship 111 translation modified

132 Blanchot explains this crucial distinction between duty (devoir) and right (droit) in his interview with Chapsal in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 37ndash42 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 33ndash5 On the significance of the distinction see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 213ndash4

133 For Blanchotrsquos own account of the legal and judicial consequences of his involvement in the struggle against the Algerian War see Blanchot Pour lrsquoamitieacute (Tours Farrago 2000) 20ndash6 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 138ndash9 Eric Hoppenot in Eacutecrits politiques 1953ndash1993 83ndash7 also gives Blanchotrsquos notes of his interview with the examining magistrate


135 For many contemporaries given de Gaullersquos near-mythic status as Francersquos wartime saviour (ironically not unlike that of Peacutetain at the end of the 1914ndash18 war) Blanchotrsquos readiness to equate the position of Peacutetain in 1940 brought to power by the illegal self-dissolution of the Third republic with that of de Gaulle in 1958 brought to power illegally by the collapse of the Fourth republic was both shocking and provocative It was a comparison to which

An IntErruPtIon 271

he would nevertheless consistently return Ten years later in a piece published in Comiteacute (in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 107 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 89) he was to liken the position of lsquoevery writer and every artistrsquo implicated in the institutions of the Gaullist Fifth republic with that of intellectuals collaborating with Vichy between 1940 and 1944 In making the point he was perhaps also reflecting ruefully on his own lsquonaivetyrsquo in 1940 and 1941 (as he put it in 1993) in attempting by his involvement in the Vichy-sponsored Jeune France cultural association to lsquouse Vichy against Vichyrsquo as he explains in a brief memoir collected in La Condition critique 467ndash78 (p 469) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 134ndash43 (p 135) On the Jeune France episode see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 158ndash66

136 On the notion of counterlaw in Blanchot as the law of necessary impurity contamination and exposure to the other see Derrida Parages 233ndash66 Parages 217ndash49

137 See eacutetienne Balibar lsquoBlanchot lrsquoinsoumisrsquo in Blanchot dans son siegravecle 288ndash314 and for a contemporary reformulation of what is at stake Balibar Droit de citeacute (Paris Presses universitaires de France 2002) 17ndash22 As Balibar points out other prominent thinkers in that tradition which cuts across received oppositions between left and right (and in that sense perhaps goes some way towards explaining the logic governing Blanchotrsquos own political evolution) include such diverse and in many respects incompatible figures as Schmitt Benjamin Arendt and Agamben I return to Blanchotrsquos response to Benjamin and to his differences with Agamben in my next chapter Any reference to the work of Arendt on the other hand sauf erreur seems oddly absent from Blanchotrsquos writing and it would no doubt be interesting to examine why As for Schmitt no evidence to my knowledge has so far emerged to suggest Blanchot was familiar with his work or if he was what he may have thought of it notably in the light of Schmittrsquos role as apologist for the Third reich (to which Blanchot from the outset was implacably opposed) It is however worth noting that Schmittrsquos Legality and Legitimacy (Legalitaumlt und Legitimitaumlt 1932) was first translated into French in 1936 and there is every possibility Blanchot may have read the book at the time or may have encountered it or other texts by Schmitt in the original German Schmittrsquos proximity to Heidegger would have constituted a further reason for Blanchotrsquos interest At any event by the end of the 1930s Schmitt was sufficiently well known in radical French Catholic circles and among intimates of the Collegravege de sociologie for Klossowski for instance to cite The Concept of the Political (Der Begriff des Politischen 1932) in


the original German as an adversarial foil in an essay published in Esprit in December 1938 under the general rubric of lsquoFrench Prefascismrsquo barely two months following the Munich debacle (to which the journal was bitterly opposed) and less than a month after Kristallnacht For an account of Klossowskirsquos use of Schmitt in this context see Denis Hollier lsquoHostis hospes des lois de lrsquohostiliteacute agrave celles de lrsquohospitaliteacutersquo Traverseacutees de Pierre Klossowski edited by Laurent Jenny and Andreas Pfersmann (Geneva Droz 1999) 25ndash32

138 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 35 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 19 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos reference to Luther see Balibar lsquoBlanchot lrsquoinsoumisrsquo 297ndash8 and La Proposition de lrsquoeacutegaliberteacute (Paris Presses universitaires de France 2010) 354ndash5

139 Balibar lsquoBlanchot lrsquoinsoumisrsquo 297 emphasis in the original

140 See Blanchot lsquoLa France nation agrave venirrsquo Combat 19 November 1937 131ndash2

141 Blanchot lsquoLe Marxisme contre la reacutevolutionrsquo La Revue franccedilaise 28th year 4 25 April 1933 506ndash17 (p 516) emphasis in the original For readers at the time the reference to the human person (la personne) was a clear theological signal suggesting a conception of self that was irreducible to (liberal) individualism and (totalitarian) collectivism alike On La Revue franccedilaise edited by Jean-Pierre Maxence one of Blanchotrsquos regular associates during the early to mid-1930s see Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle Les NonshyConformistes des anneacutees 30 (Paris Seuil [1969] 2001) 60ndash7 Though Maxence professed a version of personalism the term soon became more closely identified with the thought of Emmanuel Mounier and the journal Esprit (with which Blanchot seems to have had few if any dealings at all) On the evolution of Esprit during the prewar and postwar period see Michel Winock lsquoEspritrsquo Des Intellectuels dans la citeacute 1930ndash1950 (Paris Seuil [1975] 1996)


143 See Blanchot lsquoOn demande des dissidentsrsquo Combat 20 December 1937 154ndash5 This was to be the last of Blanchotrsquos signed political articles in the extremist nationalist press In his capacity as reacutedacteur en chef of both publications Blanchot nevertheless carried on writing editorials and probably other material for the deeply conservative daily the Journal des deacutebats and the nationalist weekly Aux eacutecoutes into the Summer of 1940 For more details and the reasons why this parting shaft in Combat does not represent a turn to Fascism as some critics have hastily assumed see my

An IntErruPtIon 273

Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 39ndash41 44ndash6 and Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 101ndash2 151ndash7

144 Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 301 The Book To Come 247 In his Lettre polonaise (1957) later collected in his A la recherche drsquoun communisme de penseacutee (Paris Fourbis 1993) 65ndash122 Mascolo drew attention to what he saw as the dispiriting discrepancy between the inertia of the French political class and the very different climate in Poland following the liberalisation associated with the rise to power of Wladislaw Gomulka lsquoPolitics is our passionrsquo he wrote in a passage Blanchot would make his own lsquoBut if poetry is decidedly our sole passion [notre unique passion] it is also necessary to go further with the added force that comes from speaking under pressure and say that politics is our sole passion [notre unique passion] It is no different from poetry the one is nothing without the otherrsquo (p 107) On Blanchotrsquos association with Mascolo at the time see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 376ndash83

145 See Blanchotrsquos letter to Laporte dated 22 December 1984 reproduced in Nancy Maurice Blanchot Passion politique 61 During the 1930s he explained to his correspondent lsquoI was faced with a real dichotomy writing in the daytime in the service of this or that (not to forget that I also wrote for a famous archeologist in need of an amanuensis [un eacutecrivant]) and writing at night which set me apart [me rendait eacutetranger] from any exigency other than itself while changing my identity or directing it towards an ungraspable and anxiety-laden unknown If I was guilty of anything [Srsquoil y a eu faute de ma part] it was in that split [partage]rsquo

146 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 142 200 The Writing of the Disaster 90 131 Compare Bataille Œuvres complegravetes VIII 300 capitals in the original

147 On this reading of Le TregravesshyHaut see my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot 181ndash206 and for an account of the novel inflected by the aftermath of May 1968 see Georges Preacuteli La Force du dehors exteacuterioriteacute limite et nonshypouvoir agrave partir de Maurice Blanchot (Paris recherches 1977)

148 Compare for instance Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 38 48 The Writing of the Disaster 20 27

149 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 149 The Step Not Beyond 108 translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos recourse to the figure of the messianic in the next chapter

150 See Derrida Spectres de Marx 21ndash85 Specters of Marx 1ndash60


151 See Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 110 The Step Not Beyond 79 translation modified

152 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 186ndash7 The Step Not Beyond 136ndash7 translation modified For earlier use of the term communauteacute in Blanchotrsquos text see Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 87 The Step Not Beyond 61

153 See Nancy lsquoLa Communauteacute deacutesœuvreacuteersquo Aleacutea 4 February 1983 11ndash49 La Communauteacute deacutesœuvreacutee (Paris Christian Bourgois 1986) The Inoperative Community translated by Peter Connor Lisa Garbus Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1991)

154 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 25 The Unavowable Community 12 emphasis in the original translation modified Compare Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 180 The Step Not Beyond 132 It was of course the writer himself in that earlier phrasing who had suggested such diverse names for the exteriority of being as death the relation with others or else speech

155 See Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 9ndash10 The Unavowable Community 1ndash2


157 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 9 The Unavowable Community 1 translation modified

158 All the more curious in this respect is Nancyrsquos claim advanced in Maurice Blanchot Passion politique almost thirty years after the event that Blanchot in La Communauteacute inavouable had sought covertly to defend that politically dangerous view of community as fusional communion that Nancy in his February 1983 article had attributed to Bataille lsquoWhen the opportunity presented itself as a result of that issue of Aleacutearsquo Nancy writes lsquoof explicitly resuming a thinking of ldquocommunityrdquo which he may well have felt bound to keep private [discregravete] or even secret [Blanchot] took it in a direction ndash incidentally quite removed from my own not to say diametrically opposed to it ndash which conjured up in the darker recesses of community [faisait surgir dans le fond obscur de la communauteacute] a kind of ldquocommunionrdquo in several guises (erotic christological and literary) It is entirely possible that through the prism of the word ldquocommunismrdquo revisited he was restaging something of what in earlier times and in different terms he had found so compellingrsquo (p 31) But as the 1983 exchange shows (and as Blanchot makes clear in La Communauteacute inavouable

An IntErruPtIon 275

17ndash20 The Unavowable Community 7ndash8) the main disagreement lay elsewhere and had to do with Blanchotrsquos reservations about Nancyrsquos reading of Bataille not because Blanchot contra Nancy wished to cling to a vision of fusional communion but because in Blanchotrsquos eyes Bataillersquos thinking of the sacrificial precisely because it interrupted and suspended any dialectic of completion was already irreducible to what Nancy had sought to identify and question in his 1983 article the dream (or nightmare) of community as regressive pseudo-religious communion

159 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 25ndash6 The Unavowable Community 12 translation modified Compare Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 180 The Step Not Beyond 132 lsquoIf speech [parole] gives itself to the other [agrave lrsquoautre] if it is that gift itself this gift that is entirely wasted cannot give the hope it will ever be welcomed by the other received as a gift A speaking always exterior to the other in the exteriority of being (or not being) of which the other is the clue [lrsquoindice the mark] the non-placersquo emphasis in the original translation modified

160 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 26 The Unavowable Community 12 translation modified Compare Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 185 The Step Not Beyond 135

161 See Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable (Paris Minuit 1983) 26n1 The Unavowable Community translated by Pierre Joris (New York Station Hill Press 1988) 57n5 Compare Derrida Drsquoun ton apocalyptique adopteacute naguegravere en philosophie 93 Derrida and Negative Theology 65 emphasis in the original translation modified For Blanchotrsquos other brief extract see Derrida Drsquoun ton apocalyptique 77ndash8 Derrida and Negative Theology 57 For Derridarsquos explicit mention of the phrase from Le Pas aushydelagrave see Parages 46 Parages 38

162 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 16 The Step Not Beyond 7 translation modified Blanchot himself also re-cites this fragment in the essay lsquoQuirsquo (1989) in La Condition critique 440ndash3 Who Comes After the Subject edited by Eduardo Cadava Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York routledge 1991) 58ndash60 On that occasion in order doubly to make the point Blanchot also attributed it to Claude Morali who in the interim had borrowed it for the title of a book of his own to which Levinas contributed a preface Qui est moi aujourdrsquohui (Paris Fayard 1984)

163 See Duras La Maladie de la mort (Paris Minuit 1982) The Malady of Death translated by Barbara Bray (New York Grove Press 1986) I examine Blanchotrsquos commentary on the story in my


Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 213ndash32

164 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 52ndash3 The Unavowable Community 30 emphasis in the original translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos use of the Levinasian doublet of Saying (Dire) and said (dit) in the next chapter

165 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 54 The Unavowable Community 31 emphasis in the original translation modified 13 February 1962 was the date of the funeral of the eight anti-war demonstrators killed five days earlier following the violent intervention of the police at the intersection of the boulevard Voltaire and the rue de Charonne in Paris The cortegravege leading to Pegravere Lachaise cemetery is reported to have attracted more than half a million or so unofficial mourners Also present at the demonstration was Celan who remembered the event in a poem entitled lsquoIn einsrsquo Gesammelte Werke I 270 lsquoDreizehnter Feber Im Herzmund erwachtes Schibbolethrsquo it began before sounding the exact same note as Blanchot twenty years later lsquoMit dir Peuple de Paris No pasaraacuten [Thirteenth of February In the heartrsquos mouth An awakened shibboleth With you Peuple de Paris No pasaraacuten]rsquo On the poetrsquos involvement in the demonstration see Celan Die Gedichte Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe edited by Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 2003) 701 and on Celanrsquos use of dates here and elsewhere see Derrida Schibboleth pour Paul Celan (Paris Galileacutee 1986) 41ndash9 Sovereignties in Question The Poetics of Paul Celan edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York Fordham University Press 2005) 20ndash5 On the still controversial background to the demonstration see Jim House and Neil MacMaster Paris 1961 Algerians State Terror and Memory (Oxford Oxford University Press 2006) 247ndash52 As the authors point out it is sometimes argued that commemoration of the February protest serves the purpose of obscuring the memory of the much greater violence used by French police against mainly Algerian demonstrators the previous October which resulted in many more deaths and casualties The reasons for marking the February date on both Celanrsquos and Blanchotrsquos part had however little to do with commemoration far more with the task of affirming an effective yet anonymous and necessarily evanescent multiplicity to whom an act of uncompromising political refusal might be ascribed

166 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 55ndash6 The Unavowable Community 32 emphasis in the original translation modified

An IntErruPtIon 277

167 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 22 The Unavowable Community 10 emphasis in the original translation modified Compare Le Pas aushydelagrave 148 The Step Not Beyond 108

168 Houmllderlin Hyperion Empedokles Aufsaumltze Uumlbersetzungen 917 Houmllderlinrsquos Sophocles translated by David Constantine (Tarset Bloodaxe Books 2001) emphasis in the original translation modified Antitheos in Houmllderlin used here to refer to Antigone herself notes Jochen Schmidt (p 1492) means lsquonot only ldquoopponent of the God [Gottesgegner]rdquo but also ldquocounter-God [Gegengott]rdquorsquo

169 Blanchot Le TregravesshyHaut (Paris Gallimard LrsquoImaginaire [1948] 1988) back cover The Most High translated by Allan Stoekl (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1995) dust jacket translation modified This blurb is admittedly not signed by Blanchot and doubts have been expressed as to its authorship researches have however shown that the text was based on a page by Blanchot typed and corrected by hand by the writerrsquos sister-in-law which would appear to vouch for its authenticity In subsequent printings of the novel at Blanchotrsquos instigation the text was nevertheless removed For Hegelrsquos influential reading of Antigone as a model of dialectical equalisation or reconciliation between symmetrically opposed legitimacies that of the family on the one hand and that of the State on the other see for example Hegel Werke XVII 132ndash3 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion edited by Peter C Hodgson translated by r F Brown et al 3 vols (Berkeley University of California Press 1985ndash8) II 664ndash5 Blanchotrsquos remark also incorporates a silent reference to Lacoue-Labarthersquos 1998 translation of Houmllderlinrsquos Antigone as well as to the writerrsquos 1978 essay on Houmllderlinrsquos version of the play in LrsquoImitation des modernes (Paris Galileacutee 1986) 39ndash69 Typography Mimesis Philosophy Politics edited by Christopher Fynsk (Stanford Stanford University Press 1998) 208ndash35 which Lacoue-Labarthe develops further in his Meacutetaphrasis suivi de Le theacuteacirctre de Houmllderlin

278

4

Writing ndash disaster

I

What is called disaster

uml Disaster beyond experience [inexpeacuterimenteacute] that which withdraws from all possibility of experience ndash writing at the limit It bears repeating disaster de-scribes [le deacutesastre deacuteshycrit] Which does not mean that disaster as a force of writing excludes itself is beyond writing [hors eacutecriture] outside text [un horsshytexte]


The word disaster deacutesastre which plays such an important role in reception of Blanchotrsquos work following the publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre in 1980 was not itself however a recent addition to the writerrsquos vocabulary Without ever being properly identical with itself the word had long exerted discrete albeit shifting pressure on the authorrsquos writing Already in the 1930s charged with fears or hopes of cultural and political upheaval the word suggesting dire nationalist outcomes was no stranger to Blanchotrsquos journalism2 And in the dark days of Summer 1940 as France was forced to confront defeat at the hands of the invading German forces it was most likely Blanchot who between 7 and 10 July was responsible for launching the front-page rubric in the Journal des deacutebats entitled lsquoAfter the Disaster [Apregraves le deacutesastre]rsquo which began by reminding its readers that lsquofor everyone in France who saw the disaster [le deacutesastre] coming who witnessed the tragic events in the course of which it unfolded who struggled in vain to warn and advise the grief is immensersquo3 By November 1945


however as roger Laporte first pointed out4 Blanchot had begun to deploy the word with rather different implications most notably in one of his earliest postwar critical interventions lsquoLa Lecture de Kafka [reading Kafka]rsquo Considering in that essay the extraordinary discrepancy between the reticence of Kafkarsquos work and the prolixity of its commentators Blanchot wondered whether the two were not somehow connected and lsquowhether Kafka himself had anticipated in such triumph such disaster [un pareil deacutesastre]rsquo lsquoKafkarsquos stories in the whole of literaturersquo he explained lsquoare among the bleakest the most inescapably fettered [riveacutes attached chained anchored] to absolute disaster [un deacutesastre absolu]rsquo lsquoAnd they are also the onesrsquo he went on lsquothat most tragically put hope on the rack not because hope is condemned by them but because it fails even to reach the point of being condemned However complete the catastrophe a slim margin remains ndash of which it is impossible to say whether it keeps hope intact or on the contrary dashes it for everrsquo5

A year later still exercised by the radical hopelessness to which Kafkarsquos writing gave expression yet without which hope itself would be no more than a forlorn memory Blanchot again resorted to the word referring now to lsquothe disaster [deacutesastre] and terrible final scenes of torture and deathrsquo bringing LrsquoEspoir Andreacute Malrauxrsquos novelistic lament for the Spanish republic to a despairing but nevertheless affirmative close6 Disaster on these terms then whether as literary predicament or political defeat was by its nature never total necessarily exceeded itself and always said more than it was possible to say In this as in other respects it bore the burden of that otherness of being later to be recast as an otherwise than being described by Levinas in a bold thought experiment from the same postwar years when using the exact same image as Blanchot he spoke of being lsquoinescapably fettered [riveacute]rsquo at night in the absence of all people and things to something resembling the absent presence of the dark exposed to the experience without experience of what in the early writings of Levinas and Blanchot alike came to be known as the incontrovertible retrocession of the il y a existence without world being without presence phenomenality without phenomena7

In June 1952 in an essay from Les Temps modernes that was later to form the closing chapter of LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire it was again an irremediable loss of origin that the word disaster served to name simultaneously binding and unbinding what it affected and finding

WrItInG ndash DIsAstEr 281

expression in that compulsion to repeat in which Freud found evidence of the disaggregating exigencies of the death drive lsquoYes we are bound to disaster [lieacutes au deacutesastre]rsquo remarked Blanchot lsquobut whenever failure returns it is essential to realise failure is nothing but this return Beginning again and again [Le recommencement] this force [puissance] prior to all beginning that is the error [lrsquoerreur the wandering] of our dyingrsquo8 Five years further on in November 1957 considering in Mallarmeacutersquos late work a similar double logic of manifestation and dissolution necessity and chance configuration and dispersion Blanchot again reached for the word lsquo[Mallarmeacutersquos] Un coup de deacutesrsquo he suggested using phenomenological language to address something already irreducible to phenomenology lsquoto whose certain presence our hands eyes and attention all bear witness is not only unreal and uncertain but can be what it is [ne pourra ecirctre] only in so far as the general rule which makes chance unavoidable [donne au hasard statut de loi] is breached in some region of being where what is necessary and what is fortuitous are both thwarted [mis en eacutechec] by the force of disaster [la force du deacutesastre]rsquo9

During the following decade the silent ripples of deacutesastre continued to radiate outwards In his dialogue on Antelme from April 1962 lsquouniversal disaster [lrsquouniversel deacutesastre]rsquo is the phrase used by Blanchot to describe the historical event of the camps albeit that here too disaster was nothing simple but bore the traces of its own delimitation its separation from itself even its reversal lsquoas if in man [lrsquohomme humankind]rsquo one of Blanchotrsquos speakers puts it lsquomore terrible [terrible] than universal disaster were the inexorable affirmation that always keeps him upright [lrsquoinexorable affirmation qui toujours le maintient debout]rsquo10 And writing anonymously in Comiteacute in the wake of the events of May 1968 which he had spent largely in the company of Antelme and others Blanchot once more had recourse to disaster to evoke a freshly revolutionary and resolutely aporetic idea of communism which he did in these provocative and peremptory terms lsquoCommunism cannot inherit This is essential cannot lay claim even to itself is required always to let the legacy of the ages however venerable become lost in the sand [se perdre] at least momentarily but in a radical way The theoretical hiatus is absolute the de facto break decisive Between the capitalist free-market world that is our own and the present of communismrsquos demand (present without presence) the link [le trait drsquounion literally a hyphen which both connects and separates] is


that of a disaster [drsquoun deacutesastre] of a star change [drsquoun changement drsquoastre]rsquo11

Here too then disaster was a function of a complex double movement It spoke of an exhaustion that was also an interruption an encounter with the finite that was also a passage to the infinite In the context it mattered little perhaps that the cod etymology that Blanchotrsquos words seemed to accredit (disaster signifying cosmic upheaval rather than as the dictionary suggests an event placed under the influence of an unpropitious star) confused cosmology with astrology politics with apocalypse or the historical with the messianic For if Blanchot was willing to subscribe to this etymological obfuscation as he does on several occasions in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre alongside repeated warnings not to take for granted the time-honoured association between etymon ie that which is true and the derivation of words it was because the distant glow of dis-aster in this sense that is separated from itself by an invisible hyphen came once more from Mallarmeacute who in a sonnet written in tribute to Edgar Allan Poe in 1877 had famously referred to the artwork or poem hewn from a meteorite and a remnant perhaps of some unknown far-off cosmic catastrophe as lsquoCalme bloc ici-bas chu drsquoun deacutesastre obscurrsquo lsquo[A] stern block here fallen from a mysterious disasterrsquo as the poet tried his hand at translating his own verse soon after12

The reference to Mallarmeacute in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ndash his name henceforth stamped on the words deacutesastre and eacutecrire alike (lsquoce jeu insenseacute drsquoeacutecrirersquo Blanchot recalls notably in the epigraph to LrsquoEntretien infini) ndash is both persistent and abyssal Twice over for instance in the course of the book Blanchot cites in italics another of the poetrsquos carefully chiselled sayings in which poetical political and philosophical motifs again combine and which in the version proposed by Blanchot asserts lsquoThere is no explosion but a book [Il nrsquoest drsquoexplosion qursquoun livre]rsquo13 In so far as they inscribed writing within both a political and a more- or otherwise-than-political future these were incisive and for Blanchot prophetic words They initially came about as the result of a dinner held on 9 December 1893 when Mallarmeacute and various friends were asked by a journalist to comment on the news that an anarchist bomb had exploded at the French National Assembly that evening The diverse responses to the event appeared in a special supplement of Le Journal the following day Mallarmeacutersquos actual words according to the manuscript were slightly different from those subsequently attributed to him What he finally


wrote that evening it seems was this lsquoI know of no other bomb than a book [Je ne sais pas drsquoautre bombe qursquoun livre]rsquo In 1930 the journalist involved Paul Brulat reported the phrase in his book Lumiegraveres et grandes ombres as follows lsquoThere is no other explosion than a fine book [Il nrsquoy a drsquoautre explosion qursquoun beau livre]rsquo Eleven years later in his influential biography of the poet which Blanchot had occasion to review at the time for the Journal des deacutebats Henri Mondor cites another version and has Mallarmeacute declare lsquoI am aware of no other bomb than a book [Je ne connais drsquoautre bombe qursquoun livre]rsquo while in 1953 in an unpublished essay on the poet that owed more than a little to a reading of Blanchot Jean-Paul Sartre reported likewise pausing merely to remove the literary flourish and give the phrase a more earthy or colloquial turn lsquoIrsquom unaware of any bomb other than a book [Je ne connais pas drsquoautre bombe qursquoun livre]rsquo14 In recasting Mallarmeacutersquos statement in 1980 it is hard to say whether Blanchot was misremembering the poetrsquos words or deliberately rephrasing them Perhaps more importantly however the various modifications undergone by Mallarmeacutersquos words were already proof of those words themselves ie that quotations like books however much they gather up meaning also have their fate more akin to their dispersion For in the lengthy trail it left down the years Mallarmeacutersquos literary bomb not only announced but also illustrated with self-instantiating logic the shattering centrifugal force of the explosion ndash the disaster ndash it evoked And as though doubly to prove the point when Blanchot came to incorporate into LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre the 1978 text in which his commentary on Mallarmeacutersquos remark had first appeared he chose to delete at least half of this already fragmentary text fragmenting it twice over as confirmation perhaps that disaster was not just a word but that every word was itself also a disaster and likewise every quotation too15

By 1980 disaster in Blanchot was therefore no solitary star but already a constellation travelling through the heavens turning on itself echoing the eternal silence of infinite space lsquoNothing will have taken place but the placersquo Mallarmeacute had it lsquoexcept perhaps a constellation [Rien nrsquoaura eu lieu que le lieu excepteacute peutshyecirctre une constellation]rsquo16 But this did not mean that steering a course by the stars was any simple matter For one thing Blanchotrsquos title LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was itself already multiple Admittedly this is true of any title in so far as it always refers to itself and to the work it allegedly presents the words Das Schloszlig (The Castle) for


instance name both the title of Kafkarsquos novel and that novel itself not to mention the mysterious edifice to which Kafkarsquos protagonist diligently seeks access But there was also more Not only was the word deacutesastre already a virtual quotation from Mallarmeacute by 1980 in the wake of Derrida and others much the same was also true of the word eacutecriture As a result alongside whatever else it might mean each word in Blanchotrsquos title also pointed to itself lsquowritingrsquo was writing and lsquodisasterrsquo itself disaster As for the phrase lsquolrsquoeacutecriture du deacutesastrersquo this too was a quotation from the volume called LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre where like much else in the book it is repeated twice that is both as itself and as other than itself as a kind of spectral parasite inhabiting or better (if one can say this) exhabiting the text not as identity but as otherness not as possibility writes Blanchot but as impossibility17

The grammatical relationship between the two nouns in the title also left ample room for speculation Was disaster to be thought as the object of writing or its subject or even both together Did disaster qualify writing or writing qualify disaster Was it the ambition of Blanchotrsquos text to write about disaster or was it already the case that disaster was responsible for writing And if these two grammatical structures could not be told apart this could only mean that if disaster was already writing then writing was already disaster But what in that case was meant by the word disaster By way of definition the (French) dictionary gives eacuteveacutenement funeste malheur grave deacutegacirct ruine eacutechec complet entraicircnant de graves conseacutequences ie fateful event serious mishap damage ruin complete failure resulting in grave consequences But what guarantee was there that Blanchotrsquos singular usage of deacutesastre inspired it seems by a fanciful etymology falls within the dictionaryrsquos jurisdiction The purpose of dictionaries after all is not to prescribe merely to describe Might it not be that Blanchot just like Mallarmeacute was exploiting the word disaster or disshyaster not for its accepted translatable meanings but for other more secret untranslatable reasons In any case what is it that constitutes the identity of a word if not its always different repetition in an infinite number of always other contexts Might it not be as deployed in Blanchotrsquos writing that the hidden freight of the word dis-aster interrupted and displaced with the help of this supplementary invisible unspoken hyphen was enough to release it from the burden of its conventional given meanings thereby redeem it so to speak and inscribe it otherwise It is at any event hard to decide what disaster or dis-aster in Blanchotrsquos text actually names


other than the very displacement it enacts as it separates the word from itself and seemingly attributes it to a new hitherto unspoken language But as such is it certain it evokes a catastrophic historical event as most readers of Blanchot perhaps too quickly have tended to assume Is it not just as plausibly an always prior trace no sooner inscribed than effaced always already withdrawn from itself a structure so to speak of essential dispersion without which all thought of history or catastrophe would be impossible How far might it be determined as any kind of negativity or positivity at all In other words is disaster in the world as part of the world or does it precede and exceed all worldliness as such If so what are the consequences for thinking writing speaking in the present

So many abyssal difficulties then face Blanchotrsquos reader from the threshold of the text But there is more to come First to greet the reader on the opening and on numerous subsequent pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre matching the enigmatic multiplicity of the bookrsquos title with the no less puzzling singularity of a mute typographical tally is something which is neither a letter nor a word at all but an unpronounceable non-verbal trace in the form of an icon or emblem Such devices it will be remembered are a common feature of Blanchotrsquos fragmentary texts In August 1958 in Botteghe Oscure the fragmentary character of the extract from the as yet unpublished LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was announced by a five-branch star-like motif at the head of a number of component passages In the birthday tribute to Heidegger issued the following year Blanchot signalled the dispersed status of his text by attaching to each of the individual elements an initial cross while in the 1962 version of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli this initial disseminatory function was fulfilled by a different four-cornered icon And there is similar variation elsewhere The fragmentary texts in LrsquoEntretien infini displayed on both first and second publication a redoubled neuter sign A different solution however as we have seen was adopted for Le Pas aushydelagrave where the fragments (except for the very first) are signalled by a regular diamond motif ( ) though some earlier versions of texts carried alternate devices including at times no device at all Similarly but differently in another way previous versions of texts woven into LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ranging from the earliest the 1975 response to Levinas entitled lsquoDiscours sur la patiencersquo to the last of all the prepublication selection published in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise the Gallimard house journal barely


two months before the title appeared in bookshops all displayed a double rhomb-shaped symbol uml instead of the single device familiar to subsequent readers as though to indicate in advance to those readers that repetition always came first and singularity was never thinkable without prior doubleness or even duplicity18

It is hard to know whether the sheer diversity of typographical devices found in Blanchotrsquos fragmentary texts was deliberately calculated by the writer or arose as a result of the contingent preferences of sub-editors publishers or printers This however is arguably less important than it might seem What counts far more is the complex double function of these non-verbal typographical or scriptural markers First to the extent that they detach each piece of writing from that or those accompanying it and thereby allocate it a place in a textual series they confer on the work as a whole so to speak a certain kind of sequential structure and it is this that allows readers to recognise in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre for instance something more than a random collection of relatively short texts of varying length Organisation however as Barthes was wont to observe particularly where the fragmentary is concerned is only ever a certain form of disorganisation In this sense to gather up a given number of fragments within a larger whole while mitigating the dispersion of those discrete elements nevertheless by implicitly acknowledging it also accentuates it with the result that each piece of text separated from that which precedes or follows by a typographic device figures in the place it happens to occupy only as one among many as an otherwise anonymous contingent and provisional member of an enigmatically indeterminate class to which it belongs by chance more than by design and might easily be replaced by another Here it is easy to understand how for Blanchot as for others fragmentary writing soon came to be seen as an instantiation of what in Le Pas aushydelagrave is called lsquonomadic affirmation [lrsquoaffirmation nomade]rsquo19 At any event this repetitive marking and re-marking of the text amounts to a proliferating double signature it implies a degree of lsquofalsersquo unity as Blanchot calls it20 gathering up the text while all the more effectively compromising that unity by exposing the written page to the haphazard multiplicity of the (fragmentary) outside

Moreover while the repeated presence of the same recurrent typographical device at the head of each fragment announces the radical contingency of each item in the would-be collection it also


serves to emphasise the extent to which each item is at the same time radically irreplaceable irreducibly resistant to any form of aggregation The paradox is one that traverses all Blanchotrsquos thinking of the fragmentary what it demonstrates is how any counting of the many (the multiple the innumerable) must necessarily pass by way of an affirmation of the one (the singular the unique) and vice versa The infinite and the finite join together not as two complementary aspects of a dialectic but as differentiated repetitions of the same (and of the other) This explains why from one context to another one place of publication to another the typographical devices to which Blanchot has recourse in their very repetitiveness are so frequently subject to variation admittedly of seemingly trivial character were it not that here as elsewhere less is always more For even as each text is insistently inscribed within a given singular context it is apparent that any such placement qua placement is only provisional and necessarily impermanent In other words what the singularity of localised inscription brings with it paradoxically is an awareness of the necessary threat or promise of erasure Blanchotrsquos books of fragmentary writing offer themselves to reading as collections of text but what they collect is the radically uncollectable

The elongated four-cornered diamond- or rhomb-shaped device that appears at the head of each of the textual fragments that make up LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is therefore anything but decorative Moreover alongside its status as non-verbal trace or inscription it has numerous other possible connotations pictorial musical architectural nautical or simply geometrical For one it mirrors the figure of the lozenge first employed in heraldry (the word itself is said to derive from an Old French term for a stone slab or slate) It also recalls a device used it seems in plain-song notation and repeats a visual motif common in architectural design Being in the form of a rhombus ie in geometry an oblique equilateral parallelogram it also has in memory what in both French and English is known as a rhumb a nautical term referring says the OED to lsquothe line followed by a vessel sailing on one course or a wind blowing continuously in one direction or any one of the set of lines drawn through a point on a map or chart and indicating the course of an object moving always in the same directionrsquo a word as Blanchot was aware that had become current again in modern French as a result of the work of the poet and essayist Paul Valeacutery one of Mallarmeacutersquos most influential literary heirs who during the 1920s


published selections from his fragmentary early morning jottings under various titles one of which was Rhumbs lsquoWhy give this name to a collection of impressions and ideasrsquo Valeacutery asked in a prefatory note recalling the wordrsquos nautical connotations He went on to explain

Just as the needle of the compass remains fairly constant while the course to be followed changes so it is possible to see the whims or successive applications of our thinking the variations of our attention the ups-and-downs of our mental lives the distractions of our memory the diversity of our desires emotions and enthusiasms mdash as deviations [eacutecarts] from supposed constancy in the essential underlying intent of the mind a kind of self-presence [sorte de preacutesence agrave soishymecircme] distinct from each one of its moments The notes and opinions that make up this book were so many deviations [eacutecarts] from a certain privileged direction of my mind whence Rhumbs21

From Blanchotrsquos perspective these words were an encouragement but they also constituted a warning For like Schlegel (and it is revealing that the first explicit mention of Valeacutery in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre immediately follows a sequence of fragments devoted to Schlegel22) Valeacutery was a prime example of an author who had responded affirmatively to the challenge of fragmentary writing while retreating from its more radical consequences In the case of German romanticism and French literary modernism the reason for this was much the same it was that in the end the dispersion of the fragmentary for Schlegel and Valeacutery alike was too quickly identified with aphoristic self-reflexion and subordinated to the totalising embrace of subjectivity and the essential (dis)unity of consciousness and thought Fragmentary writing in other words coincided with its interruptions displacements swerves and digressions but this did not mean it was immune to the seductive appeal of prospective or retrospective unity On the contrary what it confirmed for Blanchot was that writing according to the fragmentary was not without numerous risks and dangers of its own

Blanchotrsquos cautious response to Valeacuteryrsquos fragmentary texts is clearly in evidence in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre where diverse passages from the authorrsquos published and unpublished notebooks are quoted by Blanchot in four separate fragments23 This number was almost certainly not due to chance And in each instance while


acknowledging the significance of Valeacuteryrsquos contribution Blanchot intervenes discreetly to imply the possibility of an alternative view or to dissent explicitly from what his predecessor had to say or to draw attention to the heterogeneity of Valeacuteryrsquos thinking not to disparage but to welcome its inconsistency Witness the following staged dialogue with the authorrsquos text

uml Valeacutery lsquoThe thinker is inside a cage and paces up and down indefinitely between four words [entre quatre mots]rsquo This is expressed pejoratively but is not pejorative repetitive patience infinite perseverance And the selfsame Valeacutery ndash is he the same ndash will go on to affirm in passing lsquoTo think To think ndash is to lose the threadrsquo A facile commentary surprise the interval discontinuity24

Four corners four sides four citations four words alongside this already insistent reference to the figure four another significant fourfold was also not far from the pages of Blanchotrsquos book For like the used in lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo in 1958 so too in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre the fourfold form of Blanchotrsquos rhumboid device pointed to further sustained engagement with Heidegger who also makes an explicit fourfold appearance in the book as the potent destinal thinker of aletheia Ereignis the es gibt and Sein zum Tode25 (readers of the 1947 meditation lsquoAus der Erfahrung des Denkens [From the Experience of Thinking]rsquo may also remember that for Heidegger lsquothinking is restriction to a thought that once stood still like a star in the heavens [wie ein Stern am Himmel der Welt]rsquo26) But Heideggerrsquos thought is also dispatched along a series of further ellipses by Blanchot who repeatedly crosses it with that of others (the Greeks Hegel Schelling Houmllderlin Nietzsche Levinas Derrida Celan too not forgetting Mallarmeacute and Valeacutery) lsquo To thinkrsquo he writes at one stage pursuing one of the bookrsquos more insistent motifs lsquomight be said to name (to call) disaster [nommer (appeler) le deacutesastre] as ulterior motive [comme arriegravereshypenseacutee an unspoken implicit thought]rsquo27 and it is hard not to recognise in this allusive reference to the senses of German heiszligen (meaning to be called and to call for something) ndash resembling so to speak the ulterior motive of this fragment itself ndash the distant trace of Heideggerrsquos Was heiszligt Denken (What Is Called Thinking) the title of which according to German idiom as we have seen turns precisely on that double meaning


even as Blanchot seeks to do the same but otherwise by exploiting in another language the idiomatic resources of deacutesshyastre

But though Blanchotrsquos formulation may sound Heideggerian there is arguably little here as elsewhere that is properly authentically attributable to that influential predecessor Notwithstanding a shared preoccupation with eschatology (ie the four last things death judgement heaven and hell) the writing of disaster has little in common with the fourfold or Geviert articulated by Heidegger which it will be remembered crosses heaven and earth mortals and immortals and places at their crucial intersection the thesis of deathrsquos possibility that lsquopossibility of impossibilityrsquo which Blanchot with Levinasrsquos help was so intent on setting aside overwriting it with the radically other proposition of lsquothe impossibility of all possibilityrsquo28 In this context the 224th fragment of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is crucial but in another way Falling shortly after the mid-point of the book (calculated in terms of the number of fragments) and shortly before that mid-point (calculated in terms of the number of pages in the volume) occurring therefore as a kind of double caesura it intervenes to disjoin Blanchotrsquos thinking from that of Heidegger precisely in respect of deathrsquos possibility in order to articulate a very different fourfold which the text aligns or declines as follows

uml The following names [noms both names and nouns] so many sites of dislocation [lieux de la dislocation] the four winds of spiritrsquos absence blowing from nowhere thinking when it is unbound [se laisse deacutelier unleashed loosened released] by writing to the point of the fragmentary [jusqursquoau fragmentaire] Outside Neuter Disaster return These names admittedly form no system and in their abruptness like a proper name that refers to nobody slip beyond all possible meaning [hors de tout sens possible] without this slippage itself making sense leaving only a sliding half-light [une entreshylueur glissante] that illuminates nothing not even this outside-meaning [ce horsshysens an absence of meaning that does not imply presence of meaning] whose limit is nowhere indicated [dont la limite ne srsquoindique pas] So many names which surrounded by devastation in a landscape ravaged by the absence that preceded them and which they would bear within themselves if emptied of all interiority they did not stand erect outside themselves [exteacuterieurs agrave euxshymecircmes]


(abyssal stones petrified by the infinity of their fall) are each like the vestiges [les restes] of another language [un langage autre] at once vanished and never uttered that we could not even try to restore without reintroducing them into the world or exalting them to the heights of some supra-world [un surshymonde] of which in their timeless clandestine solitude they might only be the unstable interruption the invisible withdrawal29

Four vectors inscribed upon an absent horizon making navigation impossible four winds bereft of pneumatological inspiration allowing no course to be struck four terms adding up to no system four names without alethic brilliance casting only the dimmest of dying glows to mark their disappearance four stone slabs like so many mementoes of obscure disaster and four tokens of an absent language resisting all presence retreating into non-identity like a dimly post-religious tetragrammaton In all this as witnessed by the figure four something nevertheless seems to endure not unity nor simple duality nor trinitarian synthesis but perhaps the space of a book albeit one henceforth exploded in which case what comes to occupy that space enabling as well as dismantling the closure of the book itself is writing as fragmentary open to the inside as well as the outside as repetition doubling and fourfold eacutecartement division erasure discard and dissolution And this in a word ndash the word is eacutecarter from popular Latin exquartare meaning to divide into quarters untie or undo ndash is what Blanchotrsquos repetitive four-cornered four-sided graphic device responding to the fourfold of dis-aster inscribes or performs not punctual unity or consistency but the explosive fracture of a fourfold cross crossing or crossing out a four-sided framing which is also a quartering or discarding a putting at a distance or placing to one side a disjoining or loosening a disassembling or suppression ndash without negativity

Does this nevertheless imply a privileging of the space of the book of literature of the realm still described oddly enough as the aesthetic What then is the status of the book as such Blanchot addresses the question in respect of Mallarmeacutersquos unrealised project of Le Livre in lsquoldquoIl nrsquoest drsquoexplosion rdquorsquo that fragmentary residue of a fragment already mentioned which carrying out the threat or promise to unity it embodied was not integrated fully into LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre but remains nonetheless linked to it albeit


only as the radical outside so to speak of a non-existent inside Blanchot writes

The explosion at a more determined level marks an act or effect of a real unreal action A book as the principle of meaning is the only principle of the dissolution of all meaning not in any covert manner but even invisibly like a bolt from the heavens by a disseminating flagrancy the blast [lrsquoeacuteclat] of which may be eclipsed yet without in its power of infinite rupture ceasing to affect (compromise) reserve latency lapses of time expectation of destruction30

Despite possible appearances to the contrary as we already know the four corners of the book promise no gathering they enact dispersion Indeed the very burden of fragmentary writing as it traverses the book is that it is simultaneously irreducible either to the presence or absence of any book This is confirmed by the fate that LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre reserves for its own fourfold status For though it recurs persistently through the text as we have seen the number four has only tenuous grasp on Blanchotrsquos writing of disaster In all the book contains 403 unnumbered fragments of wildly varying length (from four words to five and a half pages) each distinguished and separated from the others by a making 403 incisions in all which is to say 31 13 or 13 31 uneven and irregular inscriptions their sum strangely haunted by this double numerological palindrome exhibiting twice over the ghostly presence of the number four (3 thinsp1 thinsp4 and 1 thinsp3 4) yet totalling only an imperfect multiple of 4 or one from which precisely the figure one the spectre of unity has been deducted At one stage Blanchot cites Le Rhizome (by Deleuze and Guattari) precisely to this effect already underwritten by the logic of the fragmentary agreeing that lsquothe one is part of the multiple by always being subtractedrsquo31 The account then has yet to be closed the end yet to be reached

These 403 free-floating fragments are separated further from one another by the intermittent use of different typefaces roman here italic there supplemented and interrupted here and there by an uncertain mixture of the two with the relative rarity of italics (for the most part according to French typographical conventions reserved for quotations from other hands) mysteriously singularising


some 34 fragments as though to suggest they may be marked down to some other source voice genre or tone The rationale behind these variations if one exists is not however explained in the text though as in the case of Le Pas aushydelagrave most readers will be tempted to make sense of these differences in style by invoking this or that dominant interpretative paradigm fiction versus theory literature versus philosophy poetry versus prose and so on However mingling as they do in seemingly indeterminate fashion the citational with the non-citational (to the extent that the distinction may be maintained at all) it is soon apparent that all that can be said of Blanchotrsquos italics (or lack of them) is that they imperil each of these hermeneutic oppositions not by abolishing them but by turning each and every fragment whether in roman or italics into a singular question about its own context or contexts including perhaps most importantly of all the blank space or spacing (lsquothe rhythmic principle of the work in its very structurersquo Blanchot called it in LrsquoEntretien infini) which framing each fragment detaches it from those surrounding it or attaches it to those not surrounding it (and vice versa) in addition therefore also separating it from itself as other than what it was an infinitely finite broken vessel The effect wrote Blanchot was to give writing literature art if such exist the unredeemed abandoned and fragmentary status of the world according to Isaac Luria in which suggests Blanchot as in the Lurianic Kabbala the act of creation is no longer present to itself in the immanence of its potency or power but perpetually withdrawn shrunken and effaced a shattered origin retreating like a barely visible constellation into the passivity of an unleavened past lsquo Withdrawal [Retirement] and not expansionrsquo explains Blanchot (dimly if provocatively recalling Heidegger) lsquoSuch perhaps is art like the God of Isaac Luria who creates only by excluding himselfrsquo32 lsquoIn other wordsrsquo he first put it in 1957 writing in the margins of Gershom Scholemrsquos pioneering study of Jewish mysticism

the essential problem of creation is the problem of nothingness [le neacuteant] Not how something can be created from nothing but how nothing is created so that from nothing there are grounds [lieu both location and cause] for something It is necessary for there to be nothing [il faut qursquoil (nrsquo)y ait rien] that nothing should be [que le rien soit] this is the true secret and the initial mystery a mystery that begins painfully in God himself mdash through sacrifice


retraction and limitation a mysterious willingness to be exiled from the all that he is and efface and absent himself not to say disappear33

Of the four winds Blanchot names in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ndash outside neuter disaster and return ndash it is the third disaster as the title testifies which is privileged in relation to the three others The extent of that privilege is however uncertain For what is announced in the word disaster or dis-aster as Blanchotrsquos use of the term in Comiteacute seems to suggest is an impossible aporetic trait drsquounion or hyphen connecting without connecting the three other terms alongside which it is set forming a square where each term occupies a particular corner but could equally well be positioned at any one of the others and take the place of any one of the other terms There is no frame then which is not already exceeded by whatever provisionally holds it in place For in Blanchotrsquos writing outside neuter disaster and return while far from exact synonyms are nevertheless in a serial relationship with one another in such a way that each says the same while saying it differently This of course is precisely what each strives to name according to its own idiomatic resources repetition without identity that which is always already dispersed that which is irreducible to opposition and that which is neither same nor other but always otherwise Blanchotrsquos four winds in other words do not merely present themselves they present each of the others even as by that very token they turn aside from presentation with the result that each may be read as itself but also under erasure as a provisional substitute for any or each of the others from which it nevertheless necessarily differs And this scattering of meaning to the four winds has itself a name dis-aster or deacutesshyastre albeit that by the logic or a-logic of dis-aster that name might equally well be written outside neuter disaster return dehors neutre deacutesastre retour

This explains paradoxically enough why a significant amount of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is given over to questions of definition This is at any time a precarious and abyssal operation one that in seeking to provide reliable differentiation often ends up producing the very opposite To inscribe the finite in other words is an infinite undertaking incapable of reaching conclusion No thought of ending is ever an ending of thought Indeed it is arguably no accident as far as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is concerned that the word


disaster or deacutesastre in this text that bears the name of this gesture is both first and last to be written LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre in other words both starts and finishes by writing lsquodisasterrsquo The writing of disaster (the book) once more is the writing of disaster (the thing) lsquo Disaster ruins everything while leaving everything intactrsquo this is how Blanchotrsquos text opens in roman towards the top of a page and this is how it closes in italics at the very bottom lsquo Solitude radiating out emptiness of the heavens [vide du ciel] death deferred disasterrsquo34 Disaster then in this text to which it gives its name is both incipit and explicit beginning and ending alpha and omega and that of which it speaks passes from everything at the outset to emptiness at the end from a negation suspended to a suspension of a negation That these (rhetorical) effects were calculated by the author is apparent from the fact that in 1975 in the first published extract from the book to come when Blanchot chose to cite his subsequently terminal phrase which at the time occurred a page or so before the end he did so in this variant form lsquo uml Solitude radiating out emptiness in the heavens [vide dans le ciel] death deferred sun [soleil]rsquo35 The argument seems a compelling one Oddly however the same textual evidence might equally indicate the opposite that the word lsquodisasterrsquo was always already something other than disaster and that in so far as it retained the memory of an erasure (of the extinct star it once was) so disaster though it marked a provisional ending was anything but an end in much the same way that it had not been a proper beginning either given that that the opening word lsquodisasterrsquo in this writing of disaster had always already been preceded by a single or double fourfold typographical motif in the figure of a star Between star and disaster then there was no opposition rather a double explosion that as language and something more or less than language effaced what it inscribed and inscribed what it effaced without beginning or end

Disaster is deceptive in other ways too However much in its opening pages Blanchotrsquos text seeks to present it if only to keep faith with the promise announced in the title disaster resists presentation lsquoDisaster takes care [prend soin] of everythingrsquo36 it is written at one point in italics without it being clear whether this means that disaster shows concern for everything or disposes of everything or both at the same time A similar double or neutral logic may be found at play elsewhere too Disaster it seems has the power (were this word not already a misnomer) both to outstrip and yet


fall short of the transitivity of subject-object relations lsquoIt does not affect [nrsquoatteint pas reach or touch] this one or thatrsquo the reader is told lsquoldquoIrdquo am not under threat from it It is in so far as spared and left to one side I am threatened by disaster that it threatens in me [en moi] that which is beyond me [hors de moi] an other than me who passively am made other There is no affecting disaster or being affected by it [Il nrsquoy a pas atteinte du deacutesastre the genitive is both subjective and objective] Out of reach [hors drsquoatteinte] is whoever it threatens impossible to say whether at close quarters or from afar ndash the infinite character of the threat has in a certain way breached all limitsrsquo37 Disaster then is always too long and too short and derives its radicality from that very ambiguity Its fate is both to overwhelm and to underwhelm what it affects ndash or not It belongs to temporality then only in so far as it both exceeds and suspends it and remains irreducible to being lsquoWhen disaster happens [survient]rsquo we read lsquoit does not come [ne vient pas] Disaster is its own imminence but since the future [le futur the future as esse being] as we conceive of it in the order of lived time belongs to disaster disaster has always already withdrawn or dissuaded it there is no future [avenir that which is to come] for disaster just as there is no time or space in which it might fulfil itselfrsquo38 lsquoHe does not believe in disasterrsquo another fragment announces immediately after sceptically couching its own words in italics lsquoit is impossible to believe in it whether one is alive or dying No belief that is adequate to it and at the same time a sort of disinterest disinterested in disaster Night sleepless night [Nuit nuit blanche] ndash such is disaster darkness lacking no obscurity with no light to brighten itrsquo39

If the law is disaster says another passage it is a law that does not concern us and escapes calculation whether of failure or loss40 Limitless and excessive disaster is however no absolute41 it deserves no monumentalisation but nor is it an embodiment of negativity lsquoNothing is enough for disaster which means that in the same way that destruction in its ruinous purity is not appropriate to it so the idea of totality cannot demarcate its limits all things affected and destroyed gods and men returned to absence nothingness in the place of everything all this is too much and too little Disaster deserves no capital letter though it may make death pointless even as it supplements it it does not superimpose itself upon the spacing of dying [lrsquoespacement du mourir]rsquo42 lsquoDisaster the black colour of


which should be attenuated ndash by being reinforced ndashrsquo the fragment continues lsquoexposes us to a certain idea of passivity We are passive in relation to disaster but disaster is perhaps passivity itself and in that respect past and always pastrsquo43 rather than thought gone mad it is an inherent madness of thinking located not within presence but on the side of forgetting lsquoforgetting without memory the motionless withdrawal of what was not traced ndash the immemorial perhapsrsquo44

Paradox equivocation undecidability strength and weakness power and impotence abundance and penury these then are disasterrsquos signature effects And as it is repeated as it must disaster like any signature necessarily always differs from itself and it is time and again that difference which Blanchotrsquos writing underscores and which detaches diverts and deflects each thought from itself lsquoI do not know how I came to such a passrsquo reports an unidentified first-person singular in one passage lsquobut it may be that I have reached the thought that prompts one to stand at a distance from thought for this is what it gives distance But to travel to the end of thinking [aller au bout de la penseacutee] (in the form of a thinking of the end [du bout] or the edge [du bord]) ndash is this not possible only by exchanging one thought for another Whence the injunction do not change your thinking repeat it but only if you can [si tu le peux]rsquo45 If repetition strictly speaking is impossible argues Blanchot this is but silent proof turn and turn about that impossibility is what repeats itself And if thought belongs to repetition it is to repetition not as a guarantee of identity but as return the perpetual recurrence of what is without place or position

Disaster is always more or less than it seems Description of it is necessarily oblique hypothetical apophatic Which is to say insists Blanchot neither negative nor positive

uml Disaster is not dark [sombre] it would release us from all if it could enter into relation with someone it would be an object of gay knowledge [gai savoir] as a term in language and the term of language But disaster is unknown the unknown name for that which in thought itself dissuades us from its being thought putting us at a distance by its closeness Solitary in being exposed to the thought of disaster that dissolves solitude and overwhelms every kind of thought like the intense silent and disastrous affirmation of the outside46


Disaster in Blanchot is not simply an elusive singularity unapproach-able by dint of proximity indeterminable in its resistance to relation unthinkable by virtue of being synonymous with thought itself Like a dark companion traversing the void it also exerts a strong gravitational pull mysteriously and without exception on the words concepts and writing that surround it dragging them out of their predictable orbits diverting their meaning upsetting their course Equally however its own motion is aberrant centrifugal exorbitant For the prefix de- or deacute- marking and re-marking not only the word dis-aster but a whole stellar canopy of other related and unrelated terms is already at least double If on the one hand it derives from Latin de- meaning down aside apart and mainly having a privative sense (not unlike English or German un-) on the other it also translates Greek dis- meaning twoways or twain Doubling itself in this way in dis-aster and numerous cognate or merely similar words according to a logic defiant of all ontologisation de- dis- or deacute- is dispersed and disseminated throughout Blanchotrsquos text both withdrawing words from themselves and multiplying their fractured spacing What a strange coup de deacutes or dice-throw of language Blanchotrsquos French readers might be forgiven for remarking mindful of Mallarmeacutersquos famously jagged and interrupted line spread over four pages surrounded by numerous different typefaces testifying to the fact that lsquoa dice throw never will abolish chancersquo

But chance perversely enough if it remains faithful to itself is also necessity and it is just one consequence of this logic of ineluctable contingency (lsquodisaster concern for the infinitesimal [souci de lrsquoinfime] sovereignty of the accidentalrsquo47 suggests Blanchot) that dis-aster in Blanchot implies inspires inscribes so many words or expressions in deacute- or equally dissolves itself into so many forms sharing that prefix thus entering into Blanchotrsquos text in the course of the first twenty pages alone such terms ndash terms in language but also denoting the term of language ndash as these which comprise in passing more than one redeemed neologism or paleologism disaster (deacutesastre) disinterest (deacutesinteacuterecirct) decline (deacuteclin) destruction (destruction) outside (dehors) disarray (deacutesarroi) surpassing (deacutepassement) danger (danger) distance (distance) drift (deacuterive) desolation (deacutesolation) difference (diffeacuterence) dissimulation (dissimulation) derangement (deacutesarrangement) delay (deacutelai) discourse (discours) defect (deacutefaut) despair (deacutesespoir) failing (deacutefaillance) detachment (deacutetachement) to which may be added the adjectives indecipherable (indeacutechiffrable)


disastrous (deacutesastreux) destroyed (deacutetruit) or the verbs dissuade (dissuader) disinterest (deacutesinteacuteresser) demand (demander) deflect (deacuteporter) disorient (deacutesorienter) surpass (deacutepasser) undo (deacutefaire) outstrip (deacuteborder) desire (deacutesirer) destroy (deacutetruire) decline (deacutecliner) de-scribe (deacuteshycrire) dissolve (dissoudre) denude (deacutenuer) rend (deacutechirer) be delirious (deacutelirer) fail or swoon (deacutefaillir) foil (deacutejouer) detach (deacutetacher) unbind or release (deacutelier) and the adverb already (deacutejagrave) already a signature in itself as Derrida (Jacques) was often given to point out And the remaining two hundred pages of text continue in similar vein tracing an infinitely proliferating deacutedale or daeligdal of words (a maze or labyrinth explains OED) synonymous only with its endlessly cunning yet dis-astrous displacements worthy of the great artifex to whose name it pays homage

The text that remains however is no verbal playground luxuriating in the dubious spectacle of preciosity masquerading as thought as readers of some of Blanchotrsquos later texts translated into English might on occasion legitimately wonder It is more simply that disaster deacutesastre is itself not a privileged word but always already itself a site of dis-aster Though it may appear to dominate Blanchotrsquos text disaster provides no stable centre but is only to be found disappearing into the void running down ready to explode and ever liable to turn into a white dwarf True enough concedes Blanchotrsquos text the recourse to paronomasia characteristic of many fragments may exhibit a fetishistic attachment to mere words But words suggests disaster are immensely powerful only because they are immensely weak and vice versa In any case they are radically inescapable And for that reason there is nothing to be done save to remain alert to languagersquos complex hidden freight which makes of each and every word not a self-identical point but always already a labyrinthine trail of other words each already giving way to the next in an infinite movement a lsquocircle unwound along a straight line rigorously prolonged reform[ing] a circle eternally bereft of centrersquo48

There is no fetishism therefore no fixity but cosmic motion lsquo If one says disasterrsquo a later fragment insists

we can sense that this is not a word a name or a noun [un nom] and that there is no such thing in general as any separate nominal predominant name or noun but always a whole intricate or simple phrase in which the infinity of language in its unfinished history its open system seeks to let itself be enlisted by a sequence


[processus] of verbs yet at the same time in the unresolved tension between name and verb to fall outside language as if suspended [comme en arrecirct] without however ceasing to belong to it49

It is with some justice then that Levinas in an interview with Philippe Nemo was moved to remark that Blanchot as he put it had given lsquothe noun ldquodisasterrdquo a verb-like meaningrsquo50 not least because as another fragment written in the margins of Derridarsquos Glas also explained lsquodisaster is the impropriety of its own name [son nom both name and noun] and the disappearance of the proper name (Derrida) neither noun nor verb but a remainder [un reste] which may be said to score [rayerait] by dint of invisibility and illegibility all that manifests itself and all that is spoken a remainder without result nor residue ndash patience still the passive when Aufhebung having become the unworkable [lrsquoinopeacuterable] ceasesrsquo51

In disaster then language is not all Something else without ever appearing as such unknown unnamed and unforeseen traverses each word effacing it and reinscribing it It does so however not as the transcendent or transcendental but lsquoasrsquo (as without as) the neuter the infinitely repetitive (re-)marking of difference prior to ontology Disaster perhaps is one of the many possible or impossible names of that difference which explains why disaster is both that which is most intimate to thought and most exterior to it taking care of all persistently exceeding its borders or margin Which is not to say that it may be possible to refuse to think disaster It rather implies the opposite Not just to give a name to disaster and understand what it was called and what it called for in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre but to think both the possibility and impossibility of thinking it at all this then was Blanchotrsquos arguably most difficult and most pressing challenge

II

Another epoch

uml reading these words from long ago lsquoInspiration this rootless speaking [cette parole errante] that reaches no end is the long night of insomnia and it is to defend himself against it by turning aside from it that the writer comes truly to write an activity which


restores him to the world where he is able to sleeprsquo or these others lsquoWhere I am dreaming something lies awake [cela veille] a waking which is astonishment at the dream and where indeed what lies awake in a present without duration is an impersonal presence [une preacutesence sans personne] the non-presence to which no being [aucun ecirctre] ever accedes and the grammatical formula for which might be said to be the third-person ldquoItrdquo [le ldquoIlrdquo] rsquo Why this reminder of the past [ce rappel] Why in spite of all they say about the uninterrupted waking [la veille ininterrompue] that persists behind dreaming and about the night that inspires insomnia do these words seem to be in need of being restated repeated in order to escape the meaning that animates them and to be diverted [deacutetourneacutees] from themselves and the discourse that uses them But in being restated they reintroduce a confidence thought to have been left behind [agrave laquelle on croyait avoir cesseacute drsquoappartenir] and take on an air of truthfulness say something lay claim to coherence saying you thought all this long ago you are therefore entitled to think it once again thereby restoring that reasonable continuity [continuiteacute raisonnable] which produces systems making the past function as a guarantee letting it become active capable of citing and inciting [citateur incitateur] preventing the invisible ruin that perpetual waking beyond consciousness-unconsciousness gives back to the neuter [rend au neutre]


returning in 1980 to these two passages first published in 1953 and 1961 already countersigned once before in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire and LrsquoAmitieacute respectively and now repeated re-cited and recontext-ualised for a third time Blanchot was recalling a description still formulated with the help of an authoritative quasi-phenomenological present But the present tense deployed in these vestigial extracts from the writerrsquos past output and in his later framing commentary as Le Pas aushydelagrave had shown was deceptive lsquoThe presentrsquo LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre reminds the reader lsquothough it may glory in moments [srsquoil srsquoexalte en instants] (appearing disappearing) forgets it cannot be contemporaneous with itselfrsquo53 Any present tense in other words together with the presence it served to designate was inseparable from the possibility of its return This meant that something in the present without being simply absent necessarily resisted appropriation by the present This possibility of return or repetition


or what Derrida calls iterability was an indispensable prerequisite for the appearance of any present but only in so far as it necessarily divided that present from itself rupturing its apparent homogeneity and breaching its claims to self-coincidence54 Without repetition there could be no present but repetition could only compromise the presence of the present supplying it so to speak with a silent companion a spectral shadow or ghostly double standing in for an unavailable past and a forever impending future and irreducible to presence and absence alike The present then was unavoidably traversed by something (uninterrupted waking the long night of insomnia repetition without end Blanchot calls it) which essential for its appearance as such by that token also prevented it from appearing entirely as what it took or gave itself to be It belonged to time only in so far as it was also withdrawn from time Proof of this was not hard to find It lay in the present fragment which returning to itself without ever having departed also provided an abyssal instantiation of what it affirmed for Blanchotrsquos text written in the present was also haunted by two other repeated fragments from long ago likewise in the present as indispensable to it as they were inassimilable as much inside as they were outside and as distinctively proper as they were irreducibly improper The present tense of writing was no present Blanchotrsquos fragmentary text was a remainder a spectral trace of what had never been present only ever a passive past response to its own non-occurrence

As Blanchot was well aware the philosophical implications of writingrsquos withdrawal of presence and the present are considerable Husserl with whose work the writer had long been familiar thought it essential as we have seen to privilege as the principle and touchstone of phenomenological inquiry what he called the lsquoliving present [die lebendige Selbstgegenwart living self-presence]rsquo55 But as Blanchotrsquos account of what he called lsquothe experience of artrsquo had already suggested in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire it was far from apparent how such a privilege might be assured in original or primordial fashion and it was not long before Derrida in La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene lsquoagainst Husserlrsquos express intentionrsquo as he pointedly put it began to suggest that lsquothe presence-of-the-present [la preacutesenceshydushypreacutesent] derives from repetition and not the reversersquo56 The present in so far as it was necessarily reliant on the passage of time was already by definition an intimation of mortality the originary meaning of I am Derrida argued was none other than I am mortal


lsquoThe appearing of the I to itself in the I amrsquo he explained lsquois originarily a relation with its own possible disappearancersquo The present was no sooner grasped than already lost lsquoOne can go furtherrsquo Derrida continued lsquoas language ldquoI am who I am [Je suis celui qui suis]rdquo is the admission [aveu] of a mortal The movement which leads from the I am to the determination of my being as res cogitans (and as immortality) is the very movement by which the origin of presence and ideality is concealed [se deacuterobe] in the presence and ideality it makes possiblersquo57 The absolute privilege conferred on the present in other words was grounded in relativity in an obfuscation or sleight-of-hand the present in the very terms in which it presented itself was inseparable from radical deferral disappearance death

The present tense in which Blanchotrsquos fragment rehearses and recapitulates its own past findings was already marked then structurally and thematically by the mortality of its author Death in turn however by dint of its unpresentable singularity was not an event that coincided with itself It too was the site of a repetitive doubling always future always past and not susceptible to be experienced in any present But if death la mort was necessary possibility suggests Blanchot drawing again on the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit so dying what Blanchot in LrsquoEcriture du deacutesastre as in Le Pas aushydelagrave calls le mourir using the substantivised infinitive to name an event outside any subjective or temporal horizon this was something other beyond power or possibility neither present nor absent as such and radically without term As Blanchot had put it in Le Pas aushydelagrave setting the two expressions side by side separated only by a silent comma their deceptive rhetorical similarity accentuating a more radical asymmetry lsquouml The unpredictability of death [la mort] the invisibility of dying [mourir]rsquo58 In a subsequent formulation obeying a force of repetition which was again an instance of what it described Blanchot once more returned to that relation and yielding to the initiative of words and the untranslatability of idiom addressed matters as follows

uml It is as though there is in death [la mort] something stronger than death dying itself [le mourir mecircme] ndash the intensity of dying the drive of the impossible undesirable even into the desired [la pousseacutee de lrsquoimpossible indeacutesirable jusque dans le deacutesireacute] Death is power and even potency ndash and thereby limited ndash it sets a term adjourns [ajourne] in the sense of assigning a given day


[un jour dit] both arbitrary and necessary even as it refers to an unspecified date [un jour non deacutesigneacute] But dying [le mourir] is absence of power [nonshypouvoir] interrupting the present [il arrache au preacutesent] always a crossing of the threshold excluding all term or end providing neither release nor shelter In death [la mort] it is possible to find illusory refuge the grave [la tombe] marks the stopping of the fall [lrsquoarrecirct de la chute] the funereal [le mortuaire] is the exit into the impasse Dying [le mourir] is the fleeting movement that draws into flight indefinitely impossibly and intensively59

What speaks then in mortality is not just the concealed ground of all presence but also that which is necessarily withdrawn from presence This much was already readable in Blanchotrsquos description of uninterrupted waking as resistance to presence and it was already embodied in the fragmentrsquos own recapitulative movement For language being always susceptible to repetition Blanchotrsquos fragment implied could not as a result not repeat itself which meant that words even if uttered in the first person were always already inhabited by an anonymous phantomatic third person doubling and expropriating the first presenting without presenting in spectral manner one alongside the other the finite and the infinite ie both the possibility of death and the impossibility of dying As Blanchot put it in his original essay on Leiris rewriting Descartes and Husserl alike lsquoI dream therefore it is being written [ Je recircve donc cela srsquoeacutecrit]rsquo60

But this was not all If to appropriate words in the effort to speak or write them in the first person was always to be expropriated by them in the third this also meant that expropriation in turn was the only available or even possible form of appropriation If the one was the other the other forcibly turned into the one To articulate this strangely reversible structure by which what was most proper to a name or signature was simultaneously and without contradiction that which was most improper to it (and vice versa) Derrida in a series of important studies from the early 1970s which found as we have seen a ready echo in Le Pas aushydelagrave coined the portmanteau term ex-appropriation However much a signature might be taken to frame a text and used to control its reading argued Derrida this was only possible in so far as the signature was already inscribed within that frame and exposed to the risk of being framed in its


turn The signature in other words was as much the product of the text as the text was an instantiation of the signature But as the signature forfeited all external authority what remained by a further turn of the wheel could not do other than acquire the status of a signature a signature that no longer belonged to the writer as progenitor of the work but served instead as a residual trace of the writer as illegitimate offspring of the text

But even as the author might no longer be deemed responsible for writing in the manner of the self-identical self-present origin of a text this did not relieve the writer of involvement On the contrary the writer recast as an effect of the work could not be other than absolutely answerable to it Literature lsquobeing inorganicrsquo wrote Bataille lsquois irresponsiblersquo lsquoNothing rests on it It can say everythingrsquo he continued but if Evil or negativity had sovereign value he also concluded this did not entail an absence of morality it demanded instead as Blanchot would later argue in respect of Nietzsche what Bataille described as a kind of lsquohypermorality [hypermorale]rsquo61 To write in other words and thus fall subject to the law of ex-appropriation was not to abdicate responsibility but on the contrary as Blanchotrsquos gesture of self-quotation demonstrates to be required willing or not to assume responsibility for writing not least by acknowledging that any text was part of an infinite conversation with literature philosophy history and politics So if on the one hand Blanchotrsquos fragmentary reprise of his own past texts confirmed the power of repetition as another entry has it as lsquorepetition of the extreme general collapse destruction of the presentrsquo62 on the other no less importantly through 1953 1955 1961 1971 1980 and beyond it testified to the continuity of a signature and of the thinking advanced and endorsed by that signature including in a paradox more apparent than real its enduring commitment to the impersonality of authorship and its unyielding recognition of the responsibilities of writing

Between these two versions of repetition now as dispersion now as gathering now as radical anonymity now as the persistence of a signature there was no contradiction as we have already seen It was rather that repetition this figure of anonymity impersonality and the neuter not only accounted for the inscription and erasure of the present but also presided over the possibility or impossibility of systematic thinking itself It is telling in this respect that in the course of a series of fragments exploring the relationship


between fragmentary writing and the philosophical System in an otherwise seemingly throwaway remark Blanchot cites a famous passage from Schellingrsquos 1810 Stuttgart Seminars suggesting that lsquothe soul is the properly divine in man the impersonal [das Unpersoumlnliche]rsquo and that lsquosince the human spirit [Geist] is related to the soul as something without being [Nichtseiendes] and without understanding [Verstandloses] its most profound essence considered separately from the soul and from God is madness [Wahnsinn] The understanding is regulated madness [geregelter Wahnsinn]rsquo63 reason in other words was inseparable from its opposite and from the prospect of its suspension or refutation This was not however to make an easy concession to the irrational What spoke just as incisively in Blanchotrsquos text is illustrated by what rereading Schleiermacher and Schlegel he also describes as an experience of reversal lsquoby producing a work [une œuvre]rsquo he wrote lsquoI give up [renonce] producing and formulating myself find fulfilment in something external and take my place within the nameless continuity of humankind ndash whence the relation work of art and encounter with death for in both cases we draw ever closer to a perilous threshold a crucial point at which we are abruptly turned inside out [brusquement retourneacutes]rsquo64

To write in other words was not to take possession of a world but to be excluded from it The point owing more than a little to the Lurianic Kabbala as we have seen is emphasised in another fragment reversing (while covertly retaining) a comment made by Edmond Jabegraves which had initially asked as follows lsquoIs dying [mourir] in the book to become visible for each and for oneself decipherable [deacutechiffrable]rsquo which Blanchot now refashioned to read lsquoMight it be that writing [eacutecrire] in the book is to become legible for each and for oneself indecipherable [indeacutechiffrable]rsquo65 If writing followed the logic not of death but of dying (mourir) suggested Blanchot the result was not increased visibility but legibility without manifestation and the enigmatic realisation that what was decipherable in writing for a writer was only that which being radically other was irreducibly indecipherable too What was personal or proper to the self was that which was rigorously impersonal or improper to it and as Blanchotrsquos revision stated this so by way of its reprise of a phrase borrowed from another it also performed in abyssal manner exactly what it said In so doing it showed that exclusion was not disengagement on the contrary producing the legible and the illegible alike it was the


exact opposite Which is also to say that writing could not but enter into complex dialogue with the philosophical tradition to which it was however not reducible Throughout LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Blanchotrsquos recognition of writingrsquos claims on thought remained far-reaching and unambiguous lsquoTo write in ignorance and without regard for the philosophical horizonrsquo he noted lsquoas punctuated gathered or dispersed by the words that delimit that horizon is necessarily to write with self-satisfied ease (the literature of elegance and good taste) Houmllderlin Mallarmeacute so many others do not allow us thisrsquo66

Of the various ways in which LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre takes up the philosophical tradition clearest in evidence at least in the initial sections of the book is the debt it owes to phenomenology Already from the outset the use of the word deacutesastre to signify cosmic interruption and a breaching of the established order of lsquobeing-in-the-world [lrsquoecirctreshydansshyleshymonde]rsquo67 was not without recalling and explicitly so the bracketing excluding and putting-out-of-action of the world by Husserlian epocheacute and it comes as no surprise to find a similarly subtractive gesture of thought described in analogous terms some pages later

uml Disaster does not make thought disappear only rids it of ques-tions and problems assertion and negation silence and speech sign and insignia At which point amidst the night without darkness bereft of sky heavy with the absence of world [lrsquoabsence de monde] withdrawn from all present of itself [tout preacutesent drsquoelleshymecircme] thought wakes [la penseacutee veille]68

What comes to be articulated for Blanchot in deacutesastre these lines suggest as in the phenomenological epocheacute is the uncanny capacity of thought or language without negating the world as such nonetheless if only provisionally to put its existence into parentheses in order to reflect on its meaningful articulation But between deacutesastre and epocheacute there is an essential and radical difference It is that while miming the epochal gesture constitutive of phenomenology deacutesastre was not however committed to recovering and renewing or refounding the origin (of world thought or meaning) but undertook the daunting more exacting task of thinking beyond any origin beyond experience beyond being beyond truth

If LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre put itself in phenomenologyrsquos debt therefore it was less by way of a speculative return to phenomenology


than a spectral return of phenomenology itself a phenomenology that is which no longer took existencersquos presence in the world as given nor to be its principal or guiding theme but sought instead to respond to the ghostly otherness before waking and sleeping conscious and unconscious visible and invisible worldly and unworldly occurring (without occurring) as exposure to repetition the outside and the neuter which preceded all presence and exceeding thematic understanding eluded all possibility of being grasped in or as itself As Blanchotrsquos text continues

What I do know in a convoluted contrived and only dimly related fashion [drsquoun savoir contourneacute controuveacute et adjacent] mdash with no relation to truth mdash is that waking in this sense [une telle veille] makes waking up or falling asleep impossible [ne permet ni eacuteveil ni sommeil] leaves thought beyond secrecy [hors secret] deprived of all intimacy a body of absence [corps drsquoabsence] exposed to do without itself [exposeacute agrave se passer de soi] without the ceaseless ever ceasing the exchange between the lively without life [du vif sans vie] and the dying without death [du mourir sans mort] where the lowest level of intensity does not put a stop to waiting nor has done with infinite prevarication As if lying awake [la veille] gently passively left us descending the perpetual staircase69

In that Blanchot in this fragment may be said to be examining the subjective or ideational structure of a common experience such as lying awake at night able neither properly to sleep nor properly to be roused these remarks might legitimately be thought at least in part to belong to traditional phenomenological inquiry But in so far as the description given shows little interest in what might be thought to appear to consciousness as evidence of the proper constitution and positing of meaning through the agency of a suitably commanding transcendental self and quite explicitly does away with presence experience subjectivity possibility world and truth it would be hard not to conclude the exact opposite

In the course of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre as in parts of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli and Le Pas aushydelagrave Blanchot turns his attention to several further affective personal or interpersonal structures including such well-worn phenomenological topics as suffering giving remembering forgetting speaking writing desire and death


Time and again however the effect is not to found the possibility of what is analysed but rather to challenge any possibility of foundation Blanchotrsquos account of patience is a case in point lsquoBe patientrsquo writes Blanchot repeating or citing an instantly recognisable but entirely banal commonplace remark which he then goes on to subject to detailed deconstructive scrutiny

uml lsquoBe patientrsquo Simple words They demanded much Patience has already deprived me [mrsquoa deacutejagrave retireacute] not only of my share of willing [ma part volontaire] but of my power to be patient if I am able to be patient it is because patience has not worn out in me that part of me where I hold myself fast Patience exposes me [mrsquoouvre] through and through [de part en part] to the point of a passivity that is the lsquonot of the entirely passiversquo [le lsquopas du tout agrave fait passifrsquo] and has therefore fallen below the level where passive is allegedly just the opposite of active in the same way as we fall outside inertia (the inert thing which suffers without reacting with its corollary living spontaneity purely autonomous activity) lsquoBe patientrsquo Who says such a thing There is nobody who can say it and nobody who can respond to it [lrsquoentendre hear or understand] Patience can neither be recommended nor imposed it is the passivity of dying [du mourir] in which a self [un moi] that is no longer myself [moi] answers for the limitlessness of disaster that which no present can remember70

The simplicity of language then is deceptive Patience in so far as it implies deferral sufferance temporisation argues Blanchot is necessarily incompatible with the magisterial authority of any consciously self-possessed empirical or transcendental self To decide intend or wish to be patient in other words is already to be impatient to seek to determine that which is paradoxically by essence indeterminable But if patience (from the Latin patientia suffering) is therefore understood as a yielding to the demand or demands of the other whether in the form of a person a thing or an event it cannot be construed in punctual or autarkic fashion but presupposes a degree of exposure to the other which is what Blanchot means by passivity (from Latin passivus capable of feeling or suffering) In order properly to address the singularity and specificity of patience Blanchot goes on passivity in turn needs to be thought in originary fashion ie not as inactivity following


or preceding activity on the part of the conscious subject nor as a kind of archeo-teleological predisposition preparing the way for subjectivity or consciousness since in either case this would mean accounting for it only in subsidiary or derived fashion Passivity then for Blanchot needs to be thought before the familiar binary opposition of active and passive (in which activity always takes precedence) and before that receptivity in the subject that for Husserl and the phenomenological tradition was subordinated to presence lsquoPassivityrsquo Blanchot remarks lsquois not simple receptivity [reacuteception] any more than it may be described as the formless [lrsquoinforme] and the inert [lrsquoinerte] matter lying ready [precircte] for any formrsquo71

Passivity does not occur in the present nor does it belong to the experience of any present subject and in so far as patience is a function of passivity then it too likewise can only be thought prior to the positing or positioning of a self In which case it follows that the phrase lsquobe patientrsquo cannot but be a contradiction in terms Whoever is addressed by those words is either already too much of a self to be thought to be properly patient or not enough of a self to be admonished in this way and whoever delivers such an instruction and claims both to be patient already and to know what it is to be patient is merely guilty of impatience twice over The everyday recommendation that Blanchot cites far from being an expression of commonplace possibility turns out to rest on an aporetical impossibility No sooner is the phrase spoken or written than it suspends withdraws and erases itself Patience nevertheless corresponds to an injunction indeed on Blanchotrsquos submission it is arguably little else a requirement that consists solely in a requirement To be patient in other words means simply to be required in an absolute sense exposed to the otherness of the other prior to subjective positioning and without it being possible to translate that requirement into any normative moral ethical political or aesthetic law though no law of whatever kind would be conceivable without it The requirement to be patient not only cannot be formulated as such it also necessarily precedes all other injunctions including itself

This perpetually retrocessive structure also affects the very words that Blanchotrsquos fragment invokes but then revokes For as Blanchot observes elsewhere notably in reply to Wittgensteinrsquos famous saw from the Tractatus (lsquoWhat we cannot speak about we must pass


over in silencersquo) it is only possible to acknowledge the limitations of words by recourse to more words72 The words lsquobe patientrsquo are self-defeating but in that defeat speaks something which they cannot say With the insertion of the simple device of always possible visible or invisible quotation marks detaching the words from themselves exposing their meaning to patient scrutiny Blanchotrsquos words become doubly self-defeating for they not only draw attention to their limitations they also bear witness to the limitlessness that extends beyond those limits without which those limits would not be perceptible at all lsquoBe patientrsquo as Blanchotrsquos commentary shows is an impossible injunction but what speaks in the impossibility of that injunction is the infinite passivity of patience without which there would be no words no language no injunction at all Words imply the necessary possibility of the absence disappearance and death of speaker or listener alike and if so it follows that that of which language always speaks but which words can never say is not death but dying beyond presence without end limitless disaster As Blanchot once wrote in the margins of a poem by Houmllderlin lsquo[s]peaking this we must [Parler il le faut] this this alone is right [convient] And yet ndash speaking is impossiblersquo73

If Blanchotrsquos analysis owes something to phenomenology it is in the patient way in which it explores the conditions of possibility of patience as such but as those conditions of possibility turn into aporetic conditions of impossibility as it becomes accordingly impossible to delimit or delineate the thematic consistency of any phenomenon lsquoas suchrsquo it is increasingly apparent that LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre enters into phenomenologyrsquos territory only to leave it behind engaging with phenomenology only to break with many if not all of its received assumptions which Blanchot pushes instead into a groundless abyss that is perhaps in the end only another name for the unthinkable of disaster as one fragment in italics now puts it lsquothat which retreats [se deacuterobe] in motionless flight remote from what lives and dies beyond experience [hors expeacuterience] beyond phenomena [hors pheacutenomegravene]rsquo74 lsquoIf I say disaster wakes [le deacutesastre veille]rsquo he has it a few pages earlier now in roman lsquoit is not to provide waking with a subject it is to say waking does not occur under a sidereal sky [un ciel sideacuteral]rsquo75

This was admittedly not the first time that phenomenology found its relationship to itself strained and pushed to the limit nor was it the first time among others that the phenomenon of uninterrupted


waking or insomnia had been the starting point for a rather different approach to worldly experience or being in the world Already in 1947 in pages that brought to a provisional conclusion ideas that may have first emerged in exchanges with Blanchot as far back as twenty years earlier Levinas in De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant had drawn on fatigue (la fatigue) and on idleness or laziness (la paresse) these entirely banal yet extreme and strangely limitless states of existence hitherto largely neglected by philosophy as being of interest merely to psychologists in an explicit attempt as he famously put it to reach beyond the intellectualism of Husserlian transcendental consciousness and to quit the climate of Heideggerian fundamental ontology76 For while Husserl and Heidegger in radically differing ways had begun by addressing questions of possibility (the possible constitution of the world by transcendental consciousness here the possibility of impossibility on which Dasein was grounded there) Levinas for his part adopted a very different starting point lsquoWhenever the continual interplay of our relations with the world is interruptedrsquo he wrote in 1947 evoking the contrasting legacy of his two precursors only to turn aside from their example lsquowhat one finds contrary to what one might think is not death nor the ldquopure egordquo but the anonymous fact of being [le fait anonyme de lrsquoecirctre]rsquo lsquorelation with a worldrsquo he added lsquois not synonymous with existence which precedes the worldrsquo77 What spoke in fatigue or idleness for Levinas then was not a relation with worldly experience or the properness or improperness of existence but the exact opposite the irreducibility of subjectivity to world or to being or non-being and the realisation that if being was already synonymous with its own unanswerable questions and questioning so the only task left for philosophy was for it to step beyond being no longer to search for the truth as such but to think the demands of what with considerable daring Levinas called le bien the good78

More then was at stake than the task of producing an adequate phenomenological description of fatigue or idleness Later in the discussion Levinas added to this initial list of negative or marginal affective states the experience of waking or insomnia and the horror of the dark drawing to do so on a series of literary examples including the 1941 version of Blanchotrsquos Thomas lrsquoObscur79 lsquoThe there is [Lrsquoil y a] ndash the play of being ndash is not played out through acts of forgetting [des oublis]rsquo explained Levinas discreetly rebuffing


Heidegger lsquoand does not insert itself into sleep like a dream Its very event consists in an impossibility ndash in an opposition to possibilities ndash of sleeping relaxing drowsiness absencersquo lsquoWaking [La veille]rsquo he went on lsquois anonymous There is not my wakefulness [ma vigilance] to the night in insomnia it is night itself that wakes Something wakes [Ccedila veille literally that ndash indeterminate and impersonal ndash wakes] In this anonymous waking in which I am entirely exposed to being [lrsquoecirctre] all the thoughts that fill my insomnia are suspended from nothing [suspendues agrave rien] They are without support I am so to speak the object rather than the subject of anonymous thinking [drsquoune penseacutee anonyme]rsquo80

At issue here suggests Levinas is something which though it may up to a point still be susceptible to phenomenological description has already begun to leave the orbit of that philosophy lsquothe affirmation of an anonymous vigilancersquo he notes lsquogoes beyond any phenomenon which already presupposes an ego [un moi] and thus escapes descriptive phenomenologyrsquo81 lsquoThe world of forms opens like a bottomless abyssrsquo he writes some pages later referring to the here of sleeping prior to understanding horizon and time radically detaching it from the Da- of Heideggerian Dasein (in so far as Dasein Levinas explains lsquoalready implies the worldrsquo) At such moments Levinas goes on lsquothe cosmos bursts apart [eacuteclate] leaving chaos gaping wide [pour laisser beacuteer le chaos] ie the abyss the absence of place the there is [lrsquoil y a]rsquo82 As for the experience of impending death this ultimate possibility according to Heidegger the lesson for Levinas as for Blanchot was starkly different lsquoWhat is important in the approach to deathrsquo remarked Levinas in a lecture delivered to Jean Wahlrsquos Collegravege philosophique shortly after lsquois that at a certain point we are no longer able to be able [nous ne pouvons plus pouvoir]rsquo83

More than thirty years after De lrsquoexistence aux existants returning to the experience without experience of uninterrupted waking and pursuing in his own fashion the post-phenomenological project he shared with Levinas Blanchot in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was no doubt aware of revisiting a familiar topos albeit one where what was at issue was familiarity itself its persistence and its strangeness and which by dint of Blanchotrsquos rewriting was once again exposed to the dual effects of repetition now as gathering now as dispersion now as a possible theme now as what preceded the positing of any theme and in either case beyond the authority of


any transcendental self which is precisely what Blanchotrsquos writing went on not only to describe in what it said but also to dramatise in the movement of its saying Taking up once more in 1980 this question of insomnia of lying awake at night Blanchot writes as follows

Waking [La veille] is without beginning or end To wake [veiller] is in the neuter lsquoIrsquo do not wake the impersonal wakes [on veille] night wakes always and unceasingly hollowing out the night to the point of the other night where there can be no question of sleeping Waking occurs only at night Night is a stranger to that wakefulness which acts [srsquoexerce] and fulfils its purpose [srsquoaccomplit] bearing lucid reason to what it must retain in reflection in protecting identity Waking is strangeness it does not awake from any prior slumber while also being a rewakening [reacuteveil] a constant insistent return to the motionlesness of waking Something wakes [Cela veille] without lying in wait or being on the look-out Disaster wakes [Le deacutesastre veille] Where there is waking when slumbering consciousness opening as a state of unconsciousness [inconscience] gives free rein to the light of dreaming what wakes waking [veiller the impersonal infinitive] or the impossibility of sleeping at the heart of sleep is not lit up in terms of an increase in visibility or reflective brilliance Who wakes Precisely the question is set aside [eacutecarteacutee] by the neutrality of waking nobody wakes Waking is no first-person waking power since it is not power but a reaching to the infinite without power exposure to the other of the night where thought renounces the vigour of vigilance worldly clearsightedness perspicacious mastery given over to the limitless prevarication of insomnia the wake which does not wake nocturnal intensity84

In the first instance this fragment is easily legible as a recapitulation and extension of Levinasrsquos 1947 description of insomniac waking and it is even possible that in writing lsquoCela veillersquo in 1980 Blanchot was aware of reproducing almost exactly Levinasrsquos earlier equivalent phrase lsquoCcedila veillersquo repetition however does not guarantee identity and between the description put forward by Levinas and the abyssal reflections of Blanchotrsquos fragment there is striking dissymmetry having to do perhaps most clearly with the dissymmetrical logic of repetition itself This is apparent in the ends to which these two


convergent but nonetheless distinct ways of thinking insomnia are put For Levinas the purpose was resolutely philosophical The challenge given the always prior anonymity of being was to deduce or derive the possibility of individual consciousness In that process waking provided an essential moment of transition For Levinas in so far as it corresponded to a moment of realisation or self-awareness waking served to introduce into the anonymity of being an irreducible event a fold a discontinuity a pause which interrupting the timelessness of the il y a announced the possibility and positionality of an individual consciousness what Levinas in his work of the mid-1940s and after described as hypostasis As he explains

The there is [Lrsquoil y a] lacks rhythm in the same way that the teeming multiplicity of darkness [points grouillants de lrsquoobscuriteacute] lacks perspective The positing of a subject is needed [Il faudrait la position drsquoun sujet] for it to be possible for an instant to irrupt into being and for this insomnia which is like the very eternity of being [lrsquoeacuteterniteacute mecircme de lrsquoecirctre] to cease

We thus introduce into the impersonal event of the there is [lrsquoil y a] not the notion of consciousness but waking [la veille] in which consciousness participates even as it asserts itself as consciousness precisely because it does no more than participate in it Consciousness is a part of waking which means it has already torn it in two [deacutechireacutee] It comprises precisely a shelter [abri] from that being which depersonalising ourselves we reach in insomnia the being [cet ecirctre] which is neither lost nor duped nor forgotten ndash which if we may hazard the expression is completely sobered up [dessaoucircleacute]85

Waking for Levinas in other words has a dual function while embodying exposure to the anonymity of being it also provides the chance of its suspension and thereby prompts the emergence of a subject For Levinas this was admittedly not an end in itself but a step towards reorientating phenomenology not in the direction of a thinking (or forgetting) of Being but a more originary rearticulation of the relation without relation of Same and Other In subsequent years this project was to undergo significant further development the strategy deployed in 1947 nevertheless remained a crucial resource the effects of which are still plain to see in a later text such as Autrement qursquoecirctre There too as Levinasrsquos closing chapter


makes clear it was the role of what he called the subjectivity of the subject irreducible to presence consciousness or thematisation to transcend the oppressively exclusive alternative largely attributed to Heidegger between being and non-being Thus Levinas arguing the case as so often elsewhere through an idiosyncratic patchwork of rhetorical questions bold assertions and syntactically undecidable interjections

Is it the case that the subject escapes the Concept and Essence [Essence as explained in a preliminary note this is Levinasrsquos version of Heideggerian Being] mdash anxiety before death and horror at the there is [lrsquoil y a] mdash only in resignation and in illusion against which in the hour of truth or the inevitable awakening Essence is more powerful Is it not possible to understand the subjectivity of the subject from beyond Essence as though on the basis of an Exit [Sortie] from the concept mdash a forgetting of being and of non-being Not forgetting lsquouncheckedrsquo [sans lsquocontrocirclersquo] still held within the bipolarity of Essence between being [lrsquoecirctre] and nothingness [le neacuteant] But a forgetting that might be said to be ignorance [ignorance] in the sense that nobility is ignorant of what is not noble and certain monotheists refuse to acknowledge [ne reconnaissent pas] while knowing it for what it is [tout en le connaissant] that which is not the most high [le plus haut] Ignorance beyond consciousness open-eyed ignorance86

As Levinas insists this attempt to describe beyond being and non-being what some pages further on he calls lsquoa third condition or uncondition [incondition inconditionality] of an excluded third [drsquoun tiers exclu an excluded middle]rsquo87 retained a strong commitment to the spirit of phenomenological inquiry in particular to the Husserlian concept of intentionality with its recognition of the transcendence of otherness though Levinas would develop its implications far beyond what Husserlrsquos own work seemed to allow88 Indeed at the same time as he sought to keep faith with Husserlrsquos legacy Levinasrsquos more urgent project was to move decisively beyond its strictly phenomenological horizon which he sought to do on the basis of that strange logic of substitution of indifference and responsibility combined which Levinas called lrsquounshypourshylrsquoautre the one-for-the-other in order to address subjectivity


as a kind of pre-ontological condition of possibility paradoxically irreducible to all phenomenality and thematisation as such As Levinas continued

the appearing [apparoir becoming manifest] of being is not the ultimate legitimation of subjectivity mdash it is here that the present inquiry ventures beyond phenomenology In the subjective the notions mdash and the essence they only articulate mdash lose the consistency offered them by the theme in which they manifest themselves Not in finding themselves to be lsquopsychic contentsrsquo in a lsquosubject opposed to an objectrsquo On the contrary it is in hyperbole in the superlative in the excellence of signification to which they return [remontent] mdash in the transcendence that passes through them or surpasses itself in them which is not a mode of being showing itself in a theme mdash that notions and the essence they articulate break apart and come to be knotted together in human intrigue Exteriorityrsquos emphasis is excellence Height heaven The kingdom of heaven is ethical89

In words such as these Levinasrsquos own post-phenomenological project says something of its essential overriding purpose already apparent in germ in the 1947 description of insomnia and waking In recasting the subject in its subjectivity not as presence but as a kind of radical passivity always already in the past prior to consciousness and manifestation as such the denuded and impotent hostage of an absolute unmediated and unnegotiable relation without relation with the transcendence of the other and beyond any established order of being or non-being irredeemably breached and exceeded to affirmative effect the task Levinas set himself was an unambiguous one For all that its decisive refusal of ontology made it virtually unique in the whole of modern philosophy whose foundations it sought to contest Levinasrsquos project no less than that of Husserl albeit in radically different fashion was likewise a constitutive one Its purpose was not to found the possibility of worldly experience and scientific understanding nor indeed contrary to a common misconception to formulate a religious or post-religious moral philosophy More radically and far more importantly it was to lay the philosophical foundations for the possibility and the necessity of an ethics a prescription giving precedence and priority to the demands of the Other


Between Levinasrsquos philosophical enterprise and the thinking detailed in the fragmentary writing of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre the relationship is complex Areas of explicit or implicit agreement are many the effort to think passivity and pastness outside of the received binary pairings of past and present active and passive the rearticulation of responsibility and responsiveness as proceeding not on grounds of the authority of the self but from the distance and exteriority of the Other the refusal of the all-inclusive imperium of ontology all this and more though not necessarily in the same terms nor with the same inflection finds a ready echo in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre as too does the discreet but nonetheless insistent memory of the death camps90 But this is not to say there are not important differences of emphasis language and purpose between the late work of the two friends some of which reach back to earlier exchanges between the pair91 The most obvious divergences are those of vocabulary While Blanchot not unlike Levinas plots in some detail (as he already had in Le Pas aushydelagrave) the reciprocal implications of passivity passing the past and passion it is noticeable that such other important Levinasian terms as ethics or the ethical transcendence substitution feature only marginally now in negative terms now as implicit quotations or even not at all in Blanchotrsquos text92 And among these divergences the most symptomatic of all was the different interpretation offered by Levinas and by Blanchot of that most durable of shared concerns dating back to the mid-1940s if not before and crucially at stake in their respective analyses of insomniac waking the anonymity or impersonality of being and nothingness identified with the there is the il y a93

For Levinas the il y a this exemplary token of the inescapable burden of being and non-being alike was that which it was necessary to interrupt in order to affirm and preserve the transcendence of the Other without which for Levinas no possibility of ethics or the ethical could be thought at all True enough he conceded if ethical perspectives were to have any effect in the world meaning and justice needed to be thematised as such within being lsquoThe indefinite time of essence the neutrality of its historical flowrsquo he pointed out lsquois that to which the dia-chrony of the one-for-the-other itself refers it manifests itself in this timersquo But this was only part of the story As Levinas went on

the imperturbable essence equal and indifferent to all responsibility which it henceforth encompasses turns as in insomnia from this neutrality and equality into monotony anonymity insignificance


into an incessant buzzing that nothing can stop any longer and which absorbs all signification even that of which this bustling about is a modality Essence stretching out indefinitely without restraint or interruption mdash the equality of essence not justifying in all equity any instantrsquos halt mdash without respite without possible suspension mdash such is the horrifying there is behind all finality proper to the thematising ego which cannot not sink into the essence it thematises94

Thematisation however argues Levinas is not all and it is precisely for that reason the stifling rule of the il y a can be suspended Oddly then the horror inspired by the il y a allows it to reverse itself radical immanence turns into radical transcendence with always the risk Blanchot suggests that the turn may prove not so much definitive but reversible which might then suggest that what speaks in the il y a is less the omnipotence of being than what Blanchot calls lsquothe impossibility of not being [lrsquoimpossibiliteacute de ne pas ecirctre]rsquo an anoriginal repetitiveness without beginning or end bereft of consistency interiority or truth For this is Blanchotrsquos alternative interpretation of the il y a no longer the oppressive dominion of being but the exacting rigour of impersonality or neutrality as that which precedes and has therefore always already interrupted being and non-being alike and finds expression not in meaning including the meaningfulness of the Levinasian one-for-the-other but in the vacuity of words language writing95 As Blanchot explains in a fragment that hardly by coincidence falls almost exactly halfway through LrsquoEacutecriture du desastre separating the text into two joining the book to itself while also disjoining it from itself and making a twofold intervention into philosophical ontologico-ethical language as such

uml Between these two falsely interrogative propositions why is there something rather than nothing and why is there evil in the world rather than good I cannot see the difference that it is claimed can be detected since both are borne by a lsquothere isrsquo [un laquo il y a raquo] which is neither being nor nothingness neither good nor evil and without which the whole thing collapses or has therefore already collapsed Above all the there is [lrsquoil y a] as neuter [en tant que neutre] outplays [se joue] the questions brought to bear upon it if questioned it ironically absorbs the


question which cannot gain purchase upon it [le surplomber dominate it] Even if it allows itself to be overcome it is because defeat is what is incongruously congruous to it just as bad infinity in its perpetual repetitiveness determines it as true in so far as it (falsely) imitates transcendence and in that way exposes its essential ambiguity and the impossibility for this to be measured according to what is true or just96

Always already preceding itself prior to being or non-being irreducible to the opposition between immanence and transcendence which it folds together and exceeds the neuter or neutre raised one further question in respect of Blanchotrsquos reading of Levinas and the legacy of phenomenology Levinasrsquos work had already displaced the question of the relationship in Blanchotrsquos own work between fragmentary writing and philosophy Levinas for the success of his own project was only too aware of the importance of distinguishing between what in a simple but rhetorically effective move he called philosophyrsquos Said its Dit and its Saying its Dire ie on the one hand its finite conceptual fabric embodied in thematisation and systematicity and on the other the infinity of its address to the Other If the Said served to confirm ontology Saying was what interrupted it lsquoTo enter into being and truthrsquo Levinas argued deploying a version of the phenomenological reduction

is to enter into the Said [le Dit] being is inseparable from its meaning It is spoken It is in the logos Here though is the reduction of the Said to Saying beyond the Logos being and non-being mdash beyond essence mdash truth and non-truth mdash the reduction to meaning [signification] to the one-for-the-other of responsibility (or more exactly substitution) mdash place or non-place place and non-place the utopia of the human mdash the reduction to restlessness [inquieacutetude] in the literal sense of the word or its diachrony which despite all its assembled forces despite all the forces it brings together simultaneously in union being [lrsquoecirctre] is incapable of eternalising97

In its responsiveness to the task of unsaying ndash of deacuteshydire ndash what philosophically it could not do otherwise than say Levinasrsquos thinking did not sit unproblematically within the history of Western philosophy


as Blanchot among others was quick to acknowledge reinforcing the point in a kind of abyssal supplementary footnote one of only two in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre as a whole lsquowhat is pronounced [srsquoeacutenonce] or rather announced [srsquoannonce] with Levinasrsquo he argued lsquois an excess [un surplus a supplement] a beyond the universal [un aushydelagrave de lrsquouniversel] a singularity that may be called Jewish and which waits still to be thoughtrsquo98 But though Levinasrsquos thinking was not reducible to the so-called Greek universalising tradition Blanchot added the fact remained that lsquoin many respects [agrave bien des eacutegards]rsquo Levinasrsquos lsquoother philosophyrsquo was still lsquoldquoeternal philosophy [la philosophie eacuteternelle]rdquorsquo not least because for Blanchot as for Levinas there was (and could rightly be) no other This much was clear from Levinasrsquos unstinting fidelity to the phenomenological reduction at the very moment when he sought to draw on its resources to transcend the philosophical System as such But the reduction of the Said to Saying had its pitfalls that Blanchot was careful to indicate albeit discreetly in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre He did this in at least four ways first by placing in apposition to the word Dire itself put into parentheses the alternative term eacutecriture second by underlining the word Dire alongside a conditional verb (lsquothis responsible passivity that might be termed Saying [qui serait Dire]rsquo) thus putting the word at a distance from itself third by using it in his own text in a different negative sense in the context of the dangers of etymology to denote the language of teleology lsquowords having become the sacred depository of all lost latent meaningsrsquo he noted lsquothe recovery of which is henceforth the task of whoever writes in view of some final Saying [Dire final] or counter-Saying [contreshyDire]rsquo and lastly with the addition of an explicitly sceptical caveat taking issue with its implicit phenomenological assumptions lsquolet us repeat with Levinasrsquo he writes at one stage lsquothough he privileges Saying [le Dire] as the gift of meaningfulness [don de signifiance] ldquoLanguage is already scepticismrdquorsquo99

Despite his many sympathies with Levinasrsquos project then Blanchot at this point demurred suggesting sotto voce that the opposition between the Saying and the Said was perhaps too easily hostage to an originary privileging of speech and meaningfulness In this respect it is striking that when Blanchot goes on to use Levinasrsquos formulation elsewhere as when he refers three years later for instance in Apregraves coup lsquoprior to any distinction between form and content signifier and signified even before the divide [partage]


between uttering [eacutenonciation] and utterance [eacutenonceacute]rsquo to lsquothe unqualifiable Saying [le Dire inqualifiable] the glory of a ldquonarrating voicerdquorsquo100 it was to appeal to something more originary or perhaps better more originally anoriginal than the Levinasian opposition beween Saying and Said Dire in Blanchotrsquos sense ndash writing saying speaking ndash had therefore less to do with ethical transcendence with all the problems this entailed than with the unmasterable return of the neuter traversing immanence and transcendence alike finding temporary expression perhaps in literature but only in so far as literature under the effect without effect of the neuter was always already an erasure and a reinscription a remainder

But if Levinasian Saying had its drawbacks was there perhaps another way of eluding the philosophical System in order to address the relationship between philosophy and what it excluded These were questions that preoccupy several fragments in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre This was hardly surprising for the issue at stake was none other than that of the status of Blanchotrsquos text as a place of encounter between philosophy and the fragmentary

For that encounter to occur at all Blanchot argued it was clear that the relationship between the two could not be construed as one of continuity nor indeed as one of opposition The event of the fragmentary in other words demanded to be thought in a radically different way As he explained

uml The demand of the fragmentary [lrsquoexigence fragmentaire] motions [fait signe] to the System which it dismisses (just as it dismisses in principle any authorial self) without however ceasing to make it present just as in any binary alternative the other term cannot altogether suppress [faire oublier] the first term which it needs in order to be substituted for it To criticise the System accurately [La critique juste du Systegraveme] does not consist (as is so often idly assumed) in catching it out [le prendre en faute] or in interpreting it insufficiently (as even Heidegger does at times) but in treating it as invincible beyond criticism or as the current phrase is impossible to ignore [incontournable] In that case with nothing eluding it by dint of its omnipresent unity and gathering together of everything [rassemblement de tout] there is no place left for fragmentary writing except for it to emerge as the impossible necessary [le neacutecessaire impossible] which writes itself through time [de par le temps] outside time


[hors temps] in a suspension [suspens] which without reserve [sans retenue] breaks the seal of unity precisely by not breaking it but by leaving it to one side without possibility of discovery In this way fragmentary writing may be deemed not to belong to the One in that it may be said to distance itself [srsquoeacutecarterait] from manifestation And in this way too it may be taken to denounce thought as experience (in whatever way the word is understood) no less than it does thought as completion of everything [accomplissement de tout]101

Less as an identifiable genre than as a requirement irreducible to any given genre the fragmentary in its role as ghostly double both accompanies and yet does not accompany the philosophical System as Blanchot calls it drawing most likely on Heideggerrsquos recently published (and newly translated) 1936 seminar on Schellingrsquos Treatise on Human Freedom102 The fragmentary suspends the System in other words while also remembering its possibility it is not without relation with the System therefore perhaps even to the extent of retaining some back-handed dialectical responsibility for its actual emergence here as elsewhere the fragmentary for Blanchot is never without risk For all that the fragmentary is not simply opposed to the System which it neither criticises nor directly challenges in the knowledge that to do so would mean being incorporated into the System preferring instead to let the System run its totalising course it occupies no properly identifiable place or position either positively or negatively neither inside nor outside the System as such

So if the System in say Hegel or Schelling these erstwhile fellow students of Houmllderlin is to be understood as Heidegger puts it as lsquothe totality of Being in the totality of truth and of the history of truth [das Ganze des Seyns im Ganzen der Wahrheit und der Geschichte der Wahrheit]rsquo103 this can only imply that the fragmentary in its relation of non-relation with totality somehow falls outside the jurisdiction of being including the truth of being being as truth the truth of history and history as truth All it (is) in other words in Derridarsquos formulation (is) a remainder neither absent nor present but irreducible to all being found (without being found) adds Blanchot only at the unthinkable conjunction (without conjunction) between the impossible and the necessary this place without place that is irreducibly aporetic and though the


hierarchy of terms is reversed is reminiscent only of death of la mort impossible neacutecessaire that necessary impossible death which Blanchot returning to Hegel Heidegger and Levinas invokes some pages later as the abyssal impossibility on which language is founded ndash and founders104

But how to think further this abruptly unmediated encounter between the necessary and the impossible between incontrovertible law and inassimilable interruption How to address what resists or exceeds thinking And faced with impossible necessity or necessary impossibility how to avoid simply lapsing into incredulity

Levinas for whom lsquo[l]anguage is already scepticismrsquo as we have seen once more offered a clue Blanchot quotes the phrase twice over in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre and cites it a third time in his 1980 tribute105 In doing this Blanchot no less than Levinas was aware of laying claim however obliquely to a long discredited body of thought which had already been set aside or overcome by mainstream philosophy most famously perhaps by Hegel who in The Phenomenology of Spirit as Blanchot recalls lsquomade it into a privileged moment in the systemrsquo106 Likewise Husserl who in explaining the phenomenological reduction was quick to insist that placing the world in parentheses as he put it neither implied nor entailed any doubt as to its existence Scepticism on the other hand Husserl maintained by challenging the existence of the world on the basis of evidence that could only be derived from experience of the world was a fatally contradictory self-defeating doctrine107 There was of course a reason for Husserlrsquos sensitivity It was that the word epocheacute originally meaning suspension of judgement was itself a borrowing from the sceptics Pyrrho of Elis for instance in the third century BCE as Diogenes Laertius famously records in Book Nine of his Lives of Eminent Philosophers considered epocheacute to be the end or telos of philosophy as such alone conducive to tranquillity (ataraxia)108 True enough the epocheacute of the ancient sceptics was hardly the same as the phenomenological concept introduced and developed more than two millennia later by Husserl But the proximity between the two was more than simply accidental and was surely of more than passing interest to Blanchot who only months after his friend Levinas had successfully defended his doctorate on Husserlrsquos theory of intuition at the University of Strasbourg had completed in June 1930 a dissertation of his own for the Diplocircme drsquoeacutetudes Supeacuterieures at


the Sorbonne ndash on the subject of lsquoLa Conception du dogmatisme chez les sceptiquesrsquo109

In the absence of Blanchotrsquos actual dissertation yet to be rediscovered one can but speculate on its general orientation and findings It is nevertheless worth recalling the particular usage of the term dogma by the authors on whom Blanchot was most likely working which may cast some light on the dissertationrsquos concerns Writing in the second or third century Sextus Empiricus the sceptical thinker whose work has been most extensively preserved and whom Blanchot mentions in his 1980 tribute to Levinas as though still vividly remembering their fifty-year-old conversations on epocheacute in Husserl and the ancient sceptics sought to differentiate between three categories of thinkers those who like the disciples of Aristotle or Epicure or like the Stoics claimed to have discovered truth those who like the followers of Clitomachus Carneades and other academicians deemed truth to be ungraspable or inaccessible and finally those who had not given up their inquiries and were still searching for answers110 The first two groups according to Sextus deserved the title of dogmatists in that both groups were certain they were in possession of the truth irrespective whether it was construed in positive or negative terms The third group who had yet to reach any conclusions these were skeptikoi the sceptics The word is said to derive from Greek skeptesthai meaning to inquire or to consider though the OED also suggests it is related to the noun skopos an observer or watchman in which case it might follow that for Blanchot at least scepticism was but another instance of uninterrupted waking

According to Sextus the burden of classical scepticism pace Husserl was not to deny the existence of the external world it had rather to do with propositional truth or falsity ie what it was possible to say about worldly experience lsquoThe key principle of sceptical argumentrsquo he writes lsquois that opposed to every proposition is an equal proposition for we believe that it is on that basis that we cease to dogmatisersquo111 lsquoThose who say that the sceptics reject appearancesrsquo he continues lsquoseem to me to have paid little attention to what we say For we do not overthrow the affective sense impressions which induce our assent involuntarily and these impressions are what appearances are And when we question whether the underlying object is such as it appears we grant the fact that it appears and our doubt does not concern the appearance itself


but the account given of that appearance and that is different from questioning the appearance itselfrsquo112 readers may recognise in these words something of the questioning of the authority and power of truth attributed to the work of Blanchot and various contemporaries It would however be not only anachronistic but also inaccurate to equate the scepticism of Sextus with the cultural relativism associated with what is commonly known as postmodernism ndash not least because from Sextusrsquos perspective if parallels can be drawn at all contemporary relativism in its peremptory self-certainty would more nearly equate to a form of dogmatism than critical scepticism a thought that Blanchot underlines in his turn as we shall see by radically differentiating scepticism from the nihilism with which it is so often confused

What the countertemporal turn to the legacy of ancient scepticism nevertheless uncovered for Blanchot and Levinas alike was evidence of the limits set on philosophyrsquos systematic investment in ontology rationalism and truth According to traditional metaphysics scepticism was fatally flawed not least by the implicit contradiction between what it propounded ie that in matters of truth it was appropriate to suspend judgement and the discourse on which it relied in order to establish the truthfulness plausibility or coherence of its own position (in so far as it had one) But for Levinas this was to miss the point From the perspective of his post-ontological insistence on the asymmetry between Same and Other scepticism was decisive proof of the irreducible gap between Saying and the Said on which its philosophical possibility did indeed turn But on Levinasrsquos submission it was precisely the ineliminability of that discrepancy that explained scepticismrsquos perpetual always fantomatic return (lsquoScepticism is the refutablersquo he wrote lsquobut also the returning ghost [le revenant]rsquo) and accounted for the fact that even if refuted scepticism was nevertheless possessed of what he called lsquoinvincible forcersquo113 As Levinas explains

The periodic return of both scepticism and its refutation signifies a temporality in which instants resist the memory which reclaims [reacutecupegravere] and re-presents Scepticism as it traverses the rationality or logic of knowledge is a refusal to synchronise the implicit affirmation contained in saying and the negation which this affirmation articulates [eacutenonce] in the Said To the reflection which refutes it the contradiction is visible but scepticism remains


insensitive to it as though the affirmation and the negation did not sound [ne reacutesonnaient pas] together at the same time Scepticism therefore challenges the thesis according to which what is repeated between the saying and the said is the relation that binds in synchrony the condition to the conditioned As though what counted for scepticism was the difference between my exposure [mon exposition] mdash without reserve mdash to the other which is Saying and the exposition [exposition] or statement of the Said in its equilibrium and its justice114

In revisiting ancient scepticism then Levinas did not seek to refute its refutation and thus rehabilitate it as a discourse delivering superior truth More importantly it was to find in scepticism a repressed and always already re-emergent instantiation of what he calls the dia-chrony of Saying that decoupling of the infinite act of utterance from any finite utterance which in turn he maintained was proof of the excess or ethical ex-cellence of Saying with regard to the Said

In commenting on Levinasrsquos project in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Blanchot as we have seen was already expressing discreet reservations about the lingering phenomenological assumptions of Levinasian Saying rereading Levinasrsquos pages on scepticism earlier the same year for lsquoNotre compagne clandestinersquo Blanchot continued quietly to press the case The emphasis of his account again fell on some of the implications of Levinasian Saying

Enigma of a Saying as though belonging to a God [comme drsquoun Dieu] speaking in man [lrsquohomme humankind] man who relies on no God for whom there is no residing who is exiled from all world and without other-worldly transcendence [sans arriegravereshymonde] and who lastly does not even have language as an abode [demeure] any more than he may be thought to have language in order to speak by way of affirmation or negation This is why Levinas returning to the discussion of scepticismrsquos invincibility also says (if memory serves) that lsquolanguage is already scepticismrsquo where the emphasis can be placed on already and not only because language may be deemed inadequate or consist essentially of negativity or even because it may be thought to exceed the limits of thinking [du penser] or else perhaps because of its relation with the ex-cessive and in so far as it bears the


trace of what passed by [ce qui a passeacute] without presence of a trace that left no trace always already effaced bearing the trace however beyond being Language in this way may be deemed scepticism admittedly as language that denies the possibility of clinging [srsquoen tenir] to certain knowledge or does not allow transparent communication but because of that as language that exceeds all language while not exceeding it the language of epocheacute or as Jean-Luc Nancy has it of syncope The scepticism of language thus takes from us up to a certain point (a limit that remains undecided [indeacutecise]) all guarantee by reason of which it does not enclose us in what it might claim should be a caution or condition115

As elsewhere when Blanchot responds to the work of Levinas it is hard to find evidence of what might properly be termed opposition or contradiction between the thinking of the two friends And yet as Blanchot rehearses these key concerns of Levinas there is a noticeable shift in emphasis leading the argument in the course of four intricately interwoven propositions away from Saying God or transcendence and towards language as both limit and limitless-ness inscription and erasure interruption and interminability not as dia-chronic wisdom therefore but as a radical absence of all guarantee Admittedly Blanchotrsquos formulation concedes its own debt to the phenomenological epocheacute whose legacy it discreetly overwrites however by means of a reference to Jean-Luc Nancyrsquos reading of Kant and of the question of presentation in literature and philosophy after Kant in the process returning a favour for Le Discours de la syncope in 1976 had concluded with a quotation from an essay by Blanchot on one of Francersquos most celebrated phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty in which as Nancy recalls approvingly and as Blanchot might have written apropos of Levinas (and in agreement with Levinas) one reads that lsquo[p]hilosophical discourse always at a certain moment loses itself [se perd ie both loses its way and fades away] it may even be no more than a relentless process of losing and of losing oneself [de perdre et de se perdre]rsquo116

Scepticism too for Blanchot perhaps from his earliest years as a reader of philosophy was one of the places where philosophy lost track of itself not in order to find itself in nihilistic contradiction with itself nor indeed to find itself transformed into something


other than itself but rather to find itself suspended by something neither inside nor outside and on which it had as a result no possible purchase something that was for itself without name but which here or there might receive provisional acknowledgement under a proliferation of other possible-impossible guises as scepticism the neuter the fragmentary or even perhaps as disaster Thus scepticism in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre playing a similar role as elsewhere falls to the fragmentary or the neuter

uml Scepticism a name that has scored out its own etymology and all etymology is not indubitable doubt nor is it simply nihilist negation rather irony Scepticism is bound [est en rapport] to the refutation of scepticism It is refuted if only by the fact that life goes on but death does not confirm it Scepticism is the very return of the refuted that which irrupts anarchically in capricious and irregular fashion every time (and yet simultaneously not every time) that the authority and sovereignty of reason or even unreason impose their order upon us or organise themselves definitively into a system Scepticism does not destroy the system it destroys nothing it is a kind of gaiety without laughter in any case without mockery suddenly making us lose interest in assertiveness [lrsquoaffirmation] or negation [la neacutegation] like all language in the neuter Disaster might be said also to be this lot [cette part] of always unavailable sceptical gaiety which puts seriousness (the seriousness of death for instance) beyond all seriousness just as it lightens the load of the theoretical by not letting us entrust ourselves to it117

Scepticism then while it belonged to philosophy also marked its outside its telling weakness its abiding interruption In that regard it was however not alone

III

An inheritance

uml The writer the daylight insomniac



The ancient sceptics Plato Hegel Schelling Schlegel Nietzsche Wittgenstein Husserl Heidegger Levinas Derrida numerous are the names of philosophers that reverberate through Blanchotrsquos text This does not mean LrsquoEacutecriture du desastre is a book of philosophy nor does it imply it is an anti-philosophical one Under the aegis of the fragmentary it exists (in so far as it exists) in philosophyrsquos interstices and on its margins even as it opens a territory of its own with neither map nor geography119 To this the many remnants of sentences or phrases traversing its pages some written in italics others in roman bear ample witness challenging any reader who might attempt to decipher them by using this or that generic or symbolic grid What gets said in many of the bookrsquos shorter fragments is often tantalising and elusive Phrases are no sooner proposed than suspended traced than effaced left as a remainder lsquo The calm the burning of the holocaust the annihilation of noon ndash the calm of disasterrsquo writes one fragment the twenty-ninth in sequence in italics towards the opening of the book120 repetitive circular even regressive in structure with the double reference to calm (from Greek kauma burning heat heat of the sun) bracketing the fragment before finally giving way to the cosmic dispersion of dis-aster and its iterative four-stage movement passing through a sequence of differentiated bindings each synonymous with the next while also reversing it first the calm of untroubled heat then the all-consuming sacrificial conflagration then the devastating light of midday then again the deceptive tranquillity of the burning heat of day ndash Blanchotrsquos fifteen words also stand calmly detached from themselves by the intervention of an unpronounceable scriptural icon as though to repeat and immobilise render both visible and obscure that conceptual movement retraced by Derrida in Glas one of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastrersquos most insistent intertexts through which Hegel in the Phenomenology effects the strategically important transition on the way towards the realisation of Absolute Knowledge between natural religion (die natuumlrliche Religion) and religion in the form of art (Kunstreligion) the significance of which was far from being lost on Blanchot Indispensable to that transition as Derrida shows is an all-consuming sacrifice by dint of which Hegel puts it lsquo[p]ure light disperses its unitary nature into an infinity of forms and offers itself up as a sacrifice to being-for-itself [gibt sich dem Fuumlrsichsein zum Opfer dar se donne en holocauste offers itself up as in a holocaust] so that from its substance the


individual may take an enduring existence for itselfrsquo121 Opfer offering or sacrifice writes Hegel holocauste translates Derrida partly following Jean Hyppolite and explains

The difference and play of pure light this panic-stricken [panique] pyromaniac dissemination and all-burning [le brucircleshytout] offers itself up in a holocaust to the for-itself [au pourshysoi] [ ] It sacrifices itself but does so in order to remain maintain its guard bind itself to itself strictly and become itself for-itself in proximity to itself [aupregraves de soi bei sich in Hegelrsquos German] To sacrifice itself it burns itself The burning [la brucirclure] burns itself therefore and goes out the fire dampens down the sun begins to descend [deacutecliner] to follow the course that will take it into Western interiority [lrsquointeacuterioriteacute occidentale] (the West [lrsquooccidental] as we know bears the sun in its heart) This sacrifice belongs as its negative to the logic of the all-burning to what might be called the double register of its countable calculus [son calcul comptable] If you want to burn everything it is also necessary to consume the fire avoid keeping it alive as a precious presence It is therefore necessary to put it out to keep it so as to lose it (truly) or lose it so as to keep it (truly) The two processes [procegraves also trials] are inseparable and can be read in either direction from right to left or left to right the raising [relegraveve Derridarsquos translation of Hegelian Aufhebung] of the one must attach importance [faire cas literally to turn into a case] to the other Panic-stricken limitless inversion the word holocaust that turns out to translate Opfer is more appropriate to the text than Hegelrsquos own word In this sacrifice everything (holos) is burned (caustos) and the fire can go out only by being rekindled [le feu ne pourra srsquoeacuteteindre qursquoattiseacute]122

What then is at stake in this whole complex and reversible scenario where possibility hangs on impossibility identity on extinction and conceptual progress on the interruption of presence Derrida replies as follows

This perhaps the gift the sacrifice the putting into play or setting on fire of everything [la mise en jeu ou agrave feu de tout] the holocaust are under ontologyrsquos control [sont en puissance drsquoontologie] They bear it [la portent] and outstrip it [la deacutebordent]


but cannot do other than give birth to it Without the holocaust dialectical movement and the history of Being could not open or become engaged in the ring [lrsquoanneau] of their anniversary or be negated [srsquoannuler] to produce the movement of the sun from East to West Before if it were possible here to reckon with time before all else before any determinable entity [eacutetant] there is there was there will have been [il y a il y avait il y aura eu] the irruptive event of the gift An event that no longer has to do with what is ordinarily meant by the word Giving [la donation] can no longer be thought on the basis of being [agrave partir de lrsquoecirctre] but lsquothe oppositersquo one might say were this logical inversion to be at all pertinent here where what is at issue is not yet logic but the origin of logic In [Heideggerrsquos] Zeit und Sein the gift of the es gibt gives itself to thinking before the Sein in the es gibt Sein and displaces everything that is understood by the word Ereignis often translated as event123

The calm of disaster this conflagration this destruction likewise opens a world while itself remaining radically irreducible to it Its burning heat destroys what it salvages but salvages what it destroys at the same time however as far as itself is concerned like the il y a to which Derrida turns in passing disaster resists all appropriation and finds expression only in an impossible oxymoron lsquo Obscure disaster [le deacutesastre obscur] is what carries the light [qui porte la lumiegravere]rsquo as Blanchot puts it two pages later124 The moment is a crucial one For even as it marks the very articulation of the possible under the aegis of the all-encompassing System of Hegelian thought it necessarily interrupts that movement of possibility like a caesura characterised only by its own impossibility Like the hiatus of dis(-)aster embodied in an invisible hyphen it mediates thought while resisting all mediation what Blanchot quoting Levinas calls the impossibility of all possibility indispensable to the System while radically exterior to it hovering inside and outside it as a ghostly residue which suggests Blanchot it is one of the pressing tasks of thought to honour ndash or if not to join in destroying in the knowledge that what was thereby promised to destruction by assimilation exclusion or annihilation was the indestructible which endures not as power or possibility but as the interminable impossibility of dying that always defeats the will to destroy not by overcoming it but by always eluding its authority unreachable


intangible infinitely other Disaster too then rather than anything resembling a sacrifice was more a giving or withdrawing outside all possibility resistant to the teleology of speculative knowledge and unanswerable to the question of being or non-being both

In dramatising opening and closing beginning and ending the lightening and darkening of a world without world before or after all world Blanchotrsquos twenty-ninth fragment with its evocation of the calm of disaster was not alone For almost exactly two-thirds of the way through the book occupying 268th position in this book of 403 fragments and roughly marking its midpoint in terms of pages covered thus articulating and interrupting its structure twice over in the manner of another redoubled discursive or poetic caesura stands a more sustained excursus a cosmological fable perhaps or merely a waking dream which leaning on Serge Leclairersquos On tue un enfant (A Child is Being Killed) Blanchot introduces explicitly as a (Freudian) primal scene125 As he does so however while maintaining the psychoanalytic concept he also takes care to withdraw it twice over by placing it within parentheses and by adding a question mark thus challenging the coherence of the term the appropriateness of its use and the terminological authority on which it relies (Only those for whom it is lsquorisk extreme danger daily questioningrsquo Blanchot puts it should feel entitled to use analytical vocabulary otherwise he suggests it simply turns into the readymade language of conformist culture)126 At any event Blanchotrsquos primal scene written almost entirely in italics will be familiar to many it is the most frequently cited text in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre perhaps even the whole of Blanchotrsquos later work which is no doubt proof of the way in which the fragment offers itself to reading as a testamentary address or valedictory exordium even perhaps as Lacoue-Labarthe suggests an autobiographical prose poem127

uml (A primal scene) You who live later close [proches] to a heart that beats no more suppose suppose this [supposez-le] the child ndash aged seven eight perhaps ndash standing by the curtain drawing it aside and through the windowshypane [agrave travers la vitre] looking What he sees the garden the wintry trees the wall of a house yet as he looks on no doubt as children do at where he usually plays he grows weary and slowly looks up towards the ordinary sky with its clouds the grey light the dull day without depth


What happens next the sky the same sky [le mecircme ciel] suddenly open absolutely black and absolutely empty revealing (as though through the broken windowshypane) an absence such that everything [tout] has always and forever been lost in it so much so that affirmed and dissipated within it is the dizzying knowledge that nothing is what there is and to begin with nothing beyond [rien est ce qursquoil y a et drsquoabord rien au-delagrave] What is unexpected about the scene (its interminable trait) is the feeling of happiness [le sentiment de bonheur] that immediately engulfs the child the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only in tears an unending stream [un ruissellement sans fin] of tears It is assumed he is just having a childish upset and the attempt is made to console him He says nothing He will live henceforth in that secret [dans le secret in secrecy with the secret] He will weep no more128

The effects of Blanchotrsquos ill-fitting and deceptive subtitle are many In so far as it frames designates or names the text Blanchotrsquos heading is simultaneously attached to the text it introduces and detached from it repeated twice over in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre at the head of two further fragments which it annexes to the first as its continuation or commentary the subtitle serves to release the three fragments from their original singular context in order ndash provisionally ndash to bind them anew to a fresh context As each fragment is thereby extracted from one site and projected or rejected towards another in a movement that can continue unchecked in limitless fashion as reading advances retreats or advances again a series is opened including not only the three initial fragments but also several further fragments comprising a sequence derived (like one of the three already mentioned) from a 1978 text first published under the selfsame title (lsquoUne scegravene primitiversquo) and a series drawn from a text in which Blanchot had originally reviewed Leclairersquos On tue un enfant a book in which the notion of the primal scene looms large not forgetting at least one additional supplementary fragment (in principle many others) in which the dialogue begun as a commentary on the first () lsquoprimal scenersquo is continued129 The principle of seriality in other words seems capable of infinite expansion making it impossible to decide where the series begins or ends which is what is already implicit in the staging of the primal scene For if it is the hallmark of any such scene never to have properly occurred in the present but to


repeat itself without end as always other than what it was under the influence of the logic of delayed action (or Nachtraumlglichkeit) that the primal scene exemplifies in Freud without it ever being clear what does or not belong to the scene then LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre might be seen to be nothing other than the endless reiteration of such a scene with the corollary that what was thereby revealed was the knowledge that not only was no primal scene ever properly primal but also that by that very token it was always either more or less than a scene thus confirming in radically abyssal fashion the revelation ndash the absence of revelation or revealed absence ndash staged by Blanchotrsquos text as belonging to its own (non)primal (non)scene

Blanchotrsquos subtitle ndash lsquo(A primal scene)rsquo ndash is not the only interpretative or textual frame put into play in Blanchotrsquos fragment On the contrary the remainder of the text repeats the similar framing movement several times over First the explicit address to future readers on the part of one no longer living likewise sets the text aside from itself and surrounds it with a virtual frame signalled by the invitation lsquosuppose thisrsquo This gesture in turn frames a scene involving a small child who is likewise framed as an observer looking through a window-pane at a garden which itself provides the frame for a vision of the sky a sky which is immediately reframed as somehow different while remaining the same to which the youthful onlooker framing this sky for a second time responds with tears of joy to which the text itself responds with a shift in tense from the present to the future once more setting the text at a distance from itself This multiple layering of the text whereby each frame gives way to another frame is not however all For the scene(s) described in the fragment do(es) not stand alone They recall several passages elsewhere in Blanchotrsquos work in which the text describes a similar kind of distancing effect Witness for instance (the list makes no claim to be exhaustive) the episode in LrsquoArrecirct de mort where Simone in a kind of virtual extension of the phenomenological epocheacute is glimpsed through a shop window (lsquoagrave travers la vitre drsquoun magasinrsquo) or the suggestion mentioned earlier in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire apropos of Kafka also reminiscent of the phenomenological epocheacute that the lsquopoetrsquo is someone lsquofor whom there exists not even a solitary world [un seul monde] for there exists only the outside the streaming [le ruissellement] of the eternal outsidersquo or the analogous scene in Le Pas aushydelagrave also mentioned earlier involving children playing in the garden shouting lsquowhorsquos playing being me todayrsquo (to which the answer in the impersonal third person


is lsquolui lui luirsquo him him him) which reprised some pages later the children having now departed leaves behind like some vacant stage lsquoa space infinitely empty like a garden [espace infiniment vide comme un jardin]rsquo or earlier in Le Pas aushydelagrave the recurrent perception of the sky lsquoopening on to its emptiness [sur son vide]rsquo or on to the limitless void of the blue of the heavens (le bleu du ciel) as Blanchot phrases it in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre in an unmistakeable echo of Bataillersquos 1957 novel of the same name written some twenty-two years before it finally appeared in print lsquoldquoThe blue of the heavens [Le bleu du ciel]rdquorsquo Blanchot puts it evoking the possibility of yet another frame lsquois what best expresses the emptiness of the heavens disaster as withdrawal [retrait] outside sidereal shelter and the refusal of any sacred nature [drsquoune nature sacreacutee]rsquo130

As well as referring to other texts by Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastrersquos lsquoprimal scenersquo also contains evidence of a vast library of other texts too impossible to delimit among which might be mentioned for instance as Lacoue-Labarthe suggests Pascalrsquos posthumous Meacutemorial with its startling invocation of lsquoJoy joy joy tears of joy [Joie joie joie pleurs de joie]rsquo or Mallarmeacutersquos famous essay lsquoLe Mystegravere dans les Lettresrsquo in which as far as reading was concerned the blank page was said always to return lsquoinitially gratuitous but now certain to conclude that nothing beyond [pour conclure que rien aushydelagrave] and authenticate the silencersquo a phrase Blanchot discreetly extends in his second paragraph using it to query the aestheticism implied in some of Mallarmeacutersquos own thinking131 The reference to Freudian analysis already contained in the fragmentrsquos subtitle is similarly extended into Blanchotrsquos discussion of Leclaire in the third fragment subtitled lsquo(A primal scene)rsquo which in turn resonates through LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre as a whole particularly in so far as Blanchotrsquos reading of Hegel is concerned For Leclairersquos debt via Lacan was not only to Freud but Hegel too and to the figure of double death (ie first in symbol then in reality) that features importantly in Lacanrsquos thinking notably on the subject of Antigone albeit that for Blanchot the opposition between the two deaths had the effect of rooting subjectivity within a dialectic of the possible forgetting that dying was not accessible as such and that what Leclaire observed to be the tenacious confusion between the two in common usage was both inevitable and necessary and capable of being resolved Blanchot went on only by sleight of hand or by some philosophical ruse just as the conceptual holocaust documented in


Glas only yielded to possibility in so far as its own impossibility ndash its resistance to mediation interruptive suspension and recalcitrant exteriority ndash was forgotten excluded excised132

It is not only that Blanchotrsquos so-called primal scene is framed by numerous citational perspectives putting it in conversation with a variety of literary philosophical or theoretical texts the scene also practises its own frame-like opening as the figure of the window-pane testifies But this is no simple pictorial representation The opening of the frame transforms what is seen through it changing the garden trees house then the sky not into something other (the sky remains emphatically the same) but voiding everything of all substance presence or being The radical subtraction that results is doubtless epochal in at least two senses First the framing of the sky lsquoabsolutely black and absolutely emptyrsquo brackets out all that there is save the nothing that precedes and exceeds the appearance of any object or entity at all (in much the same way that prior to all creation in the Lurianic Kabbala as Blanchot put it in 1957 it was necessary first for there to be nothing and for nothing to be) Second this voiding of the scene radically alters the relationship between frame and scene in that if what appears in the frame is everything everything reduced to nothing it follows that the scene must now include the frame itself together with the numerous other textual frames surrounding it Blanchotrsquos primal scene in other words cannot be securely positioned Instead of being read by a proliferating multiplicity of other texts it now reads them in its turn and in so doing necessarily also reads or rereads itself The scene fractures the frame explaining why the window-pane in Blanchotrsquos description suddenly appears broken The emptiness in the scene proves contagious and it is no longer possible to distinguish inside and outside which is why Blanchotrsquos scene ceases to be a scene at all and turns into an interminable infinite undelimitable abyssal trace testifying to the realisation as Blanchotrsquos text famously puts it that lsquonothing is what there is and to begin with nothing beyondrsquo

But how are these words to be taken As philosophical proposition or spiralling self-reflection As fiction or as theory or as the dissolution of the one by the other Or simply as a fragment of autobiography It is tempting of course to take Blanchotrsquos words as a statement of radical nihilism or ontological atheism To do so however would be to risk ignoring their precarious status as mere supposition irreducible either to the true or to the false which is not only how the fragment


is framed from the outset but how the fragment enjoins the reader to interpret that frame that is as a supposition paradoxically bereft of positionality a lsquosaid [dit]rsquo the reader is subsequently told in an abyssal observation that itself has no guarantee of truth lsquowhich without referring to an unsaid [non-dit] (as the conventional claim now has it) or to an inexhaustible excess of words sets aside the Saying [reacuteserve le Dire] which seems to denounce it authorise it and provoke it to a retraction [un deacutedit]rsquo133 This later fragment returning to the scene to both prolong it and comment on it thus surrounding it with an additional ill-fitting frame adds the following inconclusive remarks again printed in italics passing ostensibly from one voice to another

lsquomdash I admit ldquonothing is what there is [rien est ce qursquoil y a]rdquo makes it impossible for it to be said like some calm simple negation (as though the eternal translator were to replace it with ldquoThere is nothing [il nrsquoy a rien]rdquo)rsquo lsquomdash No negation but the terms are ponderous like blocks of verse [stances] set side by side (without proximity) in closed selfshysufficiency (outside meaning) each motionless and unspeaking thereby usurping their sentence structure of which we would find it difficult to say what was conveyed by itrsquo mdash lsquoDifficult is an understatement passing through this sentence is what it can contain only by bursting apart [eacuteclatant]rsquo lsquomdash For my part I can hear the irrevocable quality of the there is [lrsquoil y a] which being and nothingness like the sea heaving in vain unfolding and refolding tracing and effacing roll over and over [roulent] to the rhythm of the anonymous rustling soundrsquo lsquomdash Hearing the absent echo [le sans-eacutecho] of the voice what a strange soundrsquo lsquomdash The sound of strangeness but let us go no furtherrsquo lsquomdash Having already been too far returningrsquo

But the speakers do go on as does Blanchotrsquos fragment suspending its movement dispersing its words concluding without concluding as follows

lsquoThe question forever suspended having died from this ldquobeingshyableshytoshydierdquo which gives him joy and devastation did he survive or rather what then does surviving mean if not living from an acquiescence in refusal in the exhaustion of emotion withdrawn from interest in oneself disshyinterested extenuated to the point of calm expecting nothingrsquo lsquomdash Consequently waiting and waking


because suddenly wakeful and henceforth knowing this never wakeful enoughrsquo134

Never sleeping never fully awake just like these words that already interrupted by the other can themselves no longer be interrupted the fragmentary too can but continue forwards backwards sideways always outside of itself in response to that without which it would not occur at all and which if it had a name might in the end be written dis-aster

Disaster then was anything but torpid disengagement and it was hardly by chance therefore that invited in 1994 to contribute to a special issue of the periodical Lignes commemorating the friend who was robert Antelme who had died four years before Blanchot once more had recourse to the figure of insomnia knowing it to be always more than a figure lsquoOnly slowlyrsquo he wrote to the absent Antelme lsquoin these nights when I lie sleeping without sleeping [ougrave je dors sans dormir] did I became conscious (the word is not a good one) of your closeness however distant you were When this happened I convinced myself you were there not you but these repeated words ldquoIrsquom growing distant Irsquom growing distant [Je mrsquoeacuteloigne je mrsquoeacuteloigne]rdquorsquo lsquoI realised then immediatelyrsquo he went on lsquothat robert who was so generous and had so little concern for himself did not speak to me about himself or for himself but about all the places of extermination [lieux drsquoextermination] some of which he would list (if he was the one speaking) ldquoListen to them listen to these names Treblinka Chelmo Belzec Majdanek Auschwitz Sobibor Birkenau ravensbruumlck Dachaurdquorsquo135

To wake without waking then was no melancholy indulgence it was unremitting exposure to what Goya in 1797 another witness to the disasters of war (lsquoLos desastres de la guerrarsquo) called the sleep of reason ndash which brings forth monsters

IV

What happened

uml The unknown name outside of namingThe holocaust [lrsquoholocauste] this absolute event in history historically dated the allshyburning [cette toute-brucirclure] in which


the whole of history caught fire and the movement of Meaning was engulfed in which the gift without forgiving without consent was ruined without giving rise to anything that might be affirmed or denied the gift of passivity itself the gift of what cannot be given How to preserve it [le garder] if only in thought [fucirct-ce dans la penseacutee] how to make thought into that which might preserve the holocaust in which everything was lost including the thought that preserves [la penseacutee gardienne]

In mortal intensity [lrsquointensiteacute mortelle] the fleeting silence of cries without number


For many readers perhaps even including Blanchot himself the writing of disaster remained radically inseparable from one very specific disastrous turning-point in history the systematic persecution and murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 On this reading alongside the yiddish Hurbn (meaning the Destruction) or the Hebrew Shoah (meaning the Catastrophe) deacutesastre might be thought to be another solemn yet inevitably inadequate name on the part of a writer who was not a Jew for the attempted annihilation without trace of all those who in Nazi Germany and throughout Nazi-occupied Europe were identified by the wearing of a star As a result there was arguably nothing surprising in the fact that in 1985 prefacing the published text of his film Shoah to which Blanchot would pay tribute a year later Claude Lanzmann should present the transcript ndash lsquodrained of blood [exsangue] and denuded [nu]rsquo ndash by referring to it as lsquothe writing of disaster [lrsquoeacutecriture du deacutesastre]rsquo137 And more generally too though it is impossible to say how much Blanchotrsquos use of the word may have contributed to this it is clear that the word deacutesastre has achieved some currency in contemporary French discourse not only as a synonym for the devastation of wartime defeat but also as a kind of generic secularised designation for the legacy of the death camps The effects are not limited to French reception Ann Smockrsquos English translation of LrsquoEcriture du deacutesastre with the superfluous second definite article in its rendering of that title (The Writing of the Disaster) similarly gives disaster the determinate status of a unique historical event while the 1995 first American trade paperback edition made the association doubly explicit by featuring on its


cover the image of lsquoa desecrated Torah scroll fragment recovered in 1945 from Pultusk Polandrsquo now held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection in the margins of which it offered the following explanatory blurb lsquoModern history is haunted by the disasters of the century ndash world wars concentration camps Hiroshima and the Holocaust rsquo138 Academic writing too has followed much the same trend and commentators have found it easy to conclude in the words of Michael Syrotinski that lsquothe horrors of Auschwitzrsquo constitute lsquothe dominant point of referencersquo of Blanchotrsquos 1980 book139

This literal identification of deacutesastre in Blanchot with the Shoah is nevertheless highly problematic Even a casual reading cannot fail to notice that disaster in Blanchotrsquos text does not name a delimited historical event nor does it correspond to any actual identifiable phenomenon nor does it have the status of a regular or regulative discursive concept even less is it a synonym for unprecedented political violence and oppression If it is to be believed as Blanchotrsquos opening sentence affirms that lsquo[d]isaster ruins everything while leaving everything intactrsquo then it is difficult not to say impossible to understand how disaster might in some sense be equivalent to genocide its experience legacy or traumatic memory Similarly when Blanchot writes in another fragment that lsquo[w]e are not contemporary with disaster that is its difference and this difference is its fraternal threat [sa menace fraternelle]rsquo or when the reader is told that lsquo[d]isaster is the time when it is no longer possible by desire ruse or violence to risk the life one seeks to maintain through this very risk a time when the negative falls silent and when in place of men comes the infinite calm (the effervescence) which does not embody itself nor make itself intelligiblersquo140 there seem to be few grounds if any for concluding that disaster which Blanchot insists cannot be experienced as such is in any sense an attempt to name the destruction of so many millions of Jews The willingness to assimilate deacutesastre to the memory of the Shoah would much rather appear to rest on the tenacious but unfounded assumption that the fragmentary in Blanchot should be equated with negativity and with loss and destruction and that it cannot as a result be anything other than synonymous with the event that for Blanchot and others of his own and later generations has the indisputable status of a disastrous historical caesura a change of epoch no less with devastating political and philosophical consequences still to be measured141


And yet while it is plainly inadequate to see in disaster a name or symptom of Holocaust this is not to say that the memory of the camps does not feature importantly and with particular urgency (elsewhere paying tribute to Levinas Blanchot describes it as an obsession) at the very heart of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre where it forms the explicit matter of five fragments occurring like another caesura no more than a dozen pages after the first lsquoprimal scenersquo mentioned earlier142 Moreover Blanchotrsquos parcimonious but nevertheless telling recourse to the word holocaust (which appears only three times in the whole of the book) both in its literal sense of an all-burning sacrifice this emblem of possibility lodged as an irreducible impossibility at the heart of the speculative metaphysical tradition (following Derridarsquos analysis of Hegel in Glas) and in its received sense as a possible though disputed name for the murder of six million Jews suggests that one of the exacting challenges against which Blanchot sought to measure his writing in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was that of responding philosophically and politically to the memory of the camps without there being any certainty that any word or words at all might prove adequate to the task At any event to dismiss Blanchotrsquos writing as culpable evasiveness on the part of a former extremist nationalist political journalist swapping postwar philosemitism for 1930s antisemitism is not only to fail to read Blanchotrsquos text more seriously it is grotesquely to trivialise the issues at stake in reflecting on the legacy of the camps143

Blanchotrsquos engagement with the political and philosophical implications of the camps did not of course stand alone but was part of a wider evolving story of avoidance controversy and partial recognition during the postwar years At first deportees were honoured for their contribution to the French resistance movement but as years went by they were increasingly relegated to the historical background It was only slowly particularly in the wake of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem through 1961 and 1962 that commentators began to differentiate more clearly between concentration camps and extermination camps between repression and genocide between the status of those who were imprisoned arbitrarily or otherwise for political or allegedly related activities and others who were the victims of systematic racist or ethnic persecution and between those who actually entered the camps and those far more numerous who selected for murder even


as they arrived never reached the camps without these categories necessarily being mutually exclusive144

Throughout the 1940s 1950s and 1960s Blanchotrsquos published writing largely reflected these vicissitudes The earliest extant mention of what he called lsquothe solitude of the man of the camps [la solitude de lrsquohomme des camps]rsquo was in an article from 1950 on the russian nihilists (who had also featured in Camusrsquos 1949 play Les Justes) in the course of which he touched briefly on Lazare parmi nous by the poet novelist and essayist Jean Cayrol a (non-Jewish) survivor of Mauthausen concentration camp It was not however until April 1962 as we have seen in an essay on Antelmersquos LrsquoEspegravece humaine following a brief footnote five years earlier that Blanchot articulated in print a more sustained response145 In August and September the same year there appeared a further essay under the title lsquoLrsquoEcirctre juif [Being Jewish]rsquo subsequently also included in LrsquoEntretien infini in which without explicitly mentioning the death camps Blanchot was quick to acknowledge the long history of antisemitic violence in the Christian West lsquoThroughout the centuriesrsquo he wrote lsquothe Jew is the figure of the oppressed [lrsquoopprimeacute] and accused [lrsquoaccuseacute] and both is and has been the victim of oppression in every societyrsquo Beyond religion and beyond cultural tradition however and not without some brutality as he willingly conceded Blanchotrsquos more pressing concern was to identify in Judaism lsquonot the revelation of the one Godrsquo as he put it but lsquothe revelation of language [la parole speech] as the place where human beings hold themselves in relation with that which excludes all relation the infinitely Distant the absolutely Foreignrsquo146

This philosophical assessment of the lessons of Judaism was of course almost exactly contemporary with Blanchotrsquos reading of Totaliteacute et infini and owed much not only to the work of Levinas but also to the contribution of Andreacute Neher whose 1962 collection of essays LrsquoExistence juive Blanchot also acknowledged in a footnote147 Judaism then for Blanchot in 1962 was anything but a religious particularism it was characterised before all else and far more radically by its singular universalism supplemented by a no less unyielding commitment to universal singularity to exile wandering and justice lsquoThere is a truth of exile and a vocation of exilersquo he wrote in terms as bold as they were cautious lsquoand if to be Jewish is to be promised [voueacute] to dispersion it is because dispersion in the same way that it calls for dwelling without place


and in the same way that it ruins every fixed relationship of power with one individual one group or one State also when faced with the demand of the Whole clears the way for another demand [une autre exigence a different requirement] and ultimately puts an end to the temptation of Unity-Identityrsquo148 This double perspective seeking to marry an understanding of the history of a people with what Blanchot in a long footnote calls lsquothe metaphysical demand [lrsquoexigence meacutetaphysique] made on all [poseacutee agrave tous] by Judaism by dint of Jewish existencersquo explains why in LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchot felt able to combine the essay lsquoBeing Jewishrsquo and the essay on the non-Jewish Antelme under the shared rubric of lsquoThe Indestructible [LrsquoIndestructible]rsquo thus allowing his interpretation of Judaism in a move some have found contentious to announce Antelmersquos concentration camp experience and to be glossed or explicated by it in turn149

It was only in 1972 in a brief series of five or six fragments first published in tribute to Jabegraves and later incorporated into Le Pas aushydelagrave that Blanchot may be said to offer a more explicit recognition of the Jewish specificity of the Final Solution which he did in the following terms anticipating much of the argument of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre

That the fact of the concentration camps [le fait concentrashytionnaire] the extermination of the Jews and the death camps where death continues its work should be for history an absolute which interrupted history this is something that must be said [on doit le dire] without it being possible however to say anything further Discourse cannot develop on that basis Those who might need proof will not receive any Even in the assent and the friendship of those who share the same thought there is almost no affirmation possible because all affirmation has already been shattered and because friendship in its proximity can be sustained only with difficulty [srsquoy soutient difficilement] Everything has foundered everything founders no present resists150

While acknowledging the distinction between concentration camps and death camps Blanchotrsquos concern in this fragment was nonetheless to think together their shared possibility as belonging to an absolute caesura affecting history but irreducible to it But in


doing so he remained mindful of both the necessity and yet the danger of philosophical discourse On the one hand to turn aside from philosophy assuming this to be possible at all would be tantamount to a refusal to think the legacy of the camps and would result in unacceptable silence but on the other to impose philosophical discourse on the camps would risk repeating the violence of naming which by determining the other as an object to be posited positioned and controlled was at the heart of the possibility of the camps themselves

The first explicit mention of the experience of the camps in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is in this respect revealing It comes as one of a list of situations as Blanchot puts it prolonging a movement begun in LrsquoEntretien infini apropos of Antelme where passivity (in Blanchotrsquos or Levinasrsquos sense of the word) is put to the test lsquoPassivityrsquo writes Blanchot lsquowe can evoke situations of passivity distress [le malheur] the crushing power of the concentration camp State [lrsquoeacutecrasement final de lrsquoeacutetat concentrationnaire] the servitude of the slave without master fallen beneath need dying [le mourir] as lack of attention to the outcome of death In all these cases albeit with falsifying approximate understanding [drsquoun savoir falsifiant approximatif] we can recognise common traits anonymity loss of self loss of all sovereignty but also of all subordination loss of residence homeless wandering the impossibility of presence dispersion (separation)rsquo151 Blanchotrsquos analysis did not however proceed without hesitation Even as he began sketching out a preliminary philosophical argument pursuing his post-phenomenological project by enumerating a series of exemplary limit-experiences of which the camps were one he was held back by the logic of passivity itself driven to question philosophyrsquos own limits and explore the possible complicity that might exist between the oppression of the camps and the power of discourse as such Some pages earlier Blanchot had already announced as much by pointing a finger at the objectifying (albeit sometimes saving) violence implicit in literary and perhaps other kinds of criticism as embodied in lsquothe horror ndash honour ndash of the name which always risks becoming an excessive label [surshynom a name imposed rather than assumed] clawed back in vain by the movement of anonymity [le mouvement de lrsquoanonyme] the fact of being identified unified fixed arrested in a presentrsquo lsquoThe charnel-house of namesrsquo he added lsquoheads never emptyrsquo152


If the memory of the camps weighed heavily on postwar Europe then it did so not only in the minds and lives of those who survived but also within the confines of philosophical discourse itself What was the connection between instrumental reason and the design construction and administration of the camps This was not a question Blanchot was alone in asking As early as 1944 under the heading lsquoElements of Antisemitismrsquo Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment had already begun to probe lsquothe limits of the Enlightenmentrsquo and in 1966 in Negative Dialectics translated into French only two years before publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Adorno returned to the theme lsquoGenocidersquo he famously wrote lsquois absolute integration which is everywhere in the offing wherever people are drilled into uniformity (as the military phrase goes) till the point is reached when as deviations from the concept [Begriff] of their complete nothingness [Nichtigkeit] they are literally exterminatedrsquo lsquoAuschwitzrsquo he added lsquoconfirms the philosopheme of pure identity as deathrsquo153 As Adorno pointed out as would Blanchot in his turn what occurred in the camps had implications reaching far beyond its immediate victims their family friends or community lsquoWith the administrative murder of millionsrsquo Adorno observed lsquodeath was turned into something that had never before to be feared in this way No possibility remained for death to enter into the lived experience of the individual as something consistent with its course The individual was expropriated of the last meagre resource remaining That in the camps it was no longer the individual [das Individuum] that died but a mass-produced item [das Exemplar] is bound to affect the dying of those who escaped such measuresrsquo154 As for the responsibilities of thinking in these circumstances Adornorsquos diagnosis was severe but exacting and although he may have demurred at its dialectical formulation it is unlikely that Blanchot could have dissented lsquothe obvious implicationrsquo Adorno concluded lsquois that thinking in order to be true today at any rate must also think against itself If it fails to measure up to the extremity which eludes the concept [Begriff] it would be little different from the musical accompaniment the SS liked to have playing to drown out the screams of their victimsrsquo155

But how then to think against thinking And how to do so moreover without the aid and security of the dialectic even one that calls itself negative In another of the fragments dedicated to Jabegraves in 1972 in which he considered the lsquomurderousrsquo or lsquolethalrsquo


effects of the interminable rollcalls to which inmates were routinely subjected Blanchot essayed an answer

The calling of names in the camps in a way that obviously leaves no room for polite camouflage reveals the meaning of every formality of registration [drsquoeacutetatshycivil of births marriages and deaths] (and of all verification of identity which in our advanced civilisations gives rise to all kinds of police violence and denial of freedom) Language does not communicate it strips naked and according to the nakedness mdash exposure to the outside mdash proper to it which it is possible only to mitigate [tempeacuterer] ie to pervert [pervertir] by the detour which is the play of this always oblique lsquooutsidersquo which is also primarily the play of language without right or direction indirect as though in play156

To think the existence of the camps requires a turning aside from the objectifying implications of names concepts discourse But far from imposing a respectful mutism this is why it remains imperative to speak To remember the camps in other words enjoins discretion obliqueness indirection necessitating a speaking that withdraws or dissipates its own violence in order to attend to the silence it bears within it a silence that is both a resistance to language and a demand for speech If words are inescapable so too is silence and to respond to the past is to listen equally both to the one and to the other In the years following LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Blanchot would insist increasingly on the specifically Jewish dimension of what occurred But the question of the always inadequate always necessary name endured lsquoShould we forget Should we rememberrsquo he asked in 1989 again paying tribute to Jabegraves and answered lsquoremember what remember something for which we have no name ndash the Shoah the Holocaust the Extermination the Genocidersquo157

The literature on the Nazi camps is extensive The source material on which Blanchot draws in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is by necessity highly selective as revealing for what it omits as much as for what it includes Naturally enough Antelme is again mentioned by name albeit only once158 More surprisingly perhaps there is no explicit reference to any other prominent historical or autobiographical work in French documenting the experience of the camps The ground-breaking work of Leacuteon Poliakov (Breacuteviaire de la haine


1951) or Olga Wormser-Migot (Le Systegraveme concentrationnaire nazi 1968) the significant and influential testimonies of David rousset (Les Jours de notre mort 1947) Elie Wiesel (La Nuit 1958) or Charlotte Delbo (Auschwitz et apregraves 1965ndash71) among many others possible are all conspicuous by their absence as too are the names of writers in languages other than French who might have been cited with the notable exception of Celan recalled here as in Blanchotrsquos 1972 memorial homage Le Dernier agrave parler not as a poet of testimony but of its impossibility For lsquoif death is in vainrsquo remarks Blanchot apropos of Celanrsquos Buumlchner Prize address lsquoDer Meridianrsquo lsquoso too is the speaking of death [la parole de la mort] including the words that believe themselves to say it and disappoint in saying itrsquo159

Blanchotrsquos major documentary source in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre does however come to him from German the 1975 French translation of Hermann Langbeinrsquos lengthy often harrowing compilation of memoirs witness statements conversations and interviews with inmates and survivors of Auschwitz together with some members of the SS assembled during the 1960s by the author an Austrian ex-Communist who having been active in the International Brigades in Spain was interned in France and subsequently handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy authorities in 1941 After over a year in Dachau Langbein was then moved in August 1942 to Auschwitz where he remained for two years as clerk (or Schreiber) to the SS camp doctor (the SSshyStandortarzt) before being transferred again in August 1944 to Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg First published in German in 1972 as Menschen in Auschwitz his book appeared in an abridged French version three years later as Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz160 As Langbein explains being partly of Jewish descent he would normally have been categorised under Nazi racial laws as a Mischling ie a mixed-blood or half-caste and as such given the same lowly status as a Jew He was however able to keep the facts of his birth hidden from the authorities which allowed him as an Austrian and therefore an assimilated German to occupy a relatively protected position in the camp even as he remained exposed throughout were his family background to be revealed to the implicit threat as he puts it of being lsquohurled down the long ladder from the position of a privileged German to that of a Jew placed at the very bottomrsquo161


Langbein then who is mentioned twice by name in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre provides Blanchot with much if not indeed all of the detail concerning conditions in Auschwitz It is from Langbein for instance as he freely acknowledges that Blanchot borrows the example (even including some of the same turns of phrase) of inmates being forced lsquoto carry rocks at the double [porter au pas de course des pierres] from one place to another [agrave tel endroit] pile them up [agrave les empiler] then carry them back still running [toujours courant] to where they were at the startrsquo162 At the end of the same fragment it is in Langbein too that Blanchot will have found evidence of inmates refusing to contemplate suicide out of sheer defiance As Benedikt Kautsky put it quoted by Langbein lsquoat a point where I thought I could not do otherwise than collapse physically or morally my instinct for self-preservation appeared in the guise of defiance ldquoSurely you arenrsquot going to do those pigs the favour of killing yourselfrdquo This was an argument that one applied not only to others but much more effectively to oneselfrsquo163 Other sinister vignettes also have their basis in Langbein such as the grotesque incident concerning Lagerfuumlhrer Schwarzhuberrsquos six-year-old son (Blanchot commits a transcription error mistaking six for dix and misreports the boyrsquos age as ten) who was forced to go around with a sign around his neck identifying who he was in order to avoid him being sent to the gas chamber by accident or the grisly memory of the famous visit to Auschwitz in July 1942 by Himmler who while attending a mass execution for the first time is said to have felt sick (lsquoihm ist uumlbel gewordenrsquo says Langbein Meunier followed by Blanchot translates lsquosrsquoest eacutevanouirsquo felt faint) and as a result ordered steps to be taken to lsquohumanisersquo extermination which led to the introduction of the gas chambers (lsquodeath humanised on the outsidersquo remarks Blanchot lsquoon the inside horror at its most extremersquo)164

From Blanchotrsquos point of view the merits of Langbeinrsquos work were several First its detailed account of the daily reality of Auschwitz as experienced by those who witnessed it provided a ready fund of sometimes anecdotal but always telling first-hand testimony Second in Langbeinrsquos exhaustive project there was an untimely timeliness and a pressing urgency For though the events it recorded were by now thirty or more years distant Menschen in Auschwitz was not a piece of antiquarian research It was very much of the moment not only in the sense that being published


in the early to mid-1970s it was strictly contemporary with the composition of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre but also in that it was itself part of a broader long-running historical and political campaign not only in Langbeinrsquos native Austria but more widely in Europe which already in the early to mid-1960s had culminated in the first major Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt Finally and perhaps most importantly as far as Blanchot was concerned there was in Langbeinrsquos work a methodical precision allied with remarkable sobriety and unmediated directness far from discursive or conceptual presumptions which derived from his unique position as a witness in his own right and as a witness to numerous others who as the victims of genocide or political persecution were no longer able to bear witness in person

The contemporaneity of Langbeinrsquos volume was a trait it shared with certain of the other historical sources cited in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre which like the fragmentary itself also reflected the vagaries of the publishing cycle even as any conceptual opposition between the contingent and the essential came to be challenged as a result The fact was books and documents that saw the light of day seemingly by chance or by accident also said something fundamental about the deeper preoccupations of the epoch itself It was not at all as it sometimes was for others in order to defend the virtues of French parliamentary democracy that Blanchot at the time also took a keen interest for instance if in a less sustained way in contemporary revelations regarding the Soviet concentration camp system165 But here too the emphasis fell on the information provided in first-hand autobiographical and historical work such as the memoirs of Joseph Berger (with their dismaying indictment of lsquothe terrible perversions of power and terrible misfortunes of the peoplersquo) or Alexander Solzhenitsynrsquos multi-volume non-fictional narrative The Gulag Archipelago both of which Blanchot cites and which like the work of Langbein similarly became available in the early to mid-1970s amidst ongoing philosophical and political disquiet about the totalising tendencies of all State power as such166

The comparison with the Soviet experience also gave Blanchot a notional if necessarily fragile vantage point to emphasise what the camps rather than being some monstrous aberration revealed about the societies which produced them lsquoConcentration camps extermination campsrsquo he wrote carefully distinguishing the two


and invoking not the one but the many lsquofigures [figures] where the invisible forever made itself visible All the characteristics of a civilisation revealed or laid bare (ldquoWork brings freedomrdquo ldquorehabilitation through workrdquo)rsquo167 But if horror lrsquohorreur seemed to dominate in Auschwitz and meaninglessness le nonshysens in the Gulag Blanchot went on so the reverse was equally the case without either perspective capable of proving exhaustive But this was precisely the question at issue that politics which aspired to be all was not all and whenever it sought to translate itself into unlimited possibility the only outcome was nihilistic oppression subjugation and death This much came as no surprise to Blanchot Indeed reading these passages in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre it is hard not to be reminded that the writerrsquos own concerns were still those of a former journalist possessed of a passion for the political as he put it in 1984 whose own very different intellectual itinerary from the early 1930s onwards had begun and unfolded during an epoch likewise dominated by Soviet communism and German fascism and who born in 1907 was himself a near contemporary of Langbein (b 1912) Berger (b 1904) Antelme (b 1917) and Solzhenitsyn (b 1918)

In his engagement with Langbein Blanchot pays particular attention to the testimony relating to two groups who by common consent feature among the most desperate of Auschwitzrsquos many victims the so-called Muselmaumlnner those inmates who relinquishing all will or ability to carry on living were thought to have passed beyond the line separating life from death and the members of the euphemistically-titled Sonderkommando on whom was imposed the task of attending to the gas chambers for which sinister duty in most cases they eventually paid with their own lives Shared by both groups ndash the daily confrontation with the unspeakable here the total collapse of subjectivity there ndash alongside the unremitting prospect of personal destruction was the extremity of the threat posed to the victimsrsquo capacity to testify at all for themselves or for each other Experience in other words could no longer be signified or constituted as such even less located within recognisable parameters Notwithstanding the considerable efforts of Langbein and numerous others sometimes without name to record what happened and absolutely inseparable from the events to which Langbein and others sought to bear witness there remained something that resisted all verisimilitude narrative continuity or


depiction in general This explains why throughout LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre published barely eighteen months after Marvin J Chomskyrsquos NBC mini-series Holocaust a model of consumerist banalisation was broadcast on French television Blanchot makes no explicit mention at all of any of the fictional treatments of the experience of the camps either in French or any other language168 Instead Blanchot preferred to make his own a remark that comes from Langbein commenting on the sporting and musical activities that took place in Auschwitz which Langbein for his part is willing to defend up to a point explaining as he put it that lsquothe instinct of survival makes a person seek diversion wherever this is possiblersquo But as Langbein then concedes these privileges (football and boxing matches film shows musical performances) were not available to all lsquoTo be surersquo he writes lsquofor the grey mass of pariahs there was neither cinema nor sport nor concertsrsquo a verdict that Blanchot transcribes modifying its phrasing slightly only to add with noticeably greater severity the following admonishment obviously addressed more to contemporary audiences of the late 1970s and 1980s than to the survivors of Auschwitz lsquoThere is a limit at which practising an art [lrsquoexercice drsquoun art] becomes an affront to distress [une insulte au malheur] Let us not forget thisrsquo169

What here is presented by Blanchot as an ethico-moral argument ie that the misery of others should not be exploited for the purpose of aesthetic enjoyment was not the writerrsquos final word on the matter Elsewhere the case is made on more explicitly transcendental grounds it is that art suggests Blanchot in a reverse corollary of the proposition that writing is traversed by the impossibility of dying cannot properly represent destruction extreme dereliction or death In so far as it appeals to what Blanchot using the word rather differently to Levinas calls lsquothe unqualifiable Saying [Dire] the glory of a ldquonarrating voice [voix narrative]rdquo which expresses itself [donne agrave entendre] clearly without it ever being possible for it to be obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what is being communicatedrsquo literature cannot do other than speak of survival lsquoLet me sayrsquo he wrote explicitly recalling Adornorsquos famous dictum lsquothere can be no such thing as a fictional narrative [reacutecitshyfiction] about Auschwitzrsquo lsquoNo matter when it may be writtenrsquo he went on in a much-quoted sentence lsquoevery narrative will henceforth be from before Auschwitz [drsquoavant Auschwitz]rsquo170 There remained however an essential ambiguity or irony which


often goes unnoticed but of which Blanchot himself was doubtless aware It was that to illustrate the point he found himself obliged to cite a story Kafkarsquos Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) which had truly been written before Auschwitz ie in the latter part of 1912 but which as Blanchotrsquos presentation confirmed was as a result not without saying something impossible improper even intolerable about Auschwitz ie that happily unhappily lsquolife goes on perhapsrsquo What came before in other words necessarily also came after Coming as it did then before the death of many of Kafkarsquos friends and family in Auschwitz and elsewhere Die Verwandlung could not do other than bear witness as proof of the unthinkable impossibility of the camps and proof too of the desperate impropriety yet necessity of hope

Blanchotrsquos point was not that a veil of silence could or should be drawn over the camps If this were the case he would have had no use for Langbein and little interest in the detail of his research Blanchotrsquos argument was both simpler yet more complex it was that in the experience of the camps there was something literally unimaginable to use Antelmersquos word which could not therefore be made present or reconciled with narrative logic or integrated within the archeo-teleological structure of history as the history of sense The camps Nazi and Soviet were historical through and through But history was not all For if it were everything it would in fact be impossible to write it since it would be without beginning ending or middle History in other words if it exists is necessarily traversed interrupted exceeded by an unspoken unspeakable silence irreducible to history that cannot be made present or represented as such Such silence however was not nothing It left a trace not as deferred presence not as temporary absence but as something that fragile transitory and always on the brink of effacement nevertheless had a chance of surviving This was why for Blanchot as for others the diverse testimony assembled by Langbein was of such crucial importance And to underline the point Blanchot again had recourse to Langbeinrsquos account in order to cite the historical (but also much more than historical) testimony left by Salmen (or Zelman) Lewental (or Loewenthal) a Polish Jew from Ciechanoacutew who was a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando from December 1942 onwards and as such closely involved in the failed uprising of October 1944 At some stage Lewental buried two caches of documents near one of the


Birkenau crematorium buildings the one containing the diary of an unidentified member of the Łodz ghetto found outside the gas chamber by Lewental to which he added a brief commentary of his own and the other a diary detailing the circumstances of his imprisonment and the events surrounding October 1944 These two sets of documents significantly damaged by the passage of time and the conditions in which they had been preserved were discovered in July 1961 and October 1962 respectively171

Found in this way over a decade and a half after their burial Lewentalrsquos words written in Yiddish which might easily not have survived at all spoke across time and history In fragmentary form from beyond the grave they delivered an address to the future Partially destroyed by mould and by damp rendered in part illegible they spoke of that of which it was impossible to speak Speak however they did warning or reminding their uncertain readers to come in a fragment itself already half-destroyed that lsquothe whole truth is even more tragic even more terrible [La veacuteriteacute est bien plus tragique encore plus atroce translates Meunier]rsquo172 Between the version cited by Langbein and the translation given in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre there is admittedly a difference For Blanchot rewords and completes Lewentalrsquos message writing now lsquo[T]he truth was [fut] always more terrible [toujours plus atroce] more tragic [plus tragique] than what will be said about it [que ce que lrsquoon en dira]rsquo173 The gesture is arguably problematic By what right may one alter an absolutely singular text of this kind The question raised however affects all inheritance all memory all repetition How to maintain fidelity how to avoid infidelity Any answer is less decidable than it might seem For all repetition for good or ill is a betrayal and better an active remembering one might say than a pious but inert monument174 reading Lewentalrsquos message in Langbein most likely citing it imperfectly from memory (as he often does elsewhere) what Blanchotrsquos discreet and possibly inadvertent revision to Lewentalrsquos exact words nevertheless suggests is that the only response to such a message is to make it onersquos own in the certain knowledge of the absolute impossibility of doing so aware however that if such a legacy is to survive it is not enough for it simply to be echoed with the respect due to it it had to be reaffirmed even rewritten by whoever is not a witness but is nevertheless forcibly entrusted like any heir with the impossible yet necessary task of bearing witness to the witness


Words Lewental seemed to be saying could not but remain suspended on their radical inadequacy There were other difficulties too Knowledge itself Blanchot argues is not indifferent it always risks complicity with that which it seeks to grasp and explain if only by transforming it into the graspable and explicable To understand is also to forgive The knowledge of horror in other words is never far from the horror of knowledge Blanchot puts it thus lsquoKnowledge which goes so far as to accept that which is horrible [lrsquohorrible] in order to know it [le savoir] reveals the horror of knowledge [savoir knowledge that is established impervious absolute] the lower depths of cognition [connaissance] the discrete complicity which maintains its relation with that which is most intolerable in power [le pouvoir both political power and the being-able-to]rsquo175 Blanchot illustrates the point in a fragment which again draws on Langbein from whom is taken the story of the twenty-five-year-old Kalmin Furman another member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando as recounted to Langbein by Jehuda Bacon

On one occasion Furman told me he was meant to take his own parents to the crematorium At the time he attempted to hang himself but was cut down just in time Afterwards he was excused from working on corpses but in return received a special assignment whenever the SS were shooting prisoners in a special room in the crematorium Furmanrsquos job was to hold the victims by their arms If anyone failed to keep quiet he was held by the ear then the shot in the back of the neck could be aimed in the right place When I asked Bacon whether Furman had ever indicated how he could endure this he replied that Furman wanted to observe how people behaved in the face of death [wollte beobachten wie man sich vor dem Tod verhaumllt observait le comportement des hommes devant la mort translates Meunier in words Blanchot transcribes exactly]176

Citing these words from Langbein but leaving out the names of all concerned Blanchot interjects a rejoinder as final as it is brief lsquoI shall not believe this [je ne le croirai pas]rsquo In Furmanrsquos reply there was a silence unvoiced by the victim manifesting itself in the stereotypical recourse to the indifference of knowledge as a kind of self-lacerating protection against the unspeakable It is a silence


implicit in all knowledge of what happened that it is essential to hear says Blanchot And he goes on

This response (lsquoI observed how people behaved [jrsquoobservais le comportement des hommes ]rsquo) was not a response [the young man] could not respond What remains is that constrained by an impossible question he could find no alibi except in the search for knowledge [la recherche du savoir] the supposed dignity of knowledge [la preacutetendue digniteacute du savoir] this final propriety which we believe will be bestowed upon us by knowledge [par la connaissance]177

reactions to this passage have in some cases been oddly defensive providing eerie confirmation of Blanchotrsquos point that belief in the unlimited prerogative of knowledge produces a strange blindness of its own Gerald Bruns for instance describes Blanchotrsquos lsquoanecdotersquo as lsquoa moral allegory of Stoic impassivityrsquo bordering alongside Lewentalrsquos words on lsquoimplausibility or bad faithrsquo forgetting that Furman as Blanchot makes clear was acting only under extreme duress and was allowed by the SS nothing of the detachment autonomy or equanimity of a mature philosophical subject178 Gillian rose too remains stubbornly insensitive to the silence implicit in Furmanrsquos words and accuses Blanchot in showing lsquothe dignity of knowledgersquo to be lsquoobscenersquo (as she puts it) of lsquoblam[ing] the victimrsquo179 Nothing could be further from the truth Again it is as though the possibility of knowledge can have no bounds the inconceivable impossibility of Furmanrsquos position surviving death (says Blanchot) only to be deprived of that death and forced to exchange it for the death of others is therefore set at nought and the appeal to the indifference of knowledge which says more about the instrumentalisation of reason than it does about the responsibilities of the victim is shorn of all context all singularity and in the end all politics As Blanchot insists knowledge is not an impartial tool it transforms what it seeks to know into an object of knowledge which is to say an object of possible existence In so doing it renders its object acceptable to reason which as a result always risks being tainted with what it objectifies But this is not at all to say that it is desirable or even possible to renounce all knowledge It is an appeal to those who come after even as they are enjoined to know what happened that they recognise too the limits


of the power of knowledge and respond purposefully to the silent fissure of impossibility that traverses all testimony of the camps This is Blanchotrsquos own watchword repeated by him several times over in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre and elsewhere addressed as much to himself as to others both parts of which most importantly are of equal significance lsquoKnow what happened do not forget and at the same time never will you know [Sachez ce qui srsquoest passeacute nrsquooubliez pas et en mecircme temps jamais vous ne saurez]rsquo180

remembering thinking writing as Blanchot is only too keenly aware imply responsibility responsibility however is not only due to what is spoken it is owed to what remains unspoken too The realisation is one that is inseparable from the fragmentary but it traverses too the whole question of how to remember the camps As far as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is concerned it receives perhaps one of its most telling enactments in a brief fragment which opens the series of texts dealing explicitly with that legacy Written mainly in italics and made up of two unsourced truncated quotations brief to the point of unrecognisability and standing in so to speak for the numerous other memoirs testimonies or scribbled notes which have inevitably been omitted and passed over in silence since such are the limits of any book any memory any archive the fragment reads as follows lsquouml The suffering [souffrance] of our time ldquoAn emaciated man with head dropped and shoulders curved unthinking [sans penseacutee] unseeing [sans regard]rdquo ldquoOur eyes were turned to the groundrdquorsquo181 For an attentive reader of Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz these discreet and elliptical sentences are however without mystery For both feature almost verbatim within Langbeinrsquos book The first is taken from Primo Levirsquos Auschwitz memoir Se questo egrave un uomo (If This Is A Man) first published in Italian in 1947 and republished (not unlike LrsquoEspegravece humaine) to significantly greater acclaim a decade later while the second occurs towards the beginning of Levirsquos sequel La Tregua (The Truce) first published in Italian in 1963 and retracing his tortuous return journey from Auschwitz to Turin In both cases the text used by Blanchot is that given in Meunierrsquos 1974 translation though it should be noted that in transcribing the first quotation Blanchot also intervenes silently as he does elsewhere to compress the original wording182

The contexts in which these two quotations originally featured in both Levi and Langbein are not indifferent to their meaning or to Blanchotrsquos treatment of them The first brief extract from Levi


cited as such by Langbein details the stance or perhaps better the literal impossibility of stance associated by the writer with the extreme dejection dereliction and powerlessness of the figure of the Muselmann As Levi himself explains in a passage that immediately precedes that quoted by Langbein (and by Blanchot)

To sink is the easiest of matters it is enough to carry out the orders one receives to eat only the ration to observe the discipline of the work and the camp Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this way All the musselmanns who finished in the gas chambers have the same story or more exactly have no story they followed the slope down to the bottom like streams that run down to the sea On their entry into the camp through basic incapacity or by misfortune or through some banal incident they are overcome before they can adapt themselves they are beaten by time they do not begin to learn German to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion Their life is short but their number is endless they the Muselmaumlnner the drowned form the backbone of the camp an anonymous mass continually renewed and always identical of non-men who march and labour in silence the divine spark dead within them already too empty to really suffer One hesitates to call them living one hesitates to call their death death in the face of which they have no fear as they are too tired to understand183

As this context indicates there was nothing haphazard or negligent in Blanchotrsquos failure to specify the source of his quotation It is rather that to whoever had not only reached the limit but touched the limitlessness of the limit unthinking unseeing and bereft of all story denied a life and a death that might be called their own the only possible adequate-inadequate proper-improper memorial was a fading impersonal trace deprived of identity authorship or context In its haunting fragility its poverty and persistence then Blanchotrsquos quotation is radically abyssal Left anonymous it testifies to those who were deprived of name emptied of authority it speaks of those who were robbed of all authority surviving as a fleeting inscription it discreetly remembers those who did not survive at all


In recent years this notion or concept of the Muselmann has of course become a significant focus of philosophical debate lsquoAt times a medical figure or an ethical category at times a political limit or an anthropological conceptrsquo contends Agamben lsquothe Muselmann is an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity but also vegetative existence and relation physiology and ethics medicine and politics and life and death continuously pass through each otherrsquo lsquoThisrsquo he adds lsquois why the Muselmannrsquos ldquothird realmrdquo [ie in Wolfgang Sofskyrsquos words cited by Agamben the Muselmannrsquos place lsquoin limbo between life and deathrsquo] is the perfect cipher of the camp the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed and all embankments floodedrsquo184 If the figure of the sovereign Agamben argues elsewhere is synonymous with lsquothe point of indistinction between violence and law the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violencersquo coming into its own in that state of exception that precedes traverses and outlasts all acts of political constitution much the same applies in inverse fashion to the Muselmann who beyond life and death beyond all possibility of testimony is given to testify in silence and impotence to a world in which lsquothe state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of daily lifersquo185 In Auschwitz lsquothe bare life to which human beings were reducedrsquo Agamben goes on lsquoneither demands nor conforms to anything It itself is the only norm it is absolutely immanentrsquo186 For the Muselmann then all transcendence is violently expunged Death in other words is no longer a possibility to be appropriated but something of which the individual has always already been expropriated The camp for Agamben is both the ultimate confirmation and radical inversion of the Heideggerian doctrine of SeinshyzumshyTode ie as Agamben reformulates it here that the sole task of existence is to appropriate its own inappropriable ndash improper ndash finitude

In the camp every distinction between proper and improper between possible and impossible radically disappears For here the principle according to which the sole content of the proper is the improper is exactly verified by its inversion which has it that the sole content of the improper is the proper And just as in Being-towards-death the human being authentically appropriates the inauthentic so in the camp the prisoners exist everyday


anonymously towards death The appropriation of the improper is no longer possible because the improper has completely assumed the function of the proper human beings live factually at every instant towards their death This means that in Auschwitz it is no longer possible to distinguish between death and mere decease between dying and lsquobeing liquidatedrsquo187

lsquoIf in Being-towards-death it was a matter of creating the possible through the experience of the impossible (the experience of death)rsquo Agamben puts it lsquohere the impossible (mass death) is produced through the full experience of the possible through the exhaustion of its infinityrsquo In this he writes lsquothe camp is the absolute verification of Nazi politics which in the words of Goebbels was precisely ldquothe art of making possible what seemed impossiblerdquorsquo188 For Agamben lsquo[t]he Muselmann is the non-human who obstinately appears as human he is the human that cannot be told apart from the inhumanrsquo189 As such he is the final moment in a sinister conceptual hierarchy an absolute limit beyond subjectivisation or individuation enduring as a kind of undifferentiated remainder coinciding as whole or as part with neither itself nor any other embodying what Agamben calls lsquoabsolute bio-political substancersquo190

lsquoThe lesson of Auschwitzrsquo concludes Agamben speaking with untroubled philosophical authority is this that lsquothe human being is the one who can survive the human beingrsquo a proposition he suggests can be read in two ways lsquoIn the first sense it refers to the Muselmann (or the grey zone) it therefore signifies the inhuman capacity to survive the human In the second sense it refers to the survivor it designates the human beingrsquos capacity to survive the Muselmann the non-humanrsquo To these two interpretations Agamben then adds a third which again has to do with the possibility of the Muselmann and claims that lsquothe human being is the inhuman the one whose humanity is completely destroyed is the one who is truly humanrsquo He goes on lsquoThe paradox here is that if the only one bearing witness to the human is the one whose humanity has been wholly destroyed this means that the identity between human and inhuman is never perfect and that it is not truly possible to destroy the human that something always remains The witness is this remainderrsquo191 It is at this point in his argument that Agamben turns to Blanchot to quote or more accurately to misquote the phrase with which Blanchot in 1962 had sought to respond to Antelmersquos


LrsquoEspegravece humaine lsquoman [lrsquohomme humankind] is the indestructible that can be infinitely [sic adverb added by Agamben] destroyedrsquo192 Criticising Blanchot for supposedly lsquomisunderstand[ing] his own wordsrsquo Agamben deflects and normalises Blanchotrsquos formula by grafting onto it an ontologico-dialectical humanistic inflection it was designed to resist lsquoThe human being can survive the human beingrsquo Agamben now wrote lsquothe human being is what remains after the destruction of the human being not because there is somewhere a human essence to be destroyed or saved but because the place of the human is divided because the human being exists in the fracture between the living being and the speaking being the inhuman and the human [ ] The human being is the being that is lacking to itself and that consists solely in this lack and the errancy it opensrsquo193

Agambenrsquos rewriting of Blanchotrsquos formula is nothing if not double-edged While it testifies to a striking convergence in some of their thinking what it more readily emphasises is the extent of their differences These are several in number First it is noticeable that while having through the work of both Levi and Langbein much the same access as Agamben to the name notion or concept of the Muselmann Blanchot for his part declines to use the term in transcribing the quotation from If This Is A Man When the word does appear in Blanchot which it does once only two pages later it is as part of a sequence of names each exemplifying horror (lsquobecause extermination in every form is the immediate horizonrsquo) but which together form a virtual or implicit quotation lsquothe living dead pariahs Muselmaumlnner [mortsshyvivants parias musulmans]rsquo194 If the Muselmann traverses Blanchotrsquos text then it is as a figure cited rather than used advanced only to be withdrawn not given any fixed conceptual positioning or paradigmatic identity The unmediated juxtaposition of Blanchotrsquos brief quotation from The Truce with the passage from If This Is A Man achieves a similar effect For though the two quotations are bound together in Blanchotrsquos text by the repetition of a single recurrent motif that of eyes and body downcast there is much that otherwise separates the two While the first quotation in the third person refers to conditions inside the camp and to the dereliction and abjection experienced by the Muselmann the second passage now in the first-person plural relates to the early days following the liberation of the camp at a time when the lives of the narrator and his companions


continue to be overshadowed by their recent experiences and by the even more pressing threat of disease But between despair and hope between all loss of self and its tenuous recovery Blanchot offers no teleological hierarchy Between the Muselmann and the narrator between third and first person there is no opposition therefore but a shared condition of expropriation captured in the same powerless downward turn of the body a weakness of stance that for Blanchot unlike Agamben does not offer itself to conceptual arraignment discursive determination or philosophical positioning

This emphasises a second major divergence between Blanchot and Agamben The latter as his account of the challenge embodied in the Muselmann shows remains faithful even in the breach to Heideggerrsquos thinking of death as Daseinrsquos ownmost possibility This in turn is what allows him to think the world of the camp in terms of a dialectic of infinite possibility which by definition suffers no resistance True enough the countless deaths that occurred in Auschwitz and elsewhere at the hands of the SS provide ample and incontrovertible proof of the seemingly limitless reach of deathrsquos possibility Those victims however did not belong to their executioners their deaths were not reducible to what the powers that decreed them wished to make of them and their very destruction testified to something over which those authorities had no control As they fell subject to their murderers there was something in the death meted out to them that refused and resisted that subjection Even in the camps then the pas aushydelagrave remained a threshold of political resistance For all dying Blanchot insisted even under the most extreme violent and unspeakable circumstances is born by disastrous impossibility What the indestructible names anonymously and in the neuter is not humanityrsquos inhuman capacity to survive itself then but the impersonal always other trace of impossibility that interrupts all possibility including that of absolute destruction However much the genocidal project of the Nazis was sustained by the paranoid fantasy of destroying the Jewish people absolutely and in total secrecy as Himmler announced in his notorious Poznań speech of October 1943 a trace necessarily remained not as a presence or an absence to be retrieved or restored but a mark of fragile indestructibility an otherness that bears witness to the impossible that inheres in all possibility even the most comprehensive as an indelible memory of destruction


Prolonging the thought of disaster in 1986 in response to Lanzmannrsquos Shoah it was this according to Blanchot that might be thought to constitute the singularity of the camps and of the Shoah their simultaneous status as both monstrous possibility and residual impossibility lsquoThis is what the genocide of the Jews wasrsquo suggested Blanchot again remembering Levinas lsquonot only the annihilation of all Jews but the annihilation of that annihilation itself Nobody was meant to know neither those carrying out the orders nor those giving them nor the supreme instigator nor finally the victims who should have disappeared in the ignorance and in the absence of their own disappearance The ldquosecrecyrdquo demanded and maintained everywhere was the secrecy of what exceeds and destroys all revelation by a human language ndash a destruction of the trace that is language ndash this ldquowithout tracerdquo or erasure of the human facersquo195 lsquoShoahrsquo he also observed this word signifying lsquoannihilationrsquo was thus a word for that which could not be annihilated Erasure itself in other words was also a trace it is what resists destruction not by denying its only too apparent well-documented possibility but by insisting on the impossible necessarily inherent within that possibility If anything survived the camp then it was not an undifferentiated remainder as Agamben seems to suggests but an impersonal trace which making memory possible yet impossible as Lanzmannrsquos film was able to testify offers both the chance and the burden of interminable mourning196

Blanchotrsquos silent quotation from Levirsquos If This Is A Man is however not the only place in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre where the writer may be found reflecting discreetly on the fate of the Muselmann Four fragments later he draws on a passage in the lsquoMuselmannrsquo chapter in Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz in which Langbein had quoted the words of an unidentified member of the Sonderkommando describing lsquoa group of emaciated starving Jews brought in from some camprsquo of whom the witness reports that lsquo[t]hey were terribly hungry and begged for a piece of bread to sustain them for the short time they still had to live Inmates brought a large amount of bread The eyes of the new arrivals which had been dimmed by horrendous hunger blazed in a wild outburst of joy [Leurs yeux ternis eacuteteints par une faim atroce srsquoilluminegraverent drsquoune ivresse sauvage translates Meunier] With both hands they seized a crust of bread and devoured it greedily while they were climbing the stairs to be shotrsquo197 reading this account alongside similar


stories detailing the often degrading extremes to which inmates (categorised in Langbein as Muselmaumlnner) were reduced as a result of the very basic needs especially hunger which they had no means of satisfying resisting or even controlling Blanchot commented as follows remembering as he did so his own earlier remarks on the question of need in LrsquoEspegravece humaine from 1962

uml It is necessary to meditate further (but is it possible) upon this in the camp if need as was said by robert Antelme experiencing it for himself bears everything maintaining an infinite relation to life even in the most abject manner (but here it is no longer a question of high or low) consecrating it through an egoism without ego there is also that limit at which need no longer helps one to live but is an aggression against the whole person a torment which denudes an obsession of the whole of being at the point where being has collapsed Dull extinguished eyes [Les yeux ternes eacuteteints] flash [brillent] suddenly with a wild glimmer [drsquoune lueur sauvage] for a crust of bread lsquoeven if the sense that one is going to die moments later still subsistsrsquo and there is no longer any question of nourishment This glimmer [lueur] or spark [eacuteclat] illuminates nothing living [nrsquoillumine rien de vivant] And yet with this look that is a last look bread is given to us as bread a gift that beyond all reason all values exterminated in nihilistic desolation and all objective order renounced maintains the fragile chance of life through the sanctification of lsquoeatingrsquo (nothing lsquosacredrsquo though let us be clear) something that is given unreservedly [sans partage] by whoever dies as a consequence (lsquoOf great importance is the mouthful of food [Grand est le manger]rsquo says Levinas after a Jewish saying)198

At this extreme point then where the possibility of properly dying or even surviving has been violently confiscated from those who have fallen victim to bare and debilitating need there supervenes and there remains a giving or gift beyond exchange or return in the end beyond need itself which devouring the human no longer serves as a foundation for shared human possibility but mutates into devastating abyssal emptiness As Blanchot goes on

But at the same time the fascination of the dying look into which the spark of life becomes frozen does not leave the requirements of need intact even in basic form making it henceforth impossible


to place eating [le manger] (bread) within the category of what can be eaten [du mangeable] At this extreme moment where dying [mourir] is exchanged for the life of bread no longer in order to satisfy a need and even less to make it desirable need [le besoin] mdash grinding need [besogneux] mdash dies [meurt] too as simple need and turning it into something inhuman (withdrawn from all satisfaction) exalts glorifies the need for bread having become an empty absolute into which henceforth we can but plummet [nous perdre be lost or ruined] in our entirety199

But even as he sought to measure the implications of such extreme dereliction Blanchot paused recalling another passage in Langbeinrsquos book citing the words of H G Adler the historian (and former inmate) of Theresienstadt concentration camp lsquoAnyone who has not experienced this destruction [aneacuteantissement annihilation translates Meunier] for himselfrsquo warned Adler lsquodoes not know and will never know Let him keep silent [Qursquoil se taise]rsquo200 There is then that which it is possible to know inseparable from it however is that which resists knowledge or understanding Neither horn of this dilemma can take precedence over the other Both are essential each imposes an obligation and requires a response The aporia remains however interminable and as far as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was concerned Blanchot could only conclude without possibility of conclusion by reiterating the dilemma as follows

the danger (here) of words in their insignificance as theory is perhaps that they claim to evoke the annihilation [lrsquoaneacuteantissement] in which everything always founders [ougrave tout sombre toujours] without attending to the lsquobe silentrsquo [le lsquotaisezshyvousrsquo] addressed to those who knew the interruption of history only from a distance or in part And yet to wake [veiller] over immeasurable absence this we must [il le faut] this we must without cease [il le faut sans cesse] because what began again [a recommenceacute] on the basis of that end (Israel all of us) is marked by this end with which we cannot be finished [nous nrsquoen finissons pas] in awakening ourselves [nous reacuteveiller]201

What wakes Blanchot put it some fifty pages earlier is of course disaster calling to attention not only the possibility of what happened but also that which was without possibility propriety


or presence in so far as history was what had meaning not only that which belonged to history therefore but also what interrupted it breached its continuity obliged it to pivot on itself lsquo Watch over absent sense [Veiller sur le sens absent]rsquo such in all senses of the term was Blanchotrsquos watchword forming a single detached injunction printed entirely in italics and part of no continuity no discourse no demonstration202 What it implied was a responsiveness and responsibility both to the historical event and to that which exceeded historical determination From the outset this was the double burden of disaster or deacutesshyastre in Blanchot and why it features throughout less as an event to be experienced or witnessed than as a caesura or hiatus separating history from itself not because disaster was somehow ahistorical but because it belonged to history only in so far as it exceeded its closure unhistorically historical historically unhistorical precisely dated says Blanchot but irreducible to historyrsquos flow In a word epochal Disaster then said more than that something in the experience of the camps however essential the historical record resisted apprehension by discursive conceptual knowledge what disaster also said was that something in philosophy itself inseparable from its normative assumptions its exclusionary logic and its institutional authority bore responsibility for what happened In other words it was as though at the very core of Western thought synonymous with its commitment to a logic of identity stood a suppression a violence an all-consuming sacrifice without which philosophy would and could not be what it was As far as that most imperious and monumental of modern philosophical edifices Hegelrsquos Phenomenology was concerned as read by Derrida in Glas closely followed by Blanchot in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre that moment had a name whose connotations were anything but academic That word encountered earlier written in lower case by Derrida and Blanchot alike was lsquoholocaustrsquo

It was therefore not for nothing argued Blanchot extending the implications of Derridarsquos analysis that Hegel in the Phenomenology and elsewhere showed such deep-rooted philosophical distrust of Judaism for it was in Judaism as far as the Christian West was concerned Blanchot went on that lay the singularity otherness and exteriority that had to be reduced assimilated or destroyed if totalising teleological reason was to reach its appointed destination its preordained rendez-vous with itself As Blanchot put it in a


fragment much indebted to Glas (and to Levinas) lsquoHegel may well be Christianityrsquos deadly enemy but in so far as he is Christian if far from being satisfied with one solitary Mediation (Christ) he mediates everything [fait meacutediation de tout turns everything into a mediation] Only Judaism is the thinking that does not mediate [ne meacutediatise pas does not think through mediation] And this is why Hegel Marx are anti-Judaic not to say antisemiticrsquo203 The suggestion was unforgiving Admittedly as we have seen Blanchot adds a minor potentially back-handed corrective some eighty pages later nuancing the initial claim at least as far as Marx was concerned when he quotes Lenin (after Henri Guillemin) to the effect that lsquothe slightest hint of antisemitism professed by any group or individual proves the reactionary nature of that group or individualrsquo204 But it was not in spite of the fact Hegel was a philosopher that his thinking displayed contempt for Judaism Blanchot contended but precisely because of it because dialectical reason required mediation and could not do other than apply its redoubtable powers of appropriation to what resisted much as the Christianity of Paul of Tarsus would attempt to do with regard to its own Judaic origins

Hegel Marx were not alone For Blanchot applied the same argument with more telling force to Heidegger Here too Blanchot told Catherine David in November 1987 following the testimony of Karl Loumlwith there was no contradiction between politics and what still notwithstanding Heideggerrsquos declared project of stepping back from Western metaphysics had the obstinate status of a philosophy The one followed from the other and if Heideggerrsquos primary failing as Blanchot put it in LrsquoEntretien infini referring to Heideggerrsquos endorsement of Hitlerrsquos campaign to leave the League of Nations in November 1933 consisted in the decision to lsquoplace in Hitlerrsquos service the very language the very writing by which at a great moment in the history of thinking we were invited into what was described as the loftiest questioning coming to us from Being and from Timersquo205 so in subsequent years his lsquoirreparable faultrsquo lay in his enduring silence about the Extermination as Blanchot now called it even in answer to the interlocutor who was Paul Celan This was why attributing Lacoue-Labarthersquos formulation to Celan to whose writing it was intimately connected and now using the word in print in its own right for the first time Blanchot had little hesitation in agreeing lsquothat the Shoah in respect of the West was the revelation of its essencersquo206


That the genocide of the Jews had deep philosophical as well political and historical causes was not to claim it was the result of some inexplicable or unavoidable necessity Nor was it to suggest that the solution was to renounce philosophy and to embrace in its stead literature religion or the irrational For if it was the case that the Shoah was one of the disastrous ends of Western philosophy this served only to remind Blanchot as it did Levinas Lacoue-Labarthe Derrida and others that it was essential to pursue philosophy beyond that end to persist beyond disaster so to speak by maintaining the thought of disaster Scepticism sobriety interminable vigilance these were the tasks For if disaster spoke of the radical possibility of nothingness of nothing as radical possibility as the experience of the camps seemed to testify it also said that in nothing in the impossibility of nothing there survived a trace to which in remembering in forgetting in responding both to the future and to the past it was necessary to bear witness

In Was heiszligt Denken a text much frequented in earlier decades by Blanchot Heidegger argued that the ontological difference was not only what made thinking possible and necessary it was that which thought today was also required to think In 1980 Blanchot returned to the question and gave it an entirely new inflection What made thought possible and necessary he argued and was today its task and its challenge that by which thought is required and which endures as a requirement for thought this was none other than disaster

V

the youngest day

uml The last judgement in German the youngest day [le jour le plus jeune] the day beyond days not that judgement is reserved for the end of time on the contrary justice cannot wait it is there to be carried out dispensed considered at length (learned) too at every instant every just act (do they exist) turns this day into the last day or ndash as Kafka once put it ndash into the very last no longer just one in the ordinary sequence of days but such as to make the most ordinary of ordinary days into something extraordinary


Whoever was a contemporary of the death camps is forever a survivor death will not make him die


But it would be wrong to see the interruption of history affirmed in the thought of disaster only as a response to irredeemable catastrophe For if it marked an unthinkable caesura in the history of the West it also had its counterpart in something else also irreducible to history which likewise divided the epoch from itself which was not to say the two interruptions were the same On the contrary in a May 1964 article on Jabegraves Blanchot contrasting the one with the other wrote of a lsquorupture suffered [subie] within history and there speaks catastrophe still and forever at hand [Blanchot first glossed the phrase by adding in apposition the extermination which he then excised in 1971] the infinite violence of distress [malheur] the rupture due to the violent authority [pouvoir] that wants to mark a new era [faire eacutepoque] and leave its stamp upon it [marquer une eacutepoque] And then the other the original rupture prior to history so to speak no longer suffered but demanded [exigeacutee] and which expressing its distance from all power [puissance] delimits an interval into which Judaism introduces the affirmation which is its own the rupture shown by ldquothe wound invisible at the outsetrdquo ldquothis wound rediscovered belonging to a race [race] having its origins in the bookrdquo ldquonothing but the grief whose past and continuing existence are indistinguishable [se confondent] from those of writingrdquorsquo208

But how to think further the challenge to historical and political violence mounted by the second of these breaks And how therefore to articulate its radical difference from the first Towards the end of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre commenting on a sentence from a 1976 book by Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet in which the two authors writing in apocalyptic vein in the disenchanted aftermath of May 1968 had put forward what they called an ontology of revolution and an ethics of revolt Blanchot ventured an answer209 lsquorevolt yesrsquo he murmured lsquoas the demand of the turning [lrsquoexigence du tournant] in which time changes with the extreme of patience being in relation with the extreme of responsibilityrsquo But in that case he went on responding to another of Lardreau and Jambetrsquos remarks revolt ought not to be identified with rebellion which


was just another word for war and the struggle for mastery and domination In revolt something else was at stake which without being anhistorical was irreducible to history as narrative or event lsquoWhat might be the status of this other history [lrsquoautre histoire] thenrsquo he asked

if its characteristic feature is that it is not a history neither in the sense of Historie [history as inquiry into the past] nor in the sense of Geschichte [history as temporal sequence] (which implies the idea of gathering together [rassemblement]) and also in that nothing in it ever occurs in the present no event or advent measures it [la mesure] or counts it out [la scande] and beyond all temporal succession (which is always linear even when it is as tangled [enchevecirctreacutee] and erratic [zigzagante] as it is dialectical) it unfolds a plurality which is not that of the world nor of arithmetic an excessive history [histoire en trop] then lsquosecretrsquo and separate which assumes the end of visible history though it is without all idea of beginning and ending always in relation with an unknown that requires the utopia of knowing all because it always overflows its limits mdash an unknown which is not bound to the irrational beyond all reason nor even to something irrational within reason perhaps a return to an other meaning in the laborious work of lsquodesignificationrsquo This other history might be called a pretend history [une histoire feinte] which does not mean a mere nothing but appealing always to the emptiness of a non-place a falling short [un manque] in which what falls short is history itself beyond belief [incroyable] because wanting of all belief [en deacutefaut par rapport agrave toute croyance]210

In the twenty fragments and ten or so pages that followed bringing LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre itself to an end Blanchot probed further this suggestion of an history always already other than history To do so moving in a very different direction to his erstwhile interlocutors of 1976 he lingered on a sequence of familiar-unfamiliar names Wittgenstein Houmllderlin Kafka Melville and Levinas each of which served as a kind of threshold for a series of meditations on the exteriority of thought to philosophy the dangerously fascinating withdrawal from thought of what Blanchot calls the One the end or ends of what undecidably goes under the name of literature the relationship between writing the Law laws and regulations


the figure of the messianic in Jewish thinking waking as a waking beyond waking and disaster deacutesastre as deferred dying

But although they reprise several important motifs that had appeared earlier in Blanchotrsquos text these closing fragments do not produce closure For one thing they send a reader back to earlier passages already touching on Wittgenstein Houmllderlin Kafka Melville Levinas the identity of the Messiah or the exigencies of waking thereby redoubling the burden of reading rather than alleviating it For another the ending they invoke as this brief cursus suggests has not only always already happened without happening it is also in the form of a proleptic interruption or suspension of time history meaning lsquo Let us share out [partageons] eternity in order to make it transitoryrsquo urges for instance the last fragment printed in roman the third before the end of the book offering a knowingly paradoxical prescription that has the strange effect of dividing time from itself both as that which inheres within itself (the transitory) and as that which endures beyond itself (the eternal) and speaks of a possibility or perhaps better an impossibility which irreducible to the timeless and the time-bound as such entrusts to the community of readers to whom it is addressed a task that belongs to the infinite only in so far as it is already the demand of finitude and which stepping beyond the two disabling theism and atheism alike provides a trace of what Nancy has called Blanchotrsquos absentheacuteisme or absentheism211

In these final pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre there is much else that is similarly informed by Blanchotrsquos increasingly explicit engagement with what Nancy goes on to describe as the theological or better theomorphological dimension in the formerrsquos thinking212 From the 1970s onwards and during the 1980s in particular this found expression in Blanchotrsquos growing receptivity to Jewish thought and tradition even as he remained cautiously mindful of his own position as a non-Jew It is nevertheless apparent that in these later years Blanchot turned more and more to the Old Testament the Talmud and the work of such writers thinkers or commentators as Jabegraves Scholem David Banon Marc-Alain Ouaknin and of course Levinas213 But when Blanchot once more evoked the thought of Levinas in the closing pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre it was to unexpected effect Leaving aside the intense engagement with Autrement qursquoecirctre that figures so prominently in earlier sections


of the book Blanchot now moved ten further years back in time to copy out in the form of a single fragment given in italics Levinasrsquos claim made at the end of a 1963 article on the question of Jewish identity (nuancing the distrust of lsquopoems and poetic activityrsquo Blanchot observes that Levinas displays elsewhere) that lsquoto accept [admettre] the action of literature [la litteacuterature] on humanity [les hommes] ndash this perhaps is the ultimate wisdom [lrsquoultime sagesse] of the West in which the people of the Bible will recognise itselfrsquo214 lsquoAre true books just booksrsquo Levinas had inquired immediately before in that nearly twenty-year-old essay lsquoOr are they not also the embers still glowing beneath the ashesrsquo he went on lsquoas rabbi Eliezer called the words of the Prophets [les paroles des Sages] In this way the flame traverses history without burning in it But the truth illuminates whoever breathes life back into the dormant flame More or less Itrsquos a question of breathrsquo

Though it stood alone in Blanchotrsquos text surrounded by a blank unspeaking margin like so many other fragments in the book this surprising encomium to literaturersquos ardently transhistorical quasi-religious importance on Levinasrsquos part did nevertheless gesture in the direction of the three other literary names featuring in its vicinity Houmllderlin Kafka and Melville only one of whom was admittedly a Jew but each of whom by dint of Blanchotrsquos citation beyond confessional affiliation was discreetly accorded vicarious prophetic status (Prophetic it may be remembered is the epithet used in Le Pas aushydelagrave to describe that which in the past already repeated the future215) But before going on to cite or gloss their contribution to what Levinas called ultimate wisdom Blanchot in another slightly earlier fragment had entered a minor caveat having precisely to do with the status of prophecy lsquoHe who waitsrsquo he observed in familiar yet densely elliptical vein lsquoprecisely does not wait for you [ne trsquoattend pas] In this way you are however awaited [attendu] but not in the vocative case not called [non appeleacute]rsquo216 Like others in the book alongside a veiled allusion the fragment also contained a partial quotation the significance of which would only become apparent if at all in abyssal fashion some pages later In the meantime one of the lessons of the fragment was nevertheless clear As Blanchot had insisted in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli waiting in so far as it could be both a transitive and intransitive verb was importantly already neither the one nor the other The future could not not


come in other words and was thus bound to be awaited but it was necessarily imponderable irreducibly uncertain and defiant of all purposeful attention Whatever prophecy entailed was inseparable from a necessary hesitation suspension or deferral lsquoWhen language [la parole] becomes propheticrsquo Blanchot put it in January 1957 annotating a book by Andreacute Neher lsquoit is not the future [lrsquoavenir] that is given but the present [le preacutesent] that is withdrawn and all possibility of firm stable lasting presence Even the Eternal City and the Indestructible Temple are suddenly ndash and unbelievably ndash destroyed It is like the wilderness [deacutesert] again and language [la parole] too is like the wilderness [deacutesertique] a voice needing the wilderness in order to cry and endlessly reviving within us the dread [lrsquoeffroi] the acceptance [lrsquoentente] and the memory of the wildernessrsquo217

In the oblique turn to prophecy what interested Blanchot in 1980 as already in 1957 as Nancy suggests was not religious doctrine as such but something more original and more radical the resources of language and thought when exposed to the chance both the promise and the threat of epochal turn And this was the question Blanchot went on to pursue in the long fragment that immediately followed resuming a train of thinking begun earlier in the book when he had addressed the demand of a lsquoplurality subtracted from unity and from which unity always subtracts itself a relation with the other by the other that is not unified or alternatively a difference irreducible [eacutetrangegravere] to the different the fragmentary without fragments this remainder [ce reste] to be written which in the same way as disaster has already preceded and ruined any beginning of writing and speechrsquo218 Despite this originary dispersion the power and privilege of the One were nevertheless considerable Prior to any distinction between monotheism and polytheism and not to be confused with the first in preference to the other argued Blanchot it exerted a seemingly incontrovertible hold over thought as that towards which thinking was turned even as it remained radically inaccessible to it If it had force of law then it was only because it was more prestigious than any law lsquoThe severity of the One that prescribes nothingrsquo Blanchot explained lsquoevokes that which is imprescriptible [imprescriptible unchanging inalienable] in the Law superior to all prescriptions and so high there is no height at which it reveals itself The Law by the authority beyond all justification usually attributed to it (in such a way that


whether it is legitimate or illegitimate is not important) is already a lowering of the One which being neither high nor low neither single nor secondary allows any number of equivalences which all leave it intact the Same the Simple Presencersquo219

lsquoBut what would happenrsquo Blanchot then asked returning to that other (than) history described a page earlier lsquoif it were possible to thwart the One [faire eacutechec agrave lrsquoUn] And how to thwart the Onersquo lsquoPerhapsrsquo he suggested lsquoby speaking [en parlant] by a kind of speech [une sorte de parole]rsquo and he added lsquoThat no doubt is disasterrsquos struggle [le combat du deacutesastre] And it was in a sense Kafkarsquos struggle too struggling for the One against the Onersquo220 Kafka though did not stand alone and in the fragment that followed Blanchot emphasised the point by quoting the second part of a famous two-line epigram by Houmllderlin entitled lsquoWurzel alles Uumlbels [root of All Evil]rsquo written in the early part of January 1800 almost exactly a year after the poetrsquos famous New Yearrsquos letter to his brother cited some pages earlier in which he declared himself in Blanchotrsquos words lsquoready to throw his pen under the table in order to give himself over completely [afin drsquoecirctre tout] to the revolutionrsquo221 and only months after the coup drsquoeacutetat of the Eighteenth Brumaire which saw Napoleacuteon imposed as the autocratic dictatorial First Consul lsquoTo be at one [Einig zu sein] is godly and goodrsquo wrote the poet in opening words Blanchot silently elided only then to adopt as his own the question that followed lsquobut whence comes the craving [Sucht Blanchot translates deacutesir maladif unhealthy desire] among men that there should be only the one person [nur Einer qursquoil nrsquoy ait que lrsquoun] and the one thing only [Eines nur qursquoil nrsquoy ait que de lrsquoun]rsquo222

The political implications of Blanchotrsquos campaign to eject all pretenders to the One as so many oppressive tyrants were plain enough But what then did it mean to struggle for the One against the One To oppose the One Blanchot explained by mere dialectical reversal would simply be to pay homage to its transcendent power rather than confronting and thus confirming it it was essential to seek instead to separate or subtract or withdraw it from itself making it ever poorer and ever more vacant thereby affirming the singular One against the totalising One and it was this interminable process of suspension and reinscription suggests Blanchot that most potently set Kafkarsquos writing apart The struggle for the One against the One in this sense as Blanchot puts it was not an overcoming


of literature lsquoKafkarsquos gift to usrsquo he argued lsquoa gift which we do not receive is a kind of struggle for literature by literature a struggle whose finality at the same time proves elusive [eacutechappe] and which is so different from what we know by that or any other name that even to call it unknown is inadequate to describe it since it is as familiar to us as it is alienrsquo223 Taking this analysis into a reading of Kafkarsquos Castle Blanchot reaffirmed an interpretation he had first put forward in LrsquoEntretien infini which had to do with the radically suspensive effects of that most banal of experiences unending fatigue lsquoAt nightrsquo he wrote lsquoinsomnia is dis-cussion not the labour of arguments clashing [se heurtant] with other arguments but extreme commotion [lrsquoextrecircme secousse] empty of thoughts [sans penseacutees] disturbance shattered to the point of calm [lrsquoeacutebranlement casseacute jusqursquoau calme]rsquo at which point Blanchot added an abyssal illustrative parenthesis lsquothe exegeses that come and go in The Castle this story of insomniarsquo without it being clear as far as this last phrase was concerned whether the genitive was to be taken as subjective or objective ie whether the story was one written about sleeplessness or one written by or during sleeplessness (Kafka like Blanchot was often in the habit of writing at night)224 In a sense it was both and neither and if Kafkarsquos novel could be described now as a story about wakefulness now as a story about fatigue there was no contradiction it was just that if to write was always to have reached a limit it was also to discover that the limit had already given way to the limitlessness that inhabited it In other words what constituted the singularity of the One when pressed was also what deprived it of any self-coincidence as totality To be exposed to the demand of the One was not to touch ground therefore but to be confronted instead with an absolute absence of ground As Blanchot goes on

uml It is strange that K at the end of The Castle should by some commentators be consigned to madness From the outset he is beyond the debate between reason and unreason in so far as everything he does is without relation [sans rapport] with the reasonable and yet absolutely necessary that is just or justified Similarly it does not seem possible that he should die (whether damned or saved is almost unimportant) not only because his struggle [son combat] is not in terms of living and dying but also because he is too weary [fatigueacute] (his weariness the only feature


to be accentuated as the story proceeds) to be able to die [pour pouvoir mourir] for the advent of his death [lrsquoavegravenement de sa mort] not to change into an interminable non-event [inavegravenement interminable]225

Notwithstanding Blanchotrsquos unambiguous atheism comments Nancy it is difficult not to sense in this impossibility of dying this simultaneous exacerbation and suspension of human finitude the veiled yet nevertheless insistent presence of the theme of resurrection226 That there are other biblical motifs at work in these final pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is likewise hard to deny Explicitly mentioned alongside the work of Kafka and partaking in the same literary struggle is another remarkably eschatological text Melvillersquos story lsquoBartleby the Scrivenerrsquo which Blanchot had first reviewed in 1945 in a translation by Pierre Leyris and which had recently been republished in a new version by Michegravele Causse in the Autumn 1976 issue of Le Nouveau Commerce (in which just over a year earlier Blanchot had published the fragmentary discussion of Levinasrsquos Autrement qursquoecirctre that now occupies the first fifty or so pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre)227 This was not the first time Blanchot had taken an interest in the American novelist reviewing in September 1941 Jean Gionorsquos French version of Moby Dick the critic had explained to his readers how lsquoAhab and his crew embark on a hopeless struggle [combat] and perish in a disaster [deacutesastre] crowned by lightning [couronneacute par la foudre]rsquo228 Nearly forty years later the struggle and the disaster remained But what they now offered Blanchot as he returned again to lsquoBartlebyrsquo was a kind of radical instantiation of a double gesture of affirmation and withdrawal in which neither the one nor the other was allowed to pose itself as such but was always already contaminated overwritten dissolved by the other reiterating Bartlebyrsquos talismanic refrain lsquoI would prefer not torsquo which he rendered in 1980 in deliberately syncopated or interrupted fashion as lsquoje preacutefeacutererais ne pas (le faire)rsquo abandoning the translation adopted in 1975 in the remarks on Levinas in Le Nouveau Commerce (which had lsquojrsquoaimerais mieux ne pas le fairersquo) and reverting punctuation aside to Leyrisrsquos 1945 text (lsquoje preacutefeacutererais ne pas le fairersquo) Blanchot now glossed its enigmatically hesitant yet insistent demand as follows lsquothe phrasersquo he wrote lsquospeaks in the intimacy of our nights the negative preference the negation that effaces the preference and in so doing effaces itself the neuter of


that which would rather not be done the restraint the gentleness that cannot be called obstinate and which confounds [deacutejoue] obstinacy with these few words language falls silent [se tait] while perpetuating itself [en se perpeacutetuant while in or by perpetuating itself]rsquo229

Despite appearances then to refuse to comply in Bartlebyrsquos case was no negative gesture based on superior strength To affirm withdrawal was already to withdraw affirmation and to undo both so to speak beyond this or that preference resulting in prolonged exposure to the neuter and the impossible On the part of Bartleby scrivener copyist writer no longer prepared to subject his hand or script to the control of others it was to offer lsquoa passive resistancersquo as Melville calls it230 to the law of Wall Street not however by opposing it directly rather by taking up residence within it accepting its rules while gently revoking them exasperating its occupants driving them from their offices finally taking their place now become a ghostly contagious presence a recalcitrant vagrant whose final gesture wasting away and falling asleep in the Tombs (as the old New York prison was called) refusing to make death into either an outcome or an event as Blanchot puts it was to reveal infinite passivity at the heart of finite power and to interrupt the authority of a legal machine no longer able to control what went on within its carefully patrolled precincts

If Melvillersquos story gave voice to a kind of epochal resistance to the law by subordinating it to an interruption as original as it was enigmatic embodying it in a character who was little more than a name and whose main activity was to refrain from all activity then so too Kafkarsquos writing according to Blanchot was likewise synonymous with an encounter with different manifestations of the law whose authority was both traversed and suspended by it For if writing was exposure not only to the Law (what Derrida in an essay on Kafka would later describe as the lsquobeing-law of the lawrsquo) but also to the laws of a given culture or society and to the everyday rules by which the life and death of its citizens were organised or given meaning then it necessarily followed in so far as all literature was a writing and in so far as Law laws or rules were inseparable from their textual inscription that literature had the strange capacity of intervening before the Law not in order to transgress it but by silently citing quoting framing transcribing or copying it gently to set it aside and detach it from itself as a provisional and contingent


moment belonging to an infinity of language that asserting nothing had always already called time on the power and authority to which the law lay claim231 Here for Blanchot was the secret without secret of literature not only in Melville but in Kafka too in whom it was again not without far-reaching political implications lsquoKafkarsquos trial [Le procegraves de Kafka]rsquo Blanchot wrote referring both to the novel by that name and the movement it unfolded but which never reached completion lsquomay be interpreted as an interlacing [enchevecirctrement] between these three domains (the Law laws and rules) an inadequate interpretation however in so far as to give it credence one would have to posit a fourth domain not attributable to the other three [ne relevant pas des trois autres] ndash that of the overhang [surplomb the way in which a geographical or architectural feature protrudes over another] of literature itself even though literature refuses this privileged standpoint not allowing itself to become dependent on some other order or any order whatsoever (pure intelligibility) in the name of which it might be symbolisedrsquo232

Literature writing for Blanchot in so far as it had always already interrupted the law was inseparable from the law of that interruption To suspend the law in other words was not to break the law but rather as we have seen to obey a more originary law of suspension To measure the radical consequences of this literary and political argument Blanchot in the closing pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre made a bold move This first of all took him back to Levinasrsquos Difficile Liberteacute on which he had drawn earlier not only to vouchsafe the status of literature as ultimate wisdom but also in enigmatically abyssal manner to announce the imminent return of the question of prophecy reverting then to Levinas Blanchot picked up where he had left off In the course of a lengthy fragment devoted to the messianic in Jewish thought in terms that are both faithful yet at times surprisingly unfaithful he transcribed a sequence of passages quotations and motifs from one of Levinasrsquos earliest published Talmudic commentaries from 1960 and 1961 in which Levinas had explored a number of texts from the Tractate Sanhedrin (97bndash99a) dealing precisely with the question of prophecy and the relationship between the future and the Messianic epoch233 It was in that commentary for instance that Blanchot will have encountered the story of the Messiah waiting lsquoat the gates of rome among the beggars and the lepersrsquo234 As readers of Levinas will recall it was rabbi Joshua b Levi prompted by the prophet Elijah who


put the question to the Messiah lsquoWhen will you comersquo (lsquoQuand viendrasshytursquo lsquoPour quand ta venuersquo writes Blanchot transcribing the question in two separate contexts lsquoagrave quand ta venuersquo Levinas had originally had it) only to receive by way of answer the word lsquoTodayrsquo (lsquoPour aujourdrsquohuirsquo says Blanchot lsquopour aujourdrsquohui mecircmersquo insists Levinas) lsquoThe reply is admittedly impressiversquo comments Blanchot lsquotoday means today [crsquoest donc aujourdrsquohui]rsquo And he goes on lsquoit means now [maintenant] and always now There is no reason to wait though there is it seems a duty [obligation] to do so And when is now A now that does not belong to ordinary time which necessarily disrupts it [le bouleverse] fails to maintain it [ne le maintient pas the word maintenant meaning lsquonowrsquo originally derives from the present participle of the verb maintenir] destabilises it especially if one remembers that this ldquonowrdquo outside any text [hors texte] on the part of a story of severe fictionality [drsquoun reacutecit de seacutevegravere fiction] refers back to texts that make it once more dependent on realisable-unrealisable conditionsrsquo At this stage in his commentary perhaps borrowing the reference from Scholem Levinas had wondered whether the reference to lsquotodayrsquo ought not be taken as a silent quotation from Psalm 95 7 where Levinas reads lsquoToday if you wish to hear my voice [Aujourdrsquohui si vous voulez entendre ma voix]rsquo a gloss that Blanchot quotes in turn albeit in an idiosyncratically redundant translation of his own lsquoNow so long as you pay attention to me or if you are willing to listen to my voice [Maintenant pour peu que tu me precirctes attention ou si tu veux bien eacutecouter ma voix]rsquo235

In these closing pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre there are several further borrowings from Levinasrsquos Talmudic commentary both implicit and explicit including for instance the proposition that the Messiah may already have come which Levinas takes from rabbi Hillel or the idea that the coming of the Messiah may be conditional on human endeavour moral improvement or repentance a view associated by Levinas with rabbi Johanan or even the possibility advanced by rabbi Nachman on the basis of a reference in Jeremiah 30 21 that the Messiah may perhaps be none other than lsquoMersquo ndash lsquoMoirsquo as Levinas translates it236 (Blanchotrsquos responsibility alone however was the ndash absentheistic ndash inference directed against lsquothe Christian hypostasisrsquo that there was therefore nothing divine about the Messiah lsquoas comforter and the just of the justrsquo he remarks lsquoit is not even certain that he is a person or an individual [quelqursquoun de


singulier]rsquo237) Arguably the most important exchange in this tacit dialogue between Levinas and Blanchot is the observation which the latter makes his own that the advent of the Messiah in Judaism diverged radically from the (Christian Hegelian) idea of an end to history lsquoA totally different concept of redemption determines the attitude to Messianism in Judaism and in Christianityrsquo Scholem followed here by Blanchot had likewise argued lsquoJudaismrsquo Scholem went on lsquoin all of its forms and manifestations has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly on the stage of history and within the community It is an occurrence which takes place in the visible world and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearancersquo Christianity on the other hand he maintained lsquoconceives of redemption as an event in the spiritual and unseen realm an event which is reflected in the soul in the private world of each individual and which effects an inner transformation to which nothing external in the world necessarily correspondsrsquo lsquoWhat for the one [ie Christianity]rsquo Scholem concluded lsquostood unconditionally at the end of history as its most distant aim was for the other [ie Judaism] the true centre of the historical process even if it was henceforth peculiarly decked out as a ldquohistory of salvation [Heilsgeschichte]rdquorsquo238 And though he demurred at Scholemrsquos preference for apocalyptic messianism over rabbinical rationalism Levinasrsquos position was little different lsquoJudaismrsquo he concurred lsquodoes not bring with it a doctrine of an end to history dominating individual destiny Salvation is not an end to history ndash or its conclusion It remains at every moment possiblersquo239

It was here that Blanchotrsquos own Bartleby-like intervention as reader and as copyist was at its most incisive For he ended this lengthy fragment on Jewish messianism by citing a final lsquomysterious textrsquo (as he calls it) which first spoken by rabbi Hiyaa b Abba in rabbi Johananrsquos name was again extracted from Levinasrsquos commentary on Sanhedrin 99a The text given in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ran as follows lsquoAll the prophets ndash there is no exception ndash have prophesied only for messianic time [epocheacute] As for future time what eye has seen it except for You Lord who will act for him who is faithful to you and remains waitingrsquo For once Blanchotrsquos original wording is worth reproducing in full It reads lsquoTous les prophegravetes ndash il nrsquoy a pas drsquoexception ndash nrsquoont propheacutetiseacute que pour le temps messianique [lrsquoeacutepokhegrave] Quant au temps futur quel œil lrsquoa vu en dehors de Toi Seigneur qui agiras pour celui qui trsquoest fidegravele et


reste en attentersquo240 The writer concluded with a parenthesis citing the names of Levinas and Scholem one alongside the other showing a prudent reluctance perhaps to choose between these divergent yet equally authoritative thinkers As for the original Talmudic text that is the object of Levinasrsquos remarks readers do not need to look far Levinas cites it as follows lsquoAll the prophets without exception prophesied only in respect of the messianic era As for the world to come no eye has seen it except for You O Lord who will act for him who awaits yoursquo Again for purposes of comparison it is worth giving the French text in full lsquoTous les prophegravetes sans exception nrsquoont propheacutetiseacute que pour lrsquoeacutepoque messianique Pour ce qui est du monde futur aucun œil ne lrsquoa vu en dehors de Toi O Seigneur qui agiras pour celui qui trsquoattendrsquo241

Already according to Levinas the original passage from Tractate Sanhedrin incorporated within it a loose version of Isaiah 64 4 (lsquono eye has seen a God besides thee who waits for those who wait for himrsquo)242 Blanchotrsquos own response it seems was to reply with a free traduction of his own which despite being only two sentences long diverged in no fewer than eight distinct ways from the source text cited by Levinas Inaccuracies of this kind are not unknown in Blanchot who frequently quotes from memory and as we have seen often silently improves texts and translations for his own purposes Here as elsewhere there is evidence of a coherent strategic purpose in Blanchotrsquos rather surprising infidelity Admittedly some of the changes made to the Talmudic text quoted by Levinas are more matters of style than of substance like for instance the decision to replace the adverbial expression lsquowithout exception [sans exception]rsquo with the interpolated phrase lsquothere is no exception [il nrsquoy a pas drsquoexception]rsquo which is more assertive in tone and allows Blanchot to insert in the negative a reference to the thought of the il y a but is otherwise acceptably close to the original text Other modifications are more significant such as the omission of the vocative lsquoOrsquo in lsquoO Lord [O Seigneur]rsquo which suggests a less effusive relationship with the godhead and is reminiscent of Blanchotrsquos earlier attempt to imagine a kind of futural waiting irreducible to all transitivity Even more striking is Blanchotrsquos substitution of the phrase lsquotime to come [temps futur]rsquo for lsquoworld to come [monde futur]rsquo and the transformation of the confident statement lsquono eye [aucun œil] has seen itrsquo into the more quizzical rhetorical question lsquowhat eye [quel œil] has seen itrsquo the result of which on both counts is to sever the connection


between the future and the certain possibility of a world Likewise the replacement of the words lsquofor him who waits [pour celui qui trsquoattend]rsquo with the cognate but otherwise barely justifiable phrase lsquofor him who is faithful to you [pour celui qui trsquoest fidegravele]rsquo extended in another instance of calculated redundancy by the intransitive expression lsquoand remains waiting [et reste en attente]rsquo has the effect of postponing by now for the second time all transitive recourse to the verb attendre But perhaps most surprising of all among Blanchotrsquos silent revisions is the expression lsquomessianic time [temps messianique]rsquo used in preference to Levinasrsquos lsquomessianic era [eacutepoque messianique]rsquo a decision for which he compensates by supplying in parentheses in italics and together with a question mark the Greek word eacutepokhegrave as employed by Sceptics and Husserlians alike as though to emphasise in this abrupt confrontation between these two traditions the Hellenic and the Judaic the philosophical yet more than philosophical implications of the messianic suspension of the end (of world time and epoch) in Jewish thought

In a context that may be thought by some to be demanding of the most scrupulous fidelity what is to be made of so many unfaithful ndash some will say violent ndash displacements

There are four aspects of Blanchotrsquos partial rewriting of Levinasrsquos Talmudic quotation that merit attention First it should be remembered that occupying as it does a significant place in Judaic tradition and ritual the main purpose of the Talmud according to Levinas was not to serve as a discourse of pious edification On the contrary he put it in 1968

in itself the text of the Talmud is a form of intellectual struggle [combat intellectuel] and bold opening [ouverture hardie] onto those questions mdash even the most irksome mdash towards which the commentator has to find a path without allowing himself to be misled by the appearance of tortuous discussions which mask in fact an extreme attention to the real Mischievous [espiegravegles] and laconic in their ironic or abrupt formulation while still profoundly enamoured of the possible [eacuteprises du possible] the pages of the Talmud consign an oral tradition and teaching that were written down [devenus eacutecrit] only by accident and which it is essential to restore to their dialogic and polemical vitality notably the way in which multiple mdash but not haphazard mdash meanings emerge [se legravevent] and hum [bourdonnent] in each response [chaque dire]243


Explaining elsewhere his own reading of the Talmud and without seeking he says to exclude its religious significance Levinas nevertheless emphasised the extent to which as he put it lsquoits [religious] meaning is not only transposable into philosophical language but refers to philosophical problems toorsquo lsquoThe thought [penseacutee] of the Doctors of the Talmudrsquo he went on lsquoproceeds from a meditation [reacuteflexion] that is radical enough also to satisfy the demands of philosophyrsquo244 Admittedly Levinas concedes that lsquothe exposition of a Talmudic text by someone who has not spent his life studying rabbinic literature in the traditional way is a very daring enterprise [une entreprise tregraves oseacutee] even if whoever attempts it has been familiar since childhood with the square letters and even if he has derived much from these texts for his own intellectual lifersquo245 In other words while the discourse of the Talmud was singular in so far as it was an integral part of Judaism it was also entirely universal in its address in so far as it sought to establish ethical principles that were valid for all

But what then of a reader who like Blanchot belonged to the outside Not being able to lay claim to the intimate knowledge and understanding acquired even by a self-confessed modest commen-tator such as Levinas schooled in the art of Talmudic interpretation by lsquothe prestigious ndash and merciless [impitoyable] ndash teacher of exegesis and of Talmudrsquo Mordechai Chouchani246 Blanchot (like the current writer) could not feature as anything other than an illegitimate interloper And yet at the same time in so far as the thinking found in the Talmud belonged according to Levinas to philosophy just as much as it did to religion it followed that any reader had equal right even equal responsibility to participate in the dialogue or polemic enshrined within it A reader alien to Talmudic tradition was in other words faced with a double burden while being deprived of authorised knowledge regarding the appropriate method for interpreting a text he or she in his or her capacity as reader was nevertheless required to respond to an event of reading that had always already taken place The predicament is held within an aporia As such however it is arguably less strange than might first appear For it is a condition shared in essence by any reader encountering any text for the first or even the second time required to respond that is in so far as reading is already a response but having no definitive method for doing so which according to Levinas was exactly the task facing even the seasoned Talmudic


exegete That Blanchot was able structurally to revise Levinasrsquos Talmudic quotation and felt entitled to do so merely confirmed this double burden with all its opportunities and risks which is also to say its hyperbolic responsibility

In rewriting Levinasrsquos text Blanchot in the form of an unfaithful divergent or even contestatory wording affixed to that text a signature of his own As he did so he not only appropriated the text for his own purposes by an act of calculated hubris he also modestly inscribed himself within it and testified twice over to the infinity implied within this necessarily finite text For Levinas who found it embodied in privileged fashion in the Talmud but inseparable from all writing in general this was what he called lsquothe prophetic dignity of language capable of always signifying more than it says [capable de signifier toujours plus qursquoil ne dit] the marvel of inspiration whereby man [lrsquohomme] listens with astonishment to what he is uttering already reads the utterance and interprets it and why human speech is already writing [eacutecriture lower-case scripture]rsquo247 In transcribing Levinas with a difference or differences then Blanchot was illustrating this abiding and incontrovertible principle of interpretative excess Copying the text incorrectly he admitted and exacerbated his own incompetence but by refusing to sacralise the text he allowed it to differ from itself and bear witness to its inalienable prophetic futurity His position as a copyist then was both infinitely cautious and infinitely risky and it was hardly by chance he found himself repeating the affirmative yet always less than affirmative gesture of Bartleby giving himself over to the endless task of copying but only in so far as what he did (or better preferred not to) owed allegiance to its own Law simultaneously in the observance and in the breach and patiently responsibly turned aside from all other institutional authority

Blanchotrsquos silent revisions to Levinasrsquos quotation were not however gratuitous There was a second important aspect to the intervention LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre sought to make in these closing pages which had to do with the nature of the messianic promise itself Blanchot of course agreed that Jewish messianism was crucially different from its Christian counterpart But if he endorsed the notion that the messianic promise in Judaism was inseparable from some kind of ethical social or political activity he also went a step further For Scholem Jewish messianism was either restorative or utopian depending on whether it saw its goal as lsquoa return to a primeval


time [Urzeit] to a state of things which in the course of history or perhaps even from the very beginning became decadent and corrupt and which needs restoration restitution or reintegrationrsquo or alternatively as a lsquophenomenon in which something emerges which has never before existed in which something totally new is unmistakeably expressedrsquo248 But either way however it was represented it seems that for both currents of thinking the messianic future was premised on the possibility of a world a world grounded in redemptive wholeness no longer subject to fragmentation or to decline and embodying for all time that which was just and good

But not so for Blanchot whose silent replacement of lsquoworld [monde]rsquo by lsquotime [temps]rsquo in Levinasrsquos Talmudic quotation suggested a very different emphasis For as Blanchot went on to imply it was one of the irredeemable ironies of the structure of the messianic promise that whoever was welcomed as a Messiah always risked being unmasked as an impostor This much was abundantly clear from Scholemrsquos own lengthy account of the rise consecration yet ultimate apostasy of the pseudo-Messiah Sabbatai Zevi (or Sevi) in the mid-seventeenth century followed as it was by protracted attempts on the part of his followers to reconcile their enduring religious expectations with this unforeseen turn of history249 What this meant as Steacutephane Mosegraves observes was that lsquothe Jewish idea of messianism is in its very essence an aporia messianism can only affirm itself by realising itself but no sooner does it realise itself than it negates itself Whence its tragic quality the messianic tension of the Jewish people has always had it live in the expectation of a radical upheaval of life on earth which each time it seemed as though it was in the offing very quickly appeared illusory Whence too in Jewish mysticism the constant cautioning against the temptation of impatience of premature intervention into history Whence also in Jewish religious consciousness its strange and distinctive experience of time which is lived in its very nature as expectation neither as a kind of pagan enjoyment of the present moment nor as a kind of spiritual escape transcending time but an ever renewed aspiration from the very heart of time itself to the coming of the absolutely new conceived as capable of emerging at any moment redemption is always imminent but if it were to come it would be immediately put into question in the very name of the absolute demand it claims to meetrsquo250

For Blanchot the political lesson was clear For if every prophet always already risked being in some sense a false prophet the appeal


to the messianic was by that token a temptation it was necessary to resist not in order to deny the messianic promise in the name of secular historical progress but paradoxically in order to affirm it as something always already withdrawn from linear or teleological history If the messianic promise was to endure intact it was therefore indispensable that it remain perpetually unrealised not to say radically unrealisable It was therefore essential in Blanchotrsquos eyes to subtract the messianic promise from the future realisation of a world (lsquoMessianic impatiencersquo he wrote elsewhere lsquois perhaps the danger of dangersrsquo251) and why rather than culminating in any world State regime or leader it could only speak here and now not of history but of the time without time that was the time of the fragmentary Otherwise the consequences were serious What followed would not be historyrsquos suspension but its sacralisation not the political as radical contestation inalienable freedom and infinite refusal but politics as irrational belief providential power and abusive tyranny The messianic in other words rather than an impatient hastening of the end was its own exact opposite a patient deferral of all possibility of ending As Blanchot went on to argue in the fragment immediately following

uml Why did Christianity need a Messiah who might be God It is not enough to say through impatience But if we do view historical figures as gods it is surely by an impatient subterfuge And why the idea of the Messiah Why the necessity of completion in justice Why can we not bear why can we not desire that which is without end Messianic hope ndash hope which is also dread ndash becomes unavoidable when history appears politically only as arbitrary chaos [un tohushybohu] a process deprived of sense But if political reason becomes messianic in its turn this confusion which denies all seriousness to the search for reasonable (comprehensible) history just as it does to the demand [lrsquoexigence] of messianism (the accomplishment of morality) is merely a sign of a time [temps] so agonising so dangerous that all recourse appears justified can one keep onersquos distance [prendre du recul] when Auschwitz is happening How to say Auschwitz has happened252

True enough conceded Blanchot messianic belief as Scholem had long maintained was an understandable response to urgent


historical crisis But it was nevertheless a temptation which as such was dangerous not only to politics the future and writing but also to itself For if the messianic was a promise of realisation that in realising its promise could paradoxically not do otherwise than abolish itself as a promise it followed that properly to affirm it was also to suspend it and to suspend it to affirm it again and again In this respect the messianic marked a step beyond belief and disbelief theology and atheology theism and atheism as Nancy might put it which advanced nothing it did not immediately withdraw and vice versa It was at any event this hyperbolic self-resistance self-withdrawal or self-deconstruction of the messianic that is the third motif that Blanchot chose to stress in his recasting of Levinasrsquos quotation For the messianic promise to be maintained then it was necessary for it to remain void of any actual past or future Messiah Its only spokesperson might be the prophet Elijah not named at any stage by Blanchot to whom it nevertheless fell to keep open the always vacant unnamable futural place at table As Blanchot put it in response to a questionnaire about commitment in literature written only months after the publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre

[i]f in the Passover ceremony [la ceacutereacutemonie de la pacircque juive] it is traditional to reserve a cup of wine for whoever will precede and announce the messianic advent [lrsquoavegravenement messianique] of the world of the just [du monde juste] one can understand why the vocation of the (committed) writer is not to see himself in the role of prophet or messiah but to keep the place of whoever will come to preserve that empty place against usurpers and to maintain the immemorial memory that reminds us that we too were all slaves once and that though we may be free we remain and will remain slaves so long as others remain so that there is therefore (to put it too simply) freedom only for the other and by the other a task which is admittedly an infinite one and risks condemning the writer to a didactic pedagogic role and by that token excluding him from the demand he bears within himself and constrains him to have no place no name no role and no identity that is to be never yet a writer253

This paradoxical self-suspension of the messianic was what was no doubt at stake in Blanchotrsquos overwriting of the expression


lsquomessianic era [eacutepoque messianique]rsquo with a reference to lsquomessianic time [temps messianique]rsquo a time that on Blanchotrsquos submission then was anything but a span of time an era or epoch This for two reasons First as Blanchot explained earlier it followed from the story picturing the Messiah at the gates of rome that the presence of the Messiah on the scene was anything but lsquopresencersquo It was a coming that elided itself strictly in so far as it was not present to itself but a response to an appeal from the other As Blanchot explains lsquoIf the Messiah is at the gates of rome among the beggars and the lepers it might be thought that his incognito would protect him or prevent his coming but precisely he is recognised someone driven by the relentless need for questioning [presseacute par la hantise de lrsquointerrogation] asks ldquoWhen will you comerdquo The fact of being there [Le fait drsquoecirctre lagrave] is therefore not the same as coming [la venue] Even when the Messiah is there the call ldquoCome come [Viens viens]rdquo must always ring out His presence is no guarantee Whether future and past (it is said once at least that the Messiah has already come) his coming does not correspond to any presencersquo254

The notion that the Messiah may have already come as already indicated is one that Blanchot will have found in Levinasrsquos Talmudic commentary But he will have found it too in the work of another of the key interlocutors addressed in these closing pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Kafka For it was Kafka in the passage from the Octavo Notebooks to which Blanchot refers in the fragment that came next who had suggested most likely following rabbi Israel ben Eliezer the founder of Hasidism that lsquoThe Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary [nicht mehr noumltig] he will come only after his coming [erst nach seiner Ankunft kommen] he will not come on the last day [am letzten Tag] but on the very last [am allerletzten]rsquo But if this seemed to suggest the coming of the Messiah was a distraction and that what really counted were humanityrsquos own patient efforts at achieving justice with the implication that the expectations raised by the messianic promise needed to be deferred postponed perhaps even abandoned this was far from the whole truth Indeed some days or pages earlier Kafka had explained a contrario that lsquo[i]t is only our concept of time that lets us call it the Day of Judgement [das Juumlngste Gericht] in reality it is a state of emergency [ein Standrecht a special or military tribunal constantly in session that delivers summary


judgements]rsquo255 The Messiah on Blanchotrsquos submission having always already preceded his own coming and carried by the future only in so far as he was already borne by the past was irreducible to all presence all plenitude embodiment or finality But if the time of the messianic was time beyond time even one might say the time of eternal return this was not to say the Messiah belonged to timeless eternity rather that the messianic promise necessarily traversed divided and interrupted time rather than belonging to a deferred future then it corresponded here and now to a demand it was impossible to elude in the present but only in so far as it implied a radical interruption of that present As both an injunction and a promise the messianic in other words was always double it not only enjoined patience obliqueness and withdrawal it also required urgency directness and intervention

It was only fitting then that Blanchotrsquos most far-reaching intervention into Levinasrsquos quotation was also its most oblique It consisted as we have seen of a silently quizzical almost incidental aside interrupting the movement of the Talmudic text For after boldly substituting his own messianic time for Levinasrsquos messianic epoch Blanchot immediately reinserted the word eacutepoque not however as itself naturalised within French primarily meaning a full unitary period of historical time but as its own Greek other eacutepokhegrave implying suspension withdrawal division Only five pages before the end of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre what to make of this sudden provocative even violent juxtaposition of Athens and Jerusalem It was evidently not the first time such an encounter had been announced proposed or enacted Like Derrida Blanchot was no doubt mindful of the Hegelian implications of the famous Joycean proposition voiced admittedly lsquowith saturnine spleenrsquo (lsquoWomanrsquos reason Jewgreek is greekjew Extremes meet Death is the highest form of life Bahrsquo) with which Derrida in 1964 had concluded his influential early essay on Levinas lsquoViolence and Metaphysicsrsquo observing nevertheless as he did so the latterrsquos unequivocal preference for Abraham over Ulysses and his strongly stated wish lsquoto oppose to the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca the story of Abraham leaving his homeland for ever for an as yet unknown land forbidding his servant even to take his son back to this starting pointrsquo256 This commitment to nomadic exile in lieu of patriotic rootedness was one that Blanchot shared and this explains perhaps the tentative elliptical manner in which he aligns


the Greek thought of epocheacute with that of the Judaic messianic epoch Implicit in Blanchotrsquos interpolation was the belief that the meeting between the two did not necessarily imply fusion or incorporation It was rather that their unmediated textual collision served to question the primacy or autonomy of each and open the chance or possibility of difference without opposition relation without relation dissymmetry without hierarchy

It was at any event in those terms in an essay written for the catalogue of the exhibition lsquoDe la Bible agrave nos jours [From the Bible to the Present-Day]rsquo held at the Grand Palais in Paris some five years after LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre that Blanchot went on to consider the double legacy of the Greeks and the Jews lsquoIn our traditionrsquo he argued

as it becomes exhausted while yet maintaining itself it seems to me that there have always been two chosen peoples two lsquomiraclesrsquo or two enigmas two small populations [peuples peoples] almost imperceptible on the map and yet rich with a message that has educated the centuries One however has never suffered as a result of being this model nation the exemplary representative of something that sustains our nostalgia It has never been a subject of complaint against the Greeks that they passed down to us the logos philosophy beauty and a certain idea of democracy The Greeks a chosen people par excellence But for the Jews the same election or a higher and more ancient election is held to be an arrogant claim a particularity that isolates even if what was passed down or taught to the Jews is valid for all and is the affirmation or promise of the Unique that is valid for all257

In addressing in tandem the legacy of the Greeks and of the Jews then Blanchot was far from attempting to assimilate the one to the other It was rather that the challenge was never to think the one without the other never that is to subscribe to the abstract universality of the logos without simultaneously affirming the singularity it negated For if lsquoit never occurred to the Greeks these bearers of the logosrsquo he noted with feigned surprise lsquothat there should be equality of speech and of law with the Barbariansrsquo it should be remembered he argued that lsquothe Hebrews were singled out from amongst all the nations (which is what Egypt represents) in order to acknowledge in this withdrawal


[retrait] or this setting aside [mise agrave lrsquoeacutecart] the opening to all and to all the nations and before the Eternal the equality of all (but not the abstract repetitive equality which excludes responsibility and fraternity) as though what was revealed to the Jews was that they were other in order to be released from the Same and in order to become responsive to alterity in the extraordinary concern for the otherrsquo258

If the interruption of being time and thought announced in Greek epocheacute and in the messianic promise of Judaism was offered to writing as its chance and its necessity it was in so far as nothing was given in itself or as such but only in turn as a trace that was both an affirmation and a withdrawal the one as the other the other as the one It is not by chance in this respect that the thought of disaster throughout LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre remains inseparable from a thought of the gift a gift never available in itself as such but only as an incontrovertible demanding yet always unfulfilled and incalculable promise lsquoDisaster is the gift [Le deacutesastre est le don]rsquo Blanchot wrote in a fragment that foretelling its own future had already appeared some 200 pages earlier lsquoit gives disaster [il donne le deacutesastre] it is as if it disregarded [passait outre] being and non-being alike It does not have the status of an advent [avegravenement] (that which is proper in what occurs [ce qui arrive]) ndash it does not occur [nrsquoarrive pas] such that I do not even arrive [je nrsquoen arrive mecircme pas] at this thought except without knowing without the appropriation [appropriation] of any knowledge Or else is it the advent [avegravenement] of what does not occur of what may be said to come without occurring [qui viendrait sans arriver] outside being and as it were without anchorage [par deacuterive] Posthumous disasterrsquo259

Or as he put it just before the end of the book in the form of a penultimate fragment traversed by the thought of the penultimate (lsquoLa Peacutenultiegraveme Est mortersquo Mallarmeacute famously wrote) that is by that which announcing the end defers all ending thus marking its possibility and its impossibility in so far as like death it had already happened and had yet still to happen given without being given in the form of a provisional and incomplete statement or an implicit question enigmatically printed in italics lsquo What remains to be said [Ce qursquoil reste agrave dire]rsquo260

What is it that remains to be said a reader may ask Everything ndash and yet nothing In a word always more or less than a word dis(-)aster


notes


2 One of the earliest recorded usages of the word in Blanchot belongs to one of his first published essays lsquoLes Penseacutees politiques de M Paul Valeacuteryrsquo La Revue franccedilaise XXVI 9 August 1931 749ndash50 in which writing in nationalist vein he complimented the poet for his sensitivity lsquoto the first signs of the disaster [du deacutesastre] into which our [ie French national] heritage risks being drawn and which would ruin him as one of its privileged beneficiaries [heacuteritier privileacutegieacute] more than any otherrsquo Six years later as the urgency of the political agenda became more acute so did the destructive (and saving) violence implied in the word and in a 3 March 1937 article in LrsquoInsurgeacute lsquoCe qursquoils appellent patriotismersquo Blanchot the political commentator can be found denouncing the complacency of lsquomoderatersquo opinion (extending his ire to the whole political establishment from left to right) by declaring his hope that lsquothe proximity of disaster [la proximiteacute du deacutesastre] will transform their cowardice into anguish and rot their confidence into despair [deacutesespoir]rsquo

3 Anon lsquoLrsquoAvenir de la Francersquo Journal des deacutebats 7 July 1940 1 On Blanchotrsquos authorship of at least some of the material that appeared in this short-lived column (the first of which was partially censored) see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 153

4 See roger Laporte Eacutetudes (Paris POL 1990) 11

5 Blanchot La Part du feu 9 18 The Work of Fire 1 10 translation modified In April 1941 in the second of his articles to be published in the Journal des deacutebats under Vichy (Chroniques litteacuteraires 18ndash19) the writer had likewise already begun to bind lsquothese times given over to disaster [ce temps voueacute au deacutesastre]rsquo to the unlikely prospect of hope Two and a half years further on in a September 1943 article on rimbaud in Faux Pas 166 Faux Pas 143 he asked on a more affirmative note lsquowhy is it not possible for the poet to cease being a poet without provoking a disaster [un deacutesastre] by which poetry far from being weakened is enrichedrsquo translation modified In April 1947 in an essay on Pascal addressing the relationship between success and failure Blanchot similarly observed in La Part du feu 256 The Work of Fire 263 that lsquo[p]oetry in this sense is the realm of disaster [le royaume du deacutesastre]rsquo True deacutesastre in these early reviews does not always carry these cosmological overtones


In the Journal des deacutebats for 13ndash14 November 1943 (Chroniques litteacuteraires 493) Blanchot greeted a recent volume of lesser-known works by La Fontaine by referring ironically to lsquothis disaster of a La Fontaine without the Fables [ce deacutesastre drsquoun La Fontaine sans fables]rsquo

6 Blanchot La Condition critique 45 lsquoDays of Hope by Andreacute Malrauxrsquo translated by Michael Holland Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 5ndash12 (p 5) translation slightly modified Malrauxrsquos novel was first published in 1937 while the memory of the political events with which it was concerned was still very much alive Blanchotrsquos powerful endorsement of the book in 1946 is arguably the first overt sign of the writerrsquos rejection of the prewar nationalism with which he had earlier been identified

7 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 94 Existence and existents 58 translation modified The same image also informs Levinasrsquos account of insomnia which he describes as being lsquocharacterised by the consciousness that it will never end ie that there is no way of escaping the wakefulness [vigilance] by which one is gripped Wakefulness without purpose [sans aucun but] From the moment one is fettered [riveacute] to it all notion of a starting or finishing point is gonersquo See Levinas Le Temps et lrsquoautre 27 Time and the Other 48 translation modified In the 1935 essay lsquoDe lrsquoeacutevasionrsquo Levinas had recourse to the same phrase too for his analysis of shame lsquoWhat appears in shame [la honte]rsquo he argued lsquois therefore precisely the fact of being inescapably fettered [riveacute] to oneself the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself in order to hide from oneself the irremediable presence of the I to itselfrsquo lsquoEternityrsquo Levinas adds lsquois only the accentuation or radicalisation of the fatality of being inescapably fettered to itself [lrsquoecirctre riveacute agrave luishymecircme]rsquo See Levinas De lrsquoeacutevasion (Montpellier Fata morgana 1982) 87 95 On Escape translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford Stanford University Press 2003) 64 71 translation modified readers may recall the final sentence of Thomas lrsquoObscur (itself recalling the end of Kafkarsquos Trial) which reads (in both versions) lsquoThomas looked in turn at this flood of vulgar images then plunged forth sadly desperately as if shame [la honte] had begun for himrsquo On the il y a in the early work of Levinas and Blanchot see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 62ndash3 110ndash4

8 Blanchot LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 256 The Space of Literature 244 translation modified

9 Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 284 The Book To Come 233ndash4 translation modified A similar usage of deacutesastre is also found in


Blanchotrsquos 1969 essay lsquoLrsquoAbsence de livrersquo where one reads that lsquothe Work [lrsquoŒuvre] is not bound like the book to success (to completion) but to disaster [deacutesastre] disaster is however still an affirmation of the absolutersquo lsquoIn shortrsquo Blanchot adds lsquowe can say that if the book can always be signed it remains indifferent to whoever signs it the work ndash Festivity as disaster [la Fecircte comme deacutesastre] ndash demands resignation demands that whoever claims to have written it should renounce all selfhood [renonce agrave soi] and refrain from all self-designationrsquo see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 629 The Infinite Conversation 429 translation modified

10 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 192 The Infinite Conversation 130 translation slightly modified In similar vein evoking in 1988 in a letter to Salomon Malka his prewar friendship with Levinas Blanchot recalls the part played by lsquothe misfortunes of a disastrous war [le malheur drsquoune guerre deacutesastreuse]rsquo in renewing the bond of solidarity between the pair see Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 166 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 124

11 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 115 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 93 translation modified As Blanchot was aware any desire to break absolutely with the past will always founder on the paradox that in order to put an end to history history itself is not only necessary but inescapable Though it may be premised on a certain kind of atemporality then the thought of disaster as we shall see is anything but indifferent to the (present) epoch

12 Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes I 38 1193 Mallarmeacutersquos own self-avowedly lsquobarbarous word-for-wordrsquo English version of the poem was sent to an America poet friend Sarah Helen Whitman the same year An alternative translation would be lsquoCalm block here below fallen from an obscure disasterrsquo It is worth noting too that in a 1976 essay on Ernst Bloch borrowing the term deacutesastre from Blanchot Levinas also writes it deacutesshyastre see Levinas De Dieu qui vient agrave lrsquoideacutee (Paris Vrin 1992) 66 Of God Who Comes to Mind translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford Stanford University Press 1998) 35

13 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 16 The Writing of the Disaster 7 translation modified Compare LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 190 The Writing of the Disaster 124 For lsquoce jeu insenseacute drsquoeacutecrirersquo lsquothis madsenseless gamewagerperformancersquo see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini vii The Infinite Conversation xii

14 For Mallarmeacutersquos original text and an account of the circumstances surrounding its publication see Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes II 660 and 1722ndash3 For the other versions cited see Henri Mondor Vie de Mallarmeacute (Paris Gallimard 1941) 670 Jean-Paul Sartre


Mallarmeacute la luciditeacute et la face drsquoombre edited by Arlette Elkaiumlm-Sartre (Paris Gallimard 1986) 157 For Blanchotrsquos sceptical assessment of Mondorrsquos enterprise see Blanchot Faux Pas 117ndash25 Faux Pas 99ndash106

15 For this original longer essay see Blanchot La Condition critique 347ndash9 What remains of the piece is reproduced in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 190ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 124

16 Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes I 384ndash7 In October 1943 Blanchot was already comparing the dispersed epigrams of the German mystic Angelus Silesius to lsquoa twinkling of stars [une scintillation drsquoastres]rsquo see Blanchot Chroniques litteacuteraires 472

17 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 25 106 The Writing of the Disaster 12 64 lsquoWhen writing not writing is unimportantrsquo writes Blanchot lsquothen writing changes ndash whether it takes place or not it is the writing of disasterrsquo lsquo Supposing it is possible to say in plodding fashion that the God of Leibniz is because he is possiblersquo he adds nearly two hundred fragments later lsquoso it will be apparent that it may also be said on the contrary the real is real in so far as it excludes possibility ie by being impossible in the same way as death and in the same way to a loftier extent [agrave un plus haut titre even more so as though Blanchot were directing his readersrsquo attention to the title legitimating or authorising the book itself] as the writing of disaster [lrsquoeacutecriture du deacutesastre]rsquo translations modified

18 For these earlier publications see Blanchot lsquoDiscours sur la patiencersquo Le Nouveau Commerce 30ndash31 1975 19ndash44 corresponding to LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 7ndash10 28ndash49 52ndash5 220 15 16 17 The Writing of the Disaster 1ndash3 13ndash28 29ndash31 146 6ndash7 see also using the phrase for a fourth time Blanchot lsquoLrsquoeacutecriture du deacutesastrersquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 330ndash1 July-August 1980 1ndash33 corresponding to LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 60ndash107 120ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 35ndash65 and 74ndash5

19 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 49 The Step Not Beyond 33 emphasis in the original

20 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 8 The Writing of the Disaster 2 lsquo ldquoFalserdquo unity or the simulacrum of unityrsquo notes Blanchot lsquocompromises unity better than any direct challenge to it which is in any case not possiblersquo translation modified

21 Paul Valeacutery Œuvres edited by Jean Hytier 2 vols (Paris Gallimard 1960) II 597 emphasis in the original

22 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 101 The Writing of the Disaster 62


23 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 101 149ndash50 165 174 The Writing of the Disaster 62 96 107 113 For the original texts see Valeacutery Œuvres II 579 803 871 and Cahiers edited by Judith robinson 2 vols (Paris Gallimard 1973) I 517 II 1086 I am indebted to Brian Stimpson for help in identifying the source of the third of these passages Valeacuteryrsquos collection of prose fragments Mauvaises penseacutees et autres from which two of the extracts are taken was reviewed by Blanchot on first publication in 1942 in the Journal des deacutebats see Blanchot Chroniques litteacuteraires 271ndash7

24 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 165 The Writing of the Disaster 106ndash7 translation modified See also LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 149ndash50 174 The Writing of the Disaster 96 113 Blanchot expresses himself more forcefully on this question of (retrospective) unity in a review of robinsonrsquos posthumous edition of Valeacuteryrsquos Cahiers in La Condition critique 339ndash42 In the article Blanchot voiced strong reservations at the editorrsquos decision admittedly following Valeacuteryrsquos own recommendation to arrange the poetrsquos disparate notes and thoughts under various thematic headings and he concluded by comparing the ambition behind robinsonrsquos efforts with that carried out for quite different purposes but according to Blanchot to comparable effect by Elisabeth Foumlrster-Nietzsche responsible for falsifying key aspects of her brotherrsquos Nachlaszlig and correspondence

25 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 100 114 148ndash9 152ndash4 158ndash60 162 168ndash71 180ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 61 70 94ndash5 97ndash9 101ndash3 104 108ndash11 117ndash8

26 Heidegger Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens Gesamtausgabe 13 (Frankfurt Klostermann 1983) 76


28 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 114ndash5 The Writing of the Disaster 70 translation slightly modified For the phrase lsquoimpossibility of all possibilityrsquo see Levinas Totaliteacute et infini 262 Totality and Infinity 235 translation slightly modified

29 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 95ndash6 The Writing of the Disaster 57ndash8 translation modified

30 Blanchot La Condition critique 348 The passage cited here immediately follows the first paragraph of the fragment that now appears in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 190ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 124 It is worth noting here as the reference to lsquodisseminationrsquo (already a quotation from Mallarmeacute) suggests how much of Blanchotrsquos exploration of the space of the book including


the interest in the number four and its implications is informed by his reading of Derridarsquos La Disseacutemination

31 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 196 The Writing of the Disaster 128 translation modified In Le Rhizome (Paris Minuit 1976) 17 Deleuze and Guattari wrote (slightly differently) lsquoThe multiple has to be made not by adding an always extra dimension but on the contrary in the simplest of ways by dint of sobriety at the level of the dimensions that are already available always n-1 (this is the only way the one is part of the multiple by being always subtracted) Subtract the singular from the multiplicity to be constituted write at n-1rsquo The passage reappears unchanged in Gilles Deleuze and Feacutelix Guattari Mille Plateaux (Paris Minuit 1980) 13 A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia translated by Brian Massumi (London Athlone 1988) 6 translation modified Numerology as Blanchot would know is of course an important element in the Talmud I return to Blanchotrsquos engagement with Jewish thought in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre later in this chapter


33 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 169ndash70 The Infinite Conversation 117 emphasis in the original translation modified The context of Blanchotrsquos remarks is important for they occur in an essay from August 1957 on Simone Weil philosopher mystic political activist resistance worker and a convert from Judaism to Christianity whom some like Levinas five years earlier in his essay lsquoSimone Weil contre la Bible [Simone Weil Against the Bible]rsquo in Difficile Liberteacute 160ndash76 Difficult Freedom 133ndash41 reproached for her militant rejection of the Jewish Old Testament not to say her almost explicit antisemitism Blanchotrsquos response says the same but does so very differently reading Weil paradoxically as a kind of involuntary or inadvertent Marrano whose writing remained profoundly indebted to the very Judaic tradition she rejected proof no doubt that for Blanchot at least the supposed victory of Christianity over Judaism much canvassed by Hegel and his successors was never complete but always in doubt from the outset Blanchotrsquos main source of understanding of the Kabbala in general and of Luria in particular as he duly acknowledges was Scholemrsquos Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York Schocken [1941] 1961) a volume first translated into French in 1950 and with which Blanchot was familiar as early as 1952 (compare LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 67 The Space of Literature 70) Blanchot also refers to the Lurianic lsquobreaking of the Vesselsrsquo in a 1964 essay on


Edmond Jabegraves in LrsquoAmitieacute 255 Friendship 225 On the broader theological question of lsquocreation from nothing and divine self-limitationrsquo (to which LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is also in its way a response) see Scholem Uumlber einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1970) 53ndash89

34 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 7 220 The Writing of the Disaster 1 146 translation modified

35 See Blanchot lsquoDiscours sur la patiencersquo Le Nouveau Commerce 30ndash31 1975 43

36 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 10 The Writing of the Disaster 3 translation slightly modified






42 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 9 The Writing of the Disaster 2 translation modified It was Derrida in LrsquoEacutecriture et la diffeacuterence (Paris Seuil 1967) 7 Writing and Difference translated by Alan Bass (London routledge 1978) v who reintroduced the term espacement (spacing) in this sense which he did by quoting from Mallarmeacutersquos preface to lsquoUn coup de deacutes rsquo as Blanchot was only too aware In deploying the word in his turn Blanchot was implicitly citing not only Mallarmeacute but Derrida too and vice versa



45 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 12ndash13 The Writing of the Disaster 4 translation modified





49 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 120 The Writing of the Disaster 74ndash5 translation modified

50 Emmanuel Levinas Eacutethique et infini (Paris Le Livre de poche 1982) 41 Ethics and Infinity translated by richard A Cohen (Pittsburgh Duquesne University Press 1985) 50 translation modified

51 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 68ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 40 translation modified On the remainder (or reste) in Glas see Jacques Derrida Glas (Paris Galileacutee 1974) 7ndash11b Glas translated by John P Leavey Jnr and richand rand (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1986) 1ndash5b In referring to Glas quotations from the left-hand and right-hand columns are normally indicated by the use of a and b respectively page numbers given first refer to the 1974 Galileacutee edition those given second relate to the Leavey-rand translation

52 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 97 The Writing of the Disaster 59 emphasis in the original translation modified Of the two self-quotations contained in this fragment the first published in March 1953 glossing a comment reported by Gustav Janouch is from an essay on Kafka reprised in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 185ndash96 (p 193) The Space of Literature 177ndash87 (p 184) The second written eight years later is taken from a June 1961 review of Michel Leirisrsquos Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour and collected in LrsquoAmitieacute 162ndash70 (p 169) Friendship 140ndash7 (p 146)


54 On iterability see Derrida Marges de la philosophie 367ndash93 Margins of Philosophy 309ndash30 and Limited Inc edited by Gerald Graff (Evanston Northwestern University Press 1988) Limited Inc edited by Gerald Graff introduced and translated by Elisabeth Weber (Paris Galileacutee 1990)

55 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 24 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 19 Cartesian Meditations 22ndash3 translation modified

56 Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 58 Speech and Phenomena 52 Compare Blanchot in the essay lsquoLa Litteacuterature et lrsquoexpeacuterience originelle [Literature and the Original Experience]rsquo from June 1952 in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 255ndash6 The Space of Literature 243 lsquoIt is in this sensersquo he writes lsquothat in artrsquos vicinity lies a pact with death with repetition and with failure rebeginning repetition the fatality of return everything that is alluded to in those experiences where the sense of strangeness is coupled with a sense of deacutejagrave vu


where the irremediable takes the form of endless repetition where the same is given in the infinite regress of duplication where there is no cognition but only recognition ndash all of this alludes to that initial error which may be expressed as follows what is first is not the beginning but rebeginning and being is precisely the impossibility of being for the first timersquo emphasis in the original translation modified

57 Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 60ndash1 Speech and Phenomena 54ndash5 translation modified




61 Bataille Œuvres complegravetes IX 182 171 Literature and Evil translated by Alastair Hamilton (London Calder amp Boyars 1973) 25 ix


63 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 181 The Writing of the Disaster 118 emphasis in the original translation modified For the source text see F W J Schelling Ausgewaumlhlte Schriften edited by Manfred Frank 6 vols (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1985) IV 81ndash2 Idealism and the Endgame of Theory Three Essays by F W J Schelling edited and translated by Thomas Pfau (Albany State University of New York Press 1994) 232ndash3 translation modified Blanchot is referring to the recent French translation in Schelling Œuvres meacutetaphysiques 1805ndash1821 edited and translated by Jean-Franccedilois Courtine and Emmanuel Martineau (Paris Gallimard 1980)

64 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 18 The Writing of the Disaster 7 emphasis in the original translation modified

65 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 8 The Writing of the Disaster 2 translation modified For the original phrase see Jabegraves Aely (1972) in Le Livre des questions 2 vols (Paris Gallimard 1988ndash89) II 332 The Book of Questions Yaeumll Elya Aely translated by rosmarie Waldrop (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1983) 237 translation modified Jabegraves reproduces the two fragments (his own and Blanchotrsquos revision) side by side without comment in Ccedila suit son cours (1975) in Le Livre des marges (Paris Le Livre de poche 1987) 10 The text of Aely not insignificantly continues lsquoHas the time come for me to face the questions of my books As if


I should at least as far as they are concerned accept responsibility for writing them when it seems to me that I am not responsible at all when on the contrary in my innermost thoughts I would accuse them for having swapped my life for another that I have difficulty in living but perhaps they are calling me to account precisely for the existence I owe to them In which case through me it is my own books that question my booksrsquo (II 332ndash3)


67 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 85 The Writing of the Disaster 50



70 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 28ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 13ndash14 emphasis in the original translation modified Patience is a topic Blanchot also examines in relation to the figure of Orpheus in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 179ndash84 The Space of Literature 171ndash6 Blanchotrsquos interest in the self-deconstructive logic of commonplace expressions owes much to the influence of Jean Paulhanrsquos famous essay Les Fleurs de Tarbes which Blanchot reviewed in 1941 in a sequence of three essays two of which appear in Faux Pas 92ndash101 Faux Pas 76ndash84


72 Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus logicoshyphilosophicus translated by D F Pears and B F McGuinness (London routledge amp Kegan Paul 1961) 151 Blanchot comments on the phrase using Klossowskirsquos 1961 French translation in La Communauteacute inavouable 92 The Unavowable Community 56

73 Blanchot La Part du feu 129 The Work of Fire 127 translation modified



76 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 19 Existence and existents 19 translation modified



78 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 28 Existence and existents 23

79 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 103 Existence and existents 63 This is not to say as some critics have claimed that there is therefore a privileged relationship between the il y a and the literary (as opposed to the philosophical or the ethico-moral) To argue as much would inevitably mean reverting to an essentialist conception of literature entirely at odds with the infinite retrocession exteriority and neutrality of the il y a itself

80 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 110ndash11 Existence and existents 66 emphasis in the original translation modified

81 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 112 Existence and existents 66 emphasis in the original translation modified


83 Levinas Le Temps et lrsquoautre 62 Time and the Other 74 translation modified


85 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 111 Existence and existents 66 translation modified Compare Levinas Eacutethique et infini 39 Ethics and Infinity 49 In insomnia he says lsquoI am not awake ldquoit is awakerdquo [Je ne veille pas laquo ccedila veille raquo]rsquo Levinas goes on to refer this lsquoexperiencersquo back to the work of Blanchot

86 Emmanuel Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre ou aushydelagrave de lrsquoessence (Paris Le Livre de poche 1974) 272 emphasis and capitalisation in the original Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence translated by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague Nijhoff 1981) 177 translation modified

87 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 281 Otherwise Than Being 183ndash4 translation modified

88 For Levinas it was similarly in a radicalisation of Husserlian intentionality as an encounter with the other that lay the originality of Blanchotrsquos thinking of literature lsquo[T]he critical work of Maurice Blanchotrsquo he observed in 1959 lsquoin which literature is neither an approach to ideal Beauty nor one of the ornaments of our life nor the testimony of the times nor the translation of its economic conflicts but the ultimate relation with being [lrsquoecirctre] in a quasi-impossible anticipation of what is no longer being [ce qui nrsquoest plus lrsquoecirctre] ndash that work is inconceivable without the radical idea of intentionalityrsquo See Levinas En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 199 Discovering Existence with Husserl 190


89 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 281 Otherwise Than Being 183 emphasis in the original translation modified

90 Blanchot draws attention to the importance of the dedication (to all the victims of the death camps including members of Levinasrsquos own family) that opens Autrement qursquoecirctre in his tribute to Levinas published the same year as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre and prolonging its concerns see Blanchot La Condition critique 357ndash67 (p 367) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 144ndash52 (p 152)

91 See in particular Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 70ndash105 The Infinite Conversation 49ndash74 and Levinas Sur Maurice Blanchot Proper Names 127ndash70 On some of the main differences between Levinas and Blanchot see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 158ndash84

92 For the use of ethics or the ethical (eacutethique) see Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 26 47 48 The Writing of the Disaster 12 26 27 for lsquosubstitutionrsquo and lsquothe one for the otherrsquo both explicitly presented as quotations see LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 169 The Writing of the Disaster 109

93 On the lengthy prehistory of the exchanges between Levinas and Blanchot on the question of the il y a see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 62ndash3 110ndash3

94 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 253ndash4 Otherwise Than Being 163 emphasis in the original translation modified

95 For this alternative interpretation of the il y a which is also an alternative reading of Levinas see Blanchot La Condition critique 366 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 151 As elsewhere the fluctuating movement of Blanchotrsquos syntax bears the weight of much of the argument lsquoThe il y arsquo he writes lsquois one of Levinasrsquos most fascinating propositions his temptation too as it were the reverse side of transcendence thus indistinguishable from it which may be described in terms of being but as the impossibility of not being the incessant insistence of the neuter the nocturnal murmur of the anonymous that which never begins (and is therefore an-archic because perpetually escaping the decisiveness of a beginning) the absolute but as absolute indeterminacy all this is bewitching that is attracts towards the uncertain outside speaking infinitely outside truth in the manner of an Other [drsquoun Autrui] we could not get rid of simply by calling it deceitful (the evil demon [le malin geacutenie]) nor because it might be described as a mockery for this speaking which is only a laugh perfidiously suppressed giving meaning while yet eluding all interpretation neither gratuitous nor cheerful grave just as much and something like the illusion of seriousness being therefore what disturbs us most is also the movement most apt


to deny us the resources of being [lrsquoecirctre] as place [lieu] and light [lumiegravere] the gift perhaps of literature without knowing whether it enchants by disenchanting or whether its words that please and disgust do not ultimately attract us because it is a promise (a promise it keeps yet does not keep) to illuminate what is obscure in all speech what in speech escapes revelation and manifestation the trace again of non-presence the opaqueness of transparencyrsquo emphasis in the original translation modified

96 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 107ndash8 The Writing of the Disaster 65 translation modified The French edition of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is 220 pages long

97 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 77 Otherwise Than Being 45 translation modified

98 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 45n1 The Writing of the Disaster 149n8 emphasis in the original translation modified As Levinas puts it for his part in an essay first published in 1960 lsquo[w]hat Judaism brought into the world is not pride in national excellence (which is what the Greeks had when they distinguished themselves from the barbarians) but the idea of a universality flowing from excellence a universality of radiance [lrsquoideacutee drsquoune universaliteacute deacutecoulant de lrsquoexcellence drsquoune universaliteacute de rayonnement] Judaism conceives its function proper its religious election in its responsibilities as an elite its task as worker of the first and not the eleventh hour This is a terrible privilege [privilegravege redoutable] ldquoYou alone I distinguished among all the families on earth that is why I ask you to answer for your sinsrdquo Universality in Jewish thought rests on the responsibilities of an elite that subsists in its particularity Universality is the omega of morality not the alpharsquo Levinas Les Impreacutevus de lrsquohistoire (Paris Le Livre de poche 1994) 162 Unforeseen History translated by Nidra Poller (Urbana University of Illinois Press 2004) 117ndash8 emphasis in the original translation modified For Blanchotrsquos own later response to Jewish universality see Blanchot La Condition critique 419ndash24 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 162ndash6

99 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 23 37 151 170 The Writing of the Disaster 11 20 97 110 translation modified Unfortunately Ann Smockrsquos translation renders Blanchotrsquos Dire inconsistently now as lsquotellingrsquo now as lsquoSpeakingrsquo now as lsquowordrsquo then again as lsquoSpeakingrsquo The quotation from Levinas to which I return shortly is from Autrement qursquoecirctre 263 Otherwise Than Being 170

100 Blanchot Apregraves coup 97ndash8 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 494 translation modified


101 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 100ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 61 emphasis in the original translation modified

102 Blanchot quotes from the seminar series in a later fragment see LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 155 The Writing of the Disaster 99 compare Heidegger Schellings Abhandlung uumlber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Tuumlbingen Max Niemeyer 1971) 7 Schelling le traiteacute de 1809 sur lrsquoessence de la liberteacute humaine translated by Jean-Franccedilois Courtine (Paris Gallimard 1977) 22 Schellingrsquos Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom translated by Joan Stambaugh (London Ohio University Press 1985) 6ndash7 It is likely Blanchot was reminded of Heideggerrsquos lecture course by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy who refer to it in their discussion of the romantic fragment in LrsquoAbsolu litteacuteraire 57ndash80 The Literary Absolute 39ndash56 The passing reference to Heidegger in this fragment also asks to be read alongside the earlier passage from Schellingrsquos Stuttgart Seminars to which Heidegger perhaps understandably makes no reference in his discussion of the 1809 treatise which from Blanchotrsquos perspective was a tell-tale symptom of Heideggerrsquos forgetting of impersonality ndash and the neuter

103 Heidegger Schellings Abhandlung uumlber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit 58 Schelling le traiteacute de 1809 sur lrsquoessence de la liberteacute humaine 91 Schellingrsquos Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom 48 translation slightly modified

104 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 110 The Writing of the Disaster 67 translation modified On la mort impossible neacutecessaire in Blanchot see Derrida Demeure 56ndash7 The Instant of My DeathDemeure 47ndash8

105 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 123 170 The Writing of the Disaster 76ndash7 110 Compare Blanchot La Condition critique 364 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 149

106 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 122 The Writing of the Disaster 76 translation modified On scepticism in Hegel compare Blanchot La Part du feu 308 The Work of Fire 317ndash8 The reference is to Chapter 4B in the Phenomenology which traces the passage between the dialectic of Master and Slave and the emergence of unhappy consciousness See Hegel Werke III 159ndash63 Phenomenology of Spirit 123ndash6 lsquoScepticismrsquo writes Hegel lsquois the realisation of that of which stoicism was only the notion and is the actual experience of what the freedom of thought is This is in itself the negative and must exhibit itself as such With the reflection of self-consciousness into the simple thought of itself the independent existence or permanent determinateness that stood over


against that reflection has as a matter of fact fallen outside of the infinitude of thought In scepticism now the wholly unesssential and non-independent character of this ldquootherrdquo becomes explicit for consciousness the [abstract] thought becomes the concrete thinking which annihilates the being of the world in all its manifold determinateness and the negativity of free self-consciousness comes to know itself in the many and varied forms of life as a real negativityrsquo (159 123)

107 See Husserl Ideen 56 Ideas 61 and Logische Untersuchungen I (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer 1993) 110ndash12 Logical Investigations Vol 1 translated by J N Findlay (London routledge 2001) 75ndash6 lsquoThe worst objection that can be made to a theoryrsquo comments Husserl making the same philosophical point as Hegel lsquoand particularly to a theory of logic is that it goes against the self-evident conditions for the possibility of a theory in general [gegen die evidenten Bedingungen der Moumlglichkeit einer Theorie uumlberhaupt] To set up a theory whose content is explicitly or implicitly at variance with the propositions on which the sense and the claim to validity of all theory rests is not merely wrong but basically mistakenrsquo Perhaps only Nietzsche among other major thinkers had a good word for the sceptics calling them in Ecce homo lsquothe only respectable type in the whole two- or five-faced philosophical tribe [der einzige ehrenwerthe Typus under dem so zwei bis fuumlnfdeutigen Volk der Philosophen]rsquo see Nietzsche KSA 6 284 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings 90 translation modified On scepticism as epochal suspension in Nietzsche see Derrida Eacuteperons 43ndash52 Spurs 55ndash67

108 See Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers translated by r D Hicks 2 vols (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 1972) II 517ndash9

109 See Marie-Anne Lescourret Emmanuel Levinas (Paris Flammarion 1994) 83ndash5 and Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 49

110 See Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes The Modes of Scepticism Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) 1 Sextus Empiricus Esquisses pyrrhoniennes translated by Pierre Pellegrin (Paris Seuil 1997) Book I sect1 3ndash4 (p 53) Outlines of Pyrrhonism translated by r G Bury (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 1967) 3

111 Sextus Empiricus Esquisses pyrrhoniennes Book I sect6 12 (pp 59ndash61) Outlines of Pyrrhonism 9 translation slightly modified

112 Sextus Empiricus Esquisses pyrrhoniennes Book I sect10 19 (p 65) Outlines of Pyrrhonism 15 translation slightly modified


113 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 261 262 Otherwise Than Being 168 169 emphasis in the original translation slightly modified

114 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 260 Otherwise Than Being 167ndash8 emphasis in the original translation modified

115 Blanchot La Condition critique 364 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 149 emphasis in the original translation modified The reference to Nancy is to Le Discours de la syncope 1 Logodaedalus (Paris Aubier-Flammarion 1976) The Discourse of the Syncope Logodaedalus translated by Saul Anton (Stanford Stanford University Press 2007)

116 See Nancy Le Discours de la syncope 1 Logodaedalus 148 The Discourse of the Syncope Logodaedalus 138ndash9 For the quotation by Nancy see Blanchot La Condition critique 337



119 Compare Levinas Difficile Liberteacute revised edition (Paris Le Livre de poche [1976] 1990) 259 Difficult Freedom 185 where one reads lsquoThe end of philosophy is not the return to the age in which it has not begun in which one was able not to philosophise the end of philosophy is the beginning of an age in which everything is philosophy because philosophy is not revealed through philosophersrsquo


121 Derrida Glas 268a Glas 241a For the quotation from the Phenomenology see Hegel Werke III 507 Phenomenology of Spirit 688 Hyppolite in his classic French translation of La Pheacutenomeacutenologie de lrsquoesprit II 216 has lsquoLa lumiegravere pure eacuteparpille sa simpliciteacute comme une infiniteacute de formes seacutepareacutees et se donne en holocauste agrave lrsquoecirctreshypourshysoi en sorte que lrsquoentiteacute singuliegravere emprunte la subsistance agrave sa substancersquo The effects of Blanchotrsquos reading of Glas are readily discernible throughout LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre They are most particularly in evidence in the entries dealing with Hegel (including the question of Hegelrsquos antisemitism) and with the phenomenology of the gift in Heidegger Levinas and Bataille the difference between es gibt and il y a and the related question of the event (Ereignis) and what is proper or authentic (eigentlich) in Heidegger In a 1990 tribute to Derrida Blanchot acknowledged his debt to Derrida in the following terms lsquoAfter such a long silence


(perhaps hundreds and hundreds of years) I shall begin to write again not on Derrida (what presumption) but with his help and convinced I shall betray him immediatelyrsquo Blanchot followed up this beginning by raising a question about singularity and repetition lsquoIs there one Torah or tworsquo he asked replying that lsquothere are two because necessarily there is only onersquo See Blanchot lsquoGracircce (soit rendue) agrave Jacques Derridarsquo Revue philosophique 2 1990 167ndash73 (167) lsquoThanks (Be Given) to Jacques Derridarsquo translated by Leslie Hill The Blanchot Reader 317ndash23 (p 317)

122 Derrida Glas 268ndash9a Glas 241a emphasis in the original translation modified

123 Derrida Glas 269a Glas 242a translation modified This passage from Glas is also among those revisited ndash rekindled or reheated ndash by Derrida in Feu la cendre (Paris Des Femmes 1987) 26ndash32 Embers translated by Ned Lukacher (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1991) 42ndash8 It also informs Derridarsquos reading of La Folie du jour in Parages in which Derrida shows Blanchot already to be exploring the many vagaries of the light of the day whose absence if total imposes blindness but whose presence if limitless perversely tends to the same with the result that the only clarity available in the world promises (in)sight only in so far as it threatens it and is necessarily traversed and always already compromised by irredeemable darkness


125 On the Freudian primal scene or Urszene (known in French as scegravene primitive or scegravene originaire) which usually refers to the real or fantasised witnessing of parental coitus by the child see Jean Laplanche and J-B Pontalis Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1997) 432ndash3 The Language of Psychoanalysis translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London The Hogarth Press 1973) 335ndash6 For the original essay on Serge Leclairersquos On tue un enfant (Paris Seuil 1975) A Child is Being Killed translated by Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford Stanford University Press 1998) see Blanchot lsquoOn tue un enfant (fragmentaire)rsquo Le Nouveau Commerce 33ndash34 Spring 1976 19ndash29


127 See Lacoue-Labarthe Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable 66

128 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 117 The Writing of the Disaster 72 emphasis in the original translation modified The fragment was


first published (entirely in roman with italics added for the word mecircme) as lsquoUne scegravene primitiversquo Premiegravere livraison 4 1976 1 In addition to the change in wording and in position of the title (which originally appeared in conventional manner at its head) the 1980 text shows three further minor changes first it substitutes a colon for a semi-colon at the end of the first clause in the second sentence second it introduces a paragraph break (the 1976 version was one continuous paragraph) finally it deletes the adjective lsquoprimitiversquo from the expression lsquoscegravene primitiversquo as it originally appeared in sentence four On the history of this first publication and for an analysis of these changes see Lacoue-Labarthe Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable 133ndash51 For further comment see Christopher Fynsk Infant Figures (Stanford Stanford University Press 2000) 49ndash84 and Kevin Hart The Dark Gaze Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago University of Chicago Press 2004) 51ndash75

129 For the three fragments each explicitly invoking a lsquo(A primal scene)rsquo [sic] see Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 117 176ndash9 191ndash6 The Writing of the Disaster 72 114ndash16 125ndash8 Blanchot also incorporates further material first published as lsquoUne scegravene primitiversquo in Le Nouveau Commerce 39ndash40 Spring 1978 43ndash51 including not only the third fragment listed above but eight others bearing the same virtual subtitle in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 191ndash6 202ndash6 The Writing of the Disaster 125ndash8 133ndash6

130 See Blanchot LrsquoArrecirct de mort 72ndash3 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 160ndash1 LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 81 The Space of Literature 83 Le Pas aushydelagrave 16 31 9 The Step Not Beyond 7 19 2 LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 202 The Writing of the Disaster 133 translations modified

131 For the reference to Pascal see Lacoue-Labarthe Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable 136ndash7 and Blaise Pascal Œuvres complegravetes edited by Jean Mesnard 4 vols (Paris Descleacutee de Brouwer 1964ndash92) III 50ndash1 For the echo of Mallarmeacute see Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes II 234

132 On the confusion between the two deaths and need to maintain the opposition between them see Leclaire On tue un enfant 13ndash14 A Child is Being Killed 4 For Blanchotrsquos sceptical response see Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 110ndash15 The Writing of the Disaster 67ndash71 lsquoYesrsquo he writes lsquolet us remember the very early Hegel He too even before what is known as his early philosophy thought the two deaths could not be dissociated and that only the fact of confronting death not only facing it or being exposed to its danger (characteristic of heroic courage) but of entering into its


space undergoing it as infinite death and just as much as death pure and simple or by ldquonatural causesrdquo could found sovereignty and mastery spirit with all its prerogatives It followed from this perhaps absurdly that what set the dialectic in motion ie the experience of death that could not be experienced immediately blocked it a blockage which the entire subsequent process kept in memory like an aporia which had always to be taken into account I will not go into the detail how from Hegelrsquos early philosophy onwards by a prodigious enrichment of thought the difficulty was overcome All this is well known The fact remains that if death murder suicide are put to work and if death itself is deadened by becoming powerless power and later negativity there is with every step forward with the help of possible death the necessity of not overstepping ordinary death death without name death outside concepts impossibility itselfrsquo emphasis in the original translation modified Death murder suicide put to work a few pages later Blanchot would attempt to address one of the twentieth centuryrsquos most monstrous perversions of what lay hidden in these words



135 Blanchot lsquoldquoDans la nuit surveilleacuteerdquorsquo Lignes 21 January 1994 127ndash31 (p 127) The issue as a whole together with significant additional material was republished as robert Antelme Textes ineacutedits Sur LrsquoEspegravece humaine Essais et teacutemoignages (Paris Gallimard 1996) Blanchotrsquos contribution appears pp 71ndash6 and is also included in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 179ndash80 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 133

136 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 80 The Writing of the Disaster 47 emphasis in the original translation modified The fragment was first published as part of lsquoFragmentairersquo in Pierre Alechinsky and others Celui qui ne peut se servir des mots (Montpellier Fata morgana 1975) 19ndash31 (p 31) where it appeared last Blanchot quotes it again in its entirety in 1988 in lsquoldquoNrsquooubliez pasrdquorsquo Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 172ndash3 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 128 translation modified

137 See Claude Lanzmann Shoah (Paris Gallimard [1985] 2001) 17 Blanchot quotes from the film in lsquoNrsquooubliez pasrsquo La Condition critique 430ndash3 (432ndash3) lsquoDo not forgetrsquo translated by Leslie Hill Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 34ndash7 The word Shoah became


current in French as a preferred alternative to the term holocauste (first used in this sense in 1958 by Franccedilois Mauriac in his preface to Elie Wieselrsquos Auschwitz memoir La Nuit) only after the release of Lanzmannrsquos film ie five years after the publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre For the filmmakerrsquos own reasons for choosing the title for the film see Lanzmann Le Liegravevre de Patagonie (Paris Gallimard 2009) 525ndash6

138 Blanchot The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press New Bison Book edition 1995) back cover This publisherrsquos description is all the more contentious in that nowhere in the book does Blanchot mention Hiroshima nor indeed address in any explicit way either World War I or World War II A more cautious translation of the bookrsquos title would have been Writing Disaster or even Disaster Writing

139 Michael Syrotinski Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (Liverpool Liverpool University Press 2007) 117 Gary D Mole makes a similar point in his Levinas Blanchot Jabegraves Figures of Estrangement (Gainesville University Press of Florida 1997) 15 Mole even goes so far as to claim that the Shoah is lsquothe unnarrated experiencersquo at the centre of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (p 143)


141 Perhaps surprisingly there are places in Blanchotrsquos work particularly in the years after LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre when the writer nevertheless does seem to use the word in its more conventional sense as in his 1986 text on apartheid which begins lsquoSo it is that what was lived through when Nazism excluded from life and from the right to life a section of humanity persists after the disaster [apregraves le deacutesastre] which seemed to render such a calamitous doctrine [une doctrine aussi malheureuse] impossible or impossible to formulate [informulable]rsquo see Blanchot lsquoNotre responsabiliteacutersquo in Pour Nelson Mandela (Paris Gallimard 1986) 215ndash17 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 168ndash9 translation modified

142 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 129ndash34 The Writing of the Disaster 81ndash4 This is not to imply that Blanchotrsquos meditation on the camps can necessarily be confined to these pages

143 For the polemical charge levelled at Blanchot see Tzvetan Todorov Face agrave lrsquoextrecircme (Paris Seuil 1994) 124ndash5 Todorovrsquos complaint not only rests on an expeditious and misleading account of Blanchotrsquos political activities in the mid-1930s it also shows little appreciation of the complexity of Blanchotrsquos subsequent thinking Todorovrsquos own approach to the legacy of the Nazi and Soviet


camps is explicitly normative and moral it consists he writes in identifying in the world of the camps lsquovirtues everyday or heroic onesrsquo and lsquovices everyday or monstrous onesrsquo (p 50)

144 On the various phases of French reaction to the camps and the importance of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in prompting greater awareness of the Jewish specificity of the extermination camps see Sylvie Lindeperg Clio de 5 agrave 7 (Paris CNrS eacuteditions 2000) and lsquoNuit et brouillardrsquo un film dans lrsquohistoire (Paris Odile Jacob 2007) Annette Wieviorka Deacuteportation et geacutenocide (Paris Hachette 2003) LrsquoEgravere du teacutemoin (Paris Hachette 2002) and Auschwitz meacutemoire drsquoun lieu (Paris Hachette 2006) and Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Wieviorka Univers concentrationnaire et geacutenocide (Paris Mille et une nuits 2008) On the broader French political context see Henry rousso Le Syndrome de Vichy 1944ndash198 (Paris Seuil 1987) As rousso points out it was not until the 1970s in France that there was significant public recognition of the Jewish dimension of the camps and of the direct involvement of the (collaborationist) French authorities in the events of the Shoah

145 For this glancing treatment of Cayrol see Blanchot La Condition critique 178ndash81 (pp 180ndash1) Elements from the piece were incorporated into Blanchotrsquos June 1954 article lsquoTu peux tuer cet homme (You Can Kill This Man)rsquo in LrsquoEntretien infini 271ndash80 The Infinite Conversation 182ndash7 In 1951 in the story Au moment voulu (When The Time Comes) an important narrative crux is marked by the bombing of the synagogue in the rue de la Victoire in Paris in October 1941 As Martin Crowley points out in his Robert Antelme 32ndash3 Blanchotrsquos first mention of LrsquoEspegravece humaine comes in a note signalling its reissue in 1957 ten years after first publication appended to the essay lsquoLrsquoExpeacuterience de Simone Weilrsquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 56 August 1957 297ndash310 (p 306) collected in LrsquoEntretien infini 175 The Infinite Conversation 446ndash7 It is worth noting however that as early as 1960 around the time when Eichmann was seized by Mossad agents in Argentina Blanchot on the evidence of an unpublished text preserved in the papers of Dionys Mascolo cited by Christophe Bident in Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 395 was already citing the counter-example of the Nazi camps as grounds for the necessity of political disobedience lsquoThe principle which recommended that one should serve onersquos country right or wrongrsquo he wrote lsquowas buried in the extermination camps [les camps drsquoextermination] together with the victims of those who were unable [ne surent pas] to prefer disobedience founded on reason to obedience founded on madnessrsquo


146 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 181 187 The Infinite Conversation 123 127 translation slightly modified

147 See Andreacute Neher LrsquoExistence juive solitude et affrontements (Paris Seuil 1962) Blanchotrsquos remarks on Franz rosenzweig (in LrsquoEntretien infini 181 The Infinite Conversation 123) are directly inspired by a similar passage in LrsquoExistence juive 231

148 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 184 The Infinite Conversation 125ndash6 emphasis in the original translation modified In his lsquoBlanchot Violence and the Disasterrsquo collected in Auschwitz and After edited by Lawrence D Kritzman (New York routledge 1995) 133ndash48 Allan Stoekl takes Blanchot to task for allegedly reversing the traditionally negative (antisemitic) valorisation of exile exteriority and rootlessness and for lsquoultimately negat[ing] the specificity of Judaismrsquo (p 137) This is to miss the point For Blanchot as for Levinas it is absolutely crucial that traits customarily associated with Judaism are shown to be universal ie shared by humanity as a whole in which case they are no longer negative features but essential and necessary ones At any event in declaring for instance that lsquo[t]he Jew is a source of disquiet and a figure of unhappiness [malaise et malheur]rsquo (LrsquoEntretien infini 180 The Infinite Conversation 122 translation modified) an assertion the writer acknowledges already to be itself an unhappy one Blanchot is not recycling antisemitic propaganda but as he points out drawing on the contemporary and influential work of Albert Memmi the francophone Tunisian writer (and a Jew) who began his autobiographical essay Portrait drsquoun juif (Paris Gallimard 1962) Portrait of a Jew translated by Elisabeth Abbott (London Eyre amp Spottiswoode 1963) by arguing that lsquowhat is called the history of the Jews [lrsquohistoire juive] is never more than a protracted rumination on the topic of Jewish misfortune [le malheur juif]rsquo (p 29) In this respect as Memmi went on lsquo[t]he condition of the Jews [ ] is shorthand in more condensed and sombre terms for the human condition itselfrsquo (p 244) More fundamentally of course it is not necessary to go very far to find the association between Judaism exodus and exile it has its origins in the Old Testament

149 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 190n1 The Infinite Conversation 447n4 translation modified For one troubled reaction see Michael Holland lsquoLetrsquos Leave God out of thisrsquo Blanchotrsquos reading of Totality and infinityrsquo in Facing the Other the Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas edited by Seaacuten Hand (richmond Curzon 1996) 91ndash106 Blanchotrsquos lengthy footnote sandwiched between the two essays lsquoLrsquoEcirctre juifrsquo and lsquoLrsquoEspegravece humainersquo originally appeared as the


conclusion to the second part of lsquoLrsquoEcirctre juifrsquo published in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 117 September 1962 471ndash6 (pp 474ndash6)

150 Blanchot lsquoSur Edmond Jabegravesrsquo Les Nouveaux Cahiers 31 Winter 1972ndash3 51ndash2 Le Pas aushydelagrave 156 The Step Not Beyond 114 emphasis in the original translation modified In the interim in a text published anonymously in Comiteacute in October 1968 collected in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 123ndash5 (p 125) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 98ndash9 (p 99) Blanchot paid tribute to those who had protested against antisemitic attacks on Daniel Cohn-Bendit by writing that lsquothe most intense violence was no doubt in that moment of non-violence when protesting against his deportation (Cohn-Bendit banned this was the governmentrsquos meagre ldquoexemplary measurerdquo) thousands of workers and students revolutionaries then in an absolute sense marched chanting ldquoWe are all German Jewsrdquo Never had that been said anywhere never at any moment language beginning anew [parole premiegravere] opening and overturning frontiers opening overwhelming the futurersquo Soon after as Levinas records in Du sacreacute au saint (Paris Minuit 1977) 48ndash9 Nine Talmudic Readings translated by Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington Indiana University Press 1990) 115ndash6 Blanchot broke ranks with those left-wing activists who campaigning on behalf of the Palestinians had become compromised in the writerrsquos view by what he described as a kind of unwitting antisemitism Already in 1971 as the fragment cited indicates he was warning against the dangers of what in subsequent years would turn into fully-fledged Holocaust denial A further fragment dated October 1974 written on the first anniversary of the Yom Kippur war published in Change 22 February 1975 223 shows the evolution of Blanchotrsquos thinking on the question of Israelrsquos singularity lsquoWhyrsquo he asks lsquodid every calamity [tous les malheurs] finite and infinite personal and impersonal now and forever have implicit within it while ceaselessly recalling it that historically dated calamity which was however without date of a land already so reduced that it seemed almost erased from the map and whose history nevertheless overflowed the history of the world Whyrsquo See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 64 The Writing of the Disaster 37 translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos use of the word Israel later in this chapter




153 See Max Horkheimer and T W Adorno Dialektik der Aufklaumlrung (Frankfurt Fischer [1944] 1969) 177ndash217 Dialectic of Enlightenment translated by John Cumming (London Verso 1997) 168ndash208 Adorno Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt Suhrkamp [1966] 1975) 355 Negative Dialectics translated by E B Ashton (London routledge and Kegan Paul 1973) 362 translation modified That Blanchot was familiar with Adornorsquos 1966 book by the time LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was written is likely from the remarks made in response to it in 1983 in Apregraves coup 98 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 494 Blanchot also returns to Adornorsquos text in another essay published in 1984 where he writes lsquoThe categorical imperative losing the ideal generality given to it by Kant became that which Adorno formulated more or less in these terms Think and act in such a manner that Auschwitz never repeats itself which implies that Auschwitz must not become a concept and that an absolute was reached there in relation to which other rights and duties are to be judgedrsquo see Blanchot Les Intellectuels en question (Paris Fourbis 1996) 55ndash6 lsquoIntellectuals under Scrutinyrsquo translated by Michael Holland The Blanchot Reader 223 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos proximity to Adorno see Michel Lisse lsquoeacutecrire ldquoapregraves Auschwitzrdquo Maurice Blanchot et les camps de la mortrsquo Les Lettres romanes numeacutero hors-seacuterie 1995 121ndash38

154 Adorno Negative Dialektik 355 Negative Dialectics 362 In LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 216 The Writing of the Disaster 143 Blanchot formulates a thought very close to Adornorsquos as follows lsquoWhoever was a contemporary of the death camps is forever a survivor death will not make him diersquo translation modified For Jean-Luc Nancyrsquos similar analysis of the camps as exerting a totalising logic of surshyrepreacutesentation (super- or over-representation) see Nancy Au fond des images (Paris Galileacutee 2003) 57ndash99 The Ground of the Image translated by Jeff Fort (New York Fordham University Press 2005) 27ndash50

155 Adorno Negative Dialektik 358 Negative Dialectics 365 translation modified

156 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 56ndash7 The Step Not Beyond 38ndash9 emphasis in the original translation modified

157 Blanchot La Condition critique 443 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 171 translation modified



159 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 143 The Writing of the Disaster 90 translation modified On the pioneering work of Poliakov and Wormser-Migot see Lindeperg and Wieviorka Univers concentrationnaire et geacutenocide 11ndash39 On Blanchotrsquos engagement with the poems of Celan see my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 194ndash213

160 See Hermann Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz (Vienna Europaverlag [1972] 1987) Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz translated by Denise Meunier edited by Jacques Branchu (Paris Fayard 1975) A complete English version is available as People in Auschwitz translated by Harry Zohn (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 2004) The 1975 French translation for greater ease of reading (and according to his preface with the authorrsquos agreement) reduced the length of Langbeinrsquos original text by roughly a quarter and reordered some of the remaining material

161 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 19 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 5 People in Auschwitz 5 translation modified

162 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 129 The Writing of the Disaster 81 translation modified Compare Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 40 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 24 People in Auschwitz 24 Meunierrsquos version reads lsquoDes pierres eacutetaient porteacutees au pas de course drsquoun endroit agrave un autre soigneusement empileacutees puis reporteacutees toujours en courant agrave lrsquoancien emplacement etcrsquo Zohn translates lsquorocks had to be carried from one place to another quickly carefully stacked there and then rushed back to the old placersquo Blanchot makes a similar point in Apregraves coup 95ndash6 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 493

163 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 145 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 119 People in Auschwitz 121 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 130 The Writing of the Disaster 82

164 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 368 320 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 311 278ndash9 People in Auschwitz 326 282 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 132 The Writing of the Disaster 83

165 Throughout this whole period Blanchot maintained a close interest in national and international political events as is clearly apparent from his Lettres agrave Vadim Kozovoiuml between 1976 and 1998

166 See Joseph Berger Shipwreck of a Generation (London Harvill Press 1971) 177 Le Naufrage drsquoune geacuteneacuteration translated by Jacqueline Bernard and Philippe Monod (Paris Denoeumll 1974)


Alexander Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago 1918ndash56 IshyII translated by Thomas P Whitney (London Collins amp Harvill Press 1974) LrsquoArchipel du Goulag 1 et 2 parties translated by Jacqueline Lafond Joseacute Johannet reneacute Marichal and Serge Oswald (Paris eacuteditions du Seuil 1974) The Gulag Archipelago 1918ndash56 IIIshyIV translated by Thomas P Whitney (London Collins amp Harvill Press 1975) LrsquoArchipel du Goulag 3 et 4 parties translated by Geneviegraveve Johannet Joseacute Johannet and Nikita Struve (Paris eacuteditions du Seuil 1974) Compare Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 129ndash30 131ndash2 The Writing of the Disaster 81 83 It is hard to overestimate the impact of Solzhenitsynrsquos lengthy historical testimony in the mid-1970s particularly in France where the Communist Party enjoyed considerable support among both workers and intellectuals (in the first round of the 1973 legislative elections for instance it polled 213 of the popular vote more than any other party on the left) Though less prominent Joseph Berger was in many respects just as significant He was born in Poland of Jewish parents in 1904 and growing up with strong Zionist leanings emigrated in 1919 to Palestine where he became a communist and in 1922 helped found the Communist Party of Palestine In 1931 after several years spent working for the Communist cause throughout the Arab world he was recalled to Moscow and became a Soviet citizen but was arrested in January 1935 as a Trotskyist agitator For the next twenty years he was transferred from one concentration camp to another before being eventually rehabilitated and released in 1956 He emigrated to Israel the following year and died in 1978

167 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 129 The Writing of the Disaster 81 translation modified reading these words Allan Stoekl in lsquoBlanchot Violence and the Disasterrsquo cited earlier takes issue with Blanchotrsquos use of the word lsquofiguresrsquo (which Ann Smock in her translation unfortunately chooses to render as lsquoemblemsrsquo) and makes the bizarre allegation that Blanchot treats lsquothe Holocaustrsquo (a word or name that as we have seen Blanchot barely uses at all) as lsquoan examplersquo and thereby lsquoenters into complicity with the very people who set up the system [of the Holocaust] in the first place because he uses itrsquo (p 142) This is a wild misrepresentation of Blanchotrsquos thinking For at least two reasons First figures in Blanchotrsquos French are precisely not emblems (what OED calls a picture of an object serving as a symbolic representation of an abstract quality a symbol or typical representation a figured object used with symbolic meaning) but forms which explicitly impose visibility on the invisible by making dying itself an object of specularising control violently substituting for the singular


impossibility of dying the industrialised appropriation of death through technology In other words what is given brutal visibility in the camps is the remorseless figuring ndash the shaping manipulating even emblematising ndash of human existences by the camp and the oppressive socio-political system of which it was a component (An earlier version of Blanchotrsquos argument may be found in Le Pas aushydelagrave 133ndash4 The Step Not Beyond 96ndash7) Second it escapes Stoeklrsquos notice that by making plural reference to lsquoconcentration camps extermination campsrsquo Blanchot pointedly refuses to conflate the regimes under which different camps operated and reduce them to the status of examples of anything a scruple Stoekl fails to respect by silently deleting Blanchotrsquos reference to lsquoannihilation camps [camps drsquoaneacuteantissement]rsquo in the first line of his quotation (p 142) regrettably this is not the only place where Blanchot is credited with views that are the exact opposite of those expressed in his writing Similarly tendentious interpretative violence masquerading as ethical attention (but testifying only to an alarming failure to read) can be found in Max Silverman Facing Postmodernity (London routledge 1999) 28 where Blanchotrsquos question cited earlier lsquoHow to preserve [garder] it [ie lrsquoholocauste] if only in thought how to make thought into that which might preserve [garderait] the holocaust [lrsquoholocauste] in which everything was lost including the thought that preserves [la penseacutee gardienne]rsquo is wilfully and shockingly mistranslated in order to serve as evidence of Blanchotrsquos alleged lsquoappropriation of the Holocaustrsquo as follows lsquoHow should we [sic] maintain [a memory of the Holocaust [sic]] if not through thought [sic] yet how should we [sic] construct [sic] a thought [sic] which could capture [sic] that event in which everything was lost including ldquoappropriatingrdquo [sic] thoughtrsquo interpolations mine

168 On French reaction to Holocaust transmitted amidst some controversy by Antenne 2 between 13 February and 6 March 1979 nearly a year after first appearing on American television see Henry rousso Le Syndrome de Vichy 160ndash3

169 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 326 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 131 People in Auschwitz 132 translation modified Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 132 The Writing of the Disaster 83 Paraphrasing Langbein Blanchot writes lsquoBut adds Langbein for the pariahs neither sport nor cinema nor musicrsquo translation modified

170 Blanchot Apregraves coup 98ndash9 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 494ndash5 translation modified As Blanchot makes clear the reference


here is to William Styronrsquos Sophiersquos Choice published in 1979 and at the time Blanchot was writing the object of much media debate following Alan J Pakularsquos 1982 film of the same name based on the novel starring Meryl Streep which was released in France early in 1983 It is hard to say whether Blanchot had actually seen the film or even read the book

171 For Lewentalrsquos testimony see Ber Mark The Scrolls of Auschwitz translated by Sharon Neemani (Tel Aviv Am Oved 1985) 216ndash40 For a more recent transcription and translation into German (via Polish) from Lewentalrsquos original Yiddish see Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos (Oświęcim Państwowe Muzeum Oświęcim-Brzezinka 1996) 189ndash251 Many of the texts contained in both volumes are also available in French under the title Des voix sous la cendre manuscrits des Sonderkommandos drsquoAuschwitzshyBirkenau (Paris Meacutemorial de la Shoah-Calmann Leacutevy 2005) Throughout these publications there seems little agreement on the correct spelling of Lewentalrsquos name The form used by Blanchot is that given by Langbein

172 Quoted by Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 234 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 202 People in Auschwitz 202 translation modified For the original text see Mark The Scrolls of Auschwitz 240 where the translation reads lsquoThe truth as it really exists is immeasurably more tragic and terriblersquo The version given in Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens 197 is as follows lsquoDie ganze Wahrheit ist um vieles tragischer noch viel grauenerregender rsquo Langbeinrsquos translation is slightly different lsquoDie ganze Wahrheit ist um vieles tragischer noch viel entsetzlicher rsquo


174 On this aporia of impossible fidelity and necessary betrayal particularly in respect of mourning for a friend (in this case Bataille) see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 301ndash2 The Infinite Conversation 203


176 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 227 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 194 People in Auschwitz 196ndash7 translation modified


178 Bruns Maurice Blanchot The Refusal of Philosophy 225


179 Gillian rose lsquoPotterrsquos Fieldrsquo in Maurice Blanchot the Demand of Writing edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill (London routledge 1996) 190ndash208 (p 204) Similarly there seems to be no warrant at all for Stoeklrsquos perverse claim in the essay cited earlier that Blanchotrsquos remark about the horror of knowledge lsquowould at first seem to apply primarily to those who as prisoners in the camp go along with the system even try to survive in order to understand it or in order to enable others to understand itrsquo (p 143) Blanchotrsquos point is not that it was somehow wrong for inmates to attempt to act decisively against the camps as Lewental and others had done but more simply that as far as those who come after are concerned there are limits to what it is possible to comprehend

180 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 131 The Writing of the Disaster 82 translation slightly modified Contrary to appearances these words do not figure as such either in Menschen in Auschwitz or in the material collected in The Scrolls of Auschwitz or Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens They seem to condense two separate phrases the first from Lewental cited by Langbein that lsquoNo one can imagine exactly what happened [Ce qui se passait exactement aucun ecirctre humain ne peut se le repreacutesenter] All this can be conveyed only by one of us someone from our small group [ie the Sonderkommando] our inner circle provided that someone accidentally survivesrsquo the second again from Langbein recording the words called out by members of the Sonderkommando to inmates who had perhaps a better chance of surviving lsquoWhen you leave the camp talk write and scream so the world may learn what is happening herersquo [Parlez eacutecrivez criez quand vous aurez quitteacute le camp pour que le monde sache ce qui srsquoest passeacute ici]rsquo see Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 17 225 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 3 195 People in Auschwitz 3 194 For the quotation from Lewental see Mark The Scrolls of Auschwitz 239 Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens 196


182 See Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 128 198 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 102 155 People in Auschwitz 105 170 Compare Primo Levi If This Is A Man and The Truce translated by Stuart Woolf (London Sphere Books 1987) 96 190 Among the rare critics to have noticed at least the first of Blanchotrsquos silent quotations I should mention Gerald Bruns in Maurice Blanchot The Refusal of Philosophy 225ndash6 In If This Is a Man Levi writes lsquoThey crowd my memory with their faceless presences and if I


could enclose all the evil of our time in one image I would choose this image which is familiar to me an emaciated man with head dropped and shoulders curved on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seenrsquo emphasis mine (Meunierrsquos French version based on Langbein followed except for the last clause by Blanchot reads lsquoun homme deacutecharneacute la tecircte pencheacutee les eacutepaules courbeacutees dont ni le visage ni les yeux ne permettent de lire une lueur de penseacuteersquo) In his second narrative as he prepares to begin the long journey home Levi writes lsquoduring the whole interminable year spent in the Lager I had never had either the curiosity or the occasion to investigate the complex structure of the hierarchy of the camp The gloomy edifice of vicious powers lay wholly above us and our looks were turned to the groundrsquo emphasis mine (Meunier followed by Blanchot translates lsquoNos regards eacutetaient tourneacutes vers le solrsquo) It is hard to say whether Blanchot was familiar with Levirsquos two volumes as a whole both were available in French translation during the 1970s the first in a hastily produced version given the misleading title Jrsquoeacutetais un homme translated by Michegravele Causse (Paris Buchet-Chastel 1961) and subsequently disowned by Levi only to be replaced by a more accurate text in 1987 the second as La Trecircve translated by Emmanuelle Joly (Paris Grasset 1966)

183 Levi If This Is A Man and The Truce 96

184 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 48 Some pages earlier Agamben cites the same passage from If This Is a Man as Blanchot no mention is made of Blanchotrsquos use of the passage even when Agamben takes issue with Blanchotrsquos interpretation of Antelme later in the book

185 Agamben Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life translated by Daniel Heller-roazen (Stanford Stanford University Press 1998) 32 Remnants of Auschwitz 49 Agamben explores this claim in further detail in his State of Exception translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago University of Chicago Press 2005) I discuss the figure of the state of exception in Blanchot and Agamben in lsquoldquoNot In Our Namerdquo Blanchot Politics the Neuterrsquo Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 141ndash59 At stake in the differend between Agamben and Blanchot it might be said are two radically different accounts of sovereignty (or its dissolution)

186 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 69

187 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 75ndash6 emphasis in the original On this opposition between death and mere decease sterben (to die) and verenden (to perish) underpinned in its turn by the opposition


between humans who are capable of world and animals that are not see Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 171 Poetry Language Thought 176


189 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 81ndash2


191 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 133ndash4 emphasis in the original translation slightly modified

192 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 133 Compare Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 192 The Infinite Conversation 130


194 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 131 The Writing of the Disaster 82 translation modified Ann Smock translates lsquozombies pariahs infidelsrsquo As Langbein indicates those who in Auschwitz and other camps were known as Muselmaumlnner were also known elsewhere by other names Agamben makes a similar point in Remnants of Auschwitz 44 before going on however to privilege the term Muselmann throughout forgetting it would seem that it was only one name among others For a critical assessment of the implications of this decision see Fethi Benslama lsquoLa repreacutesentation et lrsquoimpossiblersquo Le Genre humain LrsquoArt et la meacutemoire des camps edited by Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris Seuil 2001) 59ndash80 and for a more sustained critique of Agambenrsquos strategy see Philippe Mesnard and Claudine Kahan Giorgio Agamben agrave lrsquoeacutepreuve drsquoAuschwitz (Paris Kimeacute 2001)

195 Blanchot La Condition critique 432 lsquoDo not forgetrsquo Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 35

196 As Blanchot writes in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 86 The Writing of the Disaster 51 lsquoIn the work of mourning grief does not work it wakes [veille]rsquo translation modified

197 See Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 120ndash1 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 96 People in Auschwitz 98 For the original text translated from the Yiddish see Mark The Scrolls of Auschwitz 206ndash7 Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens 178 There is some doubt about the identity of the author of this fragment thought however to have been Leib Langfuss by Esther Mark (who collaborated closely in researching The Scrolls of Auschwitz and was responsible for publishing the book after her husbandrsquos death)

198 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 133 The Writing of the Disaster 83ndash4 translation modified Compare LrsquoEntretien infini 195ndash6


The Infinite Conversation 132ndash3 For the quotation from Levinas himself quoting rabbi Johanan in the name of rabbi Jose b Kisma (Sanhedrin 103b) see Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 10 Difficult Freedom xiv lsquoThe Otherrsquos hunger [La faim drsquoautrui]rsquo comments Levinas lsquobe it of the flesh or of bread is sacred [sacreacutee] only the hunger of the third party limits its rights the only bad materialism is our own This first inequality perhaps defines Judaism A difficult condition An inversion of the apparent order to be performed again and again Whence the ritualism that dedicates the Jew to service with no thought of reward to accept a burden carried out at his own expense discharged at risk only to himself This is the original incontestable meaning of the Greek word liturgyrsquo emphasis in the original translation modified


200 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 526 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 446 People in Auschwitz 472

201 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 134 The Writing of the Disaster 84 translation modified To what in this passage does the word Israel refer In a recently published letter to Levinas from May 1948 cited by Olivier Corpet in La Regravegle du jeu 19 41 October 2009 246 written shortly after the declaration of the State of Israel Blanchot expressed his reaction to events in the following terms lsquoYou wonrsquot hold it against mersquo he suggested to his correspondent lsquoif I feel the need to say how much I feel bound in sympathy and admiration [estime] to those involved in the struggle in Palestine You sometimes spoke of Zionism in the past saying that it did not seem to you to measure up to Jewish destiny [agrave la mesure du destin juif] But now that after so many centuries and in such remarkable circumstances the State of Israel is once more one ought surely to see in this something beyond measure [quelque chose de deacutemesureacute] which is the hallmark of that destinyrsquo Levinas for his part would always insist as for instance in a Talmudic commentary on which Blanchot had occasion to draw later on the importance of lsquonever giving the word Israel only an ethnic sensersquo lsquoIt is not by virtue of being Israel that excellence is definedrsquo Levinas argued lsquobut by this excellence the dignity of being delivered by God himself that Israel is definedrsquo (Difficile Liberteacute 114 Difficult Freedom 83) On the difficulties arising for Levinas from this double invocation of Israel as both a futural promise and a presently existing State see Howard Caygill Levinas and the Political (London routledge 2002) 159ndash98 Pursuing his exchange with Levinas on the identity of


Israel in the long footnote placed between lsquoLrsquoEcirctre juifrsquo and lsquoLrsquoEspegravece humainersquo in LrsquoEntretien infini 191ndash2 The Infinite Conversation 447ndash8 Blanchot agreed that lsquothe question expressed by the words ldquobeing-Jewish [ecirctreshyjuif]rdquo and the question of the State of Israel should not be confused even if the one is modified by the otherrsquo The word Israel in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre cannot therefore simply be taken to refer to the State of Israel in its past present or future form True enough at least in general terms the support Blanchot expressed for the State of Israel in 1948 would remain a constant feature of his politics In 1998 for instance in one of his last public statements on the matter the writer responded to a questionnaire marking the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel (though Blanchot true to his own convictions refrained from naming it as such) with the following words lsquoWhatever happensrsquo he wrote lsquoI am with Israel I am with Israel when Israel suffers I am with Israel when Israel suffers for causing suffering I can do no more Certainly I have my political preferences I am on the side of [Shimon] Peres [leader of the Israeli Labour Party at the time Israelrsquos Foreign Minister] I believe [Menachem] Begin [former leader of the Likud Party who left power in 1983 and was closely identified with the policy of expanding Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied Palestine] was wrong very wrong to encourage settlements But I do not feel that I have the right to appear to tell people what to do when what is at stake is that which is closest to mersquo See Blanchot lsquoCe qui mrsquoest le plus proche rsquo Globe 30 July-August 1988 56 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 170 translation modified

202 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 72 The Writing of the Disaster 42 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos use of the expression lsquosens absentrsquo see Nancy La Deacuteclosion (Deacuteconstruction du christianisme 1) (Paris Galileacutee 2005) 130ndash32 DisshyEnclosure The Deconstruction of Christianity translated by Bettina Bergo Gabriel Malenfant and Michael B Smith (New York Fordham University Press 2008) 86ndash7

203 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 104 The Writing of the Disaster 63 translation modified Compare Levinas Difficile Liberteacute revised edition 328ndash33


205 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 210 The Infinite Conversation 451 emphasis in the original translation modified

206 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash93 155ndash63 (p 162) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 119ndash23 (p 123) Compare Lacoue-Labarthe


La Fiction du politique (Paris Christian Bourgois 1987) 63 Heidegger Art and Politics translated by Chris Turner (Oxford Blackwell 1990) 37

207 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 216ndash7 The Writing of the Disaster 143 translation modified For the reference to Kafka see Kafka Gesammelte Werke VI 182 Dearest Father Stories and Other Writings 78 Blanchot following Klossowskirsquos translation of Kafkarsquos Journal intime (Paris Grasset 1945) 298 cites the passage in full in La Part du feu 30 The Work of Fire 24

208 Blanchot LrsquoAmitieacute 252ndash3 Friendship 223 translation modified The quotations in Blanchotrsquos text are drawn from Jabegraves lsquoLe Livre des questionsrsquo (1963) in Le Livre des questions I 15 30 The Book of Questions The Book of Questions The Book of Yukel Return to the Book translated by rosmarie Waldrop (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1976) 13 25ndash6

209 See Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet Ontologie de la reacutevolution I LrsquoAnge (Paris Grasset 1976) 47 The book is one of the best-known instances of what came to be promoted in France in the 1970s as new philosophy or lsquola nouvelle philosophiersquo which referred in this case to an esoteric confection of Maoist politics Lacanian psychoanalysis and Christian theology

210 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 209ndash10 The Writing of the Disaster 138ndash9 emphasis in the original translation modified Blanchotrsquos reference to Historie and Geschichte is a nod in the direction of Heidegger notably sect76 of Sein und Zeit

211 See Nancy La Deacuteclosion 133 DisshyEnclosure 88 lsquoNo return to religion attempts to insinuate itself here [in Blanchot]rsquo Nancy explains lsquomuch rather what attempts to extract itself from the legacy of monotheism is its essential and essentially non-religious trait the trait of an atheism or what could be called an absentheism beyond all positing of any object of belief or nonbeliefrsquo translation modified

212 See Nancy La Deacuteclosion 137 DisshyEnclosure 90

213 See for instance Blanchot lsquorefuser lrsquoordre eacutetablirsquo Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 151ndash3 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 157ndash8 La Condition critique 419ndash24 443ndash5 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 162ndash6 171ndash2 Many of these texts postdate the publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre the concerns they voice however are already clearly at work in the 1980 volume especially in these closing pages

214 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 213 The Writing of the Disaster 141 translation modified For the original quotation see Levinas


Difficile Liberteacute 77 Difficult Freedom 53 On Levinasrsquos reticence towards poetry elsewhere see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 76 The Infinite Conversation 53



217 Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 98ndash9 The Book To Come 79 translation modified Neherrsquos 1955 book on which Blanchotrsquos essay is based has since been republished as Prophegravetes et propheacuteties lrsquoessence du propheacutetisme (Paris Payot 2004)





222 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 212 The Writing of the Disaster 140 translation modified For the original verses see Houmllderlin Saumlmtliche Gedichte 222 This was not the first time that Blanchot had recourse to the figure of the First Consul as an emblematic representation of personal dictatorship In his 1965 essay on Sade he similarly conflated Bonaparte in 1799 with de Gaulle in 1965 see LrsquoEntretien infini 342 The Infinite Conversation 229 Blanchot may also have encountered Houmllderlinrsquos epigram in Heideggerrsquos Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 187 where it is used to illustrate the differences between the same the equal the identical and the indifferent

223 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 213 The Writing of the Disaster 141 translation modified Blanchotrsquos use of the word combat or struggle in these lines does not mark a covert reintroduction of the dialectic it is a partial quotation drawing on the title of one of Kafkarsquos earliest posthumous texts Beschreibung eines Kampfes most commonly translated into French as Description drsquoun combat

224 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 83 The Writing of the Disaster 49 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 556 The Infinite Conversation 379 On Blanchotrsquos use of Kafkarsquos Castle in that essay see my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit 219ndash25 On the topos of weariness in LrsquoEntretien infini see


my lsquoWeary Wordsrsquo in Clandestine Encounters Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot edited by Kevin Hart (Notre Dame Indiana Notre Dame University Press 2010) 282ndash303

225 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 214 The Writing of the Disaster 141 translation modified One of the chief meanings of the word avegravenement used here by Blanchot relates of course to the lsquocomingrsquo of the Messiah

226 See Nancy La Deacuteclosion 140n3 DisshyEnclosure 182n14

227 For Blanchotrsquos early review see La Condition critique 41ndash4 The translation it discusses is Herman Melville Les Icircles enchanteacutees suivies de Bartleby lrsquoeacutecrivain translated by Pierre Leyris (Paris Gallimard 1945) For Caussersquos later version of Melvillersquos story see lsquoBartlebyrsquo Le Nouveau Commerce 35 Autumn 1976 76ndash122 In her brief introduction Causse not only mentions the parallel with Kafka (which Blanchot in 1945 had likewise noted while also suggesting a more persuasive affinity with Lautreacuteamont) but also describes Melvillersquos story as lsquopropheticrsquo Blanchotrsquos remarks seem to have prompted several further commentaries on the story see Ann Smock lsquoQuietrsquo Qui parle 2 Fall 1988 68ndash100 Deleuze Critique et clinique (Paris Minuit 1993) 89ndash114 Essays Critical and Clinical translated by Daniel W Smith Michael A Greco and Anthony Uhlmann (London Verso 1998) 68ndash90 J Hillis Miller Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge Harvard University Press 1990) 141ndash78 and Agamben Potentialities Collected Essays in Philosophy edited and translated by Daniel Heller-roazen (Stanford Stanford University Press 1999) 243ndash71 Deleuze in conclusion describes the figure of Bartleby among others as that of lsquothe new Christrsquo (p 114) while Agamben in similar vein credits him with being a possible lsquonew Messiahrsquo (p 270)

228 Blanchot Faux Pas 275 Faux Pas 240 translation modified

229 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 219 The Writing of the Disaster 145 translation modified For Blanchotrsquos earlier version of Bartlebyrsquos phrase see lsquoDiscours sur la patiencersquo Le Nouveau Commerce 30ndash31 1975 19ndash44 (p 28) Blanchot in 1980 was also careful to avoid Caussersquos 1976 version which had preferred the rather vaguer and less convincing lsquoje preacutefeacutererais nrsquoen rien fairersquo In 1986 as testimony to the obstinate untranslatability of Bartlebyrsquos strange watchword Pierre Leyris was responsible for a further revised version which this time opted for the more colloquial and peremptory lsquoje preacutefeacutererais pasrsquo See lsquoBartleby le scribersquo in Melville Les Contes de la Veacuteranda translated by Pierre Leyris (Paris Gallimard 1986)


230 Herman Melville Billy Budd Sailor and Other Stories edited by Harold Beaver (Harmondsworth Penguin 1967) 72

231 See Derrida lsquoPreacutejugeacutesrsquo in La Faculteacute de juger (Paris Minuit 1985) 87ndash139 Acts of Literature 183ndash220


233 See Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 83ndash131 Difficult Freedom 59ndash96

234 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 214 The Writing of the Disaster 141 There is a strong likelihood that Blanchot also followed up Levinasrsquos footnote reference to Scholemrsquos 1959 lecture lsquoTowards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism [Zum Verstaumlndnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum]rsquo republished in French translation in 1974 where he would have learnt more about lsquothis truly staggering ldquorabbinic fablerdquorsquo as Scholem calls it which dates back to the second century ie before rome became identified with the Catholic Church See Scholem Judaica I (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1963) 28 The Messianic Idea in Judaism translated by Michael A Meyer (London Allen amp Unwin 1971) 12 Le Messianisme juif essai sur la spiritualiteacute du judaiumlsme translated from the English by Bernard Dupuy (Paris Calmann-Leacutevy 1974) 37 Blanchotrsquos phrasing repeats (and inverts) Dupuyrsquos translation which refers to lsquole Messie aux portes de Rome parmi les leacutepreux et les mendiants [ie the lepers and beggars] de la Ville eacuteternellersquo

235 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 215 The Writing of the Disaster 142 translation modified Compare Difficile Liberteacute 100 Difficult Freedom 71 and Scholem Judaica I 26 The Messianic Idea in Judaism 11 Le Messianisme juif 36 (where Dupuy has lsquoAujourdrsquohui si vous eacutecoutez sa voix rsquo) On Scholemrsquos use of the quotation see Steacutephane Mosegraves LrsquoAnge de lrsquohistoire Rosenzweig Benjamin Scholem (Paris Gallimard [1992] 2006) 35ndash7 Oddly the passage is omitted from Mosegraves The Angel of History Rosenzweig Benjamin Scholem translated by Barbara Harshav (Stanford Stanford University Press 2009) readers of Blanchotrsquos Le TregravesshyHaut will recall the writerrsquos own singular use of the word lsquonow [maintenant]rsquo in the very last line of the novel when seemingly on the threshold of dying in a present tense that refers to no graspable present the narrator declares to any or all who are listening lsquoNow now is the time I shall speak [Maintenant crsquoest maintenant que je parle]rsquo See Blanchot Le TregravesshyHaut 243 The Most High 254 translation modified Levinas in his commentary remarks on the lsquoalways singular and often bizarre translationsrsquo sometimes found in the Talmud (Difficile Liberteacute 85 Difficult


Freedom 60 translation modified) It would not be hard as here to apply the exact same epithets to certain of Blanchotrsquos own versions as I show in lsquoldquoA Fine Madnessrdquo Translation Quotation the Fragmentaryrsquo Blanchot romantique A Collection of Essays 211ndash31

236 See Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 113 91 121ndash2 emphasis in the original Difficult Freedom 82 64 88


238 Scholem Judaica I 7ndash8 The Messianic Idea in Judaism 1 translation slightly modified Compare Scholem Le Messianisme juif 23ndash4

239 Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 115 emphasis in the original Difficult Freedom 84 translation slightly modified On the sometimes frosty relationship between Levinas and Scholem see Lescourret Emmanuel Levinas 39ndash40 332ndash4 reading Levinasrsquos words it is hard not to be reminded here of the proposition that features at the end of Benjaminrsquos lsquoOn the Concept of History [Uumlber den Begriff der Geschichte]rsquo according to which notes the author lsquowe know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future which holds sway over all those who turn to soothsayers [Wahrsager] for enlightenment This does not imply however that for the Jews the future became homogeneous empty time For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enterrsquo See Walter Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften edited by rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaumluser 7 vols (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1974ndash89) I 2 704 Selected Writings edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W Jennings 4 vols (London Harvard University Press 1996ndash2003) IV 397 This raises the further question of the extent of Blanchotrsquos knowledge of Benjamin whose name occurs only sparsely in the writerrsquos published texts albeit in a number of significant places The first as indicated earlier is in a review article (first published in September 1960 and later included in LrsquoAmitieacute 69ndash73 Friendship 57ndash6) of Benjaminrsquos Œuvres choisies translated by Maurice de Gandillac (Paris Julliard 1959) principally concerned with Benjaminrsquos famous essay lsquoThe Task of the Translatorrsquo (other texts included in Gandillacrsquos selection were lsquoCritique of Violencersquo lsquoFate and Characterrsquo lsquoGoethersquos Elective Affinitiesrsquo lsquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproductionrsquo lsquoOn Some Motifs in Baudelairersquo and lsquoThe Storytellerrsquo) True Blanchot demurred at Benjaminrsquos apparent belief in the existence of a pre-Babelian Ursprache but his


interest was sufficiently sparked by Benjaminrsquos presentation of the messianic promise implicit in translation (lsquoWhence a messianism proper to every translatorrsquo Blanchot remarked lsquoif he works to make languages grow in the direction of this ultimate language already attested in every present language by dint of the future held within it which translation makes its ownrsquo [LrsquoAmitieacute 70 Friendship 58 translation modified]) to repeat unchanged in a paper setting out the role of translation in the nascent project for the Revue internationale a passage that first appeared in the September 1960 article (compare LrsquoAmitieacute 71 Friendship 59 and Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 62 Political Writings 1953ndash93 62) In May 1963 in an essay entitled lsquoArs novarsquo in LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchot signalled his continuing interest by referring to various remarks by Benjamin on the aura and the fragmentary which were admittedly derived second-hand from Adornorsquos Philosophie der neuen Musik (Philosophy of Modern Music) which Blanchot was reviewing at the time It was not until 1968 that Blanchot properly revived his engagement with Benjamin which he did by quoting in an unsigned text published in Comiteacute (lsquorupture du temps reacutevolutionrsquo in Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 127 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 100) the famous description of the July revolution in Paris when Benjamin reported lsquoon the first evening of fighting it so happened that shots were fired at the dials on Paris clocktowers simultaneously and independently and from several locations at oncersquo (Gesammelte Schriften I 2 702 Selected Writings IV 395 translation slightly modified) This passage too was drawn from Benjaminrsquos lsquoOn the Concept of Historyrsquo a text that Blanchot may well have read when it first appeared in French translated by Pierre Missac in the October 1947 issue of Les Temps modernes 25 623ndash34 only a few pages after his own article lsquoA la rencontre de Sadersquo (577ndash612) Between 1947 and 1968 it is clear that Blanchot had also had access to Adorno and Gretel Adornorsquos 1955 two-volume edition of Benjaminrsquos Schriften which allowed him to replace Missacrsquos version with a more accurate translation of his own And though Benjaminrsquos name does not occur elsewhere in Blanchot it is hard to believe he could have read Scholem without being aware of the latterrsquos connection with Benjamin not least because Scholemrsquos Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism with which Blanchot had long been familiar was dedicated to Benjaminrsquos memory


241 Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 84ndash5 Difficult Freedom 60 translation modified Other translations are evidently possible David Banon


for instance in Le Messianisme (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1998) 14 gives the following version lsquoTous les prophegravetes sans exception nrsquoont propheacutetiseacute que pour les temps messianiques Pour ce qui est du mondeshyquishyvient aucun œil ne lrsquoa vu en dehors de Toi Elohim qui agiras pour celui qui trsquoattendrsquo

242 Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 85 Difficult Freedom 60

243 Levinas Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris Minuit 1968) 13 Nine Talmudic Readings 4ndash5 translation modified


245 Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 84 Difficult Freedom 59 Levinas is of course referring to himself

246 Levinas Difficile Liberteacute revised (1976) version 405 Difficult Freedom 291

247 Levinas Aushydelagrave du verset lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris Minuit 1982) 7 Beyond the Verse Talmudic Readings and Lectures translated by Gary D Mole (London Athlone 1994) xndashxi emphasis in the original translation slightly modified

248 See Scholem Judaica 3 (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1973) 155 The Messianic Idea in Judaism 51 Le Messianisme juif 105ndash6 Scholemrsquos essay first published in 1968 in response to some of the events of that year is likely to have been of particular interest to Blanchot

249 On Sabbatai Zevi see Scholem Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 287ndash324 Judaica 5 Erloumlsung durch Suumlnde (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1992) The Messianic Idea in Judaism 78ndash141 Le Messianisme juif 139ndash217 Blanchot offers a brief overview of Sabbatai Zevirsquos role as pseudo-Messiah based on Scholemrsquos account in LrsquoAmitieacute 269ndash70 Friendship 237ndash8

250 Mosegraves LrsquoAnge de lrsquohistoire 273ndash4 The Angel of History 132 emphasis in the original translation modified

251 Blanchot La Condition critique 424 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 165 emphasis in the original

252 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 216 The Writing of the Disaster 142ndash3 translation modified Tohushybohu is the word used in Genesis 1 2 for lsquothe earth was without form and voidrsquo

253 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash93 153 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 118 translation modified This implicit reference to Elijah precedes by several years Derridarsquos analogous invocation of the prophet in Ulysse gramophone 103ndash6 Acts of Literature 284ndash6 Later too Derrida likewise goes on to stress lsquothe structural


contradictionrsquo at the heart of the messianic promise in a context that as the title of Derridarsquos chapter (lsquoHe Who Accompanies Me [Celui qui mrsquoaccompagne]rsquo) plainly suggests owes much to Blanchot see Derrida Politiques de lrsquoamitieacute (Paris Galileacutee 1994) 198 The Politics of Friendship translated by George Collins (London Verso 1997) 173ndash4


255 Kafka Gesammelte Werke VI 182 179 Dearest Father Stories and Other Writings 78 38 translations modified On Kafkarsquos familiarity with Hasidism and the messianic tradition and for a reading of The Castle as a critique of messianism ndash which in Blanchotrsquos terms would also amount to its interruptive or suspensive reaffirmation ndash see robertson Kafka Judaism Politics and Literature 228ndash35 For Blanchotrsquos own familiarity with Hasidism based on a reading of Buber and Scholem see LrsquoAmitieacute 259ndash71 Friendship 228ndash39

256 See Derrida LrsquoEacutecriture et la diffeacuterence 228 Writing and Difference 192 412 For the quotation from Joyce see Ulysses (London Harmondsworth 1992) 622 and for the quotation from Levinas see En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 267 Deconstruction in Context 348 translation modified

257 Blanchot La Condition critique 419ndash20 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 162 translation modified



260 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 220 The Writing of the Disaster 146 translation modified For the quotation from Mallarmeacute see Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes I 416ndash17

5

A change of epoch

No finality where finitude reigns

[Pas de fin lagrave ougrave regravegne la finitude]

BLANCHOT La Communauteacute inavouable1

The fragmentary in Blanchot comes in many guises interrupted narrative abyssal reflection philosophical meditation deconstructive intervention literary critical note autothanatographical gloss metatheoretical excursion and much else besides still awaiting adequate characterisation At the same time however and more importantly the fragmentary is never merely coincident with these (or any other) manifestations which it forcibly suspends exceeds erases and reinscribes not in order to negate them but repeatedly to affirm their radical difference from themselves And if any given fragment is finite it follows that the fragmentary is itself necessarily infinite To the tracing of every limit in other words responds or corresponds that which unspoken or unsaid extends beyond the limit ndash a limit which while remaining impossible to cross is nevertheless interrupted effaced and overwritten so to speak with the otherness fragile precarious and ghostly upon which every limit depends This is not to say the fragmentary is a synonym for broken or deferred totality Sharing a condition of possibility with the parenthesising movement of the phenomenological epocheacute borrowed from philosophy but radicalised by Blanchotrsquos thinking to a point of unrecognisability it intervenes as a perpetual opening


to alterity to that which speaks without speaking beyond the horizon of the familiar to that which is unpredictable undecidable and irreducibly multiple in its consequences and effects

This explains why rather than a mere epiphenomenon of so-called modern or postmodern culture the fragmentary as both fait accompli and promise is rigorously inescapable It is also the reason why in turn any account of the fragmentary however lengthy cannot do other than face the fact of its own incompletion The lessons of this predicament are however double If it reminds us that to write is to confront the interminable it also demonstrates that words themselves are without end What may seem to some a curse is always already a blessing What Blanchot calls disaster as we have seen is radically inseparable from the prospect of hope Despite rumours to the contrary then the fragmentary is never a terminus never a point of conclusion or closure but an exigency inseparable from all writing an appeal or injunction in breach of all previous or existing norms delivered to that which yesterday today or tomorrow is still yet to come

The change of epoch in Blanchot if such exists is in this sense anything but an end of history It announces no new age no new era no new philosophical or theoretical system no new god This is not to say that throughout Blanchot did not remain deeply sceptical regarding the always imperialist claims of history the deep-rooted belief that like politics like narrative like meaning like sense history was all ndash without excess or remainder But this was not because Blanchotrsquos writing sought to remove itself from history On the contrary its engagement with history with politics with meaning was acute and unrelenting It insisted however that history like politics like meaning was only possible if something in history exceeded history interrupted it and stood aside from it just as it did politics narrative meaning and the rest not least because without that caesura without that detour without that interruption no event of writing no singularity no encounter indeed no history no politics and no meaning would occur at all

The change of epoch in Blanchot belongs neither to philosophy nor to history both of which it contests And for the exact same reason it does not belong to literature either Its impending immi-nence is all the more incisive for being withdrawn from the present

A ChAnGE oF EPoCh 435

and from presence which is also to say that its place without place is here wherever speech and writing occur and its time without time always already now

note


436

InDEx

Adler H G 365Adorno T W 2ndash8 15ndash16 346

352 429n 239Agamben Giorgio 45 86n 98

90n 103 271n 137 359ndash63 421n 184 422n 194 427n 227

Allen William S 168n 110Antelme Monique 154n 5Antelme robert 24 44ndash50

86n 98 89n 100 90n 103 237 268n 121 281 339 343ndash5 347 351 353 360ndash1 364 412n 145 421n 184

Arendt Hannah 271n 137Aristotle 35 117 158n 36

201 325Atack Margaret 269n 124

Balibar eacutetienne 238ndash9 271n 137Banon David 371 430n 241Barthes roland 180 286Bataille Georges 2 32 64ndash6

81n 73 100n 142 104 110 131 140 154n 5 223 243 248ndash9 252 254n 9 260n 44 274n 158 305 336 407n 121

Beaufret Jean 74n 38 103ndash4 153n 2

Beckett Samuel 2 4 6 17ndash19 69n 7 111 113 131ndash2 156n 17 165n 84 178 183

Benjamin Walter 80n 67 271n 137 429n 239

Benveniste Emile 130 160n 53 163n 64

Berger Joseph 350ndash1 416n 166Bertram Ernst 65 100n 143Blanchot Maurice

Aminadab (Aminadab) 127 161n 57

LrsquoAmitieacute (Friendship) 49ndash50 80n 67 236ndash8 253n 1 259n 41 301 397n 33 429n 239 431n 249 432n 255

Apregraves Coup (Vicious Circles) 78n 55 94n 108 321ndash2 415n 153 416n 162

LrsquoArrecirct de mort (Death Sentence) 10ndash11 71n 19 99n 135 115 137ndash8 165n 86 335

lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo 14 103ndash23 289LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (Awaiting

Oblivion) 10 14 26 48 72n 26 92n 104 103ndash53 154n 8 155n 10 160nn 50ndash1 162n 58 163n 66 165nn 84ndash5 172 174 179 222 249 285 308 372 411n 139

Au moment voulu (When the Time Comes) 10 13 23 71n 15 79n 63 129 162n 63 412n 145

references in bold refer to detailed treatment of works indicated

InDEx438

Celui qui ne mrsquoaccompagnait pas (The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me) 10 13 71n 15

La Communauteacute inavouable (The Unavowable Community) 247ndash53 274nn 154 158 275n 159 276n 165 401n 72 433

Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man) 10ndash11 13ndash14 143 162n 58 165n 86 168nn 114ndash15 267n 90

LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre (The Writing of the Disaster) 7ndash8 26 31 37 50 78nn 57 60 79n 62 106ndash7 115 155n 14 163n 64 167n 109 179 193ndash5 197 243 259nn 41ndash2 260n 44 279ndash391 395nn 17 20 396n 30 399n 52 400n 63 404n 99 405n 102 407n 121 408n 128 409n 132 410n 137 414n 150 415nn 153ndash4 416n 162 417n 167 418n 169 420n 180 422n 194 423n 201 425nn 210 213 426nn 222ndash3 427nn 225 229 428nn 234ndash5 431n 252

LrsquoEntretien infini (The Infinite Conversation) 9 17ndash23 26ndash9 31ndash7 40ndash9 61ndash8 69n 8 71n 13 73n 33 75nn 39 45 77n 53 79n 64 80nn 65 67 81n 73 84nn 86 88 85n 95 86n 96 89n 101 90n 103 92n 104

99nn 140ndash1 100n 143 101nn 146 151 120ndash2 131 151ndash2 157n 29 158n 34 163nn 64 71 164n 80 167nn 102 106 169n 120 192ndash3 196ndash7 202 206 225 259n 39 260n 44 261n 46 262nn 58 63 264n 75 269nn 122ndash3 281ndash2 285 293 343ndash5 367 375 393n 9 394n 13 397n 33 412n 145 413nn 147ndash9 419n 174 423n 201 426nn 222 224 429n 239

LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire (The Space of Literature) 9 70n 11 75n 40 82n 81 83n 82 110 187 280ndash1 301ndash2 335 397n 33 399nn 52 56 401n 70

Faux Pas (Faux Pas) 58 79n 64 97n 124 392n 5 394n 14 401n 70

La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day) 11ndash12 212 219 266n 78 269n 123 408n 123

LrsquoInstant de ma mort (The Instant of My Death) 11 183 199 257n 21

Le Livre agrave venir (The Book to Come) 14ndash16 73n 27 74n 37 84n 86 94n 109 156nn 17 19 164n 80 256n 17 273n 144 281 373

La Part du feu (The Work of Fire) 74n 37 79n 64 80n 67 97n 124 154n 4 164n 80 176ndash8 254n 9 279ndash80 392n 5 405n 106 425n 207

InDEx 439

Le Pas aushydelagrave (The Step Not Beyond) 26 30ndash1 43 56 58 63 94n 109 106ndash7 166n 87 171ndash253 254nn 3 6 256n 11 257n 21 260n 44 261n 47 265n 77 266nn 84 87 267n 90 268n 121 274n 152 275nn 159 161ndash2 277n 167 285ndash6 293 301 303ndash4 308 318 335ndash6 372 417n 167

politics 6ndash7 20 22ndash8 37 40 44ndash7 64 75n 39 76nn 46 49 80n 65 82n 81 85n 94 86n 98 90n 103 97nn 121 124 153n 3 165n 85 193ndash4 196 212 231ndash53 259n 41 260n 44 268n 121 269nn 122ndash3 126 270n 135 271n 137 272nn 141 143 273nn 144ndash5 274n 158 276n 165 279ndash82 305 310 339ndash47 352ndash3 355 362ndash3 367ndash70 374 385ndash7 392n 2 393n 6 411nn 141 143 412n 145 413n 148 414n 150 415nn 153ndash4 417n 167 420nn 179ndash80 421n 185 423n 201 426n 222 429n 239

Thomas lrsquoObscur (Thomas the Obscure) 55 65 72n 21 98n 125 180ndash1 183 216 243 256n 17 312 393n 7

Le TregravesshyHaut (The Most High) 244 253 260n 44 273n 147 277n 169 428n 235

Breton Andreacute 97n 124Bruns Gerald 78n 54 356

420n 182Buber Martin 194 259n 41

432n 255Buber-Neumann

Margarete 94n 108

Cayrol Jean 343 412n 145Celan Paul 94n 108 187

253n 1 258n 28 276n 165 289 348 367 416n 159

Char reneacute 2 4 19ndash24 26ndash7 37 46 48 60ndash1 74nn 37ndash8 75nn 39 45 92n 104 93n 105 103 153n 2 158n 34 251

Chomsky Marvin J 352Clark Timothy 154n 8Cohn-Bendit Daniel 50

414n 150Crowley Martin 86n 98

89n 100 90n 103 412n 145

Davis Colin 90n 103Delbo Charlotte 348Deleuze Gilles 32 34 262n 63

264n 75 292 397n 31 427n 227

Derrida Jacques 3 7 12 32 34 58ndash60 68n 1 70n 9 81n 70 94n 109 99n 135 101n 146 108 126 138ndash9 157n 27 161n 54 165nn 84 86 166n 87 182ndash3 204 206 208 212 215 219 225ndash6 245 249 264n 75 284 289 300 302ndash4 323 330ndash2 342 366 368 377 389 396n 30

InDEx440

398n 42 406n 107 407n 121 408n 123 431n 253

Diogenes Laertius 324Duras Marguerite 164n 80

249ndash50 268n 121

Eaglestone robert 86n 98epocheacute 51ndash62 96n 120

98n 127 179ndash80 231 234 307 324ndash5 328 335 380 389ndash91 433

Fichte Johann Gottlieb 31 113Fink Eugen 32 34ndash5 81n 73Foumlrster-Nietzsche

Elisabeth 396n 24Foucault Michel 14 32 34

70n 11 143

Gaulle Charles de 22ndash4 75n 39 235ndash6 238 269n 122 270n 135 426n 222

Goya Francisco 339

Hegel G W F 4 6 15ndash16 27ndash8 64 167n 109 176 191ndash2 253 254n 9 261n 47 277n 169 289 323ndash4 330ndash2 336 342 366ndash7 380 389 397n 33 405n 106 406n 107 407n 121 409n 132

Heidegger Martin 6 14ndash16 32ndash3 35 37ndash44 53 55 58 66 74n 38 75n 45 80n 65 81n 68 82n 81 83n 85 84n 88 85n 94 92n 104 97nn 121ndash2 98n 129 103ndash10 112 114ndash16 118ndash22 124 130ndash1 145ndash8 150 152 153nn 2ndash3 154nn 5 8

155nn 9 14 156n 19 157nn 27 29 159n 39 160n 50 161n 55 166n 99 167n 109 168nn 110 113 169n 116 191 196 199ndash204 206 226 249 262nn 58 63 264n 75 271n 137 285 289ndash90 293 303 312ndash13 316 322ndash4 330 332 359 362 367ndash8 405n 102 407n 121 421n 187 425n 210 426n 222

Heraclitus 19 22 27 43 48 92n 104 117ndash22 130 134 142 147 152ndash3 157n 27 158nn 33ndash4 36 159nn 37 39 160n 48 163n 64 166n 99 167nn 106 109 201

Houmllderlin Friedrich 1 6 38ndash40 55 82n 81 83n 85 104 106ndash7 114 117 150ndash2 154n 5 169n 116 253 261n 47 277nn 168ndash9 289 307 311 323 370ndash2 374 426n 222

Hollier Denis 271n 137Horkheimer Max 346House Jim 276n 165Husserl Edmund 51ndash60

62 95n 111 96n 120 97nn 121 124 98nn 127 129 179 302 304 307 310 312 316ndash17 324ndash5 330 382 402n 88 406n 107

Jabegraves Edmond 306 344 346ndash7 369 371 397n 33 400n 65 414n 150 425n 208

Jambet Christian 369 425n 209

InDEx 441

Janicaud Dominique 80n 65 97n 122 153n 2 154n 8 157n 27

Jaspers Karl 32ndash3 36 80n 67Joyce James 139 389Juumlnger Ernst 33 64 115

153n 2

Kafka Franz 1 6 9 11ndash12 85n 95 94n 108 177ndash8 280 284 335 353 368 370ndash2 374ndash8 388 393n 7 399n 52 425n 207 426nn 223ndash4 427n 227 432n 255

Klingemann August 31 79n 62Klossowski Pierre 32 66

99n 141 101n 147 174 193 196 198 200 204ndash7 210 262n 63 271n 137 401n 72 425n 207

Kojegraveve Alexandre 64 254n 9

Lacan Jacques 336 425n 209Lacoue-Labarthe Philippe 3

29ndash31 77n 53 82n 81 97n 122 183 260n 44 277n 169 333 336 367ndash8 405n 102 408n 128

Langbein Hermann 348ndash55 357ndash8 361 363ndash5 416nn 160 162 418n 169 419nn 171ndash2 420nn 180 182 422nn 194 197

Lanzmann Claude 340 363 410n 137

Laporte roger 243 260n 44 273n 145 280

Lardreau Guy 369 425n 209Leclaire Serge 333ndash4 336ndash7

409n 132Leiris Michel 182 304

399n 52

Levi Primo 357ndash8 361 363 420n 182

Levinas Emmanuel 34 43 45 51ndash5 57ndash8 73n 33 81n 73 84n 88 86nn 96ndash7 90n 103 93n 105 95nn 110ndash11 96n 120 97n 121 98n 129 103 108 117ndash18 126 132 136 158n 36 164n 80 176 194 249 275n 162 276n 164 280 285 289ndash90 300 312ndash22 324ndash8 330 332 342ndash3 345 352 363ndash4 367ndash8 370ndash2 376 378ndash85 387 388ndash9 393n 7 394nn 10 12 397n 33 402nn 79 85 88 403nn 90 95 404n 98 407nn 119 121 413n 148 414n 150 423n 201 425n 214 428nn 234ndash5 429n 239

Lewental Salmen 353ndash6 419n 171 420nn 179ndash80

Loumlwith Karl 32 65ndash6 196 262n 63 367

Luria Isaac 293 306 337 397n 33

Luther Martin 225 267n 103 272n 138

MacMaster Neil 276n 165Mallarmeacute Steacutephane 1 51 60

62ndash3 68n 1 94n 109 107 126 156n 19 181 208 231 243 281ndash4 287 289 291 298 307 336 391 394nn 12 14 398n 42 409n 131

Malraux Andreacute 280 393n 6Marx Karl 64 248 367

InDEx442

Mascolo Dionys 23ndash4 76n 48 242 273n 144 412n 145

Maxence Jean-Pierre 272n 141Melville Herman 370ndash2 376ndash8

427nn 227 229Memmi Albert 413n 148Merleau-Ponty Maurice 328Mole Gary 411n 139Mondor Henri 283 394n 14Morali Claude 275n 162Mosegraves Steacutephane 385 428n 235

Nancy Jean-Luc 3 29ndash31 70n 9 76n 46 77n 53 247ndash8 149 266n 83 274n 158 328 371 373 376 387 405n 102 407n 115 415n 154 424n 202 425n 211

Neher Andreacute 343 373 413n 147 426n 217

neuter 19ndash22 30 34 36ndash7 43ndash6 48ndash9 58 60ndash3 67ndash8 80n 67 85nn 91 95 86n 97 90n 103 93n 105 99n 138 112 116 131 141 143 148ndash9 157n 29 167n 102 181 183ndash5 188 190ndash1 196 213ndash15 217 222 229 243 251 264n 75 266n 83 269n 122 285 290 294ndash5 300ndash1 305 308 314 319ndash20 322 329 362 376ndash7 402n 79 403n 95 405n 102

Nietzsche Friedrich 1 25ndash6 31ndash44 57 63ndash8 79nn 63ndash4 80nn 65 67 81nn 70 73 82n 78 86n 96 99n 141 100nn 142ndash3 101nn 148 151 104 117 159n 37

191ndash212 219 247 249 251 258n 36 259n 39 260n 44 261n 47 262nn 58 63 264n 75 265n 77 289 305 330 406n 107

nihilism 7 33 37 40ndash5 66 86n 96 90n 103 196 199ndash203 205 210 243 261n 46 326 337

Parmenides 39 43 201 219 261n 47

Pascal Blaise 336 392n 5 409n 131

Paulhan Jean 98n 125 234 269n 126 401n 70

Plato 42 158n 36 167n 109 201 258n 35 261n 47 264n 75 330

Poliakov Leacuteon 347 416n 159

Queneau raymond 154n 5 254n 9

ramnoux Cleacutemence 117 120 158n 34 163n 64 166n 99

richter Johann Paul Friedrich (Jean Paul) 78n 55

rimbaud Arthur 4 69n 5 392n 5

rose Gillian 356rosenzweig Franz 413n 147rousset David 348rousso Henry 412n 144

418n 168

Sade D A F Marquis de 18 259n 43 426n 222 429n 239

Sartre Jean-Paul 55 283Schelling F W J 31 289

306 323 330 400n 63 405n 102

InDEx 443

Schlechta Karl 32Schlegel Friedrich 1 26ndash9 31

37 288 306 330Schmitt Carl 271n 137Scholem Gershom 293ndash4 371

379ndash81 384ndash6 397n 33 428nn 234ndash5 429n 239 431n 248

Sextus Empiricus 325ndash6Shoah 94n 107 339ndash68 410n 137

411n 139 412n 144Silesius Angelus 395n 16Silverman Max 417n 167Solzhenitsyn Alexander 350ndash1

416n 166Stoekl Allan 413n 148

417n 167 420n 179Styron William 418n 170Syrotinski Michael 341

Talmud 371 378ndash85 388ndash9 397n 31 423n 201 428n 235

Todorov Tzvetan 260n 44 411n 143

Valeacutery Paul 1 6 287ndash9 392n 2 396n 24

Vittorini Elio 24

Weil Simone 84n 88 397n 33 412n 145

Weller Shane 261n 46Wiesel Elie 348 410n 137Wittgenstein Ludwig 310ndash11

330 370ndash1 401n 72Wormser-Migot Olga 348

416n 159

444

445

446

447

448

449

450

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 A turning

I

II

III

IV

V

Notes

Chapter 2 The demand of the fragmentary

I

II

III

Notes

Chapter 3 An interruption

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Notes

Chapter 4 Writing ndash disaster

I

II

III

IV

V

Notes

Chapter 5 A change of epoch

Note

Index

ii


WritingA Change of Epoch

Leslie Hill

Continuum International Publishing GroupA Bloomsbury company

50 Bedford Square 80 Maiden Lane London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10038

wwwcontinuumbookscom

copy Leslie Hill 2012

Extracts from Awaiting Oblivion reprinted from Awaiting Oblivion by Maurice Blanchot translated by John Gregg by permission of the University of Nebraska Press Copyright 1962

by Editions Gallimard Translation copyright 1997 by the University of Nebraska Press

Extracts from The Infinite Conversation reprinted by permission from The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot translated by Susan Hanson The University of Minnesota Press 1993 English translation copyright 1993 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Originally

published as LrsquoEntretien infini copyright 1969 by Editions Gallimard

Extracts from The Step Not Beyond reprinted by permission from The Step Not Beyond by Maurice Blanchot translated by Lycette Nelson The State University of New York Press

copy1992 State University of New York All rights reserved

Extracts from The Writing of the Disaster reprinted from The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot translated by Ann Smock by permission of the University of Nebraska

Press Copyright 1980 by Editions Gallimard Translation copyright 1986 1995 by the University of Nebraska Press

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical

photocopying recording or otherwise without the permission of the publishers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataHill Leslie 1949ndash

Maurice Blanchot and fragmentary writing a change of epochby Leslie Hillp cm

Includes bibliographical references and indexISBN-13 978-1-4411-2527-9 (hardcover alk paper)

ISBN-10 1-4411-2527-2 (hardcover alk paper)ISBN-13 978-1-4411-6622-7 (pbk alk paper)

ISBN-10 1-4411-6622-X (pbk alk paper)1 Blanchot Maurice--Criticism and interpretation I Title

PQ2603L3343Z684 2012843rsquo912--dc232012002893

ISBN HB 978-1-4411-2527-9e-ISBN 978-1-4411-8698-0PB 978-1-4411-6622-7

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services Chennai India

ContEnts

Acknowledgements vi

1 A turning 1

2 The demand of the fragmentary 103

3 An interruption 171

4 Writing ndash disaster 279

5 A change of epoch 433

Index 437

ACKnoWLEDGEMEnts

I should like to thank the many friends colleagues and students who sometimes without realising have contributed to the writing of this book I am particularly indebted to Andrew Benjamin Christophe Bident Christopher Fynsk Seaacuten Hand Kevin Hart and Joseph Kuzma for their encouragement support and insight and am grateful to the University of Warwick for the provision of study leave that enabled me to complete what became a significantly longer book than first envisaged

Earlier versions of portions of this book have appeared elsewhere and I am grateful for permission to use some of that material again Parts of Chapter One and Chapter Two were first published as lsquoA Fragmentary Demandrsquo in The Power of Contestation Perspecshytives on Maurice Blanchot edited by Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H Hartman (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 2004) 101ndash120 205ndash209 copy 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press adapted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press Some further remarks from Chapter One were borrowed for inclusion in an article in a Blanchot special issue of the journal Europe (August-September 2007) and an initial draft of the opening section of Chapter Three likewise first appeared in French in Maurice Blanchot la singulariteacute drsquoune eacutecriture edited by Arthur Cools Nausicaa Dewez Christophe Halsberghe and Michel Lisse (Les Lettres romanes hors seacuterie 2005) A preliminary sketch of the first section of Chapter Four was published in Blanchot dans son siegravecle edited by Monique Antelme and others (Lyon eacuteditions Parangon 2009) All these texts have been substantially revised for the present book

1

A turning

I

A spectre

All becomes suspense a fragmentary arrangement of alternating and facing elements contributing to the total rhythm which may be deemed the silent poem with its blanks translated only in singular manner by each pendentive [Tout devient suspens disposition fragmentaire avec alternance et visshyagraveshyvis concourant au rythme total lequel serait le poegraveme tu aux blancs seulement traduit en une maniegravere par chaque pendentif]

MALLArMeacute lsquoCrise de versrsquo1

For more than two hundred years testifying at once to the weighty legacy of the past and the uncertain prospect of the future a spectre has haunted literature Its name is legion its signature nevertheless unmistakeable it is the spectre of fragmentary writing of the text as fragment and the fragment as text Time and again whenever a fresh break in continuity is diagnosed or a new episode in cultural history declared under such grandly vacuous names as romanticism Modernism Postmodernism even Postpostmodernism it is repeatedly to the literary fragment that critics have turned in search of an emblem of the seemingly unquenchable desire to make it new Since the early nineteenth century the list of literaturersquos fragmentary artists is at any event a long one Schlegel Houmllderlin Keats Novalis Coleridge Buumlchner Nietzsche Mallarmeacute Pound Eliot Kafka Valeacutery Proust Musil


Artaud Char Bataille Beckett numerous others too in whose work the fragment whether calculated as such or merely abandoned to its fate bears witness to the trials and tribulations birthpangs as well as death-throes of literary historical and cultural upheaval

The time of the fragment in other words is never the fullness of the present It is the time of between-times between remembering and forgetting continuity and discontinuity obedience and objection and what speaks most powerfully in the fragment is no doubt precisely this unreconciled tension between the artwork and its unravelling between its gathering and its dispersion between time past and time still to come In that tension lies redoubtable energy and this explains why in critical discourse and artistic practice alike the fragment today is little short of ubiquitous Little has escaped its appeal not fiction not poetry nor theatre not autobiography not memoir nor essay not philosophy not theory nor criticism Notwithstanding its unassuming discretion despite the intimations of apocalypse that sometimes follow in its wake fragmentation seems now to have become almost synonymous with the possibility of writing itself But the phenomenon is not limited to the printed word Much the same goes for other artforms too for painting music sculpture dance film photography and the many other multimedia activities that taking their lead from the fragment tenaciously defy categorisation

And yet there is something deeply ambiguous about this fidelity to the fragment that is such a remarkable feature of modern and contemporary experience It is that even by its most enthusiastic exponents the fragment is rarely considered to evoke anything other than negativity Whether seen to force itself on its audience with fractious transgressive violence or to withdraw into the melancholy disenchantment that comes from shattered dreams the fragment is customarily described by critics not according to what it is or to what it might be but to what it already is not in terms that is of the continuity it interrupts the unity it breaks apart the authority it contests the norms it breaches reasons for this strange state of affairs are admittedly not hard to find They follow in part from the concept of the fragment itself As Adorno argues in his posthumous (and itself fragmentary) Aesthetic Theory a literary fragment forcibly never stands alone It is always preceded by a totalising past or future whole which however unavailable or simply hypothetical is what constitutes the fragment as a fragment

A turnInG 3

Without this memory or promise of totalisation writes Adorno (and Derrida Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy albeit to different ends will argue the same) there can be no such thing as a fragment Both it and the absent whole to which it silently gestures belong together lsquoThe category of the fragmentary which here finds its placersquo remarks Adorno referring to the proliferation of fragmentary finished-unfinished works characteristic of the early twentieth century lsquois not that of contingent particularity the fragment is that part of the totality of the work which resists totalityrsquo2

This is not to say the fragment is a mere figment of the writerrsquos or criticrsquos imagination On the contrary as Adorno explains it is a crucial reminder that the totalising artwork can never properly coincide with itself and achieve closure According to Adorno it is of course the very purpose of art not to reconcile opposing tendencies but rather to articulate the impossibility of reconciliation Within this dialectic the intervention of the fragment is therefore crucial As Adorno comments

The ideological affirmative aspect of the concept of the successful artwork has a corrective in the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect work If perfect works did exist this would mean reconciliation was possible amidst the unreconcilable to which art owes its allegiance It would then be a case of art annulling its own concept the turn to the fragile and the fragmentary [die Wendung zum Bruumlchigen und Fragmentarischen] is in reality an attempt to salvage art by dismantling the claim that works are what they cannot be and to which they must nevertheless aspire both moments are contained in the fragment3

As these words suggest modern literaturersquos turn to the fragment was for Adorno a function of a double philosophico-historical process First it was a token of broken promises of defeat and failure the failure of culture to preserve itself from barbarism the failure of art to engage in progressive fashion with its own social and political destiny from which it retreated or was forced to retreat in order to preserve its fragile provisional perhaps even sham autonomy Fragmentary writing in this sense was nothing new merely a symptom of a larger history that spoke of the impasse affecting modern art its disengagement and decline Not for nothing did Adorno cheerfully suggest then to his readers they might view as a


literal indictment of the last hundred and fifty years Hegelrsquos famous dictum from the first of the Lectures on Aesthetics of the 1820s that lsquoart considered in its highest vocation is and remains for us a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]rsquo4 Was it not already clear by the second half of the nineteenth century he adds that artrsquos days were numbered citing in support the example of rimbaud abruptly abandoning at the age of eighteen his burgeoning career as a poet in order to take up a position elsewhere says Adorno as a junior clerk5

rimbaudrsquos lapse into silence though it showed the direction of things to come did not however mean art was finished reneacute Char in 1948 was not alone in proclaiming in a prose poem of the kind inaugurated by his illustrious precursor that lsquoyou were quite right to leave Arthur rimbaudrsquo6 For from within the sequestered confines to which it was relegated art nevertheless owed it to itself still to carry on Adorno insisted and to keep playing the game not unlike Hamm in Beckettrsquos Fin de partie (Endgame) a play much admired by the German thinker and whose tenuous ironic structures disintegrating as the work progresses were all that art in the philosopherrsquos view could truthfully muster in the wake of those events to which like others to come he elected to give the epochal name of Auschwitz Failure to conclude in other words did not relieve the artwork of the possibility of persisting in failure As Beckettrsquos protagonist had it lsquo[l]a fin est dans le commencement et cependant on continuersquo lsquo[t]he end is in the beginning and yet you go onrsquo7 Here stood the second moment in Adornorsquos dialectic For even as the fragment testifies to totalisationrsquos failure it also makes a paradoxical and problematic last-ditch attempt to redeem art by recalling it to those very duties it cannot fulfil The fragment here protests resists objects challenging the totalising artwork as such together with those social political and economic forces that have turned artistic expression into an alienated consumer product But while doing so it also strives to save the prospect of the work by insisting on what art nevertheless must undertake in times of ideological and aesthetic distress even if few illusions remain regarding the possibility of any effective or successful outcome But art Adorno points out is not an activity that chooses to be ruled by effectivity or success

So far so good it may be said and there is little doubt that Adorno provides a critically probing nuanced account of the

A turnInG 5

possibilities and impossibilities that the art of the fragment reveals It is however apparent that in Adornorsquos presentation of the dialectical relationship between protesting fragment and unreconciled work one of these two contradictory moments (necessarily) takes precedence over the other that of the finished-unfinished ironically reflexive modern or modernist artwork whose incompletion is paradoxical ndash dialectical ndash testimony to its status as a work animated by a totalising if unsatisfied ambition to be what it must be that is an integrated artwork For its part though its testimony may be significant the role of the fragment remains entirely secondary its structure and status always already predetermined by the deferred delayed problematic possibility of the artwork to which in spite of itself it is held to aspire As a result of the negative dialectic of which it is no more than a minor function the fragment itself is at best a passing phase so to speak a mournful hiatus in the realisation or non-realisation of the futural totality of the work

For Adorno it therefore follows that in an important sense the fragment as such does not exist In order to be what it is the fragment must be detachable from a possible past present or future whole For Adorno however no sooner is the fragment detached from that whole than by dialectical recuperation it becomes an integral part of it So long as it is a fragment in other words it is part of an absent whole however once it is deemed to be part of that whole it ceases properly to be a fragment The totality that confers on the fragment the status of a fragment also denies it the status of a fragment The fragment lives on then only as a kind of lingering ghostly memory of itself without specificity singularity or self-identity and this arguably explains despite Adornorsquos own long-standing preference for fragmentary forms of writing as witnessed for instance by the aphoristic structure of Minima Moralia or by the self-consciously exploratory nature of the essays found in the four-volume Notes to Literature why there is little explicit treatment of the fragmentary as such in the whole five hundred pages of the Aesthetic Theory In the end fragmentary writing for Adorno it seems is merely one of the ways in which compromised damaged or unachievable totality in pessimistic if critical vein speaks of its fraught divided relation to itself

But what if this concept of fragmentary writing were itself a deep expression of nostalgia a melancholy symptom of unrequited


yearning for the totalising artwork of old What if rather than being subordinate to the dialectic of the work fragmentary writing preceded and exceeded the very possibility of any work leaving it always already undone dispersed and put asunder its impossible pretensions to aesthetic totalisation merely an unsustainable regressive hypothesis What if in the end the fragment were therefore both more and less than a secondary negative effect of the work and what if the impossibility of defining it in itself and as such were its most prodigious resource And what if the abiding indeterminacy of the fragment rather than indicating a duty to labour in vain towards the completion of the work suggested instead an entirely different conception of literature one that was no longer subject to the logic of the work but beyond presence autonomy or reflexive closure affirmed itself instead as the futural promise of a radical multiplication of writing as a proliferating series of singular events

These questions are not idle ones From the 1950s onwards they emerged tenaciously and persistently as key concerns in the writing of the French novelist critic and thinker Maurice Blanchot serving to inform not only the writerrsquos account of literature literary criticism philosophy and politics but also his own work as an author of fiction and of many other more and less than fictional more and less than essayistic fragmentary texts Blanchot was not however some latecomer casting postmodern doubt on the achievements of his predecessors On the contrary he was Adornorsquos virtual contemporary born scarcely four years after his German counterpart and sharing with him (aside from a vastly different appreciation of the importance of Heidegger) not only many of the same literary and philosophical points of reference including Houmllderlin Hegel Kierkegaard Valeacutery Proust Kafka Surrealism and Beckett but also some of the same historical experiences albeit from a very different political ideological and geographical standpoint In his engagement with literary modernity however Blanchot also came to significantly different conclusions concerning the possibility or impossibility of art in the time of distress it fell to both men to witness For while similarly rethinking the legacy of traditional ie Hegelian aesthetics Blanchot attempted something arguably far more radical than Adorno which was to resist without compromise the romantic or Modernist temptation even though it might sometimes profess the opposite to subordinate fragmentary

A turnInG 7

writing to a conception of the unified artwork and the dialectic of realisation or unrealisation it implied8

Otherwise than Adorno then the challenge Blanchot sought to meet was to turn the fragment not towards the irretrievable past nor even the recalcitrant present but towards a future irreducible to any present and beyond the reach of any dialectic This meant no longer treating the fragment as governed primarily by negativity but affirming it instead as an always other promise of futurity which in turn implied an entirely different relationship with writing thinking time and politics As the world threatens increasingly to move into a new and perhaps even final epoch dominated by globalised exploitation technological uniformity and cynical nihilism it has arguably become more urgent than ever to draw on the resources of Blanchotrsquos still neglected rethinking of the fragment An important task faces readers here which is to relinquish residual fascination with the fully achieved artwork which in any case as Adorno agrees does not exist and to explore further outside of unity outside of myth outside of literature even what is at stake in fragmentary writing and what therefore comes to be affirmed in Blanchotrsquos own late fragmentary texts

As Blanchot was aware the attempt to rethink the fragment is not without risks There was always the danger as Derrida was keen to emphasise that lsquojust like ellipsis the fragment ndash the ldquoIrsquove said virtually nothing and take it back immediatelyrdquo ndash might maximise [potentialise] the dominance [maicirctrise] of the entire remaining discourse hijacking [arraisonnant] all future continuities and supplements in advancersquo Blanchot took the admonishment seriously To signal his agreement however he chose to reproduce Derridarsquos warning some sixteen or so pages before the end of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ndash as a fragment of a fragment9 This was to imply that the risk of dialectical recuperation however real was only one possibility among others and that whatever its subsequent complicities or compromises fragmentary writing was also inseparable from a kind of sovereign disobedience which meant that it necessarily contested all forms of authority including its own What fragmentary writing put at risk then was not only the possibility of totality including the negative totality envisioned by Adorno and suspected by Derrida it was also the case that once the fragment secured its divorce from any memory or prospect of totalisation it ceased to be identifiable as a fragment at all and was


therefore left to affirm itself anew not as what it was since it was plainly without proper definition but as always other than what it pretended to be as an irrepressible force of dispersion proliferation and multiplicity Dangers such as these according to Blanchot were not only unavoidable they were to be welcomed for what they demonstrated above all else was the fragmentrsquos resistance to all forms of identity or certainty As Blanchot puts it in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre

uml Fragmentary writing might well be the greatest risk It does not refer to any theory and does not give rise to any practice definable by interruption Even when it is interrupted it carries on Putting itself in question [srsquointerrogeant] it does not take control [ne srsquoarroge pas] of the question but suspends it (without maintaining it) as a non-response If it claims that its time is when the whole ndash at least ideally ndash is supposedly realised this is because that time is never certain [nrsquoest jamais sucircr] is absence of time absence in a non-negative sense [en un sens non privatif] anterior to all present-past [anteacuterieure agrave tout passeacuteshypreacutesent] and seemingly posterior to all possibility of any presence to come [comme posteacuterieure agrave toute possibiliteacute drsquoune preacutesence agrave venir]10

With these words Blanchot puts forward a radically new agenda For what is inscribed in fragmentary writing in response to the demand of the fragment is no codicil or belated homage to totality no failed adjunct or piece of literary jetsam left floating after modernityrsquos collapse but a different relation to time irreducible to the dialectical temporality of the work a different temporality in other words that Blanchot elsewhere will describe as un changement drsquoeacutepoque a change of epoch which is not simply or even at all a new period in history but more precisely and more importantly features as a turning a caesura a step beyond a moment of pure time so to speak in which what appears (without however appearing as such) is absolutely other From which it follows as Adorno perhaps suspected that it can no longer be said with confidence what a fragment lsquoisrsquo or even if it lsquoisrsquo at all This is one of Blanchotrsquos most incisive interventions For in so far as it escapes any attribution of ontic or ontological identity his writing suggests the fragment is no longer an (aesthetic) object

A turnInG 9

nor a preamble to any (aesthetic) work at all It is a demand a requirement or an imperative an exigency (from the Latin exshyagere to force out or extract) that draws writing and thinking beyond the shelter of philosophy culture or art towards something still without name in the direction of what as early as 1952 in an essay on Kafka Blanchot called the outside lsquothe streaming flow of the timeless outsidersquo lsquole ruissellement du dehors eacuteternelrsquo11 Which is also to say that one of the implications of the fragment is to call upon readers writers and others to begin to lsquosense [pressentir ie to feel something before it is properly present] that nothing fragmentary yet exists [qursquoil nrsquoy a encore rien de fragmentaire] not properly speaking but improperly speakingrsquo12

Fragmentary writing then corresponds to nothing that can be identified as such It is a non-phenomenal spectral event in both writing and thinking that it is possible ndash perhaps ndash only to affirm as a radical futural trace irreducible to presence And in the pages that follow with Blanchotrsquos help this will be the thought this book will endeavour to pursue and prolong

II

Writing the future

lsquondash Would you agree there is every certainty we are at a turning [un tournant]rsquo lsquondash If there is every certainty it is hardly a turning The fact that we may be witnessing a change of epoch [un changement drsquoeacutepoque] (if such exists [srsquoil y en a]) surely also affects the certainty with which we might define that change making both certainty and uncertainty equally inappropriatersquo

BLANCHOT LrsquoEntretien infini13

The mid- to late 1950s prompted a remarkable sea-change in Blanchotrsquos writing career They coincided in particular with a crucial historical or historial moment that with all due precautions the author was soon to describe in April 1960 as a change of epoch a period of interruption displacement and undecidability A certain history he suggested had reached an uncertain point of closure something unprecedented and necessarily indeterminable was in the


offing both on and yet beyond the horizon As Blanchot was at pains to point out the long-term consequences of that turning ndash lsquoif such existsrsquo he insisted ndash were incalculable The more immediate effects on his own intellectual project were however dramatic

On at least three distinct but closely related frontsFirst the relationship between Blanchotrsquos fictional texts and the

institution of literature underwent a remarkable shift Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man) first published in 1957 bore its title like an ironic promise and was indeed to be the last of Blanchotrsquos reacutecits or shorter fictional narratives explicitly to designate or present itself as such LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (Awaiting Oblivion) from 1962 though legible in part as a narrative declined from the outset to ascribe itself to any given or even recognisable genre True enough Blanchotrsquos fiction had long maintained an uneasy relationship with the expectations of literary form From LrsquoArrecirct de mort (Death Sentence) onwards all the writerrsquos shorter narratives had offered themselves to reading as interrogative explorations whose exorbitant status is paradoxically confirmed by the modesty with which they fall short of narrative and exceed their own boundaries by withdrawing from them If stories such as LrsquoArrecirct de mort Au moment voulu (When the Time Comes) and Celui qui ne mrsquoaccompagnait pas (The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me) belong to the genre of narrative then it is only in so far as they give voice to the impossibility of narrative itself the non-occurrence of the event or events they struggle to narrate and their own infinite futurity as a witnessing of the finite

Le Dernier Homme did this too but went one step further For it ends not by bringing a residual narrative to a proper or even improper close but by a vertiginous act or non-act of fragmentary and abyssal self-citation lsquoLater [Plus tard]rsquo we read lsquohe wondered how he had become so calm He was unable to talk about it with himself Only joy at feeling in relation with the words [en rapport avec les mots] ldquoLater he [Plus tard il ]rdquorsquo14 In finishing or better in suspending the possibility of its finishing in this way Blanchotrsquos reacutecit detaches itself from itself in order to display a singular logic of duplicitous self-repetition which twenty years later the text went on to reaffirm in an astonishing manifestation of simultaneous self-referral and self-displacement when in 1977 without changing in any other respect bar this respect itself the book suddenly began redescribing itself to incontrovertible

A turnInG 11

but undecidable effect as a new version of itself as Le Dernier Homme nouvelle version (The two dozen actual but largely insignificant changes to the 1977 version that differentiate it from the 1957 text were already in place in the printing immediately preceding dated 24 March 1971 which far from describing itself as a new version of the reacutecit did not even present itself as a reacutecit at all) This most perfect of repetitions then was also the purest of variations ndash and this most spectral of returns the most decisive of metamorphoses In future after Le Dernier Homme as La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day) had already intimated there would indeed be lsquono more reacutecitsrsquo as such For each of the fictional parafictional or semi-fictional narratives that followed including the reissue of LrsquoArrecirct de mort in 1971 and of La Folie du jour in 1973 not to mention the 1971 printing of Le Dernier Homme as well as all subsequent editions of these texts including the very last almost already posthumous text LrsquoInstant de ma mort (The Instant of My Death) was to be ironically voided of any explicit generic categorisation15

This scepticism with regard to conventional generic markers should not be seen as a repudiation of narrative as such It serves rather to emphasise the extent to which narrative in Blanchot was from the outset a mode or manner of writing whose contours and self-identity were constantly in question lsquoThere is nothing self-evident about story-telling [Raconter ne va pas de soi]rsquo the author put it in 1964 apropos of Kafka16 The notorious closing words of La Folie du jour cited above alongside numerous other possible examples said the same lsquoA story [Un reacutecit]rsquo the reader is told lsquoNo no story ever again [Non pas de reacutecit plus jamais]rsquo17 But who writes or speaks these words Is it the narrator of Blanchotrsquos story in which case he might simply be thought to be contradicting himself declaring an end to storytelling at the very moment he is retelling the end of his story Or is it some authorial figure coming reluctantly to a disappointed or disappointing conclusion or even making a sincere but unverifiable promise Either way it is clear that the text gives the lie to whoever may be thought to speak on its behalf and the audience is left at the end moving uncertainly back and forth in perpetual oscillation between a story that is not a story and an absence of story that tells a story of some kind The text in the end cannot be delimited and the question remains forever in suspense Was or is La Folie du jour a story at all If


so or not what is it that happened or did not happen And what might then be at stake in such a singularly indeterminable (non-)event

Beginnings middles and endings it is well known are what give stories their definition direction and purpose and La Folie du jour by redoubling its apparent beginning and ending and folding them into a middle that is itself dispatched to the edge as Derrida has shown repeatedly challenges its own narrative coherence and structure18 La Folie du jour has no proper beginning nor ending no development other than its own occurrence as a story that may be told only in so far as it resists or exceeds its telling and is possible as an act of narration only in so far as it measures up to the impossibility of narration Vertiginous though they are these paradoxes are not however extraordinary or exceptional running through La Folie du jour in common with all Blanchotrsquos narratives is the realisation that no narrative without exception can ever begin or end itself19 No narrative can dominate its own borders all storytelling relies on an outside to which it silently appeals but which it cannot name This is what in the discussion of Kafka mentioned earlier Blanchot describes as lsquola voix narrativersquo the narrating voice referring to that possibility of narrative that is necessarily prior to the work and without which the work cannot be written but has no existence outside the work and no possibility of appearing within the work where it functions instead only as a kind of absent ground perpetually divorcing the work from itself As Blanchot explains

The narrating voice which is inside only to the extent that it is outside at a distance without distance cannot embody itself whether it takes on the voice of a judiciously chosen character or even creates the hybrid function of a mediator (this voice that ruins all mediation) it is always different from whoever or whatever utters it it is the indifferent-difference that disrupts the personal voice Let us (for amusement) call it spectral ghostlike [spectrale fantomatique]20

Each and every narrative then in so far as it comes to be written at all is exposed to the outside Even when a narrative is complete it is simultaneously necessarily incomplete Any narrative that is all there is is always less and more than all there is lsquoIsrsquo it even at all Blanchot (and later Derrida) will ask Even in the absence of any

A turnInG 13

actual or hypothetical whole of which it may be considered to be a fragment it is in any case always already a fragment ndash of that which cannot be integrated or incorporated within it and which does not exist as such This is what is most powerfully at stake in Blanchotrsquos threefold (re)writing of Le Dernier Homme Le Dernier Homme reacutecit (1957) Le Dernier Homme (1971) and Le Dernier Homme nouvelle version (1977) Le Dernier Homme is all there is but each version each turning returning or return of the text is only one of a multitude each of which is the same as each of the others without ever being identical with it21 In its multiple repetitive (re)writings Le Dernier Homme is like a perpetual quotation of itself repeatedly the same but therefore different constantly stepping aside from itself stepping (not) beyond itself without self-coincidence or self-identity As its title suggests Blanchotrsquos text is both final and finite but it is also incomplete and infinite a fragment What marks it as a text traversed by the fragmentary is not its relative brevity then but its inability to end whether properly or improperly This does not mean it is necessarily continuous with itself On the contrary as it moves towards its suspended conclusion Le Dernier Homme becomes increasingly discontinuous intermittent dispersed across a number of possible voices styles tenses and typefaces But nor does this imply Blanchotrsquos text is an exercise in negativity a failed attempt to articulate the ineffable Indeed one of the most powerful motifs in Le Dernier Homme in its innumerable possible versions is the motif of affirmation lsquoThe happiness of saying yes of affirming without end [Bonheur de dire oui drsquoaffirmer sans fin]rsquo says the narrator in Le Dernier Homme repeating the phrase two more times in the book each time varying it as though to remind readers that repetition as in the rewriting of the text itself never guarantees identity but is always creative of difference dispersion multiplicity22

Le Dernier Homme was finally published in January 1957 Prior to that date or coinciding with it following common French publishing practice various prepublication extracts from the text had already appeared in magazines notably Botteghe Oscure La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise and Monde nouveau23 Some years before something similar had happened with selections from Au moment voulu and Celui qui ne mrsquoaccompagnait pas24 In the case of those earlier narratives the passages published had been relatively autonomous sections of the text and up to a point the


same is true of the extracts from Le Dernier Homme But the final selection from the book in the January 1957 issue of Monde nouveau managed to piece together as one continuous whole no fewer than four separate passages from the book bearing witness as it were to the increasing propensity of Blanchotrsquos prose to lend itself to fragmentary rearrangement

It therefore came as little surprise to some readers in August the following year to be confronted under the title lsquoLrsquoAttente [Waiting]rsquo with an extract from another forthcoming work which began in continuous prose only quickly to transform itself into a series of free-standing paragraph-long fragments each separated from the others by a five-pronged floral device standing at its head25 A second extract under the same title and containing some of the same sentences albeit in a different sequence and with other textual material appeared a year later in a Festschrift for the philosopher Martin Heidegger while in October 1961 some months before the publication of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli the future book to which both extracts seemed to be pointing readers of an essay on Michel Foucaultrsquos Histoire de la folie (History of Madness) in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise were given to consider a three-page introduction lsquoSur lrsquooubli [On forgetting]rsquo which in turn reiterated and refashioned many similar ideas and formulations26 Literary narrative philosophical tribute critical essay the same body of writing by Blanchot seemed to be traversing all these genres applying itself purposefully to each and respecting their different responsibilities while at the same time exposing them together with itself to the threat or promise of what escaped them What this announced was that Blanchotrsquos fictional writing assuming the expression may be maintained at all had already entered into a new and challenging phase that of the fragmentary

It was not only Blanchotrsquos literary narratives that testified to this sense of epochal change The future possibility of literary criticism was also crucially at issue The publication of Blanchotrsquos Le Livre agrave venir (The Book to Come) in 1959 marked another important threshold The book gathered together a selection of the writerrsquos monthly essays from the period between July 1953 and June 1958 for La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise (as the title of the journal remained until 1959 a consequence of its appropriation by the Nazis during the Occupation) One early article briskly sums up Blanchotrsquos thinking lsquoOugrave va la litteacuteraturersquo

A turnInG 15

lsquoWhither literaturersquo it asked The answer was disconcertingly straightforward lsquoLiteraturersquo Blanchot answered lsquois heading towards itself towards its essence which is disappearance [la disparition]rsquo27 The goal of literature Blanchot explained meaning both its purpose and its destination could no longer be identified with some external source of value whether cultural human or natural But neither could it be located within the work itself as a function of its aesthetic autonomy or its status as truthful or alethic disclosure Literaturersquos end Blanchot put it was inseparable from its ending its erasure and effacement

Like Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory and as Heidegger had also done some years earlier in the postface to lsquoThe Origin of the Work of Artrsquo Blanchot in his essay recalls Hegelrsquos celebrated remark of 1820ndash21 declaring art to be already lsquoa thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]rsquo28 Hegelrsquos position put forward paradoxically enough as Blanchot was quick to emphasise at a time of intense cultural philosophical and literary activity in Germany was that art in the modern age had forfeited its lsquoauthentic truth and vitality [die echte Wahrheit und Lebendigkeit]rsquo29 It had lost so to speak its teleological mission Art in other words had parted company with history truth reality worldly action science philosophy had taken over For the first time in its existence according to Hegel art was now merely an object of aesthetic literary critical contemplation which is also to say that for the first time it was now properly constituted as itself as art This end of art then was also its beginning and its demise the promise of a rebirth as other than it was

In Le Livre agrave venir Blanchot in the first instance appears largely to endorse Hegelrsquos verdict which is also the verdict of philosophy or history as Heidegger and Adorno in their vastly differing ways seem to agree But while Blanchot concurs that art and truth (in Hegelrsquos sense) have henceforth consummated their divorce he diverges forcibly in his assessment of this development He is not prompted to reinterpret the history and meaning of truth nor does he endeavour to recast Hegelrsquos argument in the direction of a materialist or negative dialectic Instead Blanchot seizes a chance and takes a risk The risk is that of art itself this lsquoarduous tortuous search in the dark [recherche obscure difficile et tourmenteacutee]rsquo this lsquoessentially risky experience in which art the work truth and the essence of language are all put in jeopardy are all part of what is at riskrsquo30 For Blanchot the fall of art is not proof of its historical submission to philosophical or


metaphysical truth it is the sign of a more essential more radical lapse into the necessary possibility of its own endless self-questioning And art that continually questions itself Blanchot argues which as art is inseparable from its self-questioning paradoxically enough cannot exist as art but only as a withdrawal or retreat from art No sooner does literature appear to itself as possibility then than it disappears as impossibility no sooner is the work of art constituted as such than it gives way to its own worklessness

Blanchot in this way neither entirely confirms nor entirely contradicts Hegel He follows Hegelrsquos thought part of the way only then to displace it sidestepping the numerous other implications historical here ontological there which for their part Adorno and Heidegger draw from Hegelrsquos diagnosis For it is soon apparent from Blanchotrsquos perspective that neither history nor ontology can provide a solution to artrsquos questioning Not only is art irreducible to history from whose progress it is excluded it is also incapable of making any persuasive claims as to its own essence It survives therefore only as a furtive fleeting trace of its own erasure History does not hold the truth of literature nor does literature disclose the truth of being Like language itself literature is without inside or outside beginning or end archegrave or telos As Blanchot goes on

it is precisely the essence of literature to escape any determination of its essence any assertion which might stabilise it or even turn it into a reality literature is never given but remains always to be rediscovered or reinvented It is not even certain that the word lsquoliteraturersquo or lsquoartrsquo corresponds to anything real or possible or important

And he continues

Whoever affirms literature in itself affirms nothing Whoever seeks it seeks only that which slips away whoever finds it finds only what falls short of literature or even worse what lies beyond it This is why in the end it is non-literature that each book pursues as the essence of what it loves and yearns passionately to discover31

But if the artwork by definition cannot coincide with itself what then of the literary criticism that derives its coherence and rationale from

A turnInG 17

the presumed existence of the object called literature The question is an urgent one with far-reaching implications for whoever like Blanchot writes on literature and endeavours to say something meaningful about it For while on the one hand literaturersquos non-coincidence with itself is what makes literary criticism possible since without it the critic would simply have nothing to say so on the other for the exact same reason no criticism by the power of its discourse can ever overcome the incompletion of the work it seeks to make its own The artwork cannot endorse or validate the words of the critic and literary criticism is quickly brought to the uncomfortable realisation not only that it is entirely parasitical on the artwork but also that its own discourse is necessarily superfluous to the existence of the work Ironically however if this were not the case criticism again would have little alternative but to fall silent Paradoxically then it is the inability of literary criticism to guarantee the truth of what it says about the artwork that is the best nay only hope of its longevity Its survival in other words is not a result of the discursive authority or rigour it prides itself on possessing but a function of its founding inescapable impotence32 In this of course it shares more than might at first have appeared with the literature it adopts as its object For just as the one is premised on its irresistible disappearance so the other is ultimately reliant on its abiding failure By a surprising twist literature and criticism which a moment ago seemed to exist in an inverse relationship find themselves exposed to the same risks of interminability irrelevance and incompetence Blanchot more than others from the early 1960s onwards proved particularly sensitive to this unexpected convergence In his writing the border between the two without ever being abolished became as a result increasingly permeable As the literature being written and published at the time refused more and more to legitimise itself by appeals to truth or to established values so criticism too found itself in much the same quandary forced to devise for itself a new strategy and a new language

Two examples of Blanchotrsquos changing critical idiom in response will suffice In April 1960 the writer published a first broadly philosophical dialogue the lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoeacutepoque [Conversation on a change of epoch]rsquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise This he followed up three months later with a second dialogue initially entitled lsquoLa Marche de lrsquoeacutecrevisse [Walking Sideways]rsquo33 A year after the lsquoEntretienrsquo he also published a review of Beckettrsquos recently


published novel Comment crsquoest (How It Is) which is made up of a continuous-discontinuous sequence of detached unpunctuated strophe-like blocks like so many movements or motions of text which slowly trace a narrative of sorts involving a body or procession of bodies crawling through mud interacting occasionally and violently with the help of a providential tin-opener lsquoin me that were without when the panting stops scraps of an ancient voice in me not minersquo34 Faced with so many fragmentary bribes the majority of critics at the time saw it as their task to make Beckettrsquos novel more accessible to its readership which they largely did by describing it as a further episode in that long sequence of solipsistic soliloquising on the part of an increasingly disembodied consciousnesss begun it was argued in Molloy Malone meurt and LrsquoInnommable some ten years earlier But not so Blanchot who responded instead to the unruly disconcerting strangeness of Beckettrsquos writing by transforming his own critical commentary into a hesitant and inconclusive dialogue between two (or more) unnamed interlocutors each grappling with the problematic challenge of passing judgement on Beckettrsquos fragmentary fragmented disorientating and sometimes shocking text lsquoTruly [En veacuteriteacute]rsquo says one of these voices lsquowhat to say about a workrsquo And it carries on

Do we even dare say in praising Beckettrsquos How It Is that it will live on in posterity Would we even want to praise it Which is not to say it is beyond praise rather that it discredits all praise and that it would be paradoxical therefore to read it with admiration There is a category of works that are more misunderstood by being praised than by being denigrated to disparage them is to touch the power of refusal [la puissance de refus] that has made them what they are and to witness the distance that is their measure [lrsquoeacuteloignement qui les mesure]

Do some books ndash those of the Marquis de Sade for instance ndash even want to be read asks a further perhaps the same voice to which another voice offers the following rejoinder

Let us say perhaps that works like these and Beckettrsquos in particular bring closer together far more than is customary both the movement of writing and the movement of reading seeking to integrate the two in an experience that while not joint is at

A turnInG 19

least barely differentiated and here we come back to the idea of indifference of a neutral affirmation equal-unequal [drsquoune affirmation neutre eacutegaleshyineacutegale] beyond the grasp of anything that might valorise or even affirm it [la valoriser ou mecircme lrsquoaffirmer]35

The lesson then was clear Criticism with its abiding appeal to values and truth had no purchase on the lsquolittle blurts [petits paquets]rsquo and lsquomidget grammar [grammaire drsquooiseau]rsquo36 of Comment crsquoest which refuse to obey its normative assumptions Faced with Beckettrsquos lsquonovelrsquo (which is how the original 1961 Minuit text described itself) criticism was disabled forced to carry on if at all only by enduring through its own interruption It had no other option in other words than to affirm its own impossibility True enough the text to be read still required its reader in the sense of both needing and obligating that reader but reading itself was now bound to discretion both reserve and discontinuity

This is the strategy that informs many of Blanchotrsquos critical essays from the early 1960s Alongside Beckett another influential figure in the writerrsquos changing critical strategy was the poet reneacute Char to whom he devoted two important essays subsequently collected with significant revisions in LrsquoEntretien infini lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutre [reneacute Char and the Thought of the Neuter]rsquo (1963) and lsquoParole de fragment [Fragmentary Speaking]rsquo (1964)37 Charrsquos prominence for Blanchot was not insignificant for the poet too was a writer of fragmentary texts fiercely admiring of Heraclitus a translation of whose fragments he briefly prefaced in 194838 responding to Char in the early 1960s Blanchot adopted a range of shifting approaches The 1963 essay for instance is in three distinct sections the first consists of a series of expository digressive remarks concerning Charrsquos use of impersonal neuter expressions like those found in Heraclitus turning on the question of poetryrsquos relationship (its rapport) with the unknown (lrsquoinconnu) next as a kind of abyssal illustration of this relationship without relationship with the unknown Blanchot provides a dialogue between unnamed interlocutors before signing off on a modest more personal note with a brief evocation of the current beleaguered status of Char the poet (who at the time was much criticised in France for the fragmentary quality of his recent work) which concludes in the version contained in LrsquoEntretien infini with


an unsourced fragment from Charrsquos Pauvreteacute et privilegravege which is inscribed in Charrsquos original to meaningful effect with two politically resonant locations and dates Algiers 1944 Paris 196739

Two sentences earlier Blanchot had defended Char in the following terms lsquoWhat was written still at the margin [en marge] is no longer solely marginal [marginal]rsquo40 Underscoring the implications of this remark passing so to speak from margin to interjection immediately after the version of lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo given in LrsquoEntretien infini and again immediately after the version of lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo that follows it Blanchot added two further fragmentary dialogues printed in italics each published for the first time in LrsquoEntretien infini which served to supplement the two original essays with two additional sequences of fragmentary remarks each consisting of six or seven fragmentary subsections marked with a redoubled mathematical plus-minus neuter sign and each bearing the title Parenthegraveses This twofold redoubled title was in itself of course already double for these two Parenthegraveses not only inscribed a redoubled parenthesis within Blanchotrsquos book the continuity of which they interrupted suspended and fragmented they also offered a possible thematic or philosophical treatment ndash albeit one that fell short of being a full-blown thesis ie not a thegravese but only a parenthegravese not a positing but a putting between or alongside ndash of the phenomenon of parenthetical bracketing inseparable from language as such and thus always already announcing the threat or promise of the fragment Blanchotrsquos two fragmentary parentheses then in so far as they were fragments were necessarily parenthetic in so far as they were parenthetic they were necessarily always already fragments

The main conceptual or quasi-conceptual burden of Blanchotrsquos two parentheses was the thought of the neuter he had begun expounding in the first Char essay In the opening paragraph of lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo in a passage added in 1969 Blanchot turned to glossing the still implicit relationship between the neuter and the fragmentary announced some pages earlier in LrsquoEntretien infini by way of the subtitle used for the third section of the book (lsquoLrsquoAbsence de livre le neutre le fragmentairersquo) borrowed with its word order reversed from the second piece on Char Charrsquos recourse to fragmentary writing Blanchot explained lsquoshows us how to hold together [tenir ensemble] like a repeated expression

A turnInG 21

the fragmentary the neuter [le fragmentaire le neutre] even if the repetition only repeats this enigmatic relationrsquo41 In writing or rewriting le neutre le fragmentaire or le fragmentaire le neutre in this way Blanchot sought to make at least two points First by simply juxtaposing the two expressions without punctuation he indicated a relationship between them but abstained from specifying that relationship which was evoked as a kind of unknown relationship (or relationship with the unknown) that might always revert to an indeterminate relationship without relationship Second by carefully reversing the terms of the relationship he refrained from imposing any hierarchical structure upon them with the result that neither the neuter nor the fragmentary can be said to contain the truth of the other What counts then in Blanchotrsquos thinking of the neuter the fragmentary or the fragmentary the neuter is not any of these terms in themselves but the movement between them by which each prolongs displaces replaces suspends brackets or fragments the other

Each term in Blanchotrsquos pairing then comes to be haunted by the other and no longer coincides with itself as a self-identical concept Each moreover is only available in Blanchotrsquos text as a kind of third-person adjectival substantive or substantivised adjective albeit a substantive without substance so to speak ie simultaneously as both noun and adjective but by that token neither the one nor the other and irreducible to both As he unfolds the expression lsquofragmentary speaking [parole de fragment]rsquo Blanchot goes on to insist that the fragment or fragmentary like the neuter is not merely the effect of some prior simple or dialectical unity Admittedly the temptation of seeing it in those terms cannot easily be dismissed But what is crucial for Blanchot is that the disseminating force of writing necessarily precedes the possibility of any unified or totalising work lsquoFragmentary speaking [Parole de fragment]rsquo he writes lsquoa term that is hard to approach ldquoFragmentrdquo a noun but having the force of a verb which nevertheless does not exist like a fracture [brisure both break and join] a scattering without debris [briseacutees sans deacutebris briseacutee refers to a broken branch leaving a trace or trail] interruption as speech when the halting [lrsquoarrecirct] of intermittence does not halt [nrsquoarrecircte pas] the process but on the contrary provokes it in its very disjointedness [la rupture qui lui appartient] To speak of a fragment is to refer not merely to the fragmentation of an already existing reality nor to some


future wholersquo lsquo[I]n the violence of the fragmentrsquo Blanchot adds lsquoin particular that violence to which reneacute Char gives us access an entirely other relation [un tout autre rapport] is released at least as a promise and a taskrsquo42 Of this other relation this relation with the other that the poem may be thought to enact no doubt little can be presumed in advance except that it exceeds any presumption of identity or dialectic of unity lsquoIn this way the fragmented poemrsquo Blanchot remarks lsquois therefore a poem which is not incomplete [non pas inaccompli] but which makes available another manner of completion [accomplissement] that which is at stake in waiting [lrsquoattente] and questioning [le questionnement] or in affirmation irreducible to unityrsquo43

These are cautious words But if what is at issue in the fragmentary the neuter is another relation or relation with the other that cannot be determined or decided such as Blanchot finds in waiting and questioning this is not to imply that the neuter the fragmentary is a retreat from the necessity of decision or determination On the contrary argues Blanchot the fragmentary the neuter in Char as in Heraclitus is not dedicated to quietistic sameness nor to contemplative passivity but to Difference lsquoDifference that is secret because always deferring speaking and always differing from that which signifies it but also such that everything makes a sign and becomes a sign because of it which is sayable only indirectly but not silent at work in the detour of writingrsquo44 In following this turning this turning aside or around writing is not displaying a merely self-reflexive concern On the contrary albeit discreetly Blanchot in both essays on Char in LrsquoEntretien infini is keen to emphasise the political implications of this detour In quoting the poet at the end of the first essay as we have seen in coded but patent manner he was careful to remind readers of Charrsquos radical commitment to the resistance and his fierce opposition to the Gaullist regime And in concluding lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo Blanchot made a similar point quoting back to Char in acknowledgement and solidarity the exact words Char had sent on rereading (in 1964) lsquoLa Perversion essentielle [Essential Perversion]rsquo that powerful diatribe with which Blanchot six years earlier had denounced de Gaullersquos return to power lsquoPoliticallyrsquo Char had begun lsquoMaurice Blanchot can only go from disappointment to disappointment that is to say from courage to courage [ne peut aller que de deacuteception en deacuteception crsquoestshyagraveshydire de courage en courage] since he does not

A turnInG 23

have the amnesic fickleness of the majority of great contemporary writersrsquo lsquoThus through fragmentary writingrsquo Blanchot concluded in reply lsquothe return of the hesperic accord is announced It is the time of decline but ascending decline [deacuteclin drsquoascendance] a pure detour in its strangeness that which (reneacute Char somewhere says) making it possible to go from disappointment to disappointment leads from courage to courage [permettant drsquoaller de deacuteception en deacuteception conduit de courage en courage] The gods returning having never comersquo45

What was at stake then for Blanchot in the turn to fragmentary writing during the late 1950s and early 1960s was not merely of literary literary critical or philosophical significance There were political implications too which bore on the third important shift taking place in his thinking during that period intimately related to these other changes but with a specific exigency and urgency of its own Blanchotrsquos return to active involvement in politics

In 1958 Blanchot moved back to Paris from Egraveze that village lsquoin the Southrsquo which features so mysteriously (and anonymously) in Au moment voulu where despite frequent trips to Paris he had spent the bulk of the preceding decade He quickly resumed the active interest in politics that had been such a powerful feature of his earlier career as a journalist working for a string of right-wing nationalist and conservative newspapers and magazines up until July or August 194046 But much had changed since then and Blanchotrsquos main priority was now to exercise and defend what he described in 1984 as the right to unexpected speech le droit agrave la parole inattendue a right that for Blanchot the writer and intellectual was inseparable from the detour of the fragmentary47 And as he renewed his passion for the political Blanchot did so not as a dissident member of the nationalist right as he had in the 1930s but on the side of the radical non-communist left notably in partnership with Dionys Mascolo whom Blanchot joined in rejecting de Gaullersquos return to government as a so-called man of providence and in campaigning for an end to Francersquos undeclared colonial war in Algeria As Mascolo recalled some years later Blanchotrsquos first letter on receipt of the inaugural issue of Le 14 Juillet the broadsheet Mascolo had founded with Jean Schuster to coordinate resistance to de Gaulle was uncompromising in its simplicity and its commitment to the future lsquoI should like to express my agreementrsquo wrote Blanchot lsquoI accept neither the past nor the presentrsquo48


Much of what happened next is relatively well known Blanchotrsquos continuing support for the campaign against de Gaulle and alongside Mascolo and others his fierce opposition to the Algerian war culminating in September 1960 in the lsquoManifeste des 121rsquo supporting French conscripts in refusing to take up arms in Algeria which Blanchot was closely involved in drafting though he always insisted that the lsquoDeacuteclaration sur le droit agrave lrsquoinsoumission dans la guerre drsquoAlgeacuteriersquo (as it was more properly known) was a collective document owned by all who signed it and not attributable to any single author49 It was this commitment to collective action experienced in the resistance to the war but pointing beyond Algerian independence itself finally achieved at eacutevian in April 1962 that led Blanchot and a number of friends and associates ndash Dionys Mascolo robert Antelme and Louis-reneacute des Forecircts together with Elio Vittorini Hans Magnus Enzensberger and other collaborators from Italy West Germany and elsewhere ndash to form the project of an international journal which would bring together writers from France Italy and Germany perhaps other countries too and begin to challenge national and nationalist boundaries But after extensive discussions the project for the journal collapsed a casualty of growing mistrust and disagreement between the French and German contingents50

At least in conventional terms the Revue internationale as it has become known was a failed enterprise with merely a selection of essays articles and other interventions (including the first version of Blanchotrsquos lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo) appearing in Italian in 1964 in a solitary guest issue of the journal Il Menabograve edited by Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino The demise of the project was keenly felt by Blanchot but not before he had taken the opportunity in preparatory discussion to argue in favour of the necessary link between political intervention of the kind envisaged by him for the journal and the fragmentary writing he had been exploring since the late 1950s For what was implicit in the turn to the fragmentary among others was the impossibility of attributing any text explicitly fragmentary or not to any single self-present origin This meant not only that all texts were in a sense always already fragmentary but that any fragmentary text already had an indeterminable that is always future relationship with the other or with others This is what Blanchot had endeavoured to show in his reading of the poems of Char By that logic any fragmentary

A turnInG 25

text was always already a text with multiple authors it was by definition a collective text that might be signed in a gesture of irreducible singularity by each and every indeterminable other This is why for Blanchot it followed that the preferred manner of writing for the proposed journal would have to be fragmentary writing carried out collectively and in common

But how to tell the difference between that which may and that which may not be described as fragmentary if indeed that difference exists In a long paper bearing on the project at hand and not originally intended for publication mindful too of the fact that the fragmentary was itself not one but always already several Blanchot set out in some detail the thought of the fragmentary that had come to dominate his relationship to literature criticism and philosophy and inflect his understanding of the political agenda as it presented itself in France and elsewhere in the early 1960s Thinking aloud perhaps as well as addressing his potential collaborators Blanchot wrote as follows

The journal will be made up of fragments not articles (the essay searching for a form) Simplifying things we can say that there are four types of fragments (1) The fragment that is merely a dialectical moment within a much larger whole (2) The elliptical obscurely violent form of the aphorism which as a fragment is already complete in itself Etymologically aphorism means horizon a horizon that limits and closes (3) The fragment that is linked to questing mobility and that nomadic thinking which occurs in affirmations that are separate from each other and demand to be separated (Nietzsche) (4) Finally a literature of the fragment [une litteacuterature de fragment] which stands outside the whole either because it supposes the whole to have already been realised (all literature is a literature of the end of time) or because alongside those forms of language in which the whole is articulated and expressed (ie knowledge work and salvation) literature senses an entirely other kind of speaking releasing thought from simply being thought with a view to unity in other words demanding an essential discontinuity In this sense all literature is the fragment [toute litteacuterature est le fragment] irrespective of whether it is short or infinitely long provided it points to a space of language in which the sense and function of each and every moment is to render all others


indeterminate or else (this is the other aspect) where what is at stake is some affirmation irreducible to any process of unification51

The collapse of the Revue internationale was a painful disappoint-ment for Blanchot But as Char had assured him disappointment was only one part of the story and in years to come in publishing LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli in 1962 in composing during and after the eacuteveacutenements of May 1968 various unsigned fragments that later appeared in the solitary October 1968 issue of the journal Comiteacute in reworking important sections of LrsquoEntretien infini in 1969 (which also included a fragmentary narrative already entitled lsquoLrsquoEntretien infinirsquo from March 1966) and most ambitiously of all in refashioning a complex new fragmentary idiom for himself in Le Pas aushydelagrave (The Step Not Beyond) and LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Blanchot was to display extraordinary persistence and resourcefulness in keeping faith with the fragmentary His aim no doubt was to affirm writing as a response to the threat and promise of the future But before that he also had to reconsider the past history of the fragment which he did by returning more than once to some influential predecessors the Jena romantics Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis and perhaps most importantly of all Nietzsche

III

From fragment to fragmentary

Many are the works of the ancients that have become fragments Many are the works of the moderns that were fragments the moment they were produced [gleich bei der Entstehung]

FrIEDrICH SCHLEGEL Athenaeum Fragments52

As Blanchot was aware this was not the first time the fragment had been identified with literaturersquos future Nor was it the first time the completion of philosophy had given way to the incompletion of writing nor was it the first time the boundaries between fiction theory and criticism had been boldly redrawn nor indeed was it the first time writing in fragments had been entrusted with a

A turnInG 27

new challenging political purpose To equate literature with the fragment to rediscover the infinite within the finite to reach a new understanding of poetryrsquos relationship with the unknown these were already some of the most pressing concerns of those contemporaries of Hegel with whom the philosopher had grown quickly impatient the Jena romantics notably Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis who in a brief period at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were among the first to explore the future possibilities and implications of fragmentary writing

But there were Blanchot pointed out many different kinds of fragments And on several occasions in the wake of his own turn to fragmentary writing as already apropos of reneacute Char and Heraclitus Blanchot was drawn to reconsider critically the past history of the poetic literary or philosophical fragment An early contribution to that effort from August 1964 sandwiched appropriately enough between texts dealing with interruption and the narrating voice was an essay on the Athenaeum that short-lived but hugely influential journal edited by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel in Jena between 1798 and 1800 in which much of what is now commonly associated with the romantic artwork was first formulated53

That there are several aspects of the Jena Fruumlhromantik which find a ready echo in Blanchotrsquos writing has often been noted54 Among these might be listed for instance the assertion that lsquowhere philosophy stops so literature [Poesie] must beginrsquo as Fr Schlegel puts it in fragment 45 of the Ideen of 1800 which Blanchot reworks in distinctive fashion the recasting of the critical essay as semi-fictional dialogue already attempted in Schlegelrsquos 1800 lsquoGespraumlch uumlber Poesie [Dialogue on Poetry]rsquo and explored by Blanchot as we have seen in texts from the late 1950s and early 1960s the recourse to authorial anonymity which was a feature not only of the fragments published in the Athenaeum but of many of Blanchotrsquos own later political writings notably in the samizdat broadsheet Comiteacute the appeal too to friendship with both the familiar and the unknown as being decisively linked to the plural space of literature indeed the very notion that history itself might be subject to an upheaval whose character far exceeded what it was possible to think under the rubric of the political not to mention the ironic self-reflexivity without which the critical thinking of the Fruumlhromantik would not be what it was and which in its


own particular manner is a signature characteristic of Blanchotrsquos reacutecits too

These convergences between Blanchotrsquos work and the Jena romantics are far from coincidental55 What they emphasise is the extent to which the mutation traversing Blanchotrsquos fiction and critical and political thinking was more than simply a response to the anxieties of the postwar world for it was fundamentally related to the constitution of (modern) art itself As Blanchot was quick to realise literaturersquos future as disappearance necessarily returned it together with the literary criticism shadowing it to the place where both had always already begun which is to say in philosophy Yet as literature and criticism rediscovered this common origin they did so with the enduring sense that there was something in literature and therefore in philosophy too that remained strangely inassimilable to philosophy Hegelrsquos inaugural words according to Blanchot already implied as much For if philosophy had supplied literature with a birth certificate it had also handed it a death warrant It had launched literature into the world as an autonomous possibility subject to its own effectivity freedom and finality but by the selfsame gesture it had dismissed it as that which was ineffectual constrained and without purpose which survived itself interminably as worklessness ineluctable demand and boundless error Which was why the ending of literature for Blanchot was anything but an end it affirmed instead literaturersquos future as that which is still and forever yet to come

This made a critical understanding of literaturersquos past as both thing and concept all the more pressing and in rereading the texts of Schlegel and Novalis in 1964 Blanchot was particularly attentive to the competing strands present in the thinking and the legacy of the Athenaeum Much depended on whether the critic privileged the movementrsquos beginnings or ending In the case of Fr Schlegel the choice was particularly acute for it meant deciding whether to place the emphasis on the youthful radical atheistic and individualist firebrand or to favour instead the mature diplomat journalist and Catholic convert best known for his association with Metternich56 So while Blanchot was deeply sympathetic to what Schlegel and Novalis had attempted under the rubric of fragmentary writing he remained sharply critical of Schlegelrsquos reluctance to affirm radically what was at stake in the fragment Schlegelrsquos failing in Blanchotrsquos eyes was to

A turnInG 29

have persisted in thinking of the fragment solely on the model of the aphorism lsquoentirely separate from the surrounding world like a miniature artwork and complete in itself like a hedgehog [ein Igel]rsquo as Schlegel famously and memorably described it in 179857 Blanchot explained his objection as follows

In truth and particularly in the case of Friedrich Schlegel the fragment often appears to be a means of facile self-indulgence [un moyen de srsquoabandonner complaisamment agrave soishymecircme] rather than an attempt to elaborate a more rigorous mode of writing If so writing in fragments [fragmentairement] simply means accepting onersquos own disorder retreating into oneself in self-satisfied isolation and thus refusing the opening represented by the demand of the fragment [lrsquoexigence fragmentaire] which does not exclude but exceeds totality [ ] [Schlegel] takes the fragment back to the aphorism that is to the closure of a perfect sentence The shortfall [alteacuteration] is perhaps unavoidable but it means (1) considering the fragment as a quintessential text [un texte concentreacute] having its centre in itself rather than in the field [le champ] set up by that fragment together with other fragments alongside (2) neglecting the interval (suspension or pause) that separates the fragments from each other and turns that separation into the rhythmic principle of the work in its very structure (3) forgetting that the tendency of this manner of writing is not to make a view of the whole more difficult or to loosen any bonds of unity but to make possible new relations that are no longer part of any unity in the same way that they exceed any whole58

Two versions two turnings two understandings of the fragment come into focus here the one attributed to Schlegel appeals to the interiority wholeness and solipsism of self the other articulated by Blanchot affirms exteriority dispersion otherness That on which they turn is the distinction between an art of the fragment that is nostalgic for the work and content to remain within established horizons and one that reaches beyond the horizon and beckons to an unforeseeable future without present between what in 1978 in an analysis much indebted to Blanchot Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy at least provisionally proposed calling incompletion (inachegravevement) and worklessness (deacutesœuvrement)59


But how tenable how reliable is the distinction Neither Lacoue-Labarthe nor Nancy nor indeed Blanchot is entirely convinced60 With good reason ndash for there is nothing about the fragment or the fragmentary that is ever completely decided The fragmentary Blanchot suggests is a promise To that extent it is also an infinite task to which the writer returns on numerous occasions not to define the fragmentary as such since it is precisely what resists appropriation lsquoas suchrsquo but rather to subtract the fragmentary from the fragment and divide or separate it from itself Consider for instance the following exploratory restlessly questioning fragment on the question of the fragmentary in Le Pas aushydelagrave

uml The fragmentary what does it offer us ndash a question demand or practical decision No longer to be able to write except in relation to the fragmentary is not to write in fragments except if the fragment is itself a sign for the fragmentary To think the fragmentary think it in relation to the neuter the one and the other seemingly uttered together yet without community of presence and each so to speak outside the other The fragmentary writing belongs to the fragmentary [relegraveve du fragmentaire] when everything has been said There would have to be an exhaustion of speech and by speech the completion of all (of presence as all) qua logos for it to be possible for fragmentary writing to let itself be remarked Yet we cannot in writing free ourselves from a logic of totality by considering it as ideally completed in order to retain as a lsquopure remainderrsquo a possibility of writing outside of everything without use or without term which a quite different still elusive logic (of repetition limits and return) might be thought to make available to us to study What is already clear is that writing of this kind will never be lsquopurersquo but on the contrary will have already been adulterated by dint of an adulteration that in no way might be defined (ie fixed) with reference to some norm not only because it coexists always with all forms of existence speech thought or temporality which alone may be thought to make it possible but because it excludes any consideration of pure form that is any attempt to approach it as true or proper even in its disappropriation even the inversions to which one has recourse by sheer convenience ndash rebeginning as beginning disappropriation as authenticity repetition as difference ndash leave us still within the logic of validity

A turnInG 31

The fragment then concludes without concluding as follows

The fragmentary expresses itself best perhaps in a language which does not acknowledge it Fragmentary meaning neither the fragment as part of a whole nor the fragmentary in itself Aphorisms sayings maxims quotations proverbs themes set phrases are perhaps all further removed from it than that infinitely continuous discourse whose only content is lsquoits own continuityrsquo a continuity that is only sure of itself when it supposes itself to be circular and in that circuit accepts the precondition of a return whose law is outside [aushydehors] and where the outside is outside the law [horsshyloi]61

Not the fragment as closure then but the infinite continuity of the fragmentary writing not as obedience to the law but radical scepticism and exposure to the outside the work not as self-coincident reflection but the endless unworking of that which dispersed always already differs from itself The fragmentary in other words is not an identifiable literary critical or philosophical genre it is a spectral demand that does not exist as such but which beyond aesthetics or ontology continues to inscribe itself time on the edge of time as a limit on the limit never to be grasped as such but always already effacing itself as an impossible trace a trace of the impossible Which is why it requires Blanchot again and again to return partly in response to the work of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy to the example of Schlegel together with other key romantic figures such as Novalis Fichte Schelling Schleiermacher Bettina von Arnim and August Klingemann the anonymous author of Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura62 all of whom Blanchot reads and rereads in the course of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre perpetually reiterating the point ever the same but ever different that the romantic fragment is not yet the fragmentary the fragmentary is still to come

Such was already Blanchotrsquos conclusion in lsquoLrsquoAthenaeumrsquo an essay overshadowed by the collapse of the project for the Revue internationale towards which it silently gestured In closing the essay however he also let slip another name that of another fragmentary thinker and writer of the future Nietzsche

But who or what was NietzscheNietzsche was of course a crucial reference point albeit an

intensely contested one for a host of writers and thinkers in France


and elsewhere during the 1930s 1940s 1950s and 1960s including of course Heidegger Bataille Jaspers Jean Wahl Karl Loumlwith Eugen Fink Deleuze Klossowski Foucault Derrida and Blanchot too63 Having first written at any length about Nietzsche (with whose work he had no doubt long been familiar) shortly after the war Blanchot began thinking in more detail about the contemporary figure of the thinker some twelve years later in August 1958 in an essay entitled appropriately enough lsquoNietzsche aujourdrsquohui [Nietzsche Today]rsquo mainly concerned with the history of the falsification of Nietzschersquos texts revealed by the recent editorial work of Karl Schlechta64 In the essay Blanchot also took the opportunity to consider recent work by Jaspers Lukaacutecs and Heidegger including notably as far as the last was concerned the material on Nietzsche contained in Holzwege (1950) Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze (1954) and Was heiszligt Denken (1954) retaining the same title eleven years later in LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchot was naturally obliged to make extensive revisions to his text in order to bring it up to date which he did by nuancing his account of Schlechtarsquos editorial labours in the knowledge that a new edition of Nietzschersquos work undertaken by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari had at last begun to appear and by adding a few passing references to Fink Foucault Deleuze and Klossowski More significantly in this later version of the essay Blanchot also needed to take stock of Heideggerrsquos two volumes on Nietzsche based on lectures originally delivered between 1936 and 1941 but not published till 1961 which prompted the second of the two lengthy footnotes added or extended in 196965

In the interim Blanchotrsquos own views had also begun to change Whereas in 1958 for instance largely following Jaspers (for whom lsquothe whole literary form of Nietzschersquos thinking remained aphoristic throughoutrsquo66) he was able to describe Nietzschersquos writing as lsquoessentially aphoristic [essentiellement aphoristique]rsquo he now revised the comment to read lsquoin principle fragmentary [en principe fragmentaire]rsquo Similarly the proposition advanced in 1958 again after Jaspers that Nietzsche may have suffered from lsquothe aphoristic nature that was one of the essential sources of his originalityrsquo was replaced eleven years later by the observation that the source of possible dismay on Nietzschersquos part was lsquothe demand of the fragment [cette exigence fragmentaire]rsquo There were other minor adjustments too In 1958 summarising the tasks facing any interpreter of Nietzsche Blanchot citing Jaspers spoke of the need to lsquograsp the

A turnInG 33

ldquoreal dialecticrdquo [ressaisir ldquola dialectique reacuteellerdquo]rsquo at work in Nietzschersquos writing But by 1969 this recommendation was no longer sufficient If anything it might be thought dangerously regressive whence no doubt Blanchotrsquos decision to gloss if not entirely displace the original meaning of the phrase which in revised form now commended the reader to lsquograsp the ldquoreal dialecticrdquo thinking as the play of the world the text as fragment [ressaisir ldquola dialectique reacuteellerdquo la penseacutee comme jeu du monde le texte comme fragment]rsquo67

But even in August 1958 Blanchotrsquos original essay was already not enough and was followed a month later by a further essay on Nietzsche mainly concerned with the question of nihilism largely refracted through the work of Heidegger notably the lecture course Was heiszligt Denken and Heideggerrsquos sixtieth-birthday exchange with Ernst Juumlnger which in 1955 gave rise to the publication of Heideggerrsquos long letter to Juumlnger Uumlber die Linie better known under its later title Zur Seinsfrage68 Here too when Blanchotrsquos September 1958 essay was reprised in LrsquoEntretien infini adjustments were needed and in the two closing paragraphs of his account of nihilism in Nietzsche (more essentially a debate with Heidegger) Blanchot departed almost completely from his eleven-year-old script to claim a very different status for Nietzschersquos writing than that conferred upon it by the thinker of Being lsquoPhilosophy trembles in Nietzschersquo Blanchot now wrote But was this because he was the last philosopher the ultimate metaphysician as Heidegger contended Or was it not rather Blanchot went on

because required [appeleacute] by an entirely other language the disruptive writing [lrsquoeacutecriture drsquoeffraction] which is destined to accept lsquowordsrsquo only in so far as they have been crossed out [barreacutes] spaced out [espaceacutes] put under erasure [mis en croix] by the very movement that sets them apart but in that distance holds them back as a place of difference he had to contend with a fractious demand [une exigence de rupture] which constantly diverts them from what he has the power [pouvoir] to think69

It was not however until the next essay in LrsquoEntretien infini lsquoNietzsche et lrsquoeacutecriture fragmentaire [Nietzsche and Fragmentary Writing]rsquo originally published in two parts in December 1966 and January 1967 and written in the margins of recent work by


Fink (Nietzsches Philosophie and Spiel als Weltsymbol) Foucault (Les Mots et les choses) Deleuze (Nietzsche et la philosophie) and Derrida (LrsquoEacutecriture et la diffeacuterence) that Blanchot began fully to measure the consequences of this radical shift in emphasis As his title suggested it was now time to turn aside from philosophy in order to attend to a very different exigency in Nietzschersquos thinking that of writing itself in its relation with the fragmentary70

Blanchotrsquos first move was once more to subtract there were he suggested two ways of speaking in Nietzsche two paroles two voices two tendencies two modes of inscription The first was continuous coherent and systematic even in its tireless efforts to undermine each of these traits of its own and such key themes or concepts as will to power eternal return or the overman were ample proof of the traditional philosophical perhaps even metaphysical ambitions of Nietzschersquos anti-dialectical dialectic But there was also something else Blanchot argued that was dissymmetrical with the first irreducible to any conceptual programme and inassimilable to any dialectic or anti-dialectic which manifested itself albeit by not manifesting itself in so far as it exceeded all manifestation as such in the responsiveness of Nietzschersquos writing to the demand of the fragment The distinction was not an arbitrary one It was of some urgency for Blanchotrsquos own writing For mirrored in the two slopes coexisting in Nietzschersquos thought were the two directions of what Blanchot at an earlier moment in his career had thematised alongside Levinas as the il y a ontological proposition here (and as such a continuation of metaphysics) and suspensive affirmation of the neuter there (and as such irreducible to all ontology)71 The stakes in other words could not be higher and this explains no doubt as we shall see the increasing prominence of Blanchotrsquos engagement with Nietzsche in the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s

The fragmentary in Nietzsche Blanchot went on in LrsquoEntretien infini was neither a theoretical discourse nor a literary manner It was less a force than an array of differences an exigency making itself felt in a number of oblique disparate and shifting ways Blanchotrsquos strategy was not to gather together and seek to reconcile the many apparent contradictions in Nietzschersquos writing by appealing to any single ontological psychological biographical historical or political explanation But nor was he content to let the disjoined parts of Nietzschersquos writing stand as the sign of an essentially literary

A turnInG 35

or pathologically compromised intellect Several years earlier he had applauded Heidegger for awarding Also sprach Zarathustra the same status and importance for Western thought as a treatise by Aristotle72 But rather than firmly rooting Nietzschersquos work within the history of metaphysics as Heidegger had sought to do Blanchotrsquos concern was to explore the internal slippages and discontinuities by which motifs themes concepts even names were divorced or separated from themselves in Nietzschersquos writing that is subtracted exceeded neutered or neutralised Blanchotrsquos efforts therefore were primarily directed towards thinking that towards which Nietzschersquos work gestured too without ever being able to formulate it as such that which thought is constrained to think once it leaves itself behind without relinquishing itself and strains or reaches towards the outside This for instance is what Blanchot has to say at one stage with a murmur of disagreement addressed to Eugen Fink (and to Heidegger) about Nietzschersquos thinking of the concept of world (lsquoworldrsquo in Nietzsche Heidegger had it lsquois the name for beings as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen]rsquo)

Nietzsche thinks the world this is his concern And when he thinks the world as lsquoa monster of forcesrsquo as lsquothis mystery-world of twofold delightrsquo as lsquomy Dionysiac worldrsquo or as he does elsewhere as the play of the world of this world this enigma that is the solution to every enigma he does not think being [lrsquoecirctre] On the contrary rightly or wrongly he thinks the world in order to free thought just as much from the idea of being [lrsquoideacutee drsquoecirctre] as from that of the whole [lrsquoideacutee du tout] just as much from the requirement of meaning [lrsquoexigence du sens] as from that of good [lrsquoexigence du bien] in order to free thought from thought obliging it not to abdicate but to think more than it can [penser plus qursquoelle ne peut penser] think something other than what it is possible for it to think [autre chose que son possible] in other words to speak by saying the lsquomorersquo [ce laquo plus raquo] the lsquoexcessrsquo [ce laquo surplus raquo] which precedes and follows all speech The method may be criticised but what it proclaims cannot be so easily dismissed For Nietzsche being meaning aim value God day and night the whole and unity are only valid within the world but the lsquoworldrsquo cannot be thought cannot be said as meaning or as a whole even less as a world beyond the world The world is the very outside of itself [est son dehors mecircme] the affirmation


that overwhelms [deacuteborde] all power to affirm and in the ceaseless movement of discontinuity is the play of its perpetual redoubling will to power eternal return73

In writing about Nietzsche Blanchot was fond of citing Jaspersrsquos remark that every proposition in the thinkerrsquos work is echoed elsewhere by another that contradicts it74 Blanchotrsquos purpose however was not to identify inconsistencies as such in order to resolve them or even allow them to cancel each other out His strategy was rather to search for a vanishing point a point de fuite indicative not of the power or potency of conceptual thought (ie what it can) but far more radically its impossibilities weaknesses and erasures (ie what happens when it exceeds its horizon of competence) The approach then is not so much hermeneutic as hyperbolic the aim being to push Nietzschersquos assertions to the limit to that extreme point where something other than the regularity of the concept is exposed an otherness that escapes conceptual explication and can only be inscribed by way of a logic of supplementarity that is a logic of both subtraction and addition according to which every articulation by dint of the fragmentary is no sooner affirmed than withdrawn such that withdrawal features henceforth as a species of affirmation and affirmation as a species of withdrawal the one erasing or overwriting the other in a ceaseless movement of dispersion Such logic has no proper name which is why it can receive provisionally at least the modest unassuming title of the neuter the neuter that has no centre unity or self-identity but which nonetheless exceeding positive and negative alike cannot but be affirmed which speaks in language but is not identifiable with any single word or expression or concept for it precedes and outstrips all available terms which it hollows out displaces and re-marks Neither one nor the other then but always the other the other such is Blanchotrsquos reading and writing strategy when faced with the challenge of the demand of the fragment

In attending to Nietzsche then Blanchot not only reads a discourse reaching beyond its own extremity He also pushes his own writing to the limit in an effort to respond to the fragmentary as that which at once urgently demands yet obstinately resists thinking In its response to Nietzsche it is by necessity rather than sympathy that Blanchotrsquos own writing becomes fragmentary in its turn with the writer insistently re-marking his text as a sign of

A turnInG 37

simultaneous withdrawal and effacement with the same double neuter plus-minus mathematical symbol () adopted elsewhere in LrsquoEntretien infini as witness to the parenthetical movement of writing as both exposition and exposure

In traversing the fragmentary in Schlegel Char and Nietzsche Blanchot was not seeking to resurrect the past The task was much rather to fashion an idiom as he put it in LrsquoEntretien infini such as might simultaneously name the possible and respond to the impossible75 In doing so Blanchot was to encounter some of the most pressing questions of the age

IV

the limits of nihilism

uml The last witness the end of history an epoch a turning a crisis ndash or even the end of philosophy (metaphysics) [ ] Why does writing understood as a change of epoch [changement drsquoeacutepoque] under-s tood as the experience (non-experience) of disaster in each case imply the words inscribed at the head of this lsquofragmentrsquo while also revoking them ndash even if what they announce is announced as something new [un nouveau] that has always already taken place a radical change [changement radical] from which all present is excluded


For all who experienced them at first hand the 1950s were years of anxiety and uncertainty of upheaval and stagnation discovery and obfuscation readjustment and resistance The challenges were numerous material political social intellectual philosophical literary

Heidegger put it more grandiloquently and solemnly than most for arguably particular reasons of his own in his famous 1951ndash52 lecture course Was heiszligt Denken The bookrsquos title as its author was at pains to point out was avowedly twofold meaning both what is called thinking and what is it that calls for thinking It referred not only to the sempiternal question of the nature of thinking but also in a more originary or radical sense to


that which in Heideggerrsquos view demanded or required thought lsquotodayrsquo that moment both within and beyond history which the lecturer glossed with unmistakeable contemporary relevance by reminding his German-speaking listeners of the celebrated opening lines of the second version of Houmllderlinrsquos lsquoMnemosynersquo dedicated to the goddess of memory mother to the nine muses lsquoEin Zeichen sind wir deutungslos Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast Die Sprache in der Fremde verlorenrsquo (lsquoA sign we are without meaning Without pain we are and have nearly Lost our language in foreign landsrsquo)77 In the Winter of 1951 having started with Houmllderlin Heidegger went on to develop two further closely connected propositions The first was in the form of a quotation from the confidential fourth part of Also sprach Zarathustra from 1884ndash85 lsquoThe wilderness is growing [Die Wuumlste waumlchst]rsquo went Nietzschersquos text lsquowoe to him who harbours wildernesses [weh Dem der Wuumlsten birgt]rsquo78 As for the second this came from Heidegger himself and summed up the essential theme of the lecture course as a whole lsquoWhat most calls for thinking [Das Bedenklichste]rsquo he announced lsquoin our time that calls for thinking [in unserer bedenklichen Zeit] is that we are not yet thinking [ist daszlig wir noch nicht denken]rsquo79

In unfolding these twin assertions Heidegger was quick to defend himself against the charge of cultural pessimism Nietzschersquos prognosis contained a fundamental truth that the present epoch was essentially synonymous with the reduction of the Being of beings to a series of metaphysical representations which made modern scientific and technological progress possible but by the same token transformed the whole of being into an all-encompassing nihilistic wasteland bereft of all memory and of all future This according to Heidegger was what Nietzsche had in mind when he resorted in Zarathustra to the strange figure of the ever growing wilderness lsquoWhat it means is thisrsquo he commented

devastation [Verwuumlstung] is spreading Devastation [Verwuumlstung] is more than destruction [Zerstoumlrung] Devastation [Verwuumlstung] is eerier [unheimlicher] than annihilation [Vernichtung] Destruction [Zerstoumlrung] only eliminates what has already grown and been built but devastation [Verwuumlstung] prevents future growth and obstructs any building Devastation [Verwuumlstung] is eerier than mere annihilation [Vernichtung] This too eliminates everything

A turnInG 39

including Nothing whereas devastation [Verwuumlstung] fosters and promotes that which prevents and obstructs [das Unterbindende und Verwehrende]80

These then were dark times though they were not incompatible Heidegger hastened to add in this period of incipient Wirtshyschaftswunder with extensive material happiness The future however remained bleak and the prospect of infinite overcoming that the Nietzschean overman seemed to promise was no different for it was merely a continuation or more accurately a culmination of the same unremitting centuries-old history of metaphysics

The present epoch though endless nevertheless had its limits This is what Heidegger gleaned from the temporal structure of his second proposition which in the form of a lsquonot yetrsquo implied an essentially futural dimension What it was that required thinking according to Heidegger as the fundamental question of this (and any other) epoch was the crucial twofold of Being and being(s) in other words the ontological difference This for Heidegger was not only what it was imperative to think it was what made thinking possible at all The onus placed on thinking was not however that in mechanical fashion it should simply repeat itself but that it should envisage another turning another thinking so to speak of the ontological difference Much hinged on this possibility not so much history in the conventional sense but the fate the Geschick of the West What was therefore needed insisted Heidegger was a different kind of repetition a renewal in the shape of a return to the beginning to the Presocratics and those originary texts in which thinking had first been spoken and which for the purpose of Was heiszligt Denken Heidegger limited to a small number of fragments from Parmenides But this return was less of a restoration than an attempt to speak anew what had never been thought as such and necessarily so not by historical accident nor by sinister design This was the task in which Heidegger was himself engaged and in which he sought to enlist not just the thought of the Greeks but the poetic thinking of such rare poets as Houmllderlin

There is little doubt that in the mid-1950s Heideggerrsquos lectures found in Blanchot an attentive and responsive reader First they extended and developed a poetico-philosophical dialogue between Heidegger and Houmllderlin that had long been a centre of concern for


the writer and which he acknowledged again some months after the publication of Was heiszligt Denken in an article on Houmllderlin and Heidegger for La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise initially entitled lsquoUn tournant [A Turning]rsquo the burden of which was explicitly to comment on the figure of the turn [Wende] already associated with Houmllderlin by Heidegger in an important essay from Holzwege five years earlier but to which Blanchot imparts a further political (but also more than political) turn of his own by joining to it the thought of that vaterlaumlndische Umkehr or retournement natal (lsquonative reversalrsquo suggests Ann Smock in her translation of The Space of Literature) found in Houmllderlinrsquos notes to his 1804 translation of Sophoclesrsquo Antigone81 lsquoWe are at a turning [Nous sommes agrave un tournant]rsquo this was Blanchotrsquos thought too in January 1955 and this his immediate question both to himself and to his readers lsquoThis sense of being at a turning this call to turn or to turn back what does it mean [Ce sentiment drsquoecirctre agrave un tournant cet appel agrave se tourner ou agrave se retourner que signifieshytshyil]rsquo82

For Blanchot the question was not an isolated one For the second set of reasons why Blanchot felt particularly solicited by Heideggerrsquos lecture course was that Heideggerrsquos exploration of nihilism in Also sprach Zarathustra turned not only on the figure of the overman Nietzschersquos Uumlbermensch but also of the last man der letzte Mann who would shortly provide Blanchot with the title of his last self-professed reacutecit of 1957 which may even be read as a covert or oblique commentary on the disparaging claim made by Heidegger explicating Nietzsche to the effect that it was precisely because the last man in Nietzschersquos view embodied humanity as it was hitherto formed [das bisherige Menschenwesen] that he the last man as Heidegger put it was lsquofurthest removed from the possibility of passing beyond himself [am weitesten von der Moumlglichkeit entfernt uumlber sich hinweg zu gehen]rsquo83 If indeed it was the case as Blanchot would later write that nihilism might be defined as the idea that everything can be overcome and therefore summed up in lsquothe possibility of all transcendence [la possibiliteacute de tout deacutepassement]rsquo84 then it followed that the last man exposed to the impossibility of ending was the only available necessarily indecisive response to nihilism one that invoked the impossibility (for reasons that Blanchot would soon endeavour to explicate) of that total human destruction which in other respects seemed only too possible in this age of nuclear

A turnInG 41

proliferation For by the mid-1950s Blanchot was not alone in realising that something radically new had entered the world It was now within humanityrsquos power to destroy both itself and the planet on which all life depended It was enough to define an epoch a new era which at least one of Blanchotrsquos interlocutors from April 1960 was able to sum up using an expression Heidegger had increasingly made his own la technique moderne modern technology As that anonymous voice explains

In the same way that earliest times [les temps originels] were characterised by the importance of elemental or telluric forces so today the event we are facing has an elemental aspect to it the impersonal forces [puissances impersonnelles] represented by the intervention of mass phenomena the supremacy of a machine-like calculus [du jeu machinal] and the harnessing of the constitutive forces of matter These factors can be summed up in a single term modern technology [technique moderne] which comprises collective organisation on a planetary scale for the purpose of calculated planning mechanisation and automation and atomic energy atomic being the key word here What hitherto only the stars could do man now does Man has become a star [astre] The astral era [cette egravere astrale] now commencing can no longer be contained within the bounds of history [nrsquoappartient plus aux mesures de lrsquohistoire]85

This is not to say that Blanchot was at one with Heidegger in his analysis of the demands of the present Indeed his diagnosis differed from that of the philosopher in a number of crucial respects This was already apparent from his reading of Nietzsche Indeed when in 1966 he began explicitly to address the question of fragmentary writing in Nietzsche he took up the phrase from Also sprach Zarathustra ndash lsquoDie Wuumlste waumlchst rsquo lsquothe wilderness is growing rsquo ndash which had provided Heidegger as we have seen with a key emphasis in his account of nihilism and wrote to very different effect as follows

And when Nietzsche says lsquothe wilderness is growing [le deacutesert srsquoaccroicirct]rsquo fragmentary speaking [la parole de fragment] takes the place of this wilderness without ruins except that in the case of the former the devastation always more vast is always


kept tightly within the dispersion of limits A stationary process [Devenir drsquoimmobiliteacute] That fragmentary speaking may appear to play into the hands of nihilism and provide it in its very inappropriateness [disconvenance] with an appropriate form [la forme qui convienne] this is something it is careful not to deny [deacutementir] And yet how far it outstrips this power of negation mdash not that by outplaying it it evades it [qursquoen srsquoen jouant elle la deacutejoue] on the contrary it gives it a free hand Nietzsche recognised mdash this was the point of his tireless critique of Plato mdash that being was light [lrsquoecirctre eacutetait lumiegravere] and he subjected the light of being to the severest suspicion This was a decisive moment in the destruction of metaphysics and mdash even more so mdash of ontology86

Before translating Nietzschersquos motto into a truthful pronouncement a true word about truth ein wahres Wort as Heidegger calls it87 Blanchot cautiously hesitates Not because he doubted the authority of Nietzschersquos fragment sung at both the beginning and the ending of his song in a bellowing voice and to the accompaniment of a magicianrsquos harp by the wanderer claiming to be Zarathustrarsquos shadow but because its fragmentary status putting it at the limit (Blanchotrsquos analysis begins lsquoFragmentary speaking is speaking only at the limit [La parole de fragment nrsquoest parole qursquoagrave la limite]rsquo) divides it from truth ie both the truth of nihilism which the fragmentary disobeying its own apparent negativity silently exceeds and the truth of Being closely associated by Heidegger with light as opening and manifestation but which the fragmentary withdrawing from any possibility of world discreetly contests What the fragmentary suggests here for Blanchot is that there is something inexhaustible neither positive nor negative about Nietzschersquos ever expanding wilderness and it is this realisation that in the passage cited best explains Blanchotrsquos abrupt transition from nihilism to Platonism The will to power or force of the wilderness (words that even in Nietzsche are already under erasure) as mobilised by the fragmentary lies here lsquoforcersquo says Blanchot lsquoescapes light it is not what might be thought to be simply deprived of light darkness still aspiring to become daylight what it shrinks from scandal of scandals is any reference to sight at all [toute reacutefeacuterence optique] consequently however much its action may be determined by form and held within formal

A turnInG 43

boundaries form itself an arrangement of structure always lets it slip away Neither visible nor invisiblersquo88

The wilderness then on Blanchotrsquos reading to the extent that it is drawn ever further beyond its own boundaries by the fragmentary is thus neither full nor empty neither closed nor open neither true nor false It is a space or non-space whose only trait is its neutrality its status or non-status as a neuter lying between or outside all positionality And it is worth noting that as he moves from Nietzsche to detailed exegesis of a key fragment from Parmenides in his Summer 1952 lecture course Heidegger too pauses for a moment to consider that the syntactic structure of the opening phrase of that fragment (Fr 6) hinges on an impersonal subjectless expression in the Greek a neuter [Neutrum] he briefly calls it crὴ usually translated as it is necessary or required89 This however does not satisfy Heidegger who proposes instead to give Parmenidesrsquo neuter the same syntactic status as the es in the talismanic es gibt Sein and thus construe it as proposed in the lsquoLetter on Humanismrsquo of 1946 as referring to Being But the impersonal neuter es that gives Being cannot be more originary than Being and cannot therefore be otherwise than Being giving itself to itself90 This allows Heidegger in turn to retranslate Parmenidesrsquo neuter in originary authentically Greek manner as signifying the presence of the present and this is arguably one of those moments that enabled Blanchot in a discreet footnote in October 1958 to declare Heideggerian Being in so far as it was a Neuter as Levinas contended to be a shamefaced Neuter lsquoun Neutre un peu honteuxrsquo says Blanchot that fell far short of what for Blanchot always already preceded any origin91

That the fragmentary exceeded all negation or negativity was a crucial insight for Blanchot What it implied was that nihilism at the limit by a kind of homeopathic reversal already contained its own remedy At that extreme point but only at that extreme point nihilism reversed itself92 On this prospectus though Blanchot maintained a strong interest in the fragmentary writings of Heraclitus as we shall see it also followed that Heideggerrsquos turning back to the Greek beginning was anything but unproblematic More urgent at any event than any such step back (or Schritt zuruumlck)93 as far as Blanchot was concerned was the need to meditate the consequences of the exposure of thought to what in 1973 in a pointed rejoinder to Heidegger he would explicitly thematise as the step ndash not ndash beyond le pas aushydelagrave There were other more immediate questions


too for Blanchot ndash which were political On that front between his own thinking and that of Heidegger there had long been a crucial difference not to say a veritable chasm and in several earlier texts Blanchotrsquos reservations with regard to the political implications of Heideggerrsquos thought were plainly in evidence In subsequent years most markedly from the publication of LrsquoEntretien infini onwards as the changes made in 1969 to the essay lsquoNietzsche aujourdrsquohuirsquo amply testify he was to become increasingly forthright in his condemnation of Heideggerrsquos support for the Nazi State But nowhere was Blanchotrsquos political thinking with regard to the legacy of nihilism more sharply focussed (though Heideggerrsquos name is in fact nowhere mentioned and the word itself evoked only fleetingly and ironically) than in one of his most incisive texts of the early 1960s also given the oblique form of an exploratory dialogue published in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise in April 1962 and reworked seven years later in which Blanchot responded to the republication of robert Antelmersquos concentration camp memoir LrsquoEspegravece humaine94

lsquoHumankind is the indestructible that can be destroyed [Lrsquohomme est lrsquoindestructible qui peut ecirctre deacutetruit]rsquo this was the proposition that at least one of Blanchotrsquos unnamed voices sought to defend in the discussion about Antelme95 There too Blanchot had recourse to an impersonal neuter expression lrsquoindestructible The formulation is important for it testifies to Blanchotrsquos refusal to centre discussion on the question of what is essentially proper to man or to men In avoiding the question of human existence as such Blanchot was clearly following Heidegger whose postwar lsquoLetter on Humanismrsquo had persuasively demonstrated the reliance of humanism on a metaphysics of the subject96 So Blanchotrsquos point was not that man or men or humans are indestructible in themselves by dint of their unquenchable human spirit say or the sanctity of human life or because of the overwhelming supremacy of human or humanistic values Blanchotrsquos observation was quite different it was that humankind participates in the impersonality and anonymity of that which is indestructible and yet can be destroyed This was no wilful lapsing into premature paradox or self-indulgent aporetics as critics have sometimes charged Nor was it an appeal to a new fragile or residual humanism as others have more recently suggested Nor did it testify to the survival of a dialectic of power or value some how able modestly even heroically to overcome pain and suffering and transmute loss into meaningful experience For at

A turnInG 45

least two reasons first because humanism founded on the idea of that which is proper to man necessarily implies something improper to man which must be expelled or eliminated by dividing for instance the strong from the weak the clean from the dirty the human from the bestial even the male from the female with the result that humanism in the face of human degradation is often little more than a distasteful insult And second because to have faith in manrsquos identity with himself was necessarily to endorse in the end that constant transcending and redrawing of the limits of possibility synonymous with nihilism and to legitimate the potential for murderous destruction that was inseparable from the power of humans many we know are the living species that have born the cost of the supreme power of humans and many too are the humans who on the grounds of their supposed bestiality have been sacrificed to prescriptive humanism Humanism and nihilism can of course be strange bedfellows as cinema audiences of the mid-1950s would be aware reminded by Alain resnaisrsquos 1956 film Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) of the grim symbolism of Goethersquos tree respectfully preserved by the Nazi authorities at the centre of Buchenwald concentration camp a few miles outside Weimar

Blanchotrsquos opening question in his reading of LrsquoEspegravece humaine which like others he approached as someone without immediate personal experience of the camps was not as Giorgio Agamben describes borrowing the expression from Bruno Bettelheim how to remain human (to which inside or outside the camp there are any number of possible or impossible answers) but who is Autrui who is the Other (using the invariant impersonal expression singularised by Levinas)97 Blanchotrsquos gesture in reading Antelme then was neither ontological nor moral it was not to appeal to humanism in any of its current forms but to recognise something far more radical which was that a trace neither human nor non-human testifying not to infinite human possibility but absolute human impossibility far exceeded with incontrovertible force or weakness this finite invention that was man and that the trace itself this neuter being irreducible to any kind of positivity or negativity was itself indestructible This trace is itself neither something nor nothing Blanchotrsquos text variously calls it a lsquosilent presence [preacutesence silencieuse]rsquo a presence which is that of the other [autrui] in whoever speaks lsquothe infinite and infinitely silent presence of the other [la preacutesence infinie et infiniment silencieuse drsquoautrui]rsquo testifying to a speaking or a refusing to speak


still to come and carrying with it as an outward token what Antelme describes as lsquoan abiding sense of belonging to humankind [un sentiment ultime drsquoappartenance agrave lrsquoespegravece]rsquo but which not fixing itself in any possibility of speaking in the first person is not in itself either a value or an object of evaluation and is thinkable for Blanchot only as radical impersonal anonymous need lsquoempty and in a sense neuter need therefore virtually that of all [le besoin vide et neutre en quelque sorte ainsi virtuellement celui de tous]rsquo98 lsquoIn such a wayrsquo comments one of Blanchotrsquos voices lsquothat deposed from myself [deacutechu de moi] and a foreigner to myself [eacutetranger agrave moishymecircme] what is affirmed in my stead is the foreignness of the other [autrui] ndash man as absolutely other a foreigner and a stranger the dispossessed and rootless or as reneacute Char writes unimaginable man [lrsquohomme inimaginable] ndash by whose presence passes the affirmation of an infinite demand [lrsquoaffirmation drsquoune exigence infinie]rsquo99 Inimaginable unimaginable the word was also Antelmersquos from the preface to LrsquoEspegravece humaine describing the return from the camp naming that which it was impossible to imagine and yet absolutely necessary to do so lsquoBarely did we begin telling our story than we suffocated To ourselves the story we had to tell had begun to appear unimaginable [inimaginable]rsquo100 What the experience implied then was not residual recognition but compelling exteriority

Humans then could be destroyed and yet a trace or inscription survived not as an entity not in the form of anything necessarily human or non-human but as that which testified to the impotence of the negative and therefore resisted beyond all power Like death itself perhaps it might be what provided the possible grounds for discourse history action work negativity but as for itself so to speak it necessarily withdrew from those possibilities which is no doubt why it cannot be named as such only as an absolute limit Blanchotrsquos political thinking reformulated in the encounter with Antelme was not a thinking of the human then but a thought of the outside101 It was essentially double For while it was imperative to recognise the irreducible ineluctable exteriority of empty neuter need this did not imply renouncing political action On the contrary the demand or exigency of the indestructible required that power be resisted which is what enabled indeed constrained Blanchot to reaffirm the need for historical action which he himself clearly endorsed albeit indirectly within his own text published the very month when the eacutevian accords signed between the Algerian FLN

A turnInG 47

and the French government were bringing the Algerian war to a close when he joined his voice to those of numerous others in roundly condemning torture both in the camps and in the police stations of colonial Algeria Indeed the silent presence to which he refers in discussing Antelme in April 1962 is also without possible ambiguity the refusal to speak that found its embodiment in the torture victims not only of the dark years of the Occupation but also of the bleak decade of the Algerian War

As one of Blanchotrsquos voices explains lsquoit is essential that on the basis of this attentiveness to affliction [attention au malheur] without which all relation succumbs to darkness another possibility should intervene ie for a Self [un Moi] outside me not only to take my place as it were [comme agrave ma place] and become aware of the affliction but also become responsible for it [le prenne en charge] by acknowledging it as an injustice to all and take it as the starting point for a set of common demands [une revendication commune]rsquo102 And what remains crucial in this movement from one thought to another is the necessity of the double relationship the double rapport on which Blanchot insists elsewhere the absolute requirement that of these two thoughts neither should take precedence over the other and reintroduce the authoritarian pre-eminence of a dialectic of power and possibility not that Blanchot was ever reluctant to use the power of the dialectic to think the dialectics of power as even a cursory reading of his more specifically political writings will show only that he was steadfastly resistant to the lure of its totalising omnipotence103

One of the lessons of Antelmersquos book for Blanchotrsquos political thinking was the important reminder that history was not all There was an outside a form of radical indigence a quasi-biological limit as Antelme phrased it resistant to all possible power which interrupted or suspended the possibility of history not least because it was irreducible to the history of possibility In the dialogue on Antelme as we have seen Blanchot endeavours to address this trace of impossibility by deploying the word presence preacutesence as proof of the promise of a future chance of speaking or refusing to speak The word preacutesence separated though it often is from the cognate term preacutesent may seem surprising in this context and in later work by Blanchot would increasingly be set aside or explicitly rejected It is however common enough in texts published by Blanchot in the early 1960s as we shall see including most notably of all


LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli which came out only a month before the article on Antelme The following year in Summer 1963 Blanchot also published in LrsquoArc the essay lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo discussed earlier Glossing Charrsquos poetical question lsquoHow to live without the unknown in prospect [Comment vivre sans inconnu devant soi]rsquo and drawing on Heraclitusrsquo characterisation of the oracle at Delphi Blanchot wrote as follows

Searching [La recherche] mdash poetry thought mdash relates to the unknown [lrsquoinconnu] as unknown This relation discloses [deacutecouvre] the unknown but by a disclosure [drsquoune deacutecouverte] that leaves it veiled [agrave couvert] through this relation there is presence of the unknown [preacutesence de lrsquoinconnu] the unknown in this presence is rendered present but always as unknown [comme inconnu] This relation of presence [rapport de preacutesence] must leave intact mdash untouched mdash what it conveys and still veiled [non deacutevoileacute] what it discloses [deacutecouvre] This relation will not be an unveiling [deacutevoilement] The unknown will not be revealed but indicated104

Six years later reprising the selfsame passage in LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchot nevertheless paused to reconsider the word preacutesence The first two occurrences in the passage given above he rewrote not as preacutesence but as ldquopreacutesencerdquo within quotation marks while in the case of the third (rapport de preacutesence) he deleted preacutesence entirely At a stroke of the pen preacutesence was no longer entirely present to itself it had undergone an internal or external displacement separating it from itself or even annulling it entirely it was no longer therefore in Blanchotrsquos handling of it a properly phenomenological concept105 And elsewhere in the essay Blanchot has recourse to a similar strategy of effacement and reinscription A page later for instance where it had been enough in 1963 to refer to lsquorelating to the unknown without unveiling it [sans le deacutevoiler] through a relation of presence [une relation de preacutesence] that might not be termed a disclosurersquo now in 1969 it became urgent to write of lsquorelating to the unknown without unveiling it through a relation of non-presence [une relation de nonshypreacutesence] that might not be termed a disclosurersquo106 Not only was preacutesence returned to itself as ldquopreacutesencerdquo or indeed effaced entirely it was now synonymous with nonshypreacutesence

A turnInG 49

In such instances it might be said the word reaches the limit of its own possibility and power it survives barely no longer as itself but only as itself without itself it has become inseparable from the otherness disclosed but not unveiled within and without it Presence then at this stage is not a self-belonging in the luminosity of Being but merely a trace effaced without name futural and always already past which is how Blanchot visibly and invisibly inscribes within his own text the effect without effect of the neuter And it is also what for Blanchot is crucially at stake in Antelmersquos modest affirmation of the quasi-biological unity of the species Here as there without rhetorical appropriation there is suspension of power withdrawal of possibility experience without experience a disclosure that does not reveal ontological ethical or moral certainty but an exigency an imperative a requirement a prescription that of the other the stranger the unknown the outside demanding to be thought in terms irreducible to the language of power or the language of concepts

What this implies for both Antelme and Blanchot is this that history (both the possibility of meaning and the meaning of possibility) was inseparable from its interruptions its absences its suspension All historical periodisations all moments sequences or ages turn on something necessarily withdrawn from history dividing history from itself so to speak allowing history to be told or recounted but which history as such cannot assimilate save as an event that while being historical through and through is nevertheless always already more or less than historical Events in this sense have a dual status they both belong to history and interrupt it Invited in 1986 by La Quinzaine litteacuteraire to comment on the magazinersquos twentieth anniversary this was the point Blanchot sought to make lsquoTime timersquo he wrote lsquois something of which we have no need [Le temps le temps nous nrsquoen avons pas besoin]rsquo And the key events of those twenty years reaching beyond their particular meaning he added had thereby acquired absolute status which it was impossible to diminish overcome or deny107 Similarly when some short time after the events of May 1968 in Paris it fell to Blanchot to evoke without defining it the change of epoch or changement drsquoeacutepoque that affecting numerous other contemporary cultural phenomena including developments in literary theory and the avant-garde novel served to reveal the epoch to itself he was categorical the historical but also more-than-historical absolute


event in question was lsquowhat happened there [ce qui srsquoest passeacute lagrave]rsquo in Auschwitz Warsaw (the ghetto and uprising) Treblinka Dachau Buchenwald Neuengamme Oranienburg Belsen Mauthausen ravensbruumlck so many others Why so many names and why the refusal of any one emblematic name Because each was singular each belonged to history but was irreducible to it each demanded memory and responsibility both here and now and beyond the confines of the present Immediately after recalling the events of May 1968 summed up in the famous retort to antisemitic attacks on Daniel Cohn-Bendit lsquoWe are all German Jewsrsquo lsquoNous sommes tous des Juifs allemandsrsquo Blanchot traced two other names that of a non-Jewish writer and a solitary book Antelmersquos LrsquoEspegravece humaine108

An epoch then is not simply a period of time grounded in teleological or archeological self-identity as blithely assumed by those who glibly refer to the postmodern age postmodernity postmodernism or even postpostmodernism Indeed in order to be thought at all no epoch can be fully contemporary with itself Not only does it have its beginnings elsewhere in some other time or age but it is always already marked or re-marked within itself by a caesura or hiatus a pivot or moment that does not belong to history as such if only because it is what makes history thinkable at all While enabling history then it also interrupts it which is why all periodisations are necessarily provisional speculative and inconclusive An epoch is what begins or ends But it is also what can never begin or end And this is why as Blanchot explains in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre all writing under the aegis of the fragmentary ndash and all writing suggests Blanchot partakes in the fragmentary ndash not only interrupts history but just as importantly interrupts its own interruption

V

radical suspension

Here then lsquoThe scene illustrates but the idea not an effective action in a hymen (from which proceeds the Dream) dissolute but sacred between desire and fulfilment perpetration and its

A turnInG 51

memory here preceding there recalling in the future in the past under the false appearance of a present Thus operates the Mime whose acting is limited to a perpetual allusiveness without breaking the glass it installs thus a medium pure of fictionrsquo [Voici ndash laquo La scegravene nrsquoillustre que lrsquoideacutee pas une action effective dans un hymen (drsquoougrave procegravede le Recircve) vicieux mais sacreacute entre le deacutesir et lrsquoaccomplissement la perpeacutetration et son souvenir ici devanccedilant lagrave remeacutemorant au futur au passeacute sous une apparence fausse de preacutesent Tel opegravere le Mime dont le jeu se borne agrave une allusion perpeacutetuelle sans briser la glace il installe ainsi un milieu pur de fiction raquo]

MALLArMeacute lsquoMimiquersquo109

Etymology not always a trustworthy guide had already said as much For an epoch from the Greek έpόcή is not primarily a period of time but an interruption a stoppage or a station a fixed point or pause a detour or a turning a remarkable moment therefore that implies a holding to the edge and a suspension of judgement

Much earlier in the twentieth century while still a student in Strasbourg Blanchot had no doubt encountered the term έpόcή epocheacute or epoch in a similar sense not only in the original Greek but also in a more contemporary setting in the work of Edmund Husserl where in the guise of the phenomenological reduction it represents the first conceptual move in the discovery and exploration of a radically innovative dimension of philosophical experience which Husserl would call transcendental consciousness Much of this will have been familiar to Blanchot One of his closest friends and fellow students at the time Emmanuel Levinas had been working on a doctoral thesis on Husserl since 1927 As Blanchot reported in a letter to Salomon Malka in November 1981 the pair at the time discussed Husserlrsquos work lsquoon an almost daily basis [au jour le jour]rsquo110 There is every likelihood too that Blanchot together with Levinas also attended the two lectures delivered by Husserl in Strasbourg in early March 1929 which later formed part of the matter of the philosopherrsquos Cartesian Meditations a book which Levinas in collaboration with Gabrielle Pfeiffer soon after translated into French111

As Husserl argues in his 1929 lectures the phenomenological epocheacute owed something if not to the aims and methods at least


to the possibility of Cartesian hyperbolic doubt For following in Descartesrsquos footsteps Husserlrsquos purpose was likewise to break philosophically with all naive dogmatic unfounded but well-established assumptions about the structure and meaning of experience ndash what Husserl for his part describes as the lsquonatural attitudersquo otherwise known as lsquothe world [die Welt]rsquo which is to say lsquothe sum total of objects of possible experience and experiential cognition of objects that on the basis of actual experiences are cognizable in correct theoretical thinkingrsquo ndash in order to proceed to a more rigorous foundation or better refoundation of philosophical and scientific knowledge112 To fulfil that aim Husserlrsquos strategy was not to doubt however provisionally all that was capable of doubt in order to establish as Husserl puts it lsquoa sphere of absolutely indubitable beingrsquo under the auspices of the celebrated cogito ergo sum and thereby proceed to the ontological proof of the existence of the human self or soul in the world113 More modestly albeit in the end with more radical consequences rather than negating the natural attitude as Descartes had proposed which in Husserlian terms was already to adopt an unwarranted stance or position in respect of worldly experience it was to abstain from any act of belief as to the existence or non-existence of the world and thus to put the so-called natural attitude lsquoout of action [auszliger Aktion]rsquo to lsquoexclude [ausschalten]rsquo or lsquoput it into parentheses [einklammern]rsquo114 As a result of this turn or shift in perspective opening up lsquoan infinite realm of being of a new kind [eine neuartige unendliche Seinssphaumlre]rsquo as Husserl formulates it (une sphegravere nouvelle et infinie drsquoexistence Levinas and Pfeiffer write) the epocheacute inaugurated an entirely new set of fundamental originary philosophical questions bearing on the manner in which transcendental consciousness bestows sense or meaning on worldly experience as such115 As Husserl explains in the first of the 1929 Meditations

The universal depriving of acceptance [Auszligergeltungsetzen in Husserl mise hors valeur in Levinas-Pfeiffer] the lsquoinhibitingrsquo [lsquoInhibierenrsquo lsquoinhibitionrsquo] or lsquoputting out of playrsquo [lsquoAuszligerspielshysetzenrsquo lsquomise hors jeursquo] of all positions taken towards the already-given objective world and in the first place all existential positions (those concerning being illusion possible being being likely probable etc [existence apparence existence possible hypotheacutetique probable et autres in Levinas-Pfeiffer]) mdash or as it

A turnInG 53

is also called the lsquophenomenological epocheacutersquo and lsquoparenthesisingrsquo [lsquoEinklammernrsquo lsquomise entre parenthegravesesrsquo] of the objective world mdash therefore does not leave us confronting nothing On the contrary we gain possession of something by it and what we (or to speak more precisely what I the one who is meditating) acquire by it is my pure living with all the pure subjective processes making this up and everything meant in them purely as meant in them the universe of lsquophenomenarsquo in the (particular and also the wider) phenomenological sense The epocheacute can also be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend myself purely as Ego [als Ich comme moi pur] and with my own pure conscious life in and by which the entire objective world exists for me and is precisely as it is for me116

Husserlrsquos project he was at pains to stress in this later work was not grounded in psychology The ego of which he speaks was irreducible to any psychological entity of that name and the consciousness at stake in his analysis anything but merely empirical As the philosopher reminds his readers towards the end of the first Meditation

by phenomenological epocheacute I reduce my natural human Ego and my psychic life mdash the realm of my psychological selfshyexperience mdash to my transcendental phenomenological Ego the realm of transcendental phenomenological self-experience The objective world that exists for me that always has and always will exist for me the only world that can ever exist for me mdash this world with all its objects [ ] derives its whole sense and its existential status which it has for me from me myself from me as the transcendental Ego the Ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental phenomenological epocheacute117

The rigour and detail of Husserlrsquos carefully differentiated analyses are well known This was not to say as far as Levinas was concerned notwithstanding a certain intellectualism that there was anything dryly technical about Husserlrsquos project On the contrary for Levinas who had arguably begun approaching Husserl from a perspective informed or at the very least inflected by Heideggerrsquos recasting of the tasks of phenomenology Husserlrsquos key concerns were already ontological ones This at any event was the burden of his 1930


dissertation which concluded by arguing that lsquo[t]he thesis of the ontological value inherent in subjectivity and in its intrinsic meaning constitutes the true basis of all Husserlrsquos thinking that to be is to be lived [ecirctre crsquoest ecirctre veacutecu] and to have a meaning in life [avoir un sens dans la vie] The phenomenological reduction has no other purpose than to make our true self present to us albeit to render it present to a purely theoretical and contemplative perspective which considers life but is no longer synonymous with itrsquo118

Here then for Levinas and arguably for his friend Blanchot too was a radically new philosophical resource characterised by two complementary yet equally essential perspectives On the one hand the Husserlian theory of intentionality according to which consciousness was always consciousness of something served to embed consciousness in concrete differentiated experience where it was faced with the transcendence of worldly objects not to mention the thorny question of intersubjectivity which was of particular concern to Levinas as subsequent developments would show On the other by dint of the logic of intentionality itself it remained a defining property of all transcendental consciousness that it could and should exceed the givenness of any world Both motifs came together in the phenomenological epocheacute and notwithstanding various differences of opinion or emphasis the promise of renewal that Husserlrsquos thinking represented for Levinas was to remain undiminished throughout the following decade and beyond Indeed writing in 1940 in a fresh overview of Husserlrsquos achievement published only two years after the philosopherrsquos death against the backdrop of radically changed historical and political circumstances Levinas marked the important legacy of the Husserlian epocheacute in the same unmistakeably redemptive terms lsquoThe transcendental reductionrsquo he wrote

is a violence which man mdash a being among other beings mdash does to himself in order to find himself again as pure thought To find himself again in this purity it will not suffice for him to reflect on himself for reflection itself does not suspend his involvement in the world does not re-establish the world in its role as point of identification of a multiplicity of intentions To transform manrsquos lsquotechnicalrsquo thought into spiritual activity it will therefore be necessary to refrain from presupposing the world as a condition of the mind Every truth that implicitly contains the

A turnInG 55

lsquothesis of the existence of objectsrsquo must thus be suspended The philosopher denies himself the technical habits of the man he is and who finds himself situated in the world each time he posits the existence of an object What he then discovers is himself as a philosopher and his consciousness as a consciousness that bestows a meaning upon things but does not lsquoweighrsquo upon them and the truths themselves suspended as noemata of his thought whose meaning and existence he envisages without allowing himself to be lured into positing the latter He discovers himself as transcendental consciousness The phenomenological reduction is thus an operation through which the mind suspends the validity of the natural thesis of existence in order to study its meaning in the thought that has constituted it and that for its part is no longer a part of the world but prior to the world In this returning to primary self-evidence in this manner I recover at once the origin and the significance of all of my knowledge and the true meaning of my presence in the world119

In retrospect it is not hard to understand the appeal of this radically new philosophical project for a writer such as Blanchot for whom hopes of far-reaching even violent renewal counted for so much in the years after he left university Like Husserl who concluded the Cartesian Meditations on this note Blanchot too might well have subscribed to the notion that it was first necessary to lose the world through phenomenological reduction in order properly to regain it by universal self-reflection120 As Levinas was quick to notice it is perhaps enough to read the opening pages of the 1941 version of the novel Thomas lrsquoObscur to sense the powerful literary impact the phenomenological epocheacute had on Blanchot during that period just as it did for other influential thinkers and writers in France at the time121 In 1938 at any event while still at work on Thomas lrsquoObscur but having in the meantime read further in Heidegger (notably the 1936 rome lecture lsquoHoumllderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung [Houmllderlin and the Essence of Poetry]rsquo)122 Blanchot enthusiastically paid tribute to Sartrersquos La Nauseacutee by pointing out how that novel much like his own albeit in different fashion was lsquovisibly inspired by a philosophical movement that is little known in France but is of the utmost importance that of Edmund Husserl and especially Martin Heideggerrsquo123 And in the years that followed in numerous book reviews for the Journal des deacutebats between 1941 and 1944


Blanchot continued explicitly and implicitly to maintain his belief in the literary significance of the founding philosophical texts he had encountered during the preceding decade and a half124

But how far was Husserlrsquos phenomenological epocheacute consistent with Blanchotrsquos experience as a writer of fiction In the early part of Le Pas aushydelagrave published many years later Blanchot reflects on his early encounter with literature in the 1930s and on his experience as a writer whose writing turned its author aside from the world as such and forced him to suspend what might easily have been described in the words of Husserl cited earlier as lsquoall positions taken towards the already-given objective world and in the first place all existential positions (those concerning being illusion possible being being likely probable etc)rsquo a movement that in 1973 referring to his former self in the third person Blanchot restages as follows

Try as I may I cannot picture the person [celui] who was not me and who without wishing it [sans le vouloir] began to write writing (and then realising it) in such a way that as a result the pure product of doing nothing introduced itself into the world and into his world This went on lsquoat nightrsquo During the day there were the acts of the day everyday words everyday writing statements values habits nothing that counted and yet something one dimly had to call life The certainty that in writing he was putting this certainty itself into parentheses [la certitude qursquoen eacutecrivant il mettait preacuteciseacutement entre parenthegraveses cette certitude] including the certainty of himself as a subject of writing led him slowly but also immediately into an empty space whose void (the barred zero like a heraldic device) in no way prevented the twists and turns of a lengthy itinerary125

Notwithstanding an obvious difference in purpose there is much here that is readily reminiscent of the kind of epochal procedure recommended by Husserl Like the philosopher Blanchot the writer of fiction sets aside the world and his own worldly activity neither of which are negated or denied but carry on as before at least by day while at night a new kind of experience prior to both world and work makes itself felt and takes hold in which all manner of everyday positions or propositions are simply left out of account In the process while the writer writes literally as well as metaphorically lsquoat nightrsquo his individual psychological self is also put in limbo And

A turnInG 57

as a whole new universe (or pre-universe) of thoughts and questions offers itself it becomes apparent ndash apparent without being apparent in the darkness of this other night as Blanchot will later call it ndash that thought language writing have the strange radical propensity not only to exhaust the horizon of what is already thinkable as such but also to pass beyond the world as it is seemingly given in order to apply themselves to the constitution of such a world previously thought to be necessarily out of reach thus affirming one of the crucial insights in all Blanchotrsquos (and Levinasrsquos) subsequent thinking inspired by Husserlrsquos theory of intentionality and even found by Blanchot as we have seen in the fragmentary texts of Nietzschersquos Nachlaszlig which is that thought always contains more than it can contain and words always say more than that of which they are capable126

On the other hand these parallels ought not to obscure the far-reaching incompatibility between the phenomenological epocheacute and the epochal experience of writing as described by Blanchot in 1973 The differences are several The most prominent relate to the divergent nature of the two projects if indeed the second can be adequately termed a project at all in so far as Blanchot insists that writing in those early years was not something willed by the writer it was simply what occurred In any case notwithstanding the phenomenologistrsquos experiential investment in thinking the fact remains as Levinas points out that Husserlrsquos enterprise was explicitly driven by a conceptual agenda under the control of the meditating self inquiring into the conditions under which consciousness is rooted in the world and meaning bestowed upon the world as such In Blanchot however the epochal experience of writing was far more radical It was not conditioned by the strategic ambition of uncovering lsquoa new scientific domainrsquo127 as Husserl called it It therefore not only set aside the world and its activities not only suspended everyday psychological experience it went a step further in neutralising all certainty including the transcendental claim to which Husserl confidently subscribed not least out of sheer philosophical necessity that a first or last ground might thus be reached embodied in what Husserl deploying the phenomenological reduction as the gateway to understanding of the constitution of the world as such articulated as lsquopure consciousness in its own absolute being [das reine Bewuszligtsein in seinem absoluten Eigensein]rsquo For lsquothat is what is leftrsquo he explained lsquoas the sought-after ldquophenomenological residuumrdquo even though we have ldquoexcluded


[ausgeschaltet]rdquo the whole world with all physical things living creatures and human beings ourselves included In actual fact we have lost nothing but gained the whole of absolute being which correctly understood holds within itself and thereby ldquoconstitutes [konstituiert]rdquo all worldly transcendencesrsquo128

Blanchotrsquos own encounter with writing however which probably explains his closer affinity with the thought of Heidegger was less a thinking of the constitutive irreducible originality of transcendental consciousness than an abyssal exposure to the ontological anxiety and groundlessness of language exceeding all worldly constitution in general This was at any event the burden of the lengthy previously unpublished essay opening Faux Pas in which the author endeavoured to describe the predicament of the writer as moving lsquoDe lrsquoangoisse au langage [From Dread to Language]rsquo129 And as that 1943 presentation made clear showing in passing how far the writer had also begun to distance himself from Heidegger what was at stake for Blanchot was not the status of language as ground but more radically as that which being always already prior to any ground as the thought of the il y a that Blanchot shared with Levinas had long testified bore the irreducible albeit paradoxical mark of an original absence of all origin130 In so far as the term may be used at all then Blanchotrsquos literary (yet always more or less than literary) epocheacute as Le Pas aushydelagrave shows was no simple (re)foundational gesture It could not therefore be thematised as such in thought but like the always possible addition or removal of a pair of invisible parentheses only performed in writing as an unceasing movement of inscription and effacement of differentiation deferral and displacement in which language rather than supplying any transcendental ground was synonymous only with its own distance from itself its past fragility and futural alterity Language in this perspective was anything but coincident with itself Its failing was its strength its excess its insufficiency and this reversibility a necessary feature of its ongoing articulation Which is also to say that however much it shared a condition of possibility with Husserlrsquos phenomenological epocheacute Blanchotrsquos thought of the neuter remained irreducible to all phenomenology

Already in Husserl of course as Derrida would later show in La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene (Speech and Phenomena) the question of language in general was a constant source of unresolved difficulty131 As Derrida famously argues these derived from Husserlrsquos decision

A turnInG 59

within the opening afforded by the epocheacute to emphasise that lsquocore of properly adequate experiencersquo found as he puts it in lsquothe living self-presence expressed in the grammatical meaning of the proposition ego cogitorsquo132 In order to maintain this privilege motivated by tacit adherence to long-established metaphysical tradition Husserl found himself obliged to subtract or extract the speaking voice in so far as it was synonymous with consciousness (voice for Husserl writes Derrida lsquois consciousnessrsquo133) from the irreducible and inescapable exteriority both spatialisation and temporalisation of what Derrida in his analysis articulates as writing (or archi-writing) in general The precarious nature of Husserlrsquos account of language was such that in attempting to drive a wedge as Derrida puts it lsquonot between language and non-language but within language in general between the expressive and the non-expressiversquo134 he was left with the self-presence of a speaking voice that was what it was only because of what it excluded and to which it owed its possibility and which it necessarily retained within itself as an indelible mark of temporalisation ie retention and protention alterity deferral and difference lsquoAnd that pure differencersquo observes Derrida

which constitutes the self-presence of the living present reintro-duces into it in originary fashion [originairement] the very impurity it was thought possible to banish from it The living present surges forth [jaillit] on the basis of its non-identity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace It is always already a trace This trace is unthinkable on the basis of the simplicity of a present whose life might be deemed internal to itself [dont la vie serait inteacuterieure agrave soi] The self of the living present is originarily [originairement] a trace The trace is not an attribute of which it might be said that it is what the self of the living present lsquooriginarily isrsquo [laquo est originairement raquo] Originary-being [lrsquoecirctreshyoriginaire] must be thought on the basis of the trace and not the other way round Archi-writing is at work at the very origin of meaning135

In so far as the epocheacute was essential for the articulation of Husserlian transcendental consciousness what this also meant was that the possibility of the epocheacute was not lodged in transcendental consciousness itself but in the writing and language that made reduction possible


prompting Derrida to entertain the suggestion earlier in the discussion lsquocontrary to Husserlrsquos express intentionrsquo as he ironically puts it that lsquothe ldquoreductionrdquo even before becoming a method might be deemed no different [se confondrait] from the most spontaneous act of spoken discourse the simple activity of speaking and the power of expressionrsquo136 If so rather than providing any secure transcendental ground what the epocheacute may be said to reveal is nothing other than the irreducible propensity of words themselves even as they advance meaning(s) at the same time to suspend withdraw or overwrite them and in so doing perpetually efface and reinscribe themselves the one as the other the other as the one in a manner radically inimical to all hierarchy with the result as Derridian diffeacuterance went on to suggest that the divide between the transcendental and the empirical however necessary for thought could not do other than fall victim to its abyssal fragility What comes to stand in the place of the self-coincident origin then is what Derrida in his discussion of Husserl proposes to call originary supplementarity this complex logic (or alogic) of impurity alteration displacement and substitution by which what comes first is not what is one or originary but that which is second or secondary a redoubled repetitive non-identical trace refusing to obey the teleology of temporal progression constantly referring and deferring to another137

Like originary supplementarity the neuter as articulated by Blanchot is also traversed by irreducible otherness disturbing and unsettling each and every position and possibility of demarcation Indeed both terms speak in different idiom of a parallel movement of non-identical repetition difference and dispersion For the neuter too this most modest and self-effacing of words is not attributable in Blanchot to any simple origin but rather to a movement of erasure and inscription that is always at least double always already a case of substitution for what only belatedly seems primary or final The neuter then is never itself lsquoas suchrsquo is always a supernumerary imposter (is) always already inscribed or effaced in the form of a supplementary mark supplementing nothing At times it does this almost visibly as in lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo in the quotation marks surrounding ldquopreacutesencerdquo or in the suspensive trace of a privative prefix (as in nonshypreacutesence) or in the play of quotation marks and parentheses cultivated say by Mallarmeacute (at the elusive and ever retreating centre of lsquoMimiquersquo ie both the scene described and the text describing it were it not that this difference too is nothing

A turnInG 61

other than precarious) At other times it does so invisibly without ever finding (for good reason) a recognisable place to call its own as in the case of literary discourse But both here and there it moves in indeterminate and indeterminable manner separating each word from itself and overwriting it with the spectre of always another (and another and another) not necessarily part of any language nor part of any one language but belonging to all known or unknown languages in general working (or better unworking) as a force of fragmentary dispersion exceeding the horizon of intended meanings and silently speaking in the gaps and interstices of language as the threat and promise of that endlessly recapitulative movement (or ressassement eacuteternel) carried by the neuter and which likewise carries the neuter in its turn

The neuter then is not Being neither ground nor foundation138 Both multiple and singular it (is) radical non-foundation which is why it can become a provisional name for the fragmentary which is itself but a provisional name for the neuter and why each is synonymous with the possibility of literature a possibility that does not bestow on literature any self-presence self-identity constitutive meaning defining contours or essential originating autonomy but serves only as a name for the infinite suspension division or referral that is an irreducible trait of all language and therefore all literature all non-literature and all silence past and future lsquoWould meaning in that case only exist through the neuterrsquo asks one of Blanchotrsquos voices in the strategically named Parenthegraveses following lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo To which the other rejoins lsquoOnly in so far as the neuter remains outside meaning [eacutetranger au sens] by which I mean above all neuter in respect of meaning not indifferent but haunting the possibility of meaning and non-meaning alike [sens et nonshysens] by the invisible deviation of a difference [lrsquoeacutecart invisible drsquoune diffeacuterence]rsquo And the conversation continues

mdash lsquoFrom which one might conclude that phenomenology had already begun to lose its way [eacutetait deacutejagrave deacutevoyeacutee] in the direction of the neuterrsquo mdash lsquoJust like everything that goes under the name of literature if one of its characteristics is to pursue indefinitely the epocheacute the rigorous task of suspension and self-suspension without it being possible to attribute this movement to negativityrsquo mdash lsquoNeuter might be a way of describing the literary act that participates neither in affirmation nor in negation


[ni drsquoaffirmation ni de neacutegation] and (in the first instance) releases meaning as a ghost [comme fantocircme] a haunting obsession [hantise] a simulacrum of meaning as though it was in literaturersquos nature to be spectral not haunted by itself but because we might think of it as supplying this prerequisite of all meaning [ce preacutealable de tout sens] which is its haunting obsession [sa hantise] or more simply because it might be reduced to being concerned with nothing other than simulating the reduction of the reduction [simuler la reacuteduction de la reacuteduction] irrespective of whether it was phenomenological or not and thus far from negating it (even if on occasion it pretends to do so) magnifying it by way of the interminable with the addition of everything that undermines and disrupts itrsquo139

These exchanges and others like them printed in italics marked at the start of each sequence with a redoubled symbol are themselves as far as LrsquoEntretien infini is concerned self-avowedly parenthetical like so many conversational asides hesitating in the wings of the text interrupting and framing Blanchotrsquos many discussions of literary and other topics while also being interrupted and framed by them the one and the other the other and the one They are each part of the book but also gesture impossibly beyond its covers For what is the relationship between Blanchotrsquos parentheses and the texts surrounding them but equally surrounded by them If the purpose of parentheses is to exclude disable or put out of action as Husserl suggests do Blanchotrsquos parenthetical remarks set aside a given discourse on literature that of the presumed author or are they not themselves set aside by that discourse In which case as part of that very discourse as well as bracketing Blanchotrsquos other essays do they not necessarily also bracket themselves A curious instability of the kind that arises whenever linguistic borderlines or margins are at stake comes to affect the putative relationship between parenthesising agent and parenthesised thing between lsquotranscendental consciousnessrsquo and lsquoworldly objectrsquo with the result that each is infiltrated by the other and loses its place making it impossible as in Mallarmeacutersquos lsquoMimiquersquo to decide which is which

As emblems of the neuter then Blanchotrsquos own parentheses are themselves both neutralising and neutralised All hierarchy

A turnInG 63

between subject and object transcendental ground and objective world becomes henceforth largely untenable and as in Mallarmeacutersquos enactment or re-enactment of the mime of Pierrot announced in 1886 the reader is faced with a textual theatre without stage or spectator without actors or roles without inside or outside constantly referring or deferring to other texts in a citational motion where everything and nothing is always already quotation simultaneously joined and disjoined as Mallarmeacute puts it in cod italics that there as here prove a joyful erasure of origin rather than any guarantee of authority lsquounder the false appearance of a presentrsquo lsquosous une apparence fausse de preacutesentrsquo As Blanchot suggests in these circumstances the phenomenological reduction (but Blanchot at this stage has no doubt left phenomenology behind) reverses itself testifying not to restriction but to ramification not to presence or absence but to difference or diffeacuterance not to visibility but to that which lies beyond the visible and the invisible without negativity at a distance without distance the trace effaced of the neuter

The neuter then for Blanchot is a thought perpetually other than itself and other than the other Its time is not that of human history nor divine presence but the time of the absence of time outside history work or project but aside from eternity or timelessness too Neither the one nor the other its time is that of return or returning what Blanchot returning again to Nietzsche calls le retour And when Blanchot once more had occasion to cite the Mallarmean (and by now Derridean) tag about the false appearance of the present it was as we shall see in 1973 in Le Pas aushydelagrave in the course of an exposition of what secretly fictitiously madly is invoked by Nietzsche as the experience the revelation at times even the doctrine of what he names as the Eternal return of the Same ndash were it not that what returns is precisely not the Same in its presumed identity with itself but ever the always deferred and differentiated other

Dispersing all thought of identity in this way the neuter effects in thought a radical turning ineliminable and yet indeterminate whose consequences are necessarily difficult to gauge as far as any sense of the direction character or meaning of a given historical epoch is concerned Already in 1960 in the lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoeacutepoquersquo at times ironically with reservations and with necessary uncertainty at times transferring responsibility for their remarks


to such questionable authorities as Ernst Juumlnger and Teilhard de Chardin (not to mention Hegel Marx Herodotus Kant Nietzsche or the Bible) Blanchotrsquos two interlocutors spoke of the impending changes perhaps afoot in France and the Western world in general changes that were likely to have significant political philosophical and other consequences revisiting those apocalyptic pages some nine years later Blanchot chose to leave them to their fate neither negating nor endorsing them merely adjusting here or there this or that form of words He supplemented them however with a sequence of fragmentary remarks each incised once more with a redoubled sign This extended conversation piece accordingly acquired a double title in two parts each six syllables long held together and held apart by a colon It was no longer lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoeacutepoque [Conversation on a Change of Epoch]rsquo but lsquoSur un changement drsquoeacutepoque lrsquoexigence du retour [On a Change of Epoch the Demand of return]rsquo140 The rhetorical effect was calculated but only in so far as Blanchotrsquos text thereby offered itself as a response to the incalculable

Blanchot began this second previously unpublished part of the chapter where the 1960 discussion had been suspended with Nietzschersquos daring profession of faith in the future as expressed in a famous aphorism from Die froumlhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) lsquoldquoMy thoughtsrdquo said the wanderer to his shadow ldquoshould show me where I stand but not disclose where I am going I love ignorance of the future [Ich liebe die Unwissenheit um die Zukunft] and will not succumb to impatience nor the premature enjoyment of promised thingsrdquorsquo141 There was added poignancy in Blanchotrsquos repeated quotation for in earlier times amidst the upheavals of 1937 and 1944 it had been countersigned and reaffirmed at least twice over by the friend who was Georges Bataille and whose life in the meantime before time as the aphorismrsquos certain endorsement of uncertainty demanded had itself sadly reached an end142

In his supplementary remarks perhaps still in silent homage to Bataille Blanchot first addressed the paradoxes and aporias arising from the thought or supposition of the impending end of history It was not that Blanchot had somehow become a belated convert to Kojegraveversquos teleological anthropology it was rather that like Bataille and like Nietzsche Blanchot in LrsquoEntretien infini was endeavouring to think the challenge of a future that was radically irreducible to presence a future not as being but as event not as a possibility

A turnInG 65

always already contained within a horizon of appearance but as an unprecedented unforeseeable occurrence beyond calculation or recognition His was not a transcendental inquiry then with the aim of legislating for all possible experience or experiences but an exploration of the impossibility that announces itself in thought as it does repeatedly in Thomas lrsquoObscur as the limit and condition of thinking itself What interested Blanchot in the notion of the end of history like Bataille was that while it started from an inalienable belief in the absolute omnipotence of a dialectic of progress unity and meaning it was soon forced to admit defeat at the hands of what it sought to conquer ending up turning into its own irrecuperable opposite as an experience without object sense or purpose For what would happen if the teleological ambition of the end of history were to be fulfilled No sooner would historyrsquos end be achieved than it would make any announcement to that effect impossible or meaningless in which case history would not be over and it could no longer verify or confirm its claims of totalisation A trace of incompletion would be left a repetitive witness to the unachievable possibility of its ending The end of history would not then be a dialectical dream it would become an impossible nightmare a thought to end all thoughts whose only realisation would be an endless interruption of all realisation

But Blanchot does not linger long on this fable of the end of history essential though it may seem not only to epochal thoughts of apocalypse but to epochal thought in general Approaching anew the prognosis of the initial 1960 text this fresh spiral of writing also displaced the temptation literally to accept the myth of a new age a new beginning or a new foundation Dissipating the notion of any simple epochal break Blanchotrsquos analysis of historyrsquos impossible end soon gave way to an exploration of the infinitely more tortuous aporetics of Nietzschersquos thought of eternal return As Blanchot recalls the status of that thought in Nietzsche was subject to often wildly differing interpretations For some like the influential early commentator Ernst Bertram it was a source of embarrassment the sign of a more than momentary lapse of reason on the part of its proponent lsquoa pseudo-revelation [Scheinoffenbarung]rsquo a lsquodeceptively teasing delusional mystery [dies truumlgerisch aumlffende Wahnmysterium]rsquo and alongside the overman one of Nietzschersquos two lsquogreat pedagogical liesrsquo143 For Karl Loumlwith on the other hand writing in the mid-1930s it was a key element in Nietzschersquos philosophical system where it


featured not only as an inescapable consequence but also a potent radicalisation of contemporary nihilism from which it offered the sole possibility of redemption The logic of Nietzschersquos project in this sense according to Loumlwith was rigorously double lsquoNietzschersquos whole philosophical systemrsquo he argued lsquois characterised by this twofold turning of the path along the one path to wisdom from the ldquoyou oughtrdquo of the devout to the ldquoI willrdquo of the freed spirit and from there to the ldquoI amrdquo here and eternally returnrsquo144

More significant however in renewing understanding of eternal return than Loumlwithrsquos efforts at reconstructing the system of Nietzschean thought at least as far as Blanchot was concerned in 1969 were the lectures given by Heidegger between 1936 and 1939 in which eternal return was given due prominence alongside will to power and radically inseparable from it as one of Nietzschersquos two fundamental metaphysical propositions lsquothe trait of beings as a whole [le trait de lrsquoeacutetant dans son ensemble] Will to Power Being [lrsquoecirctre] the Eternal return of the Samersquo as Blanchot sums it up145 There was however in Blanchotrsquos eyes a cost which was that lsquoin so far as Nietzsche is still deemed to belong to metaphysics and even fulfils it by bringing it to a close Heidegger thereby reintroduces the thought of Eternal return into metaphysics eternity is thought as an instant [lrsquoeacuteterniteacute y est penseacutee comme instant] and the instant as an instance of presence [lrsquoinstant comme lrsquoinstance de la preacutesence]rsquo146 In LrsquoEntretien infini for reasons he would go on to explain at greater length four years later Blanchot demurred and was reluctant to follow In so doing he drew sustenance from the thinking of two long-standing friends who had likewise lingered at length in the precincts of eternal return Bataille and Klossowski But if the first according to Blanchot on the basis of their many discussions about Nietzsche much preferred the sublime experience at Surlej to the doctrine Nietzsche sought to derive from it so it fell to the second in his more recent work to begin exploring the possibility or perhaps better the aporetic impossibility of any metaphysical expansion of that experience in which case Blanchot observed lsquonot only is Nietzsche the recipient of a new dispensation [une justice nouvelle] as a result of that questioning but also what is at stake in that questioning is a change so radical that we are incapable of mastering or even suffering [subir] itrsquo147

The thought of eternal return was far more slippery and intan-gible then than many of its interpretations suggested To unpack

A turnInG 67

it further Blanchot soon realised was to yield to a bewildering series of impossibly paradoxical and aporetic conundrums that tested thinking to the limit In 1969 Blanchot distinguished at least four critical ways in which the eternal return of the same turns aside from itself or upon itself in literally revolutionary fashion First not unlike the thought of the end of history the realisation of eternal return even as it aspires to the greatest possible coherence Blanchot pointed out is itself fundamentally incoherent There is disparity between its own status as revelation and the content of that revelation Indeed to claim eternal return as a revelation of the most radical sort simply cannot be possible if any truth value attaches to the revelation which then ceases to be Conversely if eternal return is indeed as the revelation suggests the boldest of all possible truths then it follows that the revelation is itself at best a trivial and insignificant occurrence repeating what has already been known since the beginning of time and is at worst an impossible delusion Second it follows from the thought of eternal return itself that whoever experiences it as revelation cannot be a mere individual but already an endless circle of interchangeable personas including lsquoevery name in historyrsquo148 as Nietzsche put it a celebrated letter to Jakob Burckhardt in January 1889 even though eternal return also requires of the one whom it visits as a thought to hold his or her unique place in the infinite round as the one to whom return returns As a result Nietzsche as proponent of eternal return is both radically anonymous and yet absolutely singular But what is it that returns Blanchot asked Is the lsquosamersquo the lsquosamersquo by virtue of returning or is it always already the lsquosamersquo prior to returning But if the latter how is it possible to know it is lsquothe samersquo and if the former is it not then the case that the lsquosamersquo becomes what it is only by differing from itself and therefore without ever being the lsquosamersquo at all And finally if eternal return is the object of so many enigmas and inconsistencies that deprive it of thematic stability as a ground for interpretation what is it that is being revealed communicated or commented upon by Nietzsche and his readers

Blanchotrsquos exposition this exposure to eternal return was itself not simple It occurred by way of a sequence of fragments each bearing the fracture or interruption of a double emblematic of the neuter and each testing out the effects of a thinking of the future of that which is still to come announced in the lsquonon-identity


of the samersquo and lsquorepetitive differencersquo149 The neuter here then is only another name for return and vice versa lsquoIf Eternal return can be affirmedrsquo writes Blanchot lsquoit does not affirm return as a circle nor the primacy of Unity [la primauteacute de lrsquoUn] nor the All [le Tout] even in the name of the requirement that by Eternal return ldquoall returnsrdquo for no more than the circle and circle of circles are able to represent it can the All encompass Eternal return or coincide with it Even if ldquoall returnsrdquo it is not All that returns but it returns return (as neuter) returns [cela revient le retour (comme neutre) revient]rsquo150 And if return returns then as a neuter it necessarily also returns as the fragmentary Not the fragment or fragments these remnants left behind by the completion of the all but the fragmentary in so far as it is no longer the fragment and traverses in endless detours all writing and all language without ever being graspable or realisable as such an infinite exigency to which all possible response was necessarily finite And as Blanchotrsquos fragments on the demand of return came to a fragmentary end of their own this was why they again reached out to Nietzsche lsquoThat is how you preparersquo he wrote quoting from one of Nietzschersquos 1881 notebooks lsquofor the time when you have to speak Perhaps then you will be ashamed to speak rsquo151

From the mid-1950s onwards all Blanchotrsquos texts in one way or another would participate explicitly in the fragmentary From that point on if the future was the fragmentary as far as Blanchot was concerned it was no doubt because the fragmentary was ndash or no doubt better lsquowasrsquo not ndash the future

notes

1 Steacutephane Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes 2 vols edited by Bernard Marchal (Paris Gallimard 1998ndash2003) II 211 In architecture pendentives are lsquothe spherical triangles (or triangular segments) formed by the intersection of a hemispherical dome (or in extended use a conical surface) by two pairs of opposite arches springing from the four supporting columnsrsquo (OED) Mallarmeacute is referring to the effects and implications of what he goes on to describe as lsquoune brisure des grands rythmes litteacuterairesrsquo lsquoa break in literaturersquos major rhythmsrsquo (II 212) As Derrida recalls in De la grammatologie (Paris Minuit 1967) 96 Of Grammatology translated by Gayatri Chakravorty

A turnInG 69

Spivak (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press (1976) 1997) 65 brisure is not only a break but also an articulation or joint

2 T W Adorno Aumlsthetische Theorie edited by Gretel Adorno and rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1970) 74 Aesthetic Theory translated by robert Hullot-Kentor (London Athlone 1997) 45 translation modified

3 Adorno Aumlsthetische Theorie 283 Aesthetic Theory 189ndash90 translation modified

4 G W F Hegel Werke edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel 20 vols (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1970) XIII 25 Aesthetics translated by T M Knox 2 vols (Oxford Clarendon Press 1975) I 11 Compare Adorno Aumlsthetische Theorie 13 Aesthetic Theory 3ndash4

5 Adorno Aumlsthetische Theorie 13 Aesthetic Theory 3ndash4 True enough Adornorsquos claim that having abandoned poetry rimbaud became an office worker (or Angestellte) is not entirely consistent with the known facts of rimbaudrsquos subsequent career

6 reneacute Char Œuvres complegravetes (Paris Gallimard 1995) 275

7 Samuel Beckett Fin de partie (Paris Minuit 1957) 91 Endgame (London Faber 1958) 44 According to Gretel Adorno and rolf Tiedemann in their editorsrsquo postface Adornorsquos original intention was to dedicate his Aesthetic Theory to Beckett who is mentioned several times in the book Adornorsquos best known essay on Endgame lsquoVersuch das Endspiel zu verstehen [lsquoTrying to Understand Endgame]rsquo is collected in his Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1974) 281ndash321 Notes to Literature translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen 2 vols (New York Columbia University Press 1992) I 241ndash75 it is there that he remarks that lsquoBeckettrsquos dustbins are emblems of post-Auschwitz culturersquo

8 This is not to say that either Adorno or Blanchot explicitly rejected each otherrsquos work There is however little evidence of any sustained engagement between the pair though Blanchot does make passing reference to Adorno with some of whose work he was evidently familiar notably Philosophie der neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music) the second edition of which from 1958 Blanchot discusses in a 1963 essay entitled lsquoArs novarsquo mainly devoted to Thomas Mannrsquos Doktor Faustus (which had itself drawn significantly on Adornorsquos thinking) but principally concerned with defending artistic innovation against culture that is with affirming the demand of the fragment against the artworkrsquos aspiration to totalising unity See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini (Paris Gallimard


1969) 506ndash14 The Infinite Conversation translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1993) 345ndash50 An analogous if more fiercely polemical critique of Adorno may be found in Jean-Franccedilois Lyotard Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris Union geacuteneacuterale drsquoeacuteditions 1973) 115ndash33 where Lyotard charges as follows lsquoTotality as missing there is no god to achieve reconciliation reconciliation can only ever be present in its impossibility as parody it is Satanrsquos work However much you replace god with the devil or the prefix super- with the old subterranean mole you remain stuck within the same theological frameworkrsquo (p 125) So far critics have been disappointingly slow to investigate the relationship between Blanchot and Adorno For a helpful overview see Vivian Liska lsquoTwo Sirens Singing Literature as Contestation in Maurice Blanchot and Theodor W Adornorsquo The Power of Contestation Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot edited by Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H Hartman (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 2004) 80ndash100

9 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre (Paris Gallimard 1980) 203 The Writing of the Disaster translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1986) 134 For Derridarsquos original remark which Blanchot slightly adapts see Jacques Derrida Du droit agrave la philosophie (Paris Galileacutee 1990) 129 Whorsquos Afraid of Philosophy Right to Philosophy 1 translated by Jan Plug (Stanford Stanford University Press 2002) 80 Derrida makes a similar point on numerous occasions elsewhere as for instance in response to David Tracy in God The Gift and Postmodernism edited by John D Caputo and Michael J Scanlon (Bloomington Indiana University Press 1999) 181ndash2 The point is made too by Jean-Luc Nancy LrsquoExpeacuterience de la liberteacute (Paris Galileacutee 1988) 191ndash2 The Experience of Freedom translated by Bridget McDonald (Stanford Stanford University Press 1993) 148ndash9 Nancy concurring with Blanchot adds that lsquophilosophical discourse today is fragmentation itself [la fragmentation mecircme]rsquo


11 Blanchot LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire (Paris Gallimard 1955) 81 The Space of Literature translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1982) 83 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos lsquothought of the outsidersquo see Michel Foucaultrsquos classic 1966 essay on Blanchot lsquoLa Penseacutee du dehorsrsquo in Dits et eacutecrits 1954ndash1988 4 vols (Paris Gallimard 1994) I 518ndash39 unfortunately mistranslated by Brian Massumi as lsquoThe Thought from Outsidersquo in FoucaultshyBlanchot

A turnInG 71

(New York Zone Books 1987) 7-58 It is worth emphasising that Blanchotrsquos outside is a radical outside prior to any dialectic of inside and outside in much the same way that the other night evoked in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire precedes and exceeds the (dialectical) complementarity of day and night


13 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 394 The Infinite Conversation 264 translation modified The dialogue from which this exchange is taken was first published as lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoeacutepoquersquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 88 April 1960 724ndash34 In reprising the text nine years later as we shall see Blanchot added a second section consisting of a sequence of fragments dealing with eternal return (LrsquoEntretien infini 405ndash18 The Infinite Conversation 271ndash81)

14 Blanchot Le Dernier Homme (Paris Gallimard 1957) 147 The Last Man translated by Lydia Davis (New York Columbia University Press 1987) 89 translation modified When Le Dernier Homme was reissued in 1971 the pagination was changed Unless otherwise indicated all references here will be to the 1971 printing

15 On the shifting self-presentation of Blanchotrsquos shorter fictions see Derrida Parages revised edition (Paris Galileacutee [1986] 2003) 9 Parages edited by John P Leavey translated by Tom Conley James Hulbert John P Leavey and Avital ronell (Stanford Stanford University Press 2011) 1ndash2 I examine the specific case of Le Dernier Homme in my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit (Oxford Oxford University Press 2001) 229ndash31 Conversely subsequent reprints of Au moment voulu (1987) and Celui qui mrsquoaccompagnait pas (1996) under Gallimardrsquos standard imprint retained the generic description reacutecit which was however removed when the texts were reissued in the Gallimard LrsquoImaginaire series in 1993


17 Blanchot La Folie du jour (Paris Gallimard [1973] 2002) 30 lsquoThe Madness of the Dayrsquo translated by Lydia Davis The Station Hill Blanchot Reader edited by George Quasha (Barrytown Station Hill Press 1998) 199 translation modified

18 See Derrida Parages 233ndash66 Parages 217ndash49

19 LrsquoArrecirct de mort already knew this at least in its 1948 printing which concludes with this short third-person address to the future reader (omitted in 1971) lsquoIn the darkness he would see me my


word would be his silence and he might think he was holding sway over the world but that sovereignty would still be mine and his nothingness mine and he too would know that there is no end starting from a man who wants to end alone [il nrsquoy a pas de fin agrave partir drsquoun homme qui veut finir seul]rsquo See Blanchot LrsquoArrecirct de mort (Paris Gallimard 1948) 148 lsquoDeath Sentencersquo translated by Lydia Davis The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 187 translation slightly modified


21 Blanchot makes a similar point in the brief note accompanying the new vastly abbreviated 1950 version of Thomas lrsquoObscur lsquoThere is for every workrsquo he writes lsquoan infinity of possible variantsrsquo see Blanchot Thomas lrsquoObscur nouvelle version (Paris Gallimard 1950) 7 lsquoThomas the Obscurersquo translated by robert Lamberton The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 53

22 Compare Blanchot Le Dernier Homme 11 117 and 123 The Last Man 4 70 74 translation modified

23 See as follows (the corresponding passages in the 1971 printing are given in parentheses) Blanchot lsquoLe Calmersquo Botteghe Oscure 16 1955 28ndash36 (Le Dernier Homme 106ndash21 The Last Man 63ndash72) lsquoLe Dernier Hommersquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 46 October 1956 653ndash63 corresponding to Le Dernier Homme 7ndash23 The Last Man 1ndash11) lsquoComme un jour de neigersquo Botteghe Oscure 18 1956 11ndash19 (compare Le Dernier Homme 125ndash7 134ndash47 The Last Man 75ndash7 81ndash9) lsquoLrsquoHiverrsquo Monde nouveau January 1957 43ndash52 (compare Le Dernier Homme 26ndash8 44ndash6 47ndash56 58ndash61 The Last Man 13ndash14 24ndash5 26ndash31 33ndash5)

24 See Blanchot lsquoLe retourrsquo Botteghe Oscure VII 1951 416ndash24 lsquoLe Compagnon de routersquo Botteghe Oscure X 1952 39ndash53

25 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Botteghe Oscure XXII August 1958 22ndash33

26 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag (Pfullingen Neske 1959) 217ndash24 lsquoWaitingrsquo translated by Michael Holland The Blanchot Reader edited by Michael Holland (Oxford Blackwell 1994) 272ndash8 lsquoLrsquoOubli la deacuteraisonrsquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 106 October 1961 676ndash86 (this last text appears in LrsquoEntretien infini 289ndash99 The Infinite Conversation 194ndash201) and LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (Paris Gallimard 1962) Awaiting Oblivion translated by John Gregg (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1997) Greggrsquos choice of title for his otherwise commendable English translation of Blanchotrsquos 1962

A turnInG 73

book is doubly unfortunate for it not only abandons the carefully calculated parallelism of Blanchotrsquos dual title it also forces upon the title a transitivity absent from the French original and significantly at odds with what at stake in Blanchotrsquos writing I return to the questions raised by Blanchotrsquos homage to Heidegger in my next chapter

27 Blanchot lsquoOugrave va la litteacuteraturersquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 7 July 1953 98ndash107 (p 98) Though one of the earliest to be written the essay does not in fact appear till the beginning of the fourth and final section of the book under the title lsquoLa Disparition de la litteacuteraturersquo Le Livre agrave venir (Paris Gallimard 1959) 237ndash45 lsquoThe Disappearance of Literaturersquo The Book To Come translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford Stanford University Press 2003) 195ndash201

28 See Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 237 The Book To Come 195 Compare Martin Heidegger Holzwege (Frankfurt Klostermann 1950) 65ndash6 Off the Beaten Track edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2002) 51ndash2

29 Hegel Werke XIII 25 Aesthetics I 11 translation modified



32 On this tension between the impossibility and necessity of literary criticism see Blanchot lsquoQursquoen est-il de la critiquersquo Arguments January-February-March 1959 34ndash7 subsequently reprinted with slight changes in Lautreacuteamont et Sade (Paris Minuit 1963) 9ndash14 Lautreamont and Sade translated by Stuart and Michelle Kendall (Stanford Stanford University Press 2004) 1ndash6 it also appears in English as lsquoThe Task of Criticism Todayrsquo translated by Leslie Hill The Oxford Literary Review 22 2000 19ndash24 I explore the implications of what Blanchot says here about the future of literary criticism in my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism (Notre Dame Indiana Notre Dame University Press 2010)

33 These two dialogues reappear in the 1969 volume with slightly different titles the first (as mentioned earlier) as lsquoSur un changement drsquoeacutepoque lrsquoexigence du retourrsquo the second as lsquoParler ce nrsquoest pas voirrsquo see LrsquoEntretien infini 394ndash404 35ndash45 The Infinite Conversation 264ndash71 25ndash32 A series of other dialogue essays


notably in connection with Emmanuel Levinasrsquos Totaliteacute et infini (Totality and Infinity) (1961) soon followed

34 I quote here from Beckettrsquos subsequent English translation How It Is (London Calder amp Boyars 1964) 7 The original French runs (or crawls) as follows lsquoen moi qui furent dehors quand ccedila cesse de haleter bribes drsquoune voix ancienne en moi pas la miennersquo Comment crsquoest (Paris Minuit 1961) 9


36 Beckett Comment crsquoest 94 How It Is 84

37 See Blanchot lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo LrsquoArc 22 Summer 1963 9ndash14 in LrsquoEntretien infini 439ndash46 The Infinite Conversation 298ndash302 translation modified and lsquoLa Parola in arcipelagorsquo translated into Italian by Guido Neri Il Menabograve 7 1964 156ndash9 first published in French in a much revised extended version as lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo in LrsquoEndurance de la penseacutee (Paris Plon 1968) 103ndash8 and further revised in LrsquoEntretien infini 451ndash5 The Infinite Conversation 307ndash10 Blanchotrsquos interest in Charrsquos poems was long-standing An early essay on the poet first appeared in La Part du feu (Paris Gallimard 1949) 103ndash14 The Work of Fire translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford Stanford University Press 1995) 98ndash110 and Blanchot refers to him again in closing his 1959 essay collection (Le Livre agrave venir 305 The Book to Come 251) where he cites a fragment from lsquoLa Bibliothegraveque est en feu [The Library Is On Fire]rsquo from 1956 subsequently collected in Charrsquos La Parole en archipel (1962) which he quotes again in LrsquoEntretien infini 452 The Infinite Conversation 458 lsquoIn the explosion of the universe which we are experiencingrsquo it runs lsquoa miracle the pieces that fall to the ground are alive [Dans lrsquoeacuteclatement de lrsquounivers que nous eacuteprouvons prodige les morceaux qui srsquoabattent sont vivants]rsquo translation modified see Char Œuvres complegravetes 383 On Blanchotrsquos friendship with Char whom he first met in 1940 and with whom he shared left-wing anti-Gaullist sympathies after the war see Christophe Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible (Seyssel Champ Vallon 1998)

38 See Char Œuvres complegravetes 720ndash1 Blanchot refers to Charrsquos two-page preface which had originally served to introduce Heacuteraclite drsquoEacutephegravese edited by Yves Battistini (Paris eacuteditions Cahiers drsquoArt 1948) in lsquoLa Becircte de Lascauxrsquo in Une voix venue drsquoailleurs (Paris Gallimard 2002) 55ndash7 A Voice from Elsewhere translated by Charlotte Mandell (Albany State University of New York Press

A turnInG 75

2007) 40ndash2 Char later became an important and influential friend of Heidegger to whom he was introduced by Jean Beaufret in 1955 On their relationship see Franccediloise Dastur lsquorencontre de reneacute Char et de Martin Heideggerrsquo Europe 705ndash6 January-February 1988 102ndash11 Together with Blanchot as we shall see Char was one of only four non-German-speaking contributors to Heideggerrsquos 1959 seventieth-birthday Festschrift

39 See Char Œuvres complegravetes 651 The text from which Blanchot quotes at the end of the version of the essay printed in LrsquoEntretien infini is entitled lsquoOutrages [Outrages]rsquo It recalls Charrsquos unflinching involvement in the French resistance which took him to Algiers in 1944 and his bitter political opposition to de Gaulle as the putative external nationalist leader of the resistance (whom he first met in North Africa) it also calls attention by 1967 two years before LrsquoEntretien infini to the precarious nature of the Gaullist presidential regime in France which continued to claim its legitimacy from the resistance movement but whose political authority was to be so spectacularly called into question a year later On Charrsquos meeting with de Gaulle in 1944 see Laurent Greilsamerrsquos useful if unevenly documented biography LrsquoEacuteclair au front la vie de Reneacute Char (Paris Fayard 2004) 207 Char recorded his grudging impressions of de Gaulle by writing that lsquoWe find it hard to believe that a bugle from Saint-Cyr [un clairon de SaintshyCyr ie from Francersquos prestigious military academy] could turn into Diderotrsquos harpsichord [le clavecin de Diderot the title of a famous 1932 surrealist text by reneacute Crevel] or a sweepstake general [un geacuteneacuteral de tombola] into a Ganymede [Ganymede was the handsome prince carried up Mount Olympus by Zeus and granted immortality] even in the eyes of visionary witnessesrsquo






45 Blanchotrsquos lsquoLa Perversion essentiellersquo was published in Le 14 Juillet 3 18 June 1959 it is collected in Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques


1958ndash1993 (Paris Leacuteo Scheer 2003) 13ndash25 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 translated by Zakir Paul (New York Fordham University Press 2010) 8ndash14 I return to the text in Chapter Three For Charrsquos lsquoNote agrave propos drsquoune deuxiegraveme lecture de ldquoLa Perversion essentiellerdquo in Le 14 Juillet 1959 [Note on re-reading ldquoEssential Perversionrdquo]rsquo see Char Œuvres complegravetes 744ndash5 For Blanchotrsquos response which differs slightly from the 1968 version of the essay see LrsquoEntretien infini 455 The Infinite Conversation 310 translation modified Blanchotrsquos parting remark about the gods lsquonever having comersquo reworks or reverses another text by Char the poem lsquoLes dieux sont de retour [The Gods Have returned]rsquo from La Parole en archipel in Œuvres complegravetes 386 Blanchotrsquos qualification may also be read as an admonishment addressed to Charrsquos effusively uncritical response to Heidegger

46 Here is not the place to examine in detail Blanchotrsquos prewar journalistic output I have done so elsewhere notably in my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary (London routledge 1997) 1ndash52 lsquoLa Penseacutee politiquersquo Le Magazine litteacuteraire 424 October 2003 35ndash8 and lsquoldquoNot In Our Namerdquo Blanchot Politics the Neuterrsquo Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 141ndash59 I return to some of these questions in Chapter Three For the writerrsquos own retrospective account of his political past see Jean-Luc Nancy Maurice Blanchot Passion politique lettreshyreacutecit de 1984 suivie drsquoune lettre de Dionys Mascolo (Paris Galileacutee 2011) On the writerrsquos return to Paris in 1958 see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 373ndash5

47 Blanchot Les Intellectuels en question (Tours Farrago 2000) 36 lsquoIntellectuals Under Scrutinyrsquo translated by Michael Holland The Blanchot Reader 217 translation modified

48 On Mascolorsquos political association with Blanchot see Mascolo lsquoUn itineacuteraire politiquersquo Le Magazine litteacuteraire 278 June 1990 36ndash40 and Blanchot Pour lrsquoamitieacute (Paris Fourbis 1996) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 134ndash43 lsquoFor Friendshiprsquo translated by Leslie Hill The Oxford Literary Review 22 2000 25ndash38

49 See lsquoDeacuteclaration sur le droit agrave lrsquoinsoumission dans la guerre drsquoAlgeacuteriersquo in Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 27ndash31 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 15ndash17 It was in relation to this text that Blanchot gave his first and only interview with the press (which never appeared) see Le Droit agrave lrsquoinsoumission lsquoLe dossier des 121rsquo (Paris Maspero Cahiers libres (14) 1961) 90ndash3 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 33ndash5 On French resistance to the war see Herveacute Hamon and Patrick rotman Les Porteurs de valise la reacutesistance

A turnInG 77

franccedilaise agrave la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie (Paris Seuil revised edition 1982) On Blanchotrsquos part in these events see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 391ndash402 On the drafting and redrafting of the text of the Deacuteclaration see Jeacuterocircme Duwa lsquoLa Deacuteclaration des 121 un manifeste eacutecrit par tous et non par unrsquo Blanchot dans son siegravecle edited by Monique Antelme Gisegravele Berkman Christophe Bident Jonathan Degenegraveve Leslie Hill Michael Holland Olivier Le Trocquer Jeacutereacutemie Majorel and Parham Shahrjerdi (Lyon Parangon 2009) 274ndash88

50 Numerous documents relating to the project can be found in a special issue of the journal Lignes 11 September 1990 160ndash301 For an overview of Blanchotrsquos involvement in the Revue and the reasons for its failure see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 403ndash17 for a detailed account of the various exchanges between the French German and Italian groups see roman Schmidt Die Unmoumlgliche Gemeinschaft Maurice Blanchot die Gruppe der rue SaintshyBenoicirct und die Idee einer internationalen Zeitschrift um 1960 (Berlin Kadmos 2009) and for an assessment of the enduring untimely contemporaneity of the project see Christopher Fynsk lsquoBlanchot in The International Reviewrsquo Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 104ndash20

51 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 61ndash9 (pp 62ndash3) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 62ndash6 (p 63)

52 Friedrich Schlegel Kritische Schriften und Fragmente edited by Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner 6 vols (Paderborn Ferdinand Schoumlningh 1988) 2 107 Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms translated by Ernst Behler and roman Struc (University Park Pennsylvania State University Press 1968) 134 translation modified

53 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAthenaeumrsquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 140 August 1964 301ndash13 the essay is republished in LrsquoEntretien infini 515ndash27 The Infinite Conversation 351ndash9 A few months earlier Blanchot published an essay entitled lsquoLrsquoInterruptionrsquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 137 May 1964 869ndash81 part of which reappears in LrsquoEntretien infini 106ndash12 The Infinite Conversation 75ndash9 it was followed soon after by lsquoLa Voix narrative [The Narrative Voice]rsquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 142 October 1964 675ndash85 to which reference was made earlier On the significance of the Athenaeum in German romanticism see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy LrsquoAbsolu litteacuteraire (Paris Seuil 1978) The Literary Absolute translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany SUNY 1988) and Ernst Behler German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1993)


54 See for instance Gerald Bruns Maurice Blanchot The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 1997) 148ndash9 On Blanchotrsquos relationship with romanticism more generally see Blanchot romantique A Collection of Essays edited by John McKeane and Hannes Opelz (Bern Peter Lang 2010)

55 It is worth recalling here Blanchotrsquos long-standing enthusiasm for the novels of Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich richter) whom he cites in a much quoted passage as one of only three non-classical authors with whom as a beginning writer he was familiar see Blanchot Apregraves coup (Paris Minuit 1983) 92 lsquoAfter the Factrsquo translated by Paul Auster The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 491 In 1964 Blanchot concluded his essay lsquoLrsquoAthenaeumrsquo with a footnote welcoming a recent (French) translation of Jean Paulrsquos Siebenkaumls and urging publishers to bring out other major works by the writer On the presence of Jean Paul in Blanchotrsquos fiction see Dimitris Vardoulakis lsquo ldquoWhat terrifying complicityrdquo Jean Paul as Collocutor in Death Sentencersquo in After Blanchot Literature Criticism Philosophy edited by Leslie Hill Brian Nelson and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Delaware University of Delaware Press 2005) 168ndash88

56 For a succinct account of Schlegelrsquos varied career see Ernst Behler Friedrich Schlegel (Hamburg rowohlt 1966)

57 Schlegel Kritische Schriften und Fragmente II 123 Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms 143 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 78 The Writing of the Disaster 46 lsquouml Another word on the fragment [Je reviens sur le fragment] being never single [unique] it nevertheless has no outer limit ndash the outside towards which it falls is not a threshold [son limen] ndash but nor does it have any inner limitation (it is not like the hedgehog closed upon itself) and yet something strict not because of its brevity (it can be as prolonged as a slow death) but through tightening [le resserrement] constriction to breaking point [lrsquoeacutetranglement jusqursquoagrave la rupture] links in the chain are always broken (there is no shortage of them)rsquo translation modified

58 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 526ndash7 The Infinite Conversation 359 emphasis in the original translation modified

59 See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy LrsquoAbsolu litteacuteraire 79ndash80 The Literary Absolute 57ndash8

60 See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy lsquoNoli me frangerersquo Revue des sciences humaines 185 1982 83ndash92 For Blanchotrsquos obliquely proleptic response see LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 98ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 60

A turnInG 79

61 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave (Paris Gallimard 1973) 61ndash3 The Step Not Beyond translated by Lycette Nelson (Albany SUNY Press 1992) 42ndash3 translation modified

62 Blanchot cites Klingemannrsquos 1805 satirical apocalyptic novel in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 54ndash5 The Writing of the Disaster 31ndash2 Unfortunately the index provided in the revised edition of Ann Smockrsquos English translation misidentifies Blanchotrsquos source as the celebrated thirteenth-century Italian saint of that name

63 For an overview of French reception of Nietzsche during the early and mid-twentieth century see Douglas Smith Transvaluations Nietzsche in France 1872ndash1972 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1996) and Jacques Le rider Nietzsche en France (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1999) Between Nietzsche and Blanchot there was also a further biographical or better bio-graphical connection to which Blanchotrsquos 1951 story Au moment voulu bears cryptic witness For as Nietzsche recounts in Ecce homo in Nietzsche Kritische Studienausgabe edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari 15 vols second edition (Berlin de Gruyerdtv 1988) 6 341 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings edited by Aaron ridley translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2005) 128 in the Winter of 1883 he composed the chapter entitled lsquoVon alten und neuen Tafeln [Old and New Tablets]rsquo in Also sprach Zarathustra lsquoduring the most arduous climb from the station up to the glorious Moorish eyrie of Egravezersquo [translation slightly modified] As Christophe Bident reports in Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 279ndash81 it was in that same small town some seven miles along the Mediterranean coast from Nice to which Blanchot withdrew in 1946 and where amidst frequent return visits to Paris he would spend the next twelve years of his life writing

64 As readers of Faux Pas (Paris Gallimard 1943) Faux Pas translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford Stanford University Press 2001) and of Chroniques litteacuteraires du Journal des deacutebats edited by Christophe Bident (Paris Gallimard 2007) can verify there are numerous brief references to Nietzsche in Blanchotrsquos work prior to 1945 His first substantial essay however was lsquoDu cocircteacute de Nietzsche [On Nietzschersquos Side]rsquo which first appeared in LrsquoArche 12 December 1945-January 1946 103ndash12 and is collected in La Part du feu 278ndash89 The Work of Fire 287ndash99 The 1958 essay first appeared as lsquoNietzsche aujourdrsquohuirsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 68 August 1958 284ndash95 and is republished with revisions as lsquoreacuteflexions sur le nihilisme 1 Nietzsche aujourdrsquohui


[reflections on Nihilism 1 Nietzsche Today]rsquo in LrsquoEntretien infini 201ndash15 The Infinite Conversation 136ndash43

65 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 208ndash10 The Infinite Conversation 449ndash51 In this note Blanchot not only makes a series of points directly inspired by Heideggerrsquos two Nietzsche volumes but also in concluding gives his personal verdict (which was to change little in subsequent years) on Heideggerrsquos political past as recently documented by Guido Schneeberger in his Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern Suhr 1962) Heideggerrsquos Nietzsche only appeared in French translation till 1971 though its contents anticipated by earlier lectures and essays by Heidegger were quickly known in French philosophical circles Many like Blanchot will have read them in the original German On reactions to Heidegger in France during the period see Dominique Janicaud Heidegger en France 2 vols (Paris Albin Michel 2001)

66 Karl Jaspers Nietzsche Einfuumlhrung in das Verstaumlndnis seines Philosophierens (Berlin de Gruyter [1935] 1981) 396 Nietzsche Introduction agrave sa philosophie translated by Henri Niel (Paris Gallimard 1950) 401

67 For the original quotation see Jaspers Nietzsche Einfuumlhrung in das Verstaumlndnis seines Philosophierens 18 Nietzsche Introduction agrave sa philosophie 19 For the changes made to Blanchotrsquos text compare lsquoNietzsche aujourdrsquohuirsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 288 289 and 291 and LrsquoEntretien infini 205 206 211 The Infinite Conversation 138 139 141 translation modified Blanchot had already drawn on the work of Jaspers (which he may well have read in the original German) for a 1945 essay on Nietzsche included in La Part du feu 278ndash89 The Work of Fire 287ndash99 It is also worth noting that in an essay entitled lsquoreprisesrsquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 93 September 1960 475ndash83 devoted in part to Walter Benjamin and in part to various considerations on notes and aphorisms inspired by the work of Georges Perros Blanchot still felt able to argue that lsquoaphoristic form with all its dangers and its potential [was] represented in superior fashion by Nietzschersquo (p 481) Interestingly however this part of the September 1960 essay was not republished by Blanchot though he did extract from it the discussion on Benjamin which reappeared with minor changes in LrsquoAmitieacute 69ndash73 Friendship 57ndash61 and two further passages on formal discontinuity which prefaced with a redoubled were partially redeployed as the opening section of the essay on Brecht in LrsquoEntretien infini 528ndash9 The Infinite Conversation 360ndash1 as though to underwrite the fact that from this point on what had so far been addressed not only in Nietzsche as belonging

A turnInG 81

to the genre of the aphorism but also in Blanchotrsquos own discourse had fallen subject to what the latter would go on to call the fragmentary the neuter

68 See Blanchot lsquoPassage de la lignersquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 69 September 1958 468ndash79 the essay is republished as lsquoreacuteflexions sur le nihilisme 2 Passage de la ligne [Crossing the Line]rsquo LrsquoEntretien infini 215ndash27 The Infinite Conversation 143ndash51 Heideggerrsquos lsquoZur Seinsfrage [On the Question of Being]rsquo is republished in Wegmarken (Frankfurt Klostermann 1976) 385ndash426 Pathmarks edited by William McNeill (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1998) 291ndash322 I have examined Blanchotrsquos reading of these texts in relation to the question of nihilism in my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit 235ndash43

69 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 226ndash7 The Infinite Conversation 150ndash1 emphasis in the original translation modified

70 See Blanchot lsquoNietzsche et lrsquoeacutecriture fragmentairersquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 168 December 1966 967ndash83 La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 169 January 1967 19ndash32 The essay is republished in LrsquoEntretien infini 227ndash55 The Infinite Conversation 151ndash70 There is here a clear echo of what in an article published a year earlier later incorporated into De la grammatologie Derrida called the lsquonecessary double belonging [la double appartenance neacutecessaire]rsquo of Nietzschersquos thinking see Jacques Derrida lsquoDe la grammatologie Irsquo Critique 22 December 1965 1016ndash42 (p 1029)

71 On Blanchotrsquos earlier thinking of the il y a see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 110ndash3

72 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 211 The Infinite Conversation 141 The reference is to Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer [1954] 1984) 68 What is Called Thinking translated by Fred D Wieck and J Glenn Gray (New York Harper amp row 1968) 70

73 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 245 The Infinite Conversation 163ndash4 emphasis in the original translation modified For the remark from Heidegger see Heidegger Nietzsche 2 vols (Pfullingen Neske 1961) II 59 Nietzsche translated by Joan Stambaugh David Farrell Krell and Frank A Capuzzi 4 vols (San Francisco Harper amp row 1979ndash87) IV 27 Contrast the commentary on the same fragment put forward by Eugen Fink in La Philosophie de Nietzsche translated by Hans Hildenberg and Alex Lindenberg (Paris Minuit 1965) 226ndash8 Nietzschersquos Philosophy translated by Goetz richter (London Continuum 2003) 161ndash3 to which


Blanchot is obliquely replying For the translated fragment itself (which Blanchot rewords slightly) see Nietzsche La Volonteacute de puissance edited by Friedrich Wuumlrzbach translated by Geneviegraveve Bianquis 2 vols (Paris Gallimard [1935ndash37] 1995) I 235ndash6 The idea of thought thinking lsquomore than it is capable of thinkingrsquo is one to which Blanchot has recourse elsewhere notably in a 1962 essay on Bataille See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 312 The Infinite Conversation 210 translation modified It is also a key emphasis in the account of infinity developed by Levinas in Totaliteacute et infini an infinity that by its very transcendence necessarily lsquooverflows [deacuteborde] the thought that thinks itrsquo See Levinas Totaliteacute et infini (Paris Le Livre de poche [1961] 1990) 10 Totality and Infinity translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht Nijhoff 1991) 25

74 Compare Jaspers Nietzsche Einfuumlhrung in das Verstaumlndnis seines Philosophierens 17 Nietzsche Introduction agrave sa philosophie 18ndash19

75 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 68ndash9 The Infinite Conversation 48

76 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 158ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 101ndash2 emphasis in the original translation modified

77 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 6ndash7 What is Called Thinking 10 Compare Friedrich Houmllderlin Saumlmtliche Gedichte edited by Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 2005) 1033 Hymns and Fragments translated by richard Sieburth (Princeton Princeton University Press 1984) 117

78 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 11 What is Called Thinking 29ndash30 Compare Nietzsche KSA 4 380 Thus Spoke Zarathustra translated by r J Hollingdale (Harmondsworth Penguin 1961) 315 translation modified A later altered version of the poem was included in the DionysosshyDithyramben one of the very last texts prepared by Nietzsche for publication before his breakdown in January 1889 in KSA 6 381ndash7


80 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 11 What is Called Thinking 29ndash30 translation modified

81 See Blanchot lsquoLe Tournant [The Turning]rsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 25 January 1955 110ndash20 The essay mainly an account of Beda Allemannrsquos study Houmllderlin und Heidegger (Zurich Atlantis Verlag 1954) is taken up in part under the different title of lsquoLrsquoItineacuteraire de Houmllderlin [Houmllderlinrsquos Itinerary]rsquo in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 283ndash92 The Space of Literature 269ndash76 On Houmllderlin

A turnInG 83

as a poet of the turning see Heidegger Holzwege 265ndash9 Off the Beaten Track 200ndash3 During the postwar period as Blanchot was no doubt aware Houmllderlinrsquos work was disputed territory between the conservative right and the progressive left as robert Savage recalls in his excellent Houmllderlin After the Catastrophe HeideggershyAdornoshyBrecht (rochester Camden House 2008) On the motif of vaterlaumlndische Umkehr or retournement natal as Blanchot translates it purposely eliding for self-evident political reasons any mention of a Vaterland see Houmllderlin Hyperion Empedokles Aufsaumltze Uumlbersetzungen edited by Jochen Schmidt in collaboration with Katharina Graumltz (Frankfurt Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 2008) 919ndash20 As Franccediloise Dastur suggests in Houmllderlin le retournement natal (La Versanne Encre marine 1997) 15 Blanchotrsquos version of the expression has achieved canonic status it was used for instance by the orthodox Heideggerian Franccedilois Feacutedier in his French translation of Allemannrsquos Houmllderlin et Heidegger (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1959) Lacoue-Labarthe on the other hand in his later French rendition of Houmllderlinrsquos version of Sophoclesrsquo Antigone (Paris Christian Bourgois 1998) gives the phrase more accurately as retournement patriotique (p 173) noting however in his Meacutetaphrasis suivi de Le theacuteacirctre de Houmllderlin (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1998) 33n1 that for Houmllderlinrsquos contemporaries (the reference is to Wilhelm von Humboldt) the term Umkehr (or Umkehrung) was commonly used to refer to the (French) revolution as Jochen Schmidt also points out in Houmllderlin Hyperion Empedokles Aufsaumltze Uumlbersetzungen 1483ndash4 1494 adding merely that in Houmllderlinrsquos eyes the upheaval in question was not only political but cultural and religious too

82 Blanchot lsquoLe Tournant [The Turning]rsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 25 January 1955 110 these opening paragraphs were deleted from the version included some months later in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire On the shifting history of the motif of the turn or turning in Blanchot see Michael Holland lsquoDrsquoun retour au tournantrsquo Blanchot dans son siegravecle 317ndash30



85 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 396 The Infinite Conversation 265ndash6 translation modified Heidegger had begun addressing the issue of technology or Technik again with the aid of Houmllderlin in lsquoDie Frage nach der Technik [The Question Concerning Technology]rsquo


from Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze (Pfullingen Neske 1954) 9ndash40 Basic Writings edited by David Farrell Krell (London routledge 1993) 311ndash41 Today we might be tempted to give this process a different name (which would also be the same) globalisation

86 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 239 The Infinite Conversation 159ndash60 translation modified The phrase from Zarathustra is deployed as a motto elsewhere by Blanchot on each occasion in order to invoke the relationship without relationship that is friendship with the unknown See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 256 273 The Infinite Conversation 171 183 The translation given by Blanchot is most likely the writerrsquos own Geneviegraveve Bianquisrsquos standard French version Ainsi parlait Zarathustra (Paris Gallimard 1947) 274 has for instance lsquoLe deacutesert grandit malheur agrave celui qui recegravele un deacutesertrsquo On the relationship between speech and the wilderness compare Blanchotrsquos remarks from 1957 on the language of prophecy in Le Livre agrave venir 98ndash9 The Book To Come 79 lsquoWhen speech becomes prophecyrsquo he writes lsquoit is not the future that is given but the present that is withdrawn alongside any possibility of firm stable durable presence Even the Eternal City and the indestructible Temple are suddenly ndash unbelievably ndash destroyed It is like the wilderness once again and speech too is a wilderness [deacutesertique desertic or desert-like] a voice needing the wilderness in order that it may cry out and continually reviving in us dread [lrsquoeffroi] understanding [lrsquoentente] and the memory of wildernessrsquo translation modified


88 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 240 The Infinite Conversation 160 translation modified As Blanchot was only too aware this silent exchange with Heidegger about the status of the wilderness was not without more radical historical or religious implications It was not for nothing that Levinas in 1952 objecting to the antisemitism of Simone Weil was to insist as Blanchot plainly agreed that lsquoall speech is uprootedness [toute parole est deacuteracinement] and every institution founded on reason uprootednessrsquo See Levinas Difficile Liberteacute (Paris Albin Michel 1963) 165 Difficult Freedom translated by Seaacuten Hand (London Athlone 1990) 137 translation modified

89 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 105 115 What is Called Thinking 168 188 On the enigma of crὴ see Derrida Donner le temps (Paris Galileacutee 1991) 201ndash4 Given Time translated by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1992) 159ndash61

A turnInG 85

90 Heidegger Wegmarken 334 Pathmarks 254ndash5

91 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoeacutetrange et lrsquoeacutetrangerrsquo La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 70 October 1958 673ndash83 (p 681 note) La Condition critique articles 1945ndash1998 edited by Christophe Bident (Paris Gallimard 2010) 278ndash88 (p 287n1) This is one of only a few essays of the period not taken up by Blanchot in a subsequent volume interestingly though as Bident points out in lsquoThe Movements of the Neuterrsquo in After Blanchot Literature Philosophy Criticism 13ndash34 (p 33n15) it contains the first recorded usage of the term neutre as a substantivised adjective in Blanchotrsquos work

92 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 225 The Infinite Conversation 149ndash50 I discuss this extraordinary move on Blanchotrsquos part in Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit 241ndash3

93 On the Schritt zuruumlck see Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 178

94 See robert Antelme LrsquoEspegravece humaine (Paris Gallimard [1947] 1957) The Human Race translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston The Marlboro PressNorthwestern 1998) On Blanchotrsquos important later friendship with Antelme see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 368ndash72 It would be misleading to assume that Heidegger was unaware of the political implications of the camps As Blanchot recalls in a letter to Salomon Malka in May 1988 (in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 165ndash74 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 124ndash9) Heidegger prefaced his lecture of 20 June 1952 with the recommendation that his audience display an attitude of lsquothoughtful remembrance [Andenken]rsquo towards the lsquosilent voice [lautlose Stimme]rsquo of German prisoners of war to whom at that moment in Freiburg a newly opened exhibition was paying tribute see Was heiszligt Denken 159 (the passage in question is oddly omitted from the 1968 English translation) It was of course also Heideggerrsquos view expressed the preceding winter that the war as a whole had decided little except in terms of its fateful consequences for the fatherland notably its division into East and West see Was heiszligt Denken 65 What is Called Thinking 66ndash7 lsquoPolitico-social and moral categoriesrsquo he remarked lsquowere in all respects too narrow and faint-heartedrsquo in helping to understand these events But as Blanchot points out in his letter Heideggerrsquos public recognition of the victims of war though no doubt sincere was shockingly selective

95 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 192 The Infinite Conversation 130 translation modified It is possible that in writing lsquolrsquoindestructiblersquo Blanchot was familiar with Kafkarsquos use of the word similarly in the neuter (lsquodas Unzerstoumlrbarersquo) in several aphorisms written in


Zuumlrau between Autumn 1917 and Spring 1918 See for instance Franz Kafka Gesammelte Werke in zwoumllf Baumlnden edited by Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt Fischer 1994) VI 183 189 190 Dearest Father Stories and Other Writings translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York Schocken 1954) 39 41 42 lsquoThe indestructible [Das Unzerstoumlrbare] is one [eines]rsquo writes Kafka lsquoeach individual human is that and at the same time it is common to all Whence the incomparably indivisible bond [die beispiellos untrennbare Verbindung] between humansrsquo translation modified On the indestructible in Kafka see ritchie robertson Kafka Judaism Politics and Literature (Oxford Oxford University Press 1985) 200ndash2 As Blanchot was only too aware the quarter-century following Kafkarsquos death was to place a rather different gloss on these remarks

96 See Heidegger Wegmarken 313ndash64 Pathmarks 239ndash76 Writing in October and November 1967 in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise (collected in LrsquoEntretien infini 392ndash3 The Infinite Conversation 262ndash3) Blanchot for his part also saw little difference between traditional humanism and nihilism Admittedly he still saw a use for the word humanism but it was a radically reconfigured sense of the term more akin wrote Blanchot silently quoting Nietzsche to that which is lsquowithout humanity and almost without language [sans humaniteacute et presque sans langage]rsquo For a sympathetic contemporary reaction to these remarks see Emmanuel Levinas Humanisme de lrsquoautre homme (Paris Le Livre de poche 1990) 96 Humanism of the Other translated by Nidra Poller (Urbana University of Illinois Press 2006) 58ndash9

97 See Giorgio Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz the Witness and the Archive translated by Daniel Heller-roazen (New York Zone Books 1999) 55 It should be noted that autrui though commonly translated as lsquothe other [person]rsquo is in reality an impersonal expression a rare instance of the oblique case in modern French a remnant of a previously inflected noun system It is both singular and plural masculine and feminine human and non-human ie what Blanchot describes as the neuter though the credit for reintroducing it into philosophical discourse mainly falls to Levinas For further examination of the issues at stake see Christopher Fynsk lsquoBlanchotrsquos ldquoThe Indestructiblerdquorsquo After Blanchot 100ndash22

98 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 195 199 196 The Infinite Conversation 132 135 133 translation modified Antelmersquos much-cited formula appears in two slightly different versions towards the end of his 1947 preface see Antelme LrsquoEspegravece humaine 11

A turnInG 87

The Human Race 5ndash6 Blanchot quotes the first and simpler of the two lsquoAll those familiar heroes from history or literature whether they cried love solitude the anguish of being or not being or vengeance or protested against injustice or humiliation we do not believe they were ever driven to express as their only and final demand [comme seule et derniegravere revendication] an abiding sense of belonging to humankind [un sentiment ultime drsquoappartenance agrave lrsquoespegravece]rsquo translation modified The second follows a paragraph later as Antelme probes the nature of this demand He explains that lsquothe challenge to the status of being human [la mise en question de la qualiteacute drsquohomme] provokes an almost biological demand of belonging to humankind [une revendication presque biologique drsquoappartenance agrave lrsquoespegravece humaine]rsquo translation modified But what is it that is lsquoalmost biologicalrsquo Not life itself which is biological through and through yet nothing more or less than life as though the trait of belonging were already given enigmatically as part of life but also as something other than life as a trace that is necessarily both capable and incapable of death therefore both human and non-human a response to a questioning more primary more fundamental as Antelme clearly argues than the values and emotions enshrined in history literature ethics or morals Surprisingly in Remnants of Auschwitz (pp 58ndash9) commenting on Antelmersquos unusual turn of phrase Agamben shows little sensitivity to the implications of Antelmersquos qualifier (lsquoalmost biologicalrsquo) which he dismisses as merely lsquoa euphemism of sorts a slight scruple before the unimaginedrsquo More attentive to the nuances of Antelmersquos writing is the commentary offered by Martin Crowley who in his Robert Antelme (Oxford Legenda 2003) glossing the words cited above makes the point that for Antelme lsquothe unbreakable unity of humanity is [ ] grounded in a biology beyond qualification ndash not as exclusionary confidence but as an encounter with a boundary which cannot be crossed precisely because it is a point of absolute exposurersquo (p 7) It is however worth noting that when Antelme considers the divide that separates the prisoners in the camp from the animals plants and trees that surround them and is drawn to testify to the lsquosolidityrsquo (and solitude) of the undivided and indivisible human species he characterises what humans have in common not as defiant residual subjectivity embodied in weakness and destitution (what Crowley calls a lsquodialectic of vulnerabilityrsquo [p 8]) but beyond pathos as a kind of limitless constitutive impossibility which belonging to no-one and separating each from him- or herself is radically irreducible to all humanism and all (dialectical) power in general and as such lsquoWell herersquo Antelme writes lsquothe beast is


luxurious [la becircte est luxueuse] and the tree divine [lrsquoarbre est la diviniteacute] and we cannot [nous ne pouvons] become either one or the other [ni la becircte ni lrsquoarbre] We cannot [ne pouvons pas] do that and the SS cannot [ne peuvent pas] reduce us to it And precisely when it has taken on the most hideous shape and is about to become our own face so the mask fallsrsquo lsquoAnd if we then think this [cette chose]rsquo he famously continues lsquowhich from here is assuredly the weightiest thing [la chose la plus consideacuterable] it is possible to think ldquoThe SS are men no different from ourselvesrdquo if between the SS and us ndash ie at the very point when the distance between humans is at its greatest when the limit reached by the subjugation of some and the limit reached by the power of others seem by rights to have become fixed in some unworldly hierarchy ndash we cannot [nous ne pouvons] see any substantial difference in the face of nature and death so we are bound to say that there is only one humankind [qursquoil nrsquoy a qursquoune espegravece humaine] that everything which masks this unity in the world everything that places people in the situation of being exploited and oppressed and which might be thought to imply the existence of different kinds of humanity is thereby wrong and mad [faux et fou] and that here we have the proof of this the most irrefutable proof since the most wretched of victims cannot do otherwise [ne peut faire autrement] than take due note of the fact that however vile the power wielded by the executioner cannot [ne peut ecirctre] be other than one belonging to man the power to murder He can [peut] kill a human [un homme] but he cannot [il ne peut pas] change him into anything else [en autre chose]rsquo (LrsquoEspegravece humaine 229ndash30 The Human Race 219ndash20 emphasis mine translation modified) The claim is a simple but radical one more resistant to the fact and reality of oppression exploitation and murder than any principle embodied in human national political cultural ethnic religious or other kind of identity All the more surprising then is the bizarre (and oddly worded) claim put forward by robert Eaglestone in The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford Oxford University Press 2004) according to which lsquo[r]emaining human seems to be for Antelme the sense of belonging to a nation at war with the Germansrsquo (p 336) True as Eaglestone correctly records Antelme was not a Jew was not dispatched to an extermination camp (his sister Marie-Louise to whom LrsquoEspegravece humaine is dedicated nevertheless died in ravensbruumlck) and had communist sympathies ndash but these are scarcely grounds for dismissing his testimony as that of an unthinking nationalist


A turnInG 89

100 Antelme LrsquoEspegravece humaine 9 The Human Race 3 translation modified Antelme continues lsquoThis disproportion between the experience we had lived through and the story it was possible to tell would only be confirmed by subsequent events It was clear we were dealing with one of those realities which force you to say that they beggar the imagination [qursquoelles deacutepassent lrsquoimagination] From that point on there was no doubt it was only by choice that is by renewed use of the imagination that we might attempt to say something about itrsquo (translation modified) Antelme returns to this question of the unimaginable towards the end of his text in order to emphasise the treacherous complacency lurking within it lsquoUnimaginable [Inimaginable]rsquo he notes lsquois a word that does not divide does not restrain It is the most practical word Wandering around with it as a protective shield [Se promener avec ce mot en bouclier] signifying emptiness your steps become more assured more confident and conscience reasserts itselfrsquo (LrsquoEspegravece humaine 302 The Human Race 289ndash90) lsquoUnimaginablersquo then should not be taken absolutely for as Antelme suggests an event can be experienced as unimaginable only in so far as an effort is made to imagine it (and vice versa) it thereby becomes a place of both radical impossibility and irreducible necessity as Sarah Kofman suggests in Paroles suffoqueacutees (Paris Galileacutee 1987) 45ndash6 Smothered Words translated by Madeleine Dobie (Evanston Northwestern University Press 1998) 38ndash9 and as Georges Didi-Huberman goes on to argue in Images malgreacute tout (Paris Minuit 2003) 106ndash7 On Antelmersquos use of the word lsquounimaginablersquo see also Crowley Robert Antelme 79ndash80

101 It is this that prompts the following comment on the part of one of the interlocutors in Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 102 The Infinite Conversation 72 lsquondash And we need to add all alterity already presupposes man as other [comme autrui other as neuter] and not the other way round Only what results from this is that for me the Other man [lrsquohomme Autre] who is ldquothe otherrdquo [laquo autrui raquo] is likely [risque] also to be always Other than man [lrsquoAutre que lrsquohomme] close to what cannot be close to me close to death close to the night and admittedly as repulsive [repoussant] as anything that comes to me from these regions without horizonrsquo translation modified lsquoAlways Other than manrsquo this then is the risk a risk that Blanchotrsquos writing knows to be unavoidable ndash and therefore a chance



103 See for instance the political texts of the late 1950s and 1960s collected in Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 Political Writings 1953ndash93 Blanchotrsquos insistence on this double rapport is crucial It explains why Agamben goes awry when he claims in Remnants of Auschwitz 134ndash5 contra Blanchot that the initial proposition (lsquolrsquohomme est lrsquoindestructible qui peut ecirctre deacutetruitrsquo) cannot properly entail lsquohuman relation in its primacy [la relation humaine dans sa primauteacute]rsquo (LrsquoEntretien infini 199 The Infinite Conversation 135) Admittedly Agamben is not entirely wrong but he omits crucially the second of the two movements that Blanchot explores its relation without relation with the first and fails to notice the status of the first as infinite demand Elsewhere too in his contribution to the 1998 film Maurice Blanchot by Christophe Bident and Hugo Santiago Agamben proves an expeditious and reductive reader of Blanchot claiming for instance that the key issue traversing all Blanchotrsquos writing of the late 1940s and after was the question lsquoHow is literature possible [sic] after Auschwitzrsquo as though Blanchot had not precisely begun in 1942 in his Comment la litteacuterature estshyelle possible by raising the very question of literaturersquos possibility in order precisely to interrogate the limits of the possible as such and as though in later texts Blanchot had not been scrupulous in his respect for the singularity of that or those named by the word Auschwitz And it is relevant too to note that when Agamben had occasion to refer to Blanchotrsquos proposition two years later he misquoted it claiming in The Time that Remains translated by Patricia Dailey (Stanford Stanford University Press 2005) 53 that lsquoin referring to a book by robert Antelme Blanchot once wrote that man is the indestructible that can be infinitely [sic] destroyedrsquo This casual misrepresentation of Blanchotrsquos thinking has serious implications Among others it allows Agamben to argue that lsquoif man is that which may be infinitely [Agambenrsquos emphasis] destroyed this also means that something other than this destruction and within this destruction remains and that man is this remnantrsquo which is of course in turn to impose on Blanchot precisely the humanism his thinking sets aside Agambenrsquos failure to read is revealing in other ways too Where Blanchot in LrsquoEntretien infini interprets lsquobare life [la vie nue]rsquo under the aegis of the outside the impersonal and the demand of the neuter (LrsquoEntretien infini 196 The Infinite Conversation 133 translation modified) and in that sense as a ground without ground of impossibility Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz (p 69) does the opposite taking it to provide evidence of absolute immanence as embodied in the figure of the Muselmann This explains Agambenrsquos hasty superficial

A turnInG 91

and ultimately dogmatic reference to Blanchot in his book Also questionable for its precipitate recourse to dialectics is Crowleyrsquos assertion that lsquo[f]rom the abolition of the self to its return in the instance and as the gift of the just ldquoMoi-Sujetrdquo [ldquoSubject-Selfrdquo] Blanchot [ ] moves [ ] from the destitution of the victim to the collective refusal of this oppressionrsquo (Robert Antelme 30 emphasis mine) But Blanchotrsquos double discourse does not move it stands firm gathered and dispersed by dint of its multiple voicing in order to refuse all synthesising unity and to insist that the trace of the indestructible and the dialectic of power must both be affirmed simultaneously which is also to say that they should be disjoined separated the one from the other without the former being subordinated to the dictates of the latter or vice versa Other readers too have proven deaf to the complexity of this strategy To argue for instance that Blanchot lsquodehistoricises the camps in the name of some untheorised transcendental reduction conducted in a rhetoric of truths essences and ldquola relation humaine dans sa primauteacuterdquorsquo as Colin Davis contends is to show little sensitivity to the logic and nuance of Blanchotrsquos argument and it is revealing that in his own account of the ethical implications of LrsquoEspegravece humaine Davis transforms Antelmersquos discreetly modest third-person quasi-biological affirmation into an oddly heroic assertion of the power of the self and is left as a result with no alternative than to appeal limply to humanist platitudes as when in an effort to counter Blanchotrsquos reading forgetting that Antelmersquos memoir is precisely and necessarily a belated retrospective suffocating suffocated haunted narrative he claims that lsquoin Antelmersquos book [ ] the narrator clings doggedly to his use of the first personrsquo lsquoIndeedrsquo Davis adds lsquothe text can be read as the triumph of the first person over the forces which aim to alienate it from itselfrsquo [emphasis mine] LrsquoEspegravece humaine he concludes lsquogives voice to a much more conventional mid-century Marxist humanism than the ethics of alterity [sic] sketched by Blanchotrsquo See Colin Davis Ethical Issues in TwentiethshyCentury French Fiction Killing the Other (London Macmillan 2000) 139ndash41 In this were so there would be no apparent limit to humankindrsquos ability to overcome oppression politics would be about the survival of the fittest and as Blanchot suggests in closing the only outcome would be that sinister doublet of self-confident humanist belief nihilism The ethical relation with the Other as Levinas had long argued far from relying on a dialectical trial of strength culminating in the triumph of the One over the Other (or the Other over the One) turns precisely on the Otherrsquos exteriority to my power even though (or


rather because) it is within my power always to seek to annihilate the Other Transcendence for Levinas is not superior (moral) force but the radical inaccessibility of the infinite that places the always vulnerable mortal Other beyond power and possibility lsquoThe infinite [lrsquoinfini]rsquo he explains lsquoparalyses power [le pouvoir] by its infinite resistance to murder which hard and insurmountable gleams in the face of the Other [autrui] in the total nudity of the Otherrsquos defenceless eyes in the nudity of the absolute openness of the Transcendent There is here a relation not with very great resistance but with something absolutely Other [Autre] the resistance of what has no resistance ndash ethical resistancersquo See Emmanuel Levinas Totaliteacute et infini 217 Totality and Infinity 199 For Blanchotrsquos own commentary on this passage see LrsquoEntretien infini 78 The Infinite Conversation 54 Whether the term ethics (conspicuous by its absence from Blanchotrsquos discussion of Antelme) is still an adequate description of this relation without relation with the Other is a question that Blanchot not for the first time (or the last) explicitly raises in the discussion between his two speakers

104 Blanchot lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo LrsquoArc 22 Summer 1963 9ndash14 (pp 11ndash12) The quotation is from the Argument to lsquoLe Poegraveme pulveacuteriseacutersquo (1945ndash7) in Char Œuvres complegravetes 247 According to the translation given by G S Kirk J E raven and M Schofield in The Presocratic Philosophers second edition (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1983) 209 Heraclitus Fr 93 states lsquoThe lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks out [lέgei] nor conceals [krύptei] but gives a sign [shmaίnei]rsquo Blanchot cites the fragment elsewhere in lsquoLa Becircte de Lascauxrsquo in Une voix venue drsquoailleurs 56 A Voice from Elsewhere 40 and in LrsquoEntretien infini 44 The Infinite Conversation 31 I also discuss this example in Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 128ndash34 It is worth noting that in the closing session of his Summer 1943 lecture course on Heraclitus with which Blanchot is unlikely to have been familiar Heidegger argues rather differently in a manner which is nevertheless powerfully emblematic of the divergences between the pair that Heraclitusrsquo third term should be read in more originary fashion as already incorporating the alternative that precedes lsquoto give a signrsquo he argues lsquomeans to reveal [entbergen Heideggerrsquos rendering of lέgei] something which in that it appears points to something hidden [ein Verborgenes] which it therefore conceals [verbirgt Heideggerrsquos translation of krύptei] and shelters [birgt] and thus lets that which shelters [das Bergende] emerge as such The essence of the sign is revealing concealment [die entbergende Verbergung] The essence of the sign is not however juxtaposed

A turnInG 93

and patched together from these two functions but the showing of the sign is the originary way in which that which is separated out subsequently and otherwise for itself that is revealing [Entbergen] for itself and concealing [Verbergen] for itself still prevails undivided [unzertrennt]rsquo See Heidegger Heraklit Gesamtausgabe 55 (Frankfurt Klostermann 1979) 179 On presence in Blanchot as that which being in-between is paradoxically irreducible to the present see LrsquoEntretien infini 315 The Infinite Conversation 212 where one reads as follows in words that as we shall see are reminiscent of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli published some eighteen months earlier lsquoWhat is present in this presence of speech as soon as it is affirmed is precisely what never lets itself be seen or be grasped something is there out of reach (of whoever speaks it as of whoever hears it) it is between us [entre nous] it holds itself between [cela se tient entre] and the conversation [lrsquoentretien] is an approach on the basis of this between-two [cet entreshydeux] an irreducible distance it is necessary to preserve if the relation with the unknown which is the sole gift of speech [le don unique de la parole] is to be maintainedrsquo translation modified

105 In this respect Blanchotian lsquopreacutesencersquo [sic] or nonshypreacutesence [sic] exhibits something of the same logic or anti-logic as say Levinasrsquos use of the face or visage to name that in Autrui which does not in fact appear as such At the same time that Blanchot was publishing the first version of lsquoreneacute Char et la penseacutee du neutrersquo Levinas brought out the essay lsquoLa Trace de lrsquoautre [The Trace of the Other]rsquo with which it may usefully be compared see Levinas En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris Vrin 2001) 261ndash82 lsquoThe Trace of the Otherrsquo translated by Alphonso Lingis Deconstruction in Context edited by Mark C Taylor (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1986) 345ndash59 lsquoThe trace [La trace]rsquo writes Levinas lsquomight be seen as the very indelibility of being [lrsquoindeacuteleacutebiliteacute mecircme de lrsquoecirctre] its omnipotence with respect to all negativity its vastness [son immensiteacute] incapable of closing upon itself and in any way too great for discretion interiority or a Self [un Soi] Indeed we have insisted that the trace does not create a relation [ne met pas en relation] with what might be thought to be less than being but that it obliges with regard to the Infinite [lrsquoInfini] to the absolutely Other [lrsquoabsolument Autre]rsquo (280 357 translation modified) But if so as Levinas goes on to argue the trace is irreducible to ontology which is also to say that the trace is primarily the trace of the transcendent and what Levinas calls God (which he maintains is anything but the God of ontotheology) For Blanchot however things were more complicated and many


of his subsequent dealings with the thought of Levinas to which he remained singularly receptive till the end have to do with his effort constantly renewed to neutralise so to speak the transcendence named as lsquoGodrsquo I discuss the philosophical dialogue between the two friends in Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 158ndash84 and examine their divergences on this question of transcendence in lsquoldquoDistrust of Poetryrdquo Levinas Blanchot Celanrsquo MLN 120 5 Winter 2005 986ndash1008


107 Blanchot lsquoNrsquooubliez pasrsquo La Quinzaine litteacuteraire 459 16ndash31 March 1986 11ndash12 lsquoDo Not Forgetrsquo translated by Leslie Hill Paragraph 30 3 2007 34ndash7 The turning points Blanchot identifies in the article are three in number the Declaration of the 121 the events of May 1968 and on an entirely other level the Shoah to which I return in Chapter Four

108 Blanchot LrsquoAmitieacute (Paris Gallimard 1971) 128ndash9 Friendship translated by Elizabeth rottenberg (Stanford Stanford University Press 1997) 109ndash10 The article was first written for an unnamed Polish journal The expression lsquowhat happenedrsquo in this passage is most probably borrowed from the poem of that name (lsquoWas geschahrsquo) by Celan whom Blanchot is known to have been reading at the time See Paul Celan Gesammelte Werke edited by Beda Alleman and Stefan reichert 7 vols (Frankfurt Suhrkamp [1983] 2000) I 269 Some years later in Apregraves coup (Paris Minuit 1983) 100 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 495 having perhaps in the interim read Margarete Buber-Neumannrsquos memoir Kafkas Freundin Milena (Munich Gotthold Muumlller 1963) which tells of the friendship between the two women in ravensbruumlck concentration camp where Milena died in May 1944 Blanchot does however yield to the temptation to offer a single name and comments lsquoSo [Kafka] died and what then happened [qursquoarrivashytshyil] He did not have to wait long almost all his loved ones met their end in the camps that however different their names all bear the same name Auschwitzrsquo

109 Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes II 178ndash9 lsquoMimiquersquo the brief text from which this passage is taken is best known to contemporary readers from the commentary given by Derrida in La Disseacutemination (Paris Seuil 1972) 201ndash317 Dissemination translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1981) 173ndash285 Derrida also deploys the lsquofigurersquo (figure without figure) of the glass citationality and the neuter in his reading of Blanchot notably the

A turnInG 95

essay lsquoSurvivre [Living On]rsquo in Parages 110ndash203 Parages 103ndash91 It is worth noting not only how far Derridarsquos analysis of Mallarmeacute is in general terms indebted to Blanchot but also the extent to which in Blanchotrsquos own text the crucial phrase lsquounder the false appearance of a present [sous une apparence fausse de preacutesent]rsquo had already become the object of critical attention See Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 278 294 The Book to Come 230 241 translation slightly modified As though to answer Derrida in his turn Blanchot cites the phrase again in Le Pas aushydelagrave 22 The Step Not Beyond 12

110 Salomon Malka Leacutevinas la vie et la trace (Paris Albin Michel 2005) 45ndash6 On the friendship between Levinas and Blanchot at the University of Strasbourg see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 43ndash8

111 It was while returning from the Sorbonne where as a guest of the Institut drsquoeacutetudes germaniques and the Socieacuteteacute franccedilaise de philosophie on 23 and 25 February 1929 Husserl had given two two-hour presentations subsequently published as his Paris Lectures that the philosopher also paid a four-day visit to the University of Strasbourg where he delivered a modified version of the two lectures to a lively and interested audience of 50 or 60 students in theology and philosophy mainly invited by Jean Hering (a former student of Husserl) as Malvina Husserl the philosopherrsquos wife duly records in a letter to roman Ingarden of 24 March cited by S Strasser in the introduction to his edition of the Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortraumlge (The Hague Nijhoff 1963) xxv In these Strasbourg lectures Husserl spoke in German it seems mainly on the topic of the transcendental reduction and intersubjectivity readers of Christophe Bidentrsquos biography will remember that a rare series of photographs show Blanchot and Levinas together with various friends enjoying the hospitality of one of their professors in Strasbourg Charles Blondel on 4 May the same year and it is more than likely the two friends had also attended Husserlrsquos lectures together two months earlier Having revised and expanded the text of his lectures Husserl forwarded the completed typescript to Jean Hering in Strasbourg on 17 May Hering then entrusted the text for translation to Levinas who knew Husserl well and in preparation for the trip to Paris had been asked to give the philosopherrsquos wife French lessons (more as a tactful way of offering him financial support Levinas later recalled than to assist his student in improving her vocabulary) This inaugural French version appeared two years later under the title Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes translated by Emmanuel Levinas and Gabrielle Pfeiffer (Paris [Armand Colin 1931] Vrin 1986)


predating the posthumous publication of the original German by some eighteen years When the translation appeared it followed hard on the heels of Levinasrsquos 1930 doctoral thesis Theacuteorie de lrsquointuition dans la pheacutenomeacutenologie de Husserl (Paris Vrin 1930) The Theory of Intuition in Husserlrsquos Phenomenology translated by Andreacute Orianne (Evanston Northwestern University Press 1973) which was instrumental in introducing Husserlrsquos thinking to a whole generation of French philosophers and intellectuals Levinas provides a belated echo of Husserlrsquos Strasbourg visit (and of his wifersquos shopping trip complete with embarrassing antisemitic remark) in a 1959 tribute to the philosopher in En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 174n1 Discovering Existence with Husserl 189ndash90n1

112 Edmund Husserl Ideen zu einer reinen Phaumlnomenologie und phaumlnomenologischen Philosophie (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer [1913] 2002) 8 Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy First Book translated by F Kersten (Dordrecht Kluwer 1998) 5ndash6



115 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen (Hamburg Felix Meiner 1995) 29 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 23 Cartesian Meditations translated by Dorion Cairns (The Hague Nijhoff 1973) 27 For an accessible introduction to Husserlrsquos lectures see A D Smith Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London routledge 2003)

116 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 22 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 17ndash18 Cartesian Meditations 20ndash1

117 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 27 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 22 Cartesian Meditations 26 emphasis in original

118 Levinas Theacuteorie de lrsquointuition dans la pheacutenomeacutenologie de Husserl 213 The Theory of Intuition in Husserlrsquos Phenomenology 149 translation modified

119 Levinas En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 52ndash3 Discovering Existence with Husserl 72ndash3

120 Compare Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 161 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 134 Cartesian Meditations 157 lsquoMan muszlig erst die Welt durch έpocή verlierenrsquo concludes Husserl lsquoum sie in universaler Selbstbesinnung wiederzugewinnenrsquo lsquoIl faut drsquoabord perdre le monde par lrsquoέpocήrsquo Levinas-Pfeiffer translate lsquopour le retrouver ensuite dans une prise de conscience universelle de soi-mecircmersquo Dorion Cairns in comparison is more pedestrian and

A turnInG 97

writes lsquoI must lose the world by epocheacute in order to regain it by a universal self-examinationrsquo It is worth noting that Husserlrsquos Paris lectures end with the same expression and it is quite likely his Strasbourg presentation did so too

121 For Levinasrsquos reading of Thomas lrsquoObscur see Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant (Paris Vrin [1947] 1990) 103 Existence and Existents translated by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague Nijhoff 1978) 63 Blanchotrsquos long-standing interest in the thinking of Husserl and Heidegger during the 1930s raises another question that of the relationship between his philosophical interests and the nationalist political cultural standpoint defended by him during those years in the conservative and extremist press Suffice it to say perhaps at this stage that the crucial problematic that traverses all Blanchotrsquos political literary and philosophical thinking at that time (and continued to do so in subsequent years) is the question of the law and its constitution to which I return in Chapter Three

122 The bibliography provided by Dominique Janicaud in his Heidegger en France I 544 indicates that Heideggerrsquos lecture in a translation by Henry Corbin first appeared in French in Mesures 3 15 July 1937 119ndash44 It is most likely here that Blanchot first encountered it According to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (in conversation with the author) Blanchot was however somewhat unconvinced by Corbinrsquos translation and was prompted to obtain a copy of the original German no mean achievement at the time since Heideggerrsquos text had been published only discreetly in the periodical Das Innere Reich in December 1936 and reissued the following year only as a Sonderdruck or off-print

123 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoeacutebauche drsquoun romanrsquo Aux eacutecoutes 30 July 1938 31 lsquoThe Beginnings of a Novelrsquo translated by Michael Holland The Blanchot Reader 33ndash4 (p 34)

124 Detailed comparison between the wording of Blanchotrsquos original articles and the versions given in 1943 in Faux Pas nevertheless reveals some cooling of interest on Blanchotrsquos part for phenomenological approaches to literature though this may be the result of the political climate at the time whatever the markedly divergent political leanings of its proponents phenomenology in France at the height of the Occupation still remained in the eyes of some a German science By 1945 however the situation had again changed allowing Blanchot somewhat surprisingly in a text that appears in La Part du feu 91 The Work of Fire 86 to commend the Surrealism of Andreacute Breton with its emphasis on the immediacy of poetic experience for its rediscovery of the Husserlian cogito


125 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 9 The Step Not Beyond 2 translation modified In a letter from 27 May 1940 to Jean Paulhan one of the very first readers of Thomas lrsquoObscur quoted by Bernard Baillaud in the third volume of Paulhanrsquos Œuvres complegravetes (Paris Gallimard 2011) 22 Blanchot offers his correspondent a more graphic less philosophical account of the experience of writing the novel lsquoIt allowed mersquo he wrote lsquopersonally to advance to where there is no longer any path to separate myself from the world of psychology and analysis and understand that feelings and existences can be felt deeply only in a place where in the words of the Upanishads there is neither water light air spatial infinity [infini de lrsquoespace] or rational infinity [infini de la raison] nor a total absence of all things neither this world nor anotherrsquo

126 Compare for instance Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 48ndash9 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 20 Cartesian Meditations 46ndash7

127 Husserl Ideen 56 Ideas 60 The phenomenological epocheacute Husserl explains is necessarily subject to a methodological restriction lsquoWe could nowrsquo he remarks lsquolet the universal έpocή in our sharply determinate and novel sense of the term take the place of the Cartesian attempt to doubt universally But with good reason we limit [begrenzen] the universality of that Since we are completely free to modify every positing and every judging [Urteil] and to parenthesise [einklammern] every objectivity which can be judged about as if it were as comprehensive as possible then no province would be left for unmodified judgements to say nothing of a province for science But our purpose is to discover a new scientific domain one that is to be gained by the method of parenthesising [durch die Methode der Einklammerung] which therefore must be a definitely restricted onersquo

128 Husserl Ideen 94 Ideas 113 emphasis in the original translation modified

129 See Blanchot Faux Pas 9ndash23 Faux Pas 1ndash16 translation slightly modified On the differences between Husserl and Heidegger as they appeared at the time to Levinas (and arguably Blanchot too) see Levinas En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 69 Discovering Existence with Husserl 84 lsquoAnxiety [Lrsquoangoisse]rsquo writes Levinas glossing Sein und Zeit in a 1932 essay not included in the English edition lsquois a way of being in which the unimportance insignificance and nothingness [neacuteant] of all innerworldly objects [tous les objets intrashymondains] become accessible to Daseinrsquo (p 106)

130 On Blanchotrsquos Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger during this period see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 77ndash91

A turnInG 99

131 See Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1967) 6 Speech and Phenomena translated by David B Allison (Evanston Northwestern University Press 1973) 7ndash8

132 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 24 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 19 Cartesian Meditations 22ndash3

133 Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 89 Speech and Phenomena 80


135 Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 95 Speech and Phenomena 85 translation modified Blanchot too in LrsquoArrecirct de mort shows that the living present is never given in simple fullsome presence but always already deferred and traversed by death and it is only because of the latter that the former is itself possible as Derrida shows in his turn in his essay on the story in Parages 110ndash203 Parages 103ndash91


137 See Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 98ndash117 Speech and Phenomena 88ndash104

138 Indeed to claim ontological status for the neuter in Blanchot is arguably one of the chief misconceptions perpetrated by Marlegravene Zarader in LrsquoEcirctre et le neutre agrave partir de Maurice Blanchot (Lagrasse Verdier 2001) and derives from Zaraderrsquos hasty decision to read Blanchot as an unrepentant phenomenologist

139 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 448ndash9 The Infinite Conversation 304 emphasis in the original translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos rethinking of phenomenology in Chapter Four

140 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 394ndash418 The Infinite Conversation 264ndash81 translation modified Unfortunately Susan Hansonrsquos version of the title (lsquoOn A Change of Epoch the Exigency of returnrsquo) loses the syllabic symmetry and doubleness of the original It may also be noted that (excepting the initial unnumbered and untitled narrative) LrsquoEntretien infini as a whole is composed of three sections containing nine thirteen and eighteen texts respectively ie forty in all lsquoSur un changement drsquoeacutepoquersquo is the twenty-second in this sequence falling like a poetic caesura at the end of the second section and just after the mid-point in the book

141 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 404ndash5 The Infinite Conversation 271 Compare Nietzsche KSA 3 528 The Gay Science edited by Bernard Williams translated by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge


Cambridge University Press 2001) 162 translation modified Blanchot himself is quoting from Nietzsche Œuvres philosophiques complegravetes V Le Gai Savoir suivi de Fragments posthumes eacuteteacute 1881shyeacuteteacute 1882 edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari translated by Pierre Klossowski revised by Marc de Launay (Paris Gallimard [1967] 1982) 195 As the editors point out in this republication of the 1967 volume the order of certain fragments dealing with the thought of eternal return has been revised the references provided by Blanchot in 1969 therefore no longer tally exactly with the revised 1982 text Some pages later (in LrsquoEntretien infini 417 The Infinite Conversation 280) Blanchot quotes the alternative reading of the passage found in Nietzschersquos posthumous papers (KSA 9 606 Le Gai Savoir 475)

142 Bataille first quotes the passage in a footnote to an article on lsquoNietzsche and the fascistsrsquo from Aceacutephale (1937) affirming in his main text that lsquothe future the unknown wonder of the future is the sole object of Nietzschersquos festival [lrsquoavenir le merveilleux inconnu de lrsquoavenir est le seul objet de la fecircte nietzscheacuteenne]rsquo he next cites it in Le Coupable in 1944 where he writes that lsquoUnwissenheit loved ecstatic ignorance becomes at this moment the expression of a wisdom without hope [lrsquoUnwissenheit lrsquoignorance aimeacutee extatique devient agrave ce moment lrsquoexpression drsquoune sagesse sans espoir]rsquo See Bataille Œuvres complegravetes 12 vols (Paris Gallimard 1970ndash88) I 463 and V 260ndash2 Visions of Excess Selected Writings 1927ndash39 translated by Allan Stoekl Carl r Lovitt and Donald M Leslie (Manchester Manchester University Press 1985) 193 and Guilty translated by Bruce Boone (Venice San Francisco The Lapis Press 1988) 25ndash6

143 Ernst Bertram Nietzsche Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin G Bondi 1918) 11ndash12 178 Nietzsche Attempt at a Mythology translated by robert E Norton (Urbana University of Illinois Press 2009) 12 151 For the passage quoted in LrsquoEntretien infini 407 The Infinite Conversation 273 see Nietzsche Versuch einer Mythologie 362 Nietzsche Attempt at a Mythology 306 It is likely that Blanchot first encountered Bertramrsquos study in robert Pitroursquos much earlier French translation Nietzsche essai de mythologie (Paris rieder 1932)

144 Karl Loumlwith Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Stuttgart Kohlhammer [1935] 1956) 29 Nietzschersquos Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same translated by J Harvey Lomax (Berkeley University of California Press 1997) 25 translation modified

A turnInG 101


146 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 407 The Infinite Conversation 273 translation modified Though Blanchot does not mention it explicitly it is almost certain he was writing these words in the margins so to speak of Derridarsquos essay lsquoOusia et Grammegrave note sur une note de Sein und Zeit [Ousia and Grammegrave Note on a Note from Being and Time]rsquo first published in 1968 in the volume LrsquoEndurance de la penseacutee (to which Blanchot contributed lsquoParole de fragmentrsquo) and collected in Marges de la philosophie (Paris Minuit 1972) 33ndash78 Margins of Philosophy translated by Alan Bass (Chicago University of Chicago Press) 31ndash67

147 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 408 The Infinite Conversation 273 translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos reading of Klossowskirsquos Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux revised edition (Paris Mercure de France [1969] 1991) Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle translated by Daniel W Smith (London Athlone 1997) to which these remarks are addressed in Chapter Three

148 Nietzsche Saumlmtliche Briefe edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari 8 vols (Berlin de Gruyerdtv 1984) 8 577ndash9 The letter is cited in Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 341ndash2 The key sentence in Klossowskirsquos translation reads lsquoCe qui est deacutesagreacuteable et gecircne ma modestie crsquoest qursquoau fond chaque nom de lrsquohistoire crsquoest moirsquo (p 341) lsquoWhat is unpleasant and offensive to my modesty is that deep down every name in history is mersquo

149 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 410 416 The Infinite Conversation 275 279


151 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 418 The Infinite Conversation 281 translation modified Blanchotrsquos source text is Nietzsche Le Gai Savoir 421 Compare Nietzsche KSA 9 555ndash6 Blanchotrsquos motives in quoting these lines become clearer from the fragment as a whole which reads lsquoGo on and on becoming who you are ndash the teacher and tutor of yourself You are no writer you only write for yourself That is how you keep the memory of your good moments and find what links them the gold chain of your self That is how you prepare for the time when you have to speak Perhaps then you will be ashamed to speak as sometimes you have been ashamed to write and because it is still necessary to interpret oneself because whatever you do or do not do is not enough to communicate what you are Yes you


want to communicate One day in genteel society reading much will be seen as uncouth then you will no longer need to feel ashamed at being read whereas now whoever addresses you as a writer offends you and whoever praises you for your writing reveals his lack of tact opens up a chasm between you both ndash he has no idea how much he is humiliating himself by believing he can edify you in that way I know the state of of people today when they read Ugh To want to be concerned and create for this state of affairsrsquo

2

the demand of the fragmentary

I

A gift

[ ] Waiting is always a waiting for waiting withdrawing the beginning suspending the ending and within this interval opening the interval of another waiting The night in which one waits for nothing [dans laquelle il nrsquoest rien attendu] represents this movement of waiting

The impossibility of waiting is an essential part of waiting [appartient essentiellement agrave lrsquoattente]

BLANCHOT lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo1

In 1959 alongside such long-standing admirers of Heidegger as Jean Beaufret and such recent acquaintances of the philosopher as reneacute Char and Georges Braque Blanchot was invited to contribute to a celebratory volume in honour of Heideggerrsquos seventieth birthday2 The proposal fell as we have seen at a significant time for Blanchot one that in all senses marked an epoch in his thinking and writing

That Blanchot agreed to contribute to the book was the result of various factors First it was an opportunity to pay tribute Heidegger at the time remained for Blanchot the pre-eminent contemporary thinker whose work had accompanied him more closely than any other perhaps with the exception of Emmanuel Levinas together with whom in 1927 or 1928 shortly after it was published he had


in any case first read Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and who in the decades that followed remained a key partner in Blanchotrsquos continuing engagement with Heideggerrsquos thinking Sixty years on Blanchot was still able to recall the lsquointellectual shockrsquo of that first encounter and it was this he explained in 1987 that lay behind his decision to contribute to the 1959 Festschift lsquoan event of first magnitude [un eacuteveacutenement de premiegravere grandeur] had just taken placersquo he wrote lsquoimpossible to attenuate even today even in my memoryrsquo3 But Blanchotrsquos enthusiasm for Heidegger was never unqualified As early as December 1946 in an essay on the poems of Houmllderlin published in Critique Blanchot had written admiringly but with discriminating severity about Heideggerrsquos appropriation of the poetrsquos work4 The strength of Blanchotrsquos interest remained however undiminished and as we have seen there is ample evidence from his published work that he carried on reading Heidegger throughout the 1950s usually in the original German engaging with a succession of texts as they appeared from Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track) in 1950 to Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language) nine years later not forgetting the two 1961 Nietzsche volumes and various other subsequent publications too

Blanchotrsquos relationship to Heideggerrsquos thought during that period bore another contingent or anecdotal trait In 1950 when it fell to Heidegger to express in turn his admiration for an article on Houmllderlin published in Critique (almost certainly the 1946 essay mentioned above of which he may have been made aware by Beaufret but which he must only have perused in cursory fashion) he did so by inadvertently attributing it not to Blanchot but to Bataille Blanchotrsquos friend not realising that Bataillersquos role had simply been to commission it or more accurately to propose it to Blanchot in his capacity as journal editor5 But whatever the reason for this embarrassing failure of attention or lapse of memory on Heideggerrsquos part and for the ensuing misunderstanding this flattering if wayward response to the writer whom Heidegger declared (by proxy) to be lsquothe best mind in France [la meilleure tecircte pensante franccedilaise]rsquo evidently deserved a considered reply and this was no doubt another reason for Blanchotrsquos decision to contribute to the seventieth-birthday volume for it gave him the chance to respond directly ndash which is to say in the circumstances indirectly ndash to Heidegger in his own ndash improper ndash name

Blanchotrsquos contribution to the Festschrift was therefore under-standably oblique both in manner and in content It consisted of a


short five-page extract entitled lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo which shared its title and some of its material as indicated earlier with a related yet separate piece carried by the journal Botteghe Oscure the previous Summer Like its eponymous doublet Blanchotrsquos Festschrift contribution belonged to the generically undecidable work in progress midway between intermittent narrative and essayistic meditation published as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli three years later But although the work contained in the 1959 homage largely reappears in the 1962 book it does so as we shall see in significantly altered form In this sense Blanchotrsquos Festschrift contribution was no haphazard occasional offering More than simply a page from LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (which is how Blanchot describes it in his 1987 letter to Catherine David) it asked to be read more as a writerrsquos response to a specific given context celebrating both an epoch in thought and a thought of the present epoch each marked by Heideggerrsquos signature to the importance of which Blanchot was willing to bear witness even as he took care to couch his testimony in an idiom that despite appearances to the contrary owed more to the French guest than it did to his German host

In an effort to reflect the range and implications of Heideggerrsquos thinking the 1959 Festschrift was divided into five sections Philosophy Theology Art and Literary Criticism Medicine and Physics and Poetry Sculpture and Painting with Blanchotrsquos text appearing under the third of these rubrics But whatever the impression of the volumersquos editors Blanchotrsquos contribution was transparently not literary criticism nor was it in any precise sense philosophical commentary or literary narrative either though it arguably contained elements compatible with both Its singularity as a piece of writing lay instead in its concerted interruption of the requirements of each of these canonic discourses This suspension of generic affiliation was itself closely attuned to Blanchotrsquos title For without being reducible as such to anything remotely resembling transcendental consciousness waiting much like anxiety in Sein und Zeit nevertheless offered the possibility of an experience of parenthetic disclosure in which the norms and constraints of worldly expectation were paradoxically put in abeyance and existence or being allowed as it were to speak for itself In this sense Blanchotrsquos interest in the topic of waiting was perhaps nothing new At any event it gave him the opportunity to prolong his earlier fictional and critical work and to continue to explore the legacy and the limitations of at least a certain kind of phenomenology


Waiting was not however simply one phenomenological theme among others Without being alone in this as Blanchot goes on to show in both Le Pas aushydelagrave and LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre it was a prime instance of the radical inadequacy of that metaphysics of the subject which Heidegger throughout the 1940s and 1950s had denounced so insistently as one of the crucial pillars of technological modernity In attending to the question of waiting in his Festschrift piece then there is little doubt that Blanchot in his own way was knowingly retracing Heideggerrsquos footsteps acknowledging and paying tribute to one of the abiding concerns of his predecessorrsquos thinking For in Heidegger too waiting was not an isolated topic It was inseparable from a series of fundamental questions touching on the past and the future the task of thinking and the claims of the unthought the closure of metaphysics and its possible overcoming These were questions Heidegger in the 1950s had made his own Faced with the challenge of thinking beyond the ravages of the present and with the requirement issuing from thought itself to attend to the unforeseen still unthought future the only fitting response Heidegger put it in 1952 writing in the margins of Houmllderlinrsquos poem lsquoSocrates und Alcibiades [Socrates and Alcibiades]rsquo was to wait warten But to wait he explained did not mean a deferral of thinking On the contrary it meant lsquoto remain on the look-out [Ausschau halten] within the already thought [des schon Gedachten] for the unthought [dem Ungedachten] which still lies concealed in the already thought [das sich im schon Gedachten noch verbirgt]rsquo lsquoThrough such waitingrsquo he explained lsquowe are already engaged in thinking on a path towards that which is to be thought [das zushyDenkende]rsquo6 lsquoAt issue herersquo he went on five years later turning to the threat posed by modern rationalism lsquois whether as attendants [Waumlrter those who wait] and guardians [Waumlchter those who wake] we may ensure that the silence of the appeal in the word of Being [die Stille des Zuspruches im Wort vom Sein] prevails over the noise of the claim of the principle of sufficient reason [principium rationis] to be the basis of all propositional thinking [Vorstellen]rsquo7

Waiting then was not procrastination For Heidegger and Blanchot alike it disclosed an experience of time irreducible to the representational structures of Western metaphysical thinking for which both writers agreed futurity was first and foremost a thing to be grasped a deferred present measured according to an economic calculus of investment and return expenditure and


profit subordination and appropriation This had been Heideggerrsquos lesson to Blanchot from the outset and it is what enabled him in his early critical essays to question in his turn the metaphysical understanding of the artwork as an aesthetic object posited and contemplated as such by a subject of quotidian experience and in the wake of Houmllderlin and Mallarmeacute to begin thinking of the poem as playing a primary foundational role rather than a secondary mimetic one But Blanchotrsquos debt to Heidegger also reached beyond a shared attention to specific philosophical themes It arguably also had something to do with an approach to words In this respect lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo marked a noticeable shift in Blanchotrsquos work It was one of the first of the writerrsquos texts to have extensive recourse to paronomasia as a mode of thinking The tendency is one that would become ever more prominent as we shall see in Le Pas aushydelagrave and LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre But in 1959 as far as some readers were concerned it was already reminiscent of Heideggerrsquos later writings notably the essays on language collected in Unterwegs zur Sprache and it is no doubt true that to follow Blanchotrsquos exploration of the similarities and differences between such cognate terms or near-homophones as attendre atteindre attente or attention stands some comparison with the experience of reading Heidegger when he muses on the etymologies of individual words and on the connotations of certain idiomatic German expressions8

In theme and treatment then Blanchotrsquos Festschrift contribution gathered together a number of the key concerns that by the late 1950s bore the unmistakeable signature of Heideggerrsquos thought to which it was in that respect a generous and fitting tribute

But there was something else in Blanchotrsquos text almost entirely unprecedented in the authorrsquos writing and of particular relevance as we shall see to the recipient of Blanchotrsquos tribute this birthday gift to Heidegger was in the form of a series of fragments

Thirty-five to be precise of radically differing extents the shortest consisting merely of a few words while the longest covered nearly a page as though to mark discreetly (and discretely) that the measure of any life even one lived as in this case to the biblical limit of three-score-and-ten was immeasurable as such to the necessary degree as Heidegger had long maintained that Dasein was inseparable from the inherent possibility of an unforeseeable future Thirty-five fragments then might seem to evoke only half a life But what is half a life if not necessarily and in principle already the possibility of the


whole of a life And what is the possibility of the whole of a life if not the necessary prospect of its imminent ending

Birthdays then as Blanchot was aware are by implication always deathdays In this respect it was not without significance that Heideggerrsquos birthday 26 September fell only four days after Blanchotrsquos own and that his seventieth coincided almost exactly with the second anniversary of the death of Blanchotrsquos mother9 In such circumstances what more appropriate birthday present might Blanchot send to Heidegger than a meditation on waiting on time death and the future

This is not to say Blanchotrsquos gift did not require to be opened with some care For it was soon apparent that Blanchotrsquos present was also in the form of a challenge To some of the Festschriftrsquos readers this may have seemed ungracious but as every birthday boy or girl knows the best gifts are those that are unexpected and which rather than encouraging complacency provoke the recipient to think anew of the past the present and the impending future In any case how better to thank a thinker who had made so much of the intimate bond between thinking (Denken) and thanking (Danken) as had Heidegger in Was heiszligt Denken than by inviting him to think again into the future Such it may be argued was the gesture implied by Blanchotrsquos gift to Heidegger a gift that acknowledged the otherrsquos achievement but promised more than dutiful ceremony Like any present it belonged to an economy of exchange and reciprocity but to be a gift at all if such were possible as Derrida would often put it it had also to interrupt this circle of respect or familiarity10

This asymmetry between recipient and donor by which the one is contested rather than merely acknowledged by the other is legible in a number of different ways throughout lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo First in so far as the piece incorporates a thinking about time and was offered as such to the philosopher at a significant moment in his lifersquos course it seems clear that one of Blanchotrsquos main concerns itself the fruit of many earlier exchanges with Levinas was to reflect and reflect upon his own long-standing engagement or Auseinandersetzung (ie explication as both scrutiny and dispute) with Heideggerrsquos famous remarks on death in Division Two Chapter 1 of Sein und Zeit for it is there in sect53 towards the end of Heideggerrsquos discussion of Sein zum Tode or Being-towards-death that the account of dying is decisively bound to an analysis of waiting in the form


of a description of expectation or waiting for (Erwarten)11 At this point in his exposition Heideggerrsquos purpose is clear enough It was to gain an ontological understanding of Dasein in respect of its relationship with the end (Ende) and with its own totality or wholeness (Ganzheit) Death Heidegger famously contends lsquois the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein [die Moumlglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmoumlglichkeit]rsquo lsquo[D]eath as the end of Daseinrsquo he explains lsquois Daseinrsquos ownmost possibility ndash non-relational certain and as such indefinite not to be outstripped [die eigenste unbezuumlgliche gewisse und als solche unbestimmte unuumlberholbare Moumlglichkeit des Daseins]rsquo12 But there is of course more than one way to face this imminent prospect of dying more than one way to respond to the impossible A persistent feature of anonymous everyday life claims Heidegger is that death this most proper of possibilities is experienced as a banal event merely affecting others The standard response to death he argues is for Dasein to take refuge in idle chatter (Gerede) As a result nobody it would seem really dies only a nameless impersonal substitute lsquoman stirbtrsquo lsquoon meurtrsquo lsquoone diesrsquo Dying is done in other words or better not done For Heidegger this lapse into anonymity is both a temptation and a form of blindness The everyday experience of death he terms lsquoevasive concealment [verdeckende Ausweichen]rsquo a lsquoconstant fleeing [staumlndige Flucht]rsquo before deathrsquos imminence all of which according to Heidegger is confirmation of the extent to which Dasein is so often destined to be a hapless victim of the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) that is the hallmark of the fallenness or falling (Verfallenheit) of Being

For Heidegger such failures are not contingent occurrences They are an unavoidable consequence of the withdrawal and forgetting of Being As such they imply that an authentic properly proper relationship with the possibility of impossibility presented to me by my dying is nevertheless possible Such a relationship (with that which suffers no relationship) cannot be in the form of an expecting (Erwarten) since to expect is precisely to seek to establish a transitive relationship with death and to swap for the possibility of my impossibility the calculable and impersonal possibility of worldly realisation It is however possible says Heidegger with rather different implications to anticipate (vorlaufen) the possibility of dying Indeed without such anticipation one would not be able to conceive of death as possibility at all lsquoBeing-towards-death


as anticipation of possibility [als Vorlaufen in die Moumlglichkeit]rsquo Heidegger remarks lsquois what first makes this possibility possible [ermoumlglicht allererst diese Moumlglichkeit] and sets it free as suchrsquo13 In all this the distinction between the transitivity of expecting (Erwarten) and the intransitivity of anticipation (Vorlaufen) is paramount and it is no surprise to find in Division Two Chapter 4 of Sein und Zeit that Heidegger again has recourse to the contrast between anticipation (vorlaufen) on the one hand and awaiting (erwarten) waiting for (warten auf ) or expecting (gewaumlrtigen) on the other in order to secure the crucial difference between proper and improper authentic and inauthentic personal and impersonal lsquoThe inauthentic future [Die uneigentliche Zukunft]rsquo he writes in sect68 lsquohas the character of awaiting [des Gewaumlrtigens]rsquo whereas lsquoin anticipation [im Vorlaufen] lies a more primordial Being-towards-death [ein urspruumlnglicheres Sein zum Tode] than in the concernful expecting of it [im besorgten Erwarten seiner]rsquo14

Anticipation of deathrsquos proper possibility then is what separates an authentic future from an inauthentic one But what if the opposition between expectation and anticipation between waiting for something and just waiting between transitive and intransitive with everything it serves to support in Heideggerrsquos analysis were somehow more fragile than Heideggerrsquos language appears to allow What if it were not possible to divide the future from itself on the basis of that opposition What if it were not possible to make the death that is necessarily mine the site of a decision division or determination between personal and impersonal proper and improper authentic and inauthentic eigentlich and uneigentlich What if what announced itself as the horizon of deathrsquos possibility were the impossibility of dying in which case I or better the anonymous non-person withdrawn from possibility who has henceforth taken my place would be forced to conclude that it was necessarily part of the possibility of that horizon for it to be suspended interrupted effaced

What then if the anonymity of death and my anonymity in the face of death as Blanchot argues at length in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire were the only possible ndash ie in these circumstances impossible ndash response to the imminence or futurity of death And what if the infinite indecision of this relationship without relationship with the necessary impossibility of death this comeacutedie or sham as Bataille called it in a famous essay of 195515 were the place without place


where literature neither true nor false authentic nor inauthentic complete nor incomplete became unavoidable

The question lsquoWhat if rsquo suggests Blanchot is one that lsquoliteraturersquo in its constitutive indecision its constant reinscription and effacement of the horizon its epochal resistance to ontological positioning perpetually asks of philosophy without receiving an answer

Blanchot nevertheless agreed that there was an important distinction to be made between the waiting that is a transitive expecting and the waiting that is intransitive anticipation and it was in exactly those terms his Festschrift tribute began

acute To wait merely to wait [Attendre seulement attendre]Since when had he been waiting Since he had made himself

available [libre] for waiting by losing the desire for particular things and even the desire for the end to things Waiting [lrsquoattente] begins when there is nothing left to wait for [attendre] not even the end of waiting [la fin de cette attente] Waiting does not know [ignore] and leaves aside what it is waiting for Waiting waits for nothing16

In writing these words Blanchot was perhaps mindful that some ten years earlier Beckett (who would later testify to his own affinity with LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli)17 had at one point hesitated whether to call his celebrated 1953 play En attendant Godot or simply En attendant Beckettrsquos indecision is telling It reveals a fundamental doubleness about the syntax of the word attendre which Blanchot in turn exploits to vertiginous effect in lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Attendre (meaning both to wait in the absolute and to await in determinate manner) together with the noun lrsquoattente (meaning according to context any one or more of waiting waiting for or expecting) is indifferently both transitive and intransitive as a word it hesitates between such possibles according to an irreducible undecidability As translators from the French are only too aware a perpetual ambiguity attaches to the word which context is not always sufficient to resolve Whenever the word attendre is used then the word itself waits and forces its reader to do likewise Whatever the outcome of that wait the ghostly aura of one meaning will always have been present alongside the other Indeed what manifests itself par excellence in waiting (but often precisely by not manifesting itself) is precisely


this indecision lsquoWhatever the importance of the object of waiting [lrsquoobjet de lrsquoattente both purpose and thing]rsquo Blanchot writes lsquoit is always infinitely exceeded [infiniment deacutepasseacute] by the movement of waitingrsquo18 What is at stake here for Blanchot however as he unfolds the verbal structure of waiting is not the meaning of the word in so far as it may be held to contain an original truth or truthful origin but the plural hesitation of a syntax19

In such sentences it is as though the distinction between (transitive) expectation and (intransitive) anticipation is both maintained and suspended inscribed and effaced with the result that the word attente is marked or remarked with a neutrality that defies or resists the opposition between them and leaves in limbo all that is dependent upon it lsquoWhen there is waitingrsquo LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli remarks

one waits for nothing [il nrsquoy a attente de rien] In the movement of waiting death ceases to be something for which it is possible to wait [cesse de pouvoir ecirctre attendue] Waiting in the intimate calm [tranquilliteacute intime] at the heart of which everything that occurs is turned aside [deacutetourneacute] by waiting does not let death occur as that which might satisfy waiting [suffire agrave lrsquoattente] but holds it in suspense in dissolution and at every moment exceeded by the empty monotony [lrsquoeacutegaliteacute vide] of waiting

lsquoWhat a strange opposition between waiting and deathrsquo the fragment went on apropos of the bookrsquos anonymous and impersonal protagonist lsquoHe waits for death [il attend la mort] in a state of waiting [dans une attente] indifferent to death And in the same way death does not let itself be awaited [ne se laisse pas attendre]rsquo20 To anticipate death in other words is necessarily to remain unconcerned by it while death itself only ever occurs as an exposure to the inaccessible and the interminable

Whatever its philosophical necessity then Heideggerrsquos distinction between expectation and anticipation is no sooner transposed into Blanchotrsquos French than it loses its foundational stability It is traversed by an indecision it can neither control nor avoid Indeed all that is required for Heideggerrsquos distinction to be problematised even in its own idiom is for waiting to become affected by an internal abyssal fold What happens for instance asks Blanchotrsquos text when we wait for waiting Do we tend expectantly towards the future or are we suspended in a repetitive imminence irreducible


to temporal progression To wait for waiting is not however an external adjunct to waiting It is writes Blanchot and as En attendant Godot confirms an essential part of all waiting which installs at the heart of waiting a distance or difference which separates it from itself gathers it up only in order to disperse it again in such a way that it is now both itself and not yet itself and more powerfully in evidence as the one when it is already the other A waiting that waits for waiting in so far as it is not yet a waiting is arguably no longer properly a waiting at all and yet precisely in so far as it is not yet a waiting it is arguably already more of a waiting than it will ever be The less it is itself so the more it is itself the looser the tighter the weaker the stronger the less acute the more acute As lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo puts it also referring to itself lsquoAbortive [steacuterile] waiting ever poorer and ever emptier Pregnant [pleine] waiting ever the richer for waitingrsquo And it adds lsquoThe one is the otherrsquo21 Time reverses all including itself

In such recursive moments the reflexive redoubling of experience staged by Blanchot does not operate to the benefit of absolute subjectivity as it did for instance for the Jena romantics under the influence of their reading of Fichte What intervenes instead under the auspices of an internal fold is an exposure to the outside In the movement of waiting for waiting no sooner is the act of waiting folded back upon itself than it loses its object forfeits its self-identity and is denied the possibility with which it began excluded from all projective temporality waiting becomes an exposure to an absence of foundation that may be approached only as an endless question which cannot even be properly formulated lsquoHe says he is searchingrsquo one reads lsquohe is not searching and if he asks a question [srsquoil interroge] this is perhaps already to be unfaithful to waiting which neither affirms nor questions but waits [nrsquoaffirme ni nrsquointerroge mais attend]rsquo lsquoWaiting bears a question which cannot be asked [qui ne se pose pas] Common to both the one and the other is the infinity [lrsquoinfini] which is in the merest question [la moindre question] and the faintest waiting [la plus faible attente] As soon as there is questioning no answer comes that might exhaust the questionrsquo22

Blanchotrsquos objective was not to propose a phenomenology of waiting But nor was it to subordinate waiting to a thinking of Being Beyond all prescriptive reference to the proper or improper the authentic or inauthentic it was rather to respond in writing


to the demand of the future which speaks in the indecision and impossibility of dying in so far as both eluded all characterisation The future as Blanchotrsquos account of waiting shows cannot be approached except in as much as it is always already interrupted deferred and effaced Which is no doubt why as we have seen what arrives as an event in Blanchotrsquos writing in the 1950s in response to the uncertain promise or threat of an epochal turning is the demand of the fragmentary Indeed in so far as fragmentary writing or writing according to the fragmentary is necessarily marked by interminability and incompletion any fragmentary text even any text at all is always already a waiting for what has yet to occur But what speaks in fragmentary writing for Blanchot is not only the anticipation of the future what exerts its demand over Blanchot in the fragmentary went much further for it was the impossible infinity of the unthinkable lsquoThe thought of waitingrsquo explains one of Blanchotrsquos Festschrift fragments lsquothe thought that is the waiting for that which does not let itself be thought [ce qui ne se laisse pas penser] the thought that is borne by waiting and adjourned in that waitingrsquo23

What lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo says in fragmentary form about waiting necessarily then also says something about the fragmentary For just like waiting the fragmentary appeals to a future that cannot be given cannot be made present and resists all presentation

Here too Blanchot engages obliquely with Heidegger For in lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo this birthday gift to the thinker Blanchot signals the detached fragmentary status of his textrsquos component elements by attaching to them a cross acute In lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo this acute motif has at least two functions First it is a citation Written into the margins of a homage to Heidegger on his seventieth birthday it remembers a passage from Heideggerrsquos 1951 lecture lsquoBauen Wohnen Denken [Building Dwelling Thinking]rsquo where the place of the thing in Western metaphysics is identified by the thinker as being like lsquoan unknown X [ein unbekanntes X] to which perceptible properties are attachedrsquo24 Heideggerrsquos proposed alternative based on the heavily overdetermined (and Houmllderlinian) counter-example of the bridge connecting or gathering together the two banks of a river is to go on to think the thing das Ding as embodied in the bridge in what he claims to be more originary fashion according to the figure of the fourfold (das Geviert) The fourfold crosses heaven and earth mortals and immortals At its centre its literal crux lies death Death Heidegger


reminds us means lsquohaving the capacity for death as death [den Tod als Tod vermoumlgen]rsquo25 In thinking the fourfold despite the figurersquos potential for dispersion to each of its four corners as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre will later show Heidegger overwhelmingly privileges that original unity prior to dispersion or collection as such for which he summons up the term Vershysammlung (lsquothis wonderful word [dieses wunderbare Wort]rsquo26 he calls it in Summer 1944) meaning gathering that is both the action and its outcome As readers of Heidegger will know this was no isolated trouvaille The motif of Versammlung for essential reasons permeates much if not indeed all Heideggerrsquos later thinking including his treatment of such enduring questions as that of space or place poetry thinking remembering language logos and of course Being itself27

Blanchot knows this but his writing remains unconvinced For Blanchotrsquos citation of Heideggerrsquos 1951 lecture is also necessarily an erasure if it gathers up a fragment of Heideggerrsquos abiding thoughts on the rootedness of Being it also disperses it to the four corners of the Babelian library This is the second function of the that attaches itself thirty-five times over to Blanchotrsquos gift like a necessary memento of the eternal imminence of the impossibility of dying (readers of LrsquoArrecirct de mort will also recall the doctorrsquos prognosis regarding the narrator lsquo lsquolsquoX My dear sir you can cross him off [il faut faire une croix dessus]rsquorsquo rsquo28) But if Blanchotrsquos citation of Heidegger is an erasure this is because that erasure is itself also a citation It will be remembered how in lsquoZur Seinsfragersquo first published in 1955 under an earlier title as a sixtieth-birthday homage to Ernst Juumlnger Heidegger himself adopts the motif of the St Andrewrsquos cross as a kind of emblematic erasure29 In that text its use is however restricted to the word Sein (Being) which it serves to preserve and protect against metaphysical reduction or misappropriation As such it marked the possibility of that strategic Schritt zuruumlck from metaphysical thinking mentioned earlier by recourse to which Heidegger aimed to uncover and recover a more originary and truthful understanding of Being

That the word Being or for Being was obliged to appeal to an erasure to safeguard it against another form of erasure or that the linguistic device of a St Andrewrsquos cross was charged with resisting the deleterious effects of language itself none of this oddly enough seems to have given Heidegger pause for thought and his commit-ment to the originary gathering of Being remained undiminished


Blanchot however was less certain From his perspective it was precisely the possibility of erasure as a thinking of infinite fragmentation that with a scepticism born of an attention to language not as a series of fundamental words but as a space of difference (or diffeacuterance) required him to suspect the privilege conferred on Being in Heideggerrsquos writing Blanchotrsquos alternative was not to aim to restore thinking to a regathering of the origin but rather according to the bifurcating neutrality of writing as a step (pas) that was not (pas) a step (pas) to bear witness to a thinking of effacement and reinscription irreducible to Being If lsquobeing [lrsquoecirctre]rsquo was lsquostill another name for forgetting [encore un nom pour lrsquooubli]rsquo as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli later had it this was anything but proof of the notion that forgetting was a name for Being30 It was rather the reverse a sign so to speak that writing was more originary ndash originary without originarity ndash than Being lsquoWriting as a question of writingrsquo Blanchotrsquos experience told him lsquoa question that bears the writing that bears the question denies you this relationship with being ndash understood primarily as tradition order certainty truth all forms of rootedness [enracinement] ndash that you once received from the past history of the world that domain you were called upon to manage [geacuterer] in order to fortify your ldquoEgordquo [ton laquo Moi raquo] despite the fact it had seemingly been split asunder [fissureacute] from that first day when the sky opened to reveal its emptiness [ougrave le ciel srsquoouvrit sur son vide]rsquo31

For Blanchot as far as writing was concerned there was no primordial gathering without the possibility the necessity even of dispersion More than this it was apparent for Blanchot that all gathering was already a dispersing and all dispersing already a gathering The one was always already the other prior to all ontological or dialectical unity As lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo reminded its readers prefacing the remark with a looking towards the future as what resisted positionality and sounding its most emblematic and circular refrain as proof of the principle of reversibility attendant on its composition lsquoForgetting waiting [Lrsquooubli lrsquoattente] The waiting that gathers [rassemble] disperses [disperse] the forgetting that disperses [disperse] gathers [rassemble] Waiting forgetting [Lrsquoattente lrsquooubli]rsquo32

Notwithstanding the admiration and respect each showed the other then as Blanchotrsquos and Heideggerrsquos paths crossed they also diverged Each went his separate way in other words and embarked on a different turning This much had long been plain from their


differing response to such figures of the turn as Houmllderlin and Nietzsche But there was also another ancient yet still futural figure of the turn of prime significance for Heidegger whose thinking known only in fragments was also silently quoted by Blanchotrsquos chiastic epigram Heraclitus lsquoUpon those that step into the same riverrsquo it seems the Greek thinker may once have written lsquodifferent and different waters flow They disperse [skίdnhsi] and gather [sunάgei] come together [sunίstatai] and flow away [ἀpoleίpei] approach [proseisi] and depart [ἄpeisi]rsquo33 True the authenticity of much of this fragment attested by Aristotle and Plutarch is far from certain For most commentators it appears however that the first the third and in some cases even the second of the pairs of verbs used in the fragment stem from a lost source text Citing these rhetorical doublets in French in her 1959 doctoral thesis which Blanchot would welcome in an enthusiastic review published soon after Cleacutemence ramnoux noted the impossibility of identifying any original grammatical subject (a feature whose significance would not be lost on Blanchot) and offered this version of the fragmentrsquos main proposition as Blanchot would have carefully noted lsquo(unknown subject) disperses and gathers [disperse et rassemble] (unknown subject) holds together and leaves [tient ensemble et srsquoen va] (unknown subject) advances and withdraws [srsquoavance et se retire]rsquo34

lsquoFrom Heraclitus onwardsrsquo Blanchot commented still largely following ramnoux lsquoeverything changes because with him everything beginsrsquo35 Heraclitus in other words marked a decisive turning point in what had not yet become separated into philosophy and poetry and though his fragments spoke of distant origins Heraclitus the Obscure as he was dubbed by his contemporaries (as the author of a 1941 novel then a 1950 narrative that owed at least half of its given name to that illustrious forbear was no doubt well aware) was also the enigmatic source of a body of work that spoke of the impossibility of origins The paradox was an essential one and it would have come as no surprise to Blanchot that Levinas in 1946 seeking a precursor to that beginning without beginning announced in the thought of the il y a which had long occupied the thoughts of both men should turn to Heraclitus lsquoIf one had to draw a comparison between the notion of the il y a and a major theme in ancient philosophyrsquo Levinas told his postwar audience at the Collegravege philosophique lsquoI would think of Heraclitus ndash not the myth of the


river into which one cannot step twice but in the version given in the Cratylus of a river into which one cannot step even once in which the very fixity of unity which is the form of any existent cannot constitute itself of a river into which the last element of fixity (in terms of which becoming is understood) disappearsrsquo36 ndash a parallel which the second part of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli would silently remember in this exchange between its unnamed interlocutors lsquo ldquoYou will not step twice into this placerdquo ndash ldquoI will step into it but not even oncerdquorsquo37

For Heidegger too Heraclitus marked a turning albeit of a different kind lsquoIn the thinking of Heraclitusrsquo he put it in 1951 in an essay derived from the last official lecture series he delivered in Freiburg in the Summer of 1944 a time itself marked by a historical sea-change (and not only for the reasons adduced by Heidegger) lsquothe Being (presencing [Anwesen]) of beings appears as ό LόgsV as the Laying that gathers [die lesende Lege] But this lightning flash of Being [dieser Aufblitz des Seins] remains forgotten And this oblivion [Vergessenheit] in turn also remains hidden [verborgen] by the fact that the conception of LόgsV was immediately transformed Initially therefore and for a long time after it was impossible to suppose that in the word ό LόgsV the Being of beings could have brought itself to speaking [zur Sprache]rsquo38 lsquoThe presencing of present beings [Das Anwesen des Anwesenden]rsquo he explained lsquothe Greeks call tό έόn that is tό eίnai tώn όntwn in Latin esse entium we say the Being of beingsrsquo lsquoSince the beginning of Western thoughtrsquo he went on

the Being of beings unfolds [entfaltet sich] as that which is alone worthy of thought [das einzig Denkwuumlrdige] If we think this realisation from history in a historical way [geschichtlich] only then does that in which the beginning of Western thought lies show itself that in the age of the Greeks the Being of beings becomes worthy of thought is the beginning of the West is the hidden fount [der verborgene Quell] of its destiny [seines Geschicks] Had this beginning not safeguarded what had been ie the gathering of what still lasts [die Versammlung des noch Waumlhrenden] then the Being of beings would not now hold sway out of the essence of modern technology It is as a result of this that today the whole globe finds itself encircled and held by a Western experience of Being as represented in the truth forms of European metaphysics and science39


But though the Greeks Heidegger added lsquodwelt [wohnten]rsquo in an essential determination of language as a saying of Being this was not to say that the essence of language was ever explicitly thought as such by the Greeks even by Heraclitus Though LόgsV in Heraclitus preserves this essential intimacy between Being and speaking it was therefore not long before the two were finally divorced and language turned into that instrument of expression consisting merely of sound and meaning as which it has been configured ever since lsquoOne time however [Einmal jedoch] in the beginning of Western thinkingrsquo Heidegger nevertheless concluded in prophetic tones lsquothe essence of language was lit up with the light of Being [blitzte im Lichte des Seins auf] One time when Heraclitus thought the LόgsV as a guiding thread [Leitwort leading word] so as in this word to think the Being of beings But the lightning was abruptly extinguished [verlosch jaumlh] Nobody grasped its shaft of light [seinen Strahl] and the proximity [Naumlhe] of what it illuminatedrsquo40

Three years later in 1954 Heidegger extracted from his 1943ndash44 lecture course material for a further presentation to which he gave the solemn even portentous title lsquoAletheiarsquo truth not as correspondence as Heidegger insisted but in more originary fashion as un-forgetting In his discussion Heidegger subjects one particular Heraclitean fragment Fr 72 to painstaking often tortuous philological and philosophical scrutiny In a recent English rendering T M robinson proposes simply enough lsquoThey are separated from that with which they are in the most continuous contactrsquo Heidegger however basing his text on the longer (and in part contested) version contained in the canonic Diels-Kranz edition offers the following lsquoDenn sie am meisten von ihm durchgaumlngig getragen zugekehrt sind dem LόgsV mit dem bringen sie sich auseinander und so zeigt sich denn das worauf sie taumlglich treffen dies bleibt ihnen (in seinem Anwesen) fremdrsquo Frank Capuzzi translates Heideggerrsquos version into English thus lsquoFrom that to which for the most part they are bound and by which they are thoroughly sustained the LόgsV from that they separate themselves and it becomes manifest whatever they daily encounter remains foreign (in its presencing) to themrsquo41 Glossing his reading further Heidegger paraphrases it thus lsquoMortals are irrevocably bound to the revealing-concealing gathering [dem entbergendshybergenden Versammeln zugekehrt] which lights everything present in its presencing [das alles Anwesende in sein Anwesen lichtet] But they turn [kehren sich ab] from the lighting


[von der Lichtung] and turn [kehren sich] only towards what is present [an das Anwesende] which is what immediately concerns them in their everyday dealings [im alltaumlglichen Verkehr] with each other They believe that these dealings [Verkehr] by themselves create sufficient familiarity with what is present But still it remains foreign to them For they have no inkling of that to which they have been entrusted ie of presencing [Anwesen] which only ever in its lighting has what is present come to appearance [zum Vorschein] LόgsV in whose lighting they go and stand remains concealed [verborgen] from them and for them is forgottenrsquo42

It is perhaps remarkable that publishing an article on Heraclitus only months after his Festschrift contribution Blanchot nowhere explicitly mentions Heideggerrsquos long-standing interest in the Greek thinkerrsquos fragmentary legacy True Blanchot in his essay draws mainly on ramnouxrsquos otherwise relatively traditional mythico-poetic interpretation which dutifully acknowledges Heideggerrsquos readings without necessarily endorsing them In the course of his discussion Blanchot like Heidegger before him does however attend closely to Fr 72 which following ramnoux he quotes as follows lsquoFrom the logos with which they live in most constant communication they turn aside and the things they encounter everyday seem foreign to them [Le logos avec lequel ils vivent dans le commerce le plus constant ils srsquoen eacutecartent et les choses qursquoils rencontrent tous les jours elles leur semblent eacutetrangegraveres]rsquo43 What is crucial here Blanchot contends is not the turning aside from Being and the fall into the ignorance and oblivion of the everyday a movement that for Heidegger coincides exactly with the ontico-ontological difference that joins and disjoins beings and Being What is more forcefully countersigned for Blanchot in Heraclitusrsquo fragmentary writing is rather the reversible mobility of Difference itself as a double movement of proximity and distance gathering and dispersion And to underline the point Blanchot once more had recourse to that most proverbial of Heraclitean figures celebrated in ramnouxrsquos thesis that of the ever-changing river lsquoIf Heraclitus speaks of the river whose waters never the same overwhelm us [nous tombent dessus]rsquo Blanchot wrote lsquothis is no mere didactic example [un exemple de professeur]rsquo On the contrary

[t]he river teaches us itself in immemorial fashion by the call to enter the secret of its presence to enter it never twice and not even once as one does a saying [une sentence] which has


always already closed upon itself [srsquoest toujours dejagrave refermeacutee] whenever we claim to stand within it and hold it back [nous y tenir et la retenir] The teaching of the river the teaching of fire and of the lowliest and loftiest of things Almost every one of these pronouncements is thus written in proximity to things all around engaging [srsquoexpliquant] with them in a movement that goes from things to words then from words to things according to a new relation of contrariety [contrarieacuteteacute] which it is not within our power to control once and for all but which gives us to understand mdash concretely mdash the mysterious relation existing between writing and the logos [entre lrsquoeacutecriture et le logos a phrase added in 1969] then between the logos and humans [le logos et les hommes] a relation following the double direction of lsquonearing-straying [se rapprochershysrsquoeacutecarter]rsquo when they near it they stray from it44

Citing Fr 72 by way of illustration Blanchot in 1960 then began a new paragraph in which he examined further the double contrariety of lsquogrowing closer-growing distant [se rapprochershysrsquoeacuteloigner]rsquo and of lsquoit gathers-it disperses [il rassembleshyil disperse]rsquo Nine years later revising his essay for LrsquoEntretien infini he again paused for a moment and glossed his quotation from Fr 72 with an additional sentence which read lsquoA formula in which distance [lrsquoeacutecart] is inscribed in the logos itself as that which always already destined it [lrsquoa toujours preacutealablement destineacute] for the disjunction of writingrsquo And elsewhere too similar stress is laid on the dispersion inherent in the fragmentary such that what in 1960 was described as lsquoa very lofty play of words [un tregraves haut jeu de mots]rsquo was in 1969 more firmly designated lsquoa very lofty play of writing [un tregraves haut jeu drsquoeacutecriture]rsquo45

What these textual adjustments reaffirmed while also accentuating them further was Heraclitusrsquo status as poet and writer as well as a thinker This had already been in evidence in Blanchotrsquos original text where it acted as a reminder that there could be no opposition between the fragmentary status of Heraclitusrsquo text and the thinking to which it bore witness For Blanchot the fragmentary form of Heraclitusrsquo writing remained decisive This however was far from the case for Heidegger The 1943 lecture course as summarised in the opening pages of his 1954 presentation holds to an almost entirely conventional account of the fragment according to which


the lacunary state of the Heraclitean corpus is viewed as a kind of regrettable historical accident True Heidegger takes this not as an entirely negative state of affairs but rather as a challenge to future thinking The fact remains that the essential object [das Wesentliche] of Heideggerrsquos interpretation is not the necessity or possibility of the fragmentary in Heraclitus but lsquothe definitive all-articulating unity [die alles gliedernde und maszliggebende Einheit] of the inner structure of Heraclitusrsquo writingrsquo which for Heidegger it was the task of thinking to retrieve afresh46

Blanchotrsquos Heraclitus then was a very different proposition to the thinker appropriated and represented by Heidegger Where in Fr 72 for instance Heidegger found originary confirmation of the hierarchical twofold of the ontico-ontological difference Blanchot found radical horizontality reversible movement irreducible disjunction lsquoBasically [Au fond]rsquo he wrote seemingly agreeing with Heidegger but only to underline all the more powerfully the gulf between them lsquothat which is language that which speaks in essential manner for Heraclitus in things in words and in the thwarted or harmonious passage from the one to the other and finally in all that manifests and all that conceals itself is none other than Difference itself which is mysterious because always different from whatever expresses it and such that there is nothing which does not say it and relate itself to it in saying but such too that everything speaks because of it even as itself remains unspeakablersquo47 In this unmasterable movement of language was it possible to glimpse the unconcealment of Being and attend to the unforgetting of truth Heidegger obviously believed so Blanchot however while acknowledging his debt to Heidegger thought otherwise Language he maintained was not the guardian or abode of Being but a response to the unquiet demand of the outside And it was this that for Blanchot found most eloquent expression in the language of Heraclitus this language he wrote lsquothat speaks by virtue of an enigma the enigma of Difference [lrsquoeacutenigmatique Diffeacuterence] but without complacency [sans srsquoy complaire] and without apeasement [sans lrsquoapaiser] on the contrary by making it speak and even before it becomes a word already denouncing it as logos this highly singular name in which is held the non-speaking origin of that which calls to speaking and which at its highest level where everything is silence ldquoneither speaks nor conceals but gives a signrdquorsquo48


Which was also to say that borne by the enigma of originary non-original difference the demand of the fragmentary now turned meaning history being towards the outside towards that which could no longer be named or addressed as such The challenge for Blanchot was to seek to meet that demand and to do so within the idiom of what provisionally at least might still be called literary fiction

II

A double voice

lsquoMake it possible for me to speak to you [Faites en sorte que je puisse vous parler]rsquo ndash lsquoYes but have you any idea of what I should do for thatrsquo ndash lsquoPersuade me that you are hearing me [que vous mrsquoentendez ie hearing and understanding]rsquo ndash lsquoWell then begin speak to me [parleshymoi]rsquo ndash lsquoHow might I begin to speak if you are not hearing mersquo ndash lsquoI donrsquot know It seems to me I am hearing you [que je trsquoentends]rsquo ndash lsquoWhy this familiarity [ce tutoiement ie the use of the intimate second-person singular] You never address anyone this wayrsquo ndash lsquoIt just proves that I am talking to you and no-one elsersquo ndash lsquoI am not asking you to speak to hear only to hearrsquo ndash To hear you or hear in generalrsquo ndash lsquoNot me you know that To hear only to hearrsquo ndash lsquoIn that case let it not be you speaking when you do speakrsquo

And thus in any single language [un seul langage] always sound the double voice [faire entendre la double parole]

It was a kind of struggle she was pursuing with him a silent argument [une explication silencieuse] in which she both demanded satisfaction and did him justice [lui demandait et lui rendait raison]


lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo was not long in keeping the promise announced in its title But when it reappeared three years later as part of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli it did so not in any recognisable form as a relatively autonomous set of fragments incorporated within a larger inclusive whole Instead contrary to expectation it found itself dismembered and


dispersed across several different textual locations Individual items recurred in changed sequence while others underwent deletions or were prolonged by the addition of already existing or newly found portions of text The result was an extensive reconfiguration of the words initially offered to Heidegger with for instance the passage cited as an epigraph at the head of this chapter (lsquoWaiting is always a waiting for waiting rsquo) which in 1959 had formed the final third of Blanchotrsquos opening fragment now finding itself separated from most of the rest of the fragment and joined to new material in order to create for the purposes of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli an altogether different segment of writing occurring some forty-three pages into the volume50 The prepublication extract given to Botteghe Oscure in 1958 was likewise the object of a process of calculated or uncalculated redistribution51 LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli did not then limit itself to gathering up previously published or unpublished material it sought to reaffirm the essential dispersion that had already characterised its two precursor extracts As it did so however this strategy of dissemination did not imply on the part of Blanchotrsquos 1962 text any ironic melancholy or solely ludic faith in the virtues of randomness nor any rebellious commitment to the transgression of established norms governing the continuity of literary or philosophical texts nor conversely any particular confidence in the compendiousness of post-romantic textuality all of which elsewhere and in other hands have been cited in justification of fragmentary writing On the contrary in its recourse to the fragment in its awareness that the fragmentary is inseparable from an affirmative attention to the singular event of its own writing LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was nothing if not carefully concerted

This much is already clear from the complex architectonics of the book which consists of 262 relatively short sometimes plausibly sequential sometimes apparently disconnected sometimes silently recurring fragments of text some written in the past tense some in the present some without explicit temporal marker at all ranging from relatively sustained semi-narrative developments several pages long to indeterminate snatches of unattributed dialogue between two or more voices given for the most part (though not always) in quotation marks or enigmatically truncated single-line entries seemingly independent of all narrative progression not to mention the many variations on this initial repertoire introduced in the course of the text True to its strangely double-headed title the work itself


part post-phenomenological investigation part deferred narrative part dramatic poem part love story is divided into two roughly equal halves comprising however an unequal number of component fragments 156 in the first 106 in the second each of which with the exception of the very first in each of the two numbered sections and the very last of all set apart from the preceding text and printed in italics throughout opens with an emblematic floral or diamond-shaped device () partially framing each textual remnant with an asemantic scriptural or graphic marker detaching it from the blank or silent background that surrounds it and placing it at a distance from itself as though it were no more than a possible (or impossible) quotation borrowed from some unavailable or non-existent source

Notwithstanding its promised recourse to the fragmentary LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli starts with what is one of the longest continuous or undivided passages in the book extending over some five or so pages in which contemporary readers may also have recognised with minor deletions the opening words from that first prepublication extract in Botteghe Oscure in 1958 which it is therefore tempting to view as offering a kind of introductory protocol specifying how best to approach Blanchotrsquos text In that light it is arguably not surprising that this introductory section should evoke a scene which is simultaneously a scene of reading and of writing taking place or so it would appear between two unnamed characters one in the masculine and one in the feminine suggesting the presence of two sexually differentiated humans (though even this much is far from certain) No sooner does the scene begin however than it interrupts itself lsquoHerersquo the reader is told lsquoand at [or with or upon] this phrase [or sentence] that was perhaps also addressed to him [or her or it gender is reserved at this stage] he was forced to halt [Ici et sur cette phrase qui lui eacutetait peutshyecirctre aussi destineacutee il fut contraint de srsquoarrecircter]rsquo52 Much here affecting both the story opening and the words unfolding is left in suspense The very first word ici is a case in point As it reaches out towards a singular and unique place ndash ecce hic it says from the late Latin look here now ndash the actuality of that location remains necessarily in abeyance as a consequence of the referential structure of deictics (and in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOublirsquos very first sentence there are no fewer than four such deictics)53 Other elements in Blanchotrsquos opening sentence are similarly subject to hesitation What or which for instance is the phrase or sentence


to which the incipit refers and which the protagonist is reading or writing Who is responsible for it Why and in what way does it force the protagonist to pause Who are its other intended or unintended recipients And where and when does the scene take place

It would be easy enough to answer one or all of these questions by resorting to the figure of textual mise en abyme On this account Blanchotrsquos lsquothis phrasersquo would simply be this phrase itself as it appears at the head of Blanchotrsquos page lsquoHerersquo would likewise mean this place here in the text at the start of a book called LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli And lsquohersquo the grammatical subject of the sentence would be the writer or reader of that sentence both of whom have no alternative for obvious reasons than to stop momentarily at least as the sentence reaches its end In modern novels such self-reflexive or mirroring effects are of course commonplace They occur however only in so far as there is forcibly something in a text that itself cannot be reflected or mirrored by it which is the activity of reflection itself Self-reflexivity then can only ever be partial As Derrida argues apropos of Mallarmeacute rather than testifying to a textrsquos magisterial certainty about itself it is more clearly a function of an irreducible excess of enunciation over the enunciated or of saying over the said (as Blanchot making Levinasrsquos terminology his own will later sometimes call it) which resists capture within any communicational or thematic horizon54 It is rather the horizon itself which is interrupted or suspended as a result opening language and writing to the outside to that unpredictable mobile otherness marked here as it were by the unremarkable (but always already re-marked) word lsquoherersquo as though by an iterative ie an irreplace-able but repeated and always other signature In the beginning may be the word but the beginning is always more than a word since no word is ever in itself a beginning only ever an abyssal response to another word coming before or after lsquoHerersquo then is no single point but as the fragmentary implies always already a multiplicity Whatever is gathered up in writing for the sake of reading in other words is always already dispersed by the very possibility of reading and writing55

Without breaking off now interrupting its own interruption LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli continues

It was almost by listening to her speak that he had drawn up these notes He could still hear her voice as he wrote He showed them to her She did not want to read She read only a few


passages and because he asked her gently lsquoWho is speakingrsquo she kept saying lsquoWho is speaking thenrsquo She sensed there was some mistake [erreur] but could not say what it was lsquoCross out [Effacez erase] anything that seems to you to be not rightrsquo But she could not cross anything out [effacer] either Dismally she discarded the pages he had handed her Though he had assured her he would believe everything she said she was under the impression he did not believe her enough with the force that would have made the truth palpable [preacutesente] lsquoAnd now you have taken from me something I no longer have and that you do not even have eitherrsquo Were there no words she was more willing to accept than others Or none closer than others to what she was thinking But everything was whirling [tournait] before her eyes she had lost the centre from which events radiated outwards and which till now had remained so firmly in her grasp She said in order perhaps to salvage something or perhaps because first words say everything that the first paragraph seemed to her to be the most accurate [fidegravele] and similarly some of the second especially at the end56

As Blanchotrsquos page continues it is still possible up to a point to read it as a kind of narrativised commentary on itself Just as some readers reaching the end of the paragraph duly noting the comment that lsquoperhaps first words say everythingrsquo will have tracked back to the beginning to reread the very first words in the text only to be confronted again not with a point of origin but a gesture towards the outside so some may be tempted to look ahead to see how Blanchotrsquos next paragraph ends which it does with an accurate if suitably minimal summary of the bookrsquos already minimal plot dimly reminiscent of the opening scene of Aminadab which similarly turns on an ambiguous gesture of understanding or misunderstanding communication or miscommunication between a woman and a man perhaps pointing to some incipient relationship (or absence of relationship) between them without it being possible to determine whether this relationship if it exists is the result of pure contingency or some deeper necessity whether it is the effect of some inaccessible secret shared by the pair or simply the consequence of some equally impenetrable coincidence57 This at any event is what the reader


of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli is given to understand in some of the second paragraph especially at the end

Was it mere chance [le hasard] because the room he had been given was precisely this room that had brought them so close together [mis si intimement en rapport] Others in the meantime had lived in the room and she said she avoided them on the contrary Her own room was at the end of the same corridor slightly further on where the building began to turn [se mettait agrave tourner] He could see her when she was reclining on the wide balcony and he had waved [fait des signes] to her shortly after arriving58

But as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOublirsquos opening scene unfolds it is not long before it again interrupts itself at least momentarily and in a different manner than before For it falls silent this time with or upon the strangely unattributed assertion not explained by the text that what the protagonist has just written about or in response to his partner lsquowas something she was not meant to hear [ne devait pas entendre] and that they were not meant to hear [ne devaient pas entendre] togetherrsquo59 Admittedly the gulf of understanding between the pair implied by these words is nothing new From the outset the woman is reluctant to read what she has been shown by her companion who claims however to have written largely under her dictation and she is plainly dissatisfied with those words This leads her to criticise him for having insufficient confidence in her In turn the protagonist is aware of having failed in some way attributing it to some error or lapse on his part As the narrative explains

To see her to hear her was to be bound by a premonition [pressentiment] he was eager not to betray [auquel il deacutesirait ne pas manquer] What then was the reason for his failure Why did she repudiate so dismally what she had said Was she repudiating herself He thought that at a certain moment he had done something wrong [commis une faute] He had questioned her too brutally He did not remember questioning her but that was no justification he had questioned her more insistently by his silence his expectation [attente] and the signs he had made to her He had caused her to speak the truth too openly a truth that was direct disarmed and irrevocable60


The protagonist it seems has been unduly precipitate lsquoTo be faithful [fidegravele]rsquo the reader is told lsquothis is what was asked of him to hold this chill hand [cette main un peu froide] that would take him by a series of singular twists and turns to a place where it would disappear and leave him alone But it was difficult for him not to seek out the person whose hand this was [agrave qui appartenait cette main] He had always been like this It was the hand he would think about and the woman [celle] who had held it out to him and not the course it had travelled [lrsquoitineacuteraire] There no doubt was the mistake [la faute]rsquo61 This abiding sense of failure is not however an end to it Failure too creates a bond lsquoAs he gathered up the sheets of paper (it was now her turn to observe him with curiosity)rsquo adds the story lsquohe could not help feeling that he was tied to her by that failurersquo62 Matters may have seemed to be at a close but this end is just the beginning ndash of a lengthy wait and an ever lengthier forgetting

Over the next hundred and fifty pages according to a recursive Heraclitean rhythm of flux and reflux this is what happens in the story or rather what fails or refuses to happen For if LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli is a story it is like many of Blanchotrsquos stories a story of resistance to story LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli says as much again by way of an anonymous signature by recalling a sentence on which the author of Au moment voulu in 1951 already had occasion to pause lsquoFrom the outsidersquo reports one of Blanchotrsquos 1962 fragments lsquohe would have liked it to be clearer how things stood in place of a beginning a kind of initial void an energetic refusal to allow the story to get startedrsquo lsquoStory [histoire] what does she mean by thatrsquo the next paragraph rejoins and adds lsquoHe remembers the words that had one day burst into his life ldquoNo one here desires to be bound to a story [Personne ici ne deacutesire se lier agrave une histoire]rdquo The memory is almost burnt out [eacuteteint] yet overwhelms him stillrsquo63 To resist story or history (in French the word is the same) is not however to attempt to pass beyond it but to remember it precisely by forgetting it in so far as forgetting is a condition of possibility of all memory and to attend to its unpresentable future as the time without time that conditions story or history albeit only in so far as it remains radically inaccessible to it

By suspending the past and the future as modes of presence the resistance to story opens however an interval a vacant deferral or deferred vacancy in which what appears is neither something nor


nothing but which as it withdraws from manifestation nevertheless gives a space and time for waiting ndash and for writing which is also to say space and time as waiting and as writing Occurring under the auspices of a kind of epochal interruption this opening possesses however neither origin nor term neither foundation nor purpose It cannot therefore become the object of any logic of negativity and let itself be bound to the production of a work but neither can it become a site of truthful disclosure whether as adequation or as unconcealment since its only allegiance is to the void of its own inscription Its only recourse in other words is to the fragmentary as what radically precedes positioning as such and separating time or space from itself in paradoxical but no less affirmative fashion shuttles back and forth by dint of its shifting rhythmic configuration (as Heraclitus according to Benveniste64 might have said) between the finite and the infinite the transitive and the intransitive the time-bound and the timeless Witness for instance the lsquomotionless movement [mouvement immobile]rsquo65 as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli at one stage calls it traced that is gathered up only to be dispersed again in the following fragment elements of which in slightly different form had previously been offered to Heidegger

Waiting occurs [Crsquoest lrsquoattente] when time is always superfluous [de trop] and yet when time lacks time [le temps manque au temps] This overabundant lack of time is the duration of waiting

In waiting the time which allows him to wait is wasted [se perd] so as to respond better to waiting

Waiting which takes place in time opens time to the absence of time in which there are no grounds for waiting [il nrsquoy a pas lieu drsquoattendre]

The absence of time is what lets him waitTime is what gives him something to wait forIn waiting the absence of time rules in which waiting is the

impossibility of waitingTime makes possible the impossible waiting in which the

pressure of the absence of time affirms itselfIn time waiting comes to an end without an end being put

to waitingHe knows that when time comes to an end the absence of time

also dissipates or withdraws [se dissipe aussi ou se deacuterobe] But


in waiting if time always gives him something to wait for if only his own end or the end of things he is already meant [destineacute] for the absence of time which has always released waiting from this end and from every end66

In reprising this passage it was not simply for Blanchot a matter of neutralising the opposition between the intransitivity of waiting and the transitivity of expectation and countersigning once again his exchange with Heidegger There was a more pressing task which was to uncover in waiting this blankly unassuming yet deeply elusive everyday activity or absence of activity the extent and implications of what elsewhere at the time notably in an essay devoted to Bataille in October 1962 shortly after LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was published Blanchot described as a lsquolimit-experiencersquo an experience that is which without being in any way exceptional (lsquolimit-experience is experience itself [lrsquoexpeacuterience mecircme]rsquo he maintained) exceeded the authority interiority and identity of any personal self and drove whoever was subject to it towards what might only be called an lsquoexperience of non-experience [expeacuterience de la nonshyexpeacuterience]rsquo in which existence according to a formula that had already figured in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was the site of lsquoa turning aside from all that was visible and all that was invisible [deacutetour de tout visible et de tout invisible]rsquo67

Waiting according to LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli by dint of its irremediable weakness rather than by virtue of any transgressive force was one such limit-experience It is not hard to see why Waiting by definition is neither active nor passive Its object whether a person thing word or event is likewise neither properly present nor properly absent firstly because it is possible to wait for something only if it cannot be obtained in the present (for if it were to be made present there would be no waiting) and secondly because that for which one waits being withdrawn from the here and now cannot in fact be made present as itself (and if it were to present itself it would merely prove the old adage that one never receives what one expects) In that its object is perpetually suspended like some ghostly revenant between a presence it cannot deliver and an absence it cannot overcome waiting is to that extent interminable and inescapable without culmination nor redemption its pressure as urgent in its dilatoriness as it is dilatory in its urgency In this regard as in so many others Vladimir and Estragon are exemplary figures


For characters such as these living like dying this continuation of the same is already waiting waiting for something which even when it appears to be coming like Godot necessarily always fails to do so and which if it does come like Pozzo and Lucky only serves to make the waiting more burdensome And if waiting is endless it follows that it far outstrips any object Its lack is its excess and its excess its lack Its possibility in other words seems little different from its impossibility For if Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot and Godot destined never to come in what sense might it be said they are waiting at all Is it not rather that to wait is always to be confronted with the impossibility of doing so In that case is not the impossibility of waiting rather than providing any relief from waiting not simply a more acute hyperbolic form of waiting itself

If the structure of waiting is such that it changes its putative object into a figment of itself the consequences for whoever is the subject of waiting are no less severe Vladimir and Estragon are again eloquent on the subject For if waiting is both ineluctable and without purpose beyond positivity and negativity alike the effect is paradoxically to deprive whoever is in the position of having to wait of any stable identifiable position in which to do so To wait is not to be placed in either an active or passive role it is to hang undecidably between the one and the other exposed to a kind of passivity beyond passivity as Blanchot following Levinas will later call it prior to both activity and passivity in the conventional sense The experience of deferral in other words is also a deferral of experience And if waiting were a name for such delay this also meant that time and space instead of being properly circumscribed were likewise always already their own backwards reflection time was synonymous with an absence of time in the same way that each and every place was also no place at all In waiting then the possibility of experience and the experience of possibility find themselves traversed at every turn by the impossible an impossible which is not secondary but constitutive and can be neither eliminated nor accommodated but remains both outside and inside with the result that nothing in waiting retains its proper identity but is always already interrupted compromised and contaminated by its belated spectral twin

responding to this tortuous yet imperious logic LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli abounds in all manner of bewildering inversions or reversals each testifying to the essential difference from itself of all


the various structural motifs set in motionless motion by the bookrsquos fragmentary idiom Among them populating the text in infinite number and without any claim to exhaustivity one might list for example from the outset the waiting which turns aside from itself (lsquoAs soon as one waited for something one waited a little lessrsquo) and comes into its own so to speak only when it is other than what it is (lsquoWaiting begins when there is nothing more to wait for not even the end of waiting Waiting does not know and destroys what it waits for Waiting waits for nothingrsquo) and in the end only succeeds when it fails (lsquoTo wait was to wait for the opportunity And the opportunity came only at the moment stolen from waiting the moment when it is no longer a matter of waiting at allrsquo)68 Under pressure from waiting there is also the speaking which is not yet a speaking (lsquoHe had often had the impression she was speaking but that she was not yet speaking So he waited He was trapped alongside her in the great shifting circle of waitingrsquo) and likewise the beginning which strange to tell is not yet a beginning (lsquoAnd yet had he not cautioned her from the first day that day which was not yet quite the first when she had seemed to him so embarrassed to be there surprised and almost annoyed waiting for him to justify himself while justifying herrsquo) not to forget the impending moment of the pairrsquos inevitable demise to talk about which risks however detaining them for ever (lsquoThey conversed always about the moment when they would no longer be there and though they knew they would always be there to converse upon such a moment they thought there was nothing more worthy of their eternity than to spend it evoking its endrsquo)69

In like fashion there is also the memory that words slowly erase but which nevertheless remains replete with many distressing experiences that can paradoxically no longer be called to memory (lsquoWords erode in her the memory they help her to express In her memory nothing but suffering that cannot be rememberedrsquo) not to mention the blankness of oblivion of which nothing can be said that is not contradictory as though to prove that memory and forgetting are each the deferred relay of the other (lsquoForgetting forgotten ldquoIf I forget you will you remember yourselfrdquo ndash ldquoMyself in your forgetting of merdquo ndash ldquoBut will it be me that forgets you will it be you who remembersrdquo ndash ldquoNot you not I forgetting will forget me in you and impersonal memory will efface me from whatever remembersrdquorsquo) So if memory is a kind of forgetting forgetting in turn is but a kind


of anonymous memory (lsquoWhoever forgetting draws away into forgetting also draws from us the personal power of memory at which point impersonal memory arises the memory without anyone that stands in for our forgettingrsquo) a memory or a forgetting in other words whose intimate term is deathrsquos impossibility (lsquoldquoMight it be that to forget death is really to remember it And that the only memory capable of measuring up to death is forgettingrdquondash ldquoAn impossible forgetting Each time you forget it is death that you remember in forgettingrdquorsquo)70

In the course of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli these and numerous other self-displacing motifs either singly or in combination are reiterated and rehearsed many times over Paronomasia ellipsis oxymoron chiasmus paradox all loom large in their articulation Phrases or passages that appear in seemingly abbreviated or truncated form at one moment recur in expanded or amplified fashion at the next and vice versa releasing reading from the teleological expectation that it is necessary to begin at the beginning and end at the ending the fragmentary structure of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli makes it possible to begin or end almost anywhere with the result that every fragment in the text is simultaneously both a beginning and an ending and anything but a beginning and an ending sited on the edge and at the core of a configuration that admits of neither At the same time no single fragment stands alone but is always a postponed response ndash a waiting and a forgetting ndash not only to every other fragment in the volume whether alongside or at a short or long distance from it but also to the silence or the unspoken void marked by the graphic floral or four-quartered trace () surrounding each fragment and detaching it from one context in order to attach it to another and vice versa And even as it speaks indifferently to all the other fragments in the text each recurring phrase is itself always singular irreducibly different from what it was a moment ago or from what it might be on its return In this way the fragmentary composition of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli both underwrites the necessity of chance and ensures that no single reading is ever all or even enough The interruption of the fragmentary in other words is paradoxical proof of its futural infinity Little wonder then as we have seen that implicitly and explicitly LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli should continue to reference Heraclitus

repetition not only proliferates difference it emphasises too as mentioned before the extent to which under the pull of the


fragmentary thinking is somehow able always to think more than it thinks71 This same thought thought without thought thought beyond thought is prominent too in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli where lsquo[w]aiting and forgetting ignorance and thoughtrsquo the reader is told lsquoaffirmed that which did not let itself be awaited in waiting which did not let itself be forgotten in forgetting of which ignorance was not ignorant which was not thought in thoughtrsquo72 The fragmentary here like repetition captures simultaneously both the absent and the excessive (what LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli at one stage calls lsquothe innumerable population of the void [le peuplement innombrable du vide]rsquo73) and this in turn is reflected in abyssal fashion in the protagonistrsquos empty hotel room which is empty precisely because it is occupied and now occupied by him is therefore more hospitable to his familiar-unfamiliar female guest74 such that the togetherness that at certain moments binds them to one another is more the result of separation than established intimacy lsquoldquoAre we together Not entirely are we Only if we could be separatedrdquo ndash ldquoWe are separated Irsquom afraid to say by everything you are unwilling to say about yourselfrdquo ndash ldquoBut also joined as resultrdquo ndash ldquoJoined separated [Reacuteunis seacutepareacutes]rdquorsquo75 lsquoTheir voices echo in the vast emptinessrsquo remarks the narrator lsquothe emptiness of the voices and the emptiness of this empty placersquo76 Space even when voided then or especially when voided is not closed on itself but open to the outside infinite therefore in its irredeemable finitude not unlike the nameless city in which LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli is located or perhaps better dis-located lsquothinspThe pressure of the city from every direction [de toutes parts]rsquo Blanchot puts it lsquoHouses are not there to be dwelt in [pour qursquoon y demeure] but for there to be streets and in the streets the relentless movement of the cityrsquo77

In this Blanchotrsquos concerns are anything but purely aesthetic Waiting we are told by turning everything into a question puts everything into question including itself in the exact same way as the fragmentary78 In so far as it is a treatise on waiting therefore LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli is also a treatise on the fragmentary and on the ineluctability of the questioning that traverses the one and the other as proof of the radical non-coincidence of each with itself its otherness from what it is or might appear to be And likewise echoing through LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli as though to underline both the exigency and the fragility of words there is one particularly urgent plaintive or defiant request heavy with waiting and forgetting and


couched in the form of a prayer demand or challenge recurring several times over albeit more often in the first part of the text than in the second first in formal language then later in more familiar or intimate terms now within quotation marks like a snatch of direct speech now outside the confines of reported words as a standalone phrase printed in italics mainly spoken by the female protagonist to her partner perhaps even on occasion by him to her though it is sometimes impossible to tell and announcing what seems as though it cannot be anything other than a contradiction in terms not to say an irresolvable aporia ndash which is this lsquoMake it possible for me to speak to you [Faites en sorte que je puisse vous parler]rsquo As the speaker waits for an answer not knowing whether it can ever measure up to the injunction proffered she forgets that she has already succeeded in what she was asking her partner to ensure Twice over then her request seems to be little short of impossible

True her inquiry might be taken to suggest that rather than just one manner of speaking there are always two the one already inherited from the past (lsquoI can only understand [entendre] what I have already understood [entendu]rsquo concedes LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli) and the other turning in hope and anticipation towards an as yet unspoken perhaps unspeakable future (lsquoThe secret ndash what a clumsy word [quel mot grossier] ndashrsquo the reader is later told lsquowas nothing other than the fact that she was speaking and putting off speaking [parlait et diffeacuterait de parler]rsquo)79 But how to tell these two ways of speaking apart how to separate the one from the other Might it not be as the fragmentary configuration of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli implies that all speaking is always at least double always already its own deferred or ghostly companion and that if addressing another is premised on an aporia it is precisely because of the impossibility of relation between one protagonist and the other (or conversely the possibility of relation without relation as Blanchot describes it after Levinas in other essays of the period80) that words and words alone in their fragmentary indecision offer the chance ndash fragile uncertain and irreducibly futural ndash of reaching across the unbridgeable divide that separates them And to prove the point the womanrsquos entreaty in its final avatar in the last pages of the text reverting to the formality of the second-person plural with which it began also undergoes a decisive if barely perceptible reversal lsquoldquoYesrdquorsquo the womanrsquos companion tells her ldquoyou spoke to me a lot you showed infinite generosityrdquo ndash ldquoIs that true Could you


affirm it [lrsquoaffirmer]rdquo ndash ldquoI affirm it [Je lrsquoaffirme] I will affirm it [je lrsquoaffirmerai] as much as you wishrdquo ndash ldquoThat cannot be Just think It would be worse than everything Make it possible for me not to speak to you [Faites en sorte que je ne puisse vous parler]rdquorsquo81

Notwithstanding the urgency of the womanrsquos plea it is accom-panied throughout LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli both close by and at a distance by a series of other modest but insistent remarks displacing it or displaced by it in turn The result is a complex counterpoint of recurrent and often elliptical motifs that significantly complicate relations between the pair Even from the outset the passivity implied by the womanrsquos supplication is deceptive Her own first words given three times over as lsquoldquoI should like to speak to you [Je voudrais vous parler]rdquorsquo are at any event more assertive authoritative even vehement (as the narrative describes them at one point) than may have at first appeared which is not to say speaking does not leave her vulnerable and exposed82 At other moments both in and outside the story it is she as her companion acknowledges who far from being reduced to silence is given to speak without cease83 Both traits serve perhaps to characterise Blanchotrsquos female protagonist who is never properly identified as such less as a woman than as a kind of allegory less an individualised self that is than like her male counterpart a recalcitrant verbal presence in which case the low murmur famously evoked in one oft-quoted fragment might be hers and it might even be she therefore lsquothis equal speaking [cette parole eacutegale] spaced without space affirming beneath all affirmation impossible to negate too weak to be silenced too docile to be constrained not saying something only speaking speaking without life without voice in a voice fainter than any voice living amidst the dead dead amidst the living calling (him) to die to come back to life to die calling without any callrsquo84 This might mean Blanchotrsquos female protagonist was thereby deprived of human presence were it not that to be heard at last as an equal voice ndash lsquothis equal speaking [cette parole eacutegale] he hears the equality which if it were light in the daylight [lumiegravere dans le jour] attention in attending [attention dans lrsquoattente] would be justice in deathrsquo85 we read a few lines earlier ndash is arguably more vital proof of enduring singularity than any conventional physical or psychological portrait Fourteen years earlier this much had of course already been the burden of the closing lines of LrsquoArrecirct de mort with their celebrated equivocation between the female character(s) who feature(s) in its pages and that thought in the feminine invoked at


the end to which (or to whom) having for his part also forfeited all subjective certainty or autonomy the bookrsquos male narrator delivers this powerful parting encomium

As for myself I was not the unfortunate messenger of a thought more forceful than I was neither its plaything nor its victim for that thought [cette penseacutee] if it vanquished me only did so through me and in the end was always the measure of me I loved it [ie also her and so on to the end] and loved only it and everything that happened [est arriveacute] I wanted to happen and having had regard only for it wherever it was or wherever I may have been in absence in unhappiness in the fatality of dead things in the necessity of living things in the fatigue of work in the faces born of my curiosity in my false words in my deceitful vows in the silence and in the night I gave it all my force and it gave me all its own so that this force being too great incapable of being ruined by anything condemns us perhaps to immeasurable unhappiness but if that is so I take this unhappiness on myself and I rejoice in it immeasurably and say to it eternally lsquoCome [Viens]rsquo and eternally it is there86

The word lsquoViensrsquo which now (almost) closes LrsquoArrecirct de mort or better as Derrida puts it in its capacity as a quasi-transcendental address already divided from itself forever opens and reopens Blanchotrsquos text with all the intensity of a resurrection has of course its counterpart in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli87 There too it intervenes with the force (or weakness) of a mere word that is far more than a word More often found in the courteous plural rather than the intimate singular as venez rather than viens Blanchotrsquos word belongs equally it seems to whoever speaks it or whoever is addressed by it which is also to say it is the prerogative of neither one nor the other The first occurrence is a case in point lsquo ldquoCome [Venez]rdquorsquo one reads and the text goes on lsquoShe drew nearer slowly not in spite of herself but with a kind of deep distractedness that made him marvellously attentive [avec une sorte de profonde distraction qui le rendait lui merveilleusement attentif]rsquo Opening a new paragraph it adds lsquoShe had spoken but he was not listening to her He was listening to her only in order to attract her to him by his attentivenessrsquo88 Who then utters the invitation He or she Three pages later the question is partially answered albeit at the cost of a further complication


lsquoShe appeared to me in a real wayrsquo says the text not pausing to explain the sudden shift into the first person lsquoshe was a tall young woman upon whom I marvelled at being able to gaze although I was not capable of describing her and when I said to her ldquoCome [Venez]rdquo she immediately drew nearer with a deep distractedness that made me extremely attentive [avec une profonde distraction qui me rendait extrecircmement attentif]rsquo89 Soon after lsquoVenezrsquo is said in turn to have been the male protagonistrsquos first word perhaps at the very beginning when he came to inhabit the empty hotel room90 As such it marks both the opening of the text and its suspension both the brusque incisiveness of the one and the lingering passivity of the other lsquoWhen he had said to her ldquoCome [Venez]rdquorsquo we read in yet another variation on the scene lsquondash and she immediately draws nearer slowly not in spite of herself but with a simplicity that does not bring her presence any closer ndash ought he not to have gone to meet her instead of issuing this imperious invitationrsquo The text pauses and remarks lsquoIt is an authoritative word then ndash But also an intimate one ndash A violent word ndash But bearing only the violence of a word ndash Bearing it into the distance ndash reaching into the distance without doing it harm ndash With that word is he not plucking her from that distance ndash He left her there ndash She is therefore still as distant as can be ndash But what is far is also what is nearrsquo91

lsquoVenezrsquo as these words confirm is anything but a solitary founding word For one thing as Blanchotrsquos narrative points out immediately after it is already a fragmentary translation already a partial or provisional putting into words of an unspoken gesture which preceded or accompanied it and with which LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli in so far as it did so in fact began Moreover in that it enacts as we have seen a repeated twofold call dispatched into the distance and received from a distance and by definition always addressed to more than one it belongs to that series of words ndash which includes all words ndash which are never an origin in themselves but only ever a response to another Nobody comes in other words on his or her own As Derrida argues apropos of Joyce the structure is one that affects in particular that unassuming always repeated yet always affirmative radically ineliminable word yes which like a further supplementary quasi-transcendental signature traverses all speaking and is presupposed by it92 Yes argues Derrida is never a single point but always a redoubled response never a gathering whether originary or final but always already a


dispersed fragmentary trail and so it is in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli also For it is not surprising that throughout Blanchotrsquos text one of the words that most insistently doubles or ghosts the word lsquoVenezrsquo is indeed the word yes oui It too first appears in Blanchotrsquos text without qualification and without explanatory context other than the unexpected place of its singular emergence lsquo ldquoYes [Oui]rdquorsquo says LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli almost as soon as its narrative begins to unfold lsquoldquoYesrdquo Does she truly say this word It is so transparent that it lets through what she says including the word itselfrsquo93 There are of course throughout LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli numerous other occurrences of the word uttered by the storyrsquos male and female protagonists alike and Blanchot too in his October 1962 essay on Bataille emphasised its importance by referring twice over to lsquothe decisive Yes [le Oui deacutecisif]rsquoof affirmation94 which he glossed in the following terms also deeply indebted as we shall see to LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli lsquoThis is the decisive Yes Presence without anything present [Preacutesence sans rien de preacutesent] In this affirmation which has been released from all negation (and consequently from all meaning) which has relegated and deposed the world of values which does not consist in affirming ndash ie bearing and sustaining ndash that which is [ce qui est] but rather stands beyond it outside of being [en dehors de lrsquoecirctre] and no more belongs to ontology than it does to dialectics man [lrsquohomme humans in general] sees himself assigned between being and nothingness and starting from the infinity of this in-between [agrave partir de lrsquoinfini de cet entreshydeux] accepted as relation [accueilli comme rapport] the status of his new sovereignty the sovereignty of a being without being in the becoming without end of a death impossible to diersquo95

As LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli slowly reaches its end it gathers up several motifs encountered in dispersed fashion earlier including for instance the close intimacy as familiar as it is unfamiliar of their two voices lsquotwo ways of speaking [deux paroles] tightly clasping each other like two living bodies but with indeterminate boundariesrsquo96 the proximity between the two lsquoeach lying alongside the other tightly held by the other and when she withdraws caught again while withdrawn embracing him again at a distance without distance touching her not touching himrsquo97 and the sound of her talking endlessly through the night as displaced testimony to their physical congress But if it does so however it is not in order to complete what hitherto had remained partial but by accentuating


the fragmentary to effect a kind of spectral reversal or resurrection of the scene of failure with which the text began and to affirm the in-between as the secret without secret of the possibility and impossibility of relation What comes towards the end of Blanchotrsquos text then is nothing negative nor positive but thanks to the always changing configuration of fragmentary writing a mortal-immortal neuter pact time-bound but also timeless shared between the two protagonists countersigned by a repeated and affirmative yes yes yes as witnessed among others by the following fragment

She sat up slightly propping herself up with her hand She found herself next to the party-wall and seemed to rise up over their two reclining bodies looking at them both and saying in a voice that surprised him with its chill clarity lsquoI should like to speak to you When might I do thatrsquo ndash lsquoCan you spend the night herersquo ndash lsquoYes [Oui]rsquo ndash lsquoCan you stay here nowrsquo ndash lsquoYes [Oui]rsquo

As he is listening to this lsquoyesrsquo [ce laquo oui raquo] wondering if she truly said it (it is so transparent that it lets through what she says including the word itself) she leans back as though already unburdened and taking care not to put any distance between them

He attracts her is attracted by the attraction in her still uncompleted movement But while she lifts herself up into the one he is touching and although he knows she is sliding away falling a motionless figure he does not stop blazing a trail for her and leading her driving on with her tightly holding him in a movement that makes them indistinguishable

She speaks spoken rather than speaking as though her own speech was passing through her while she lived painfully transforming her into the space of another speaking always interrupted and without life

And certainly when in the light of morning ndash most likely they have just woken up together ndash he hears her asking with enthusiasm lsquoIs it true I went on speaking without stoppingrsquo he is sure he is being invited to take possession in this single sentence of everything she said to him during the night98

Just as it had refused properly to begin LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli with the help of a fragmentary postscript printed in italics also refuses


properly to end reprising the word with which it once seemed to open so in appearing to close the text overwrites it with another which once more recalls the legacy of Heraclitus lsquoldquoNot here [ici] where she is and here [ici] where he is but between them [entre eux]rdquo ndash ldquoBetween them [Entre eux] like this place with its great air of fixity the restraint of things in their latent staterdquorsquo99

But how then to name that which refused positioning but secretly silently in the space between words and between all other things nevertheless left a trace

III

Presence without present

lsquoIs that happening [Estshyce que cela arrive]rsquo ndash lsquoNo that is not happening [cela nrsquoarrive pas]rsquo ndash lsquoSomething is coming however [Quelque chose vient cependant]rsquo


Towards the end of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli or perhaps even towards the beginning something happens An amorous encounter a meeting of minds a paradoxical misunderstanding an experience of language a disclosure of presence or merely a casual assignation in an empty hotel room One of the earliest fragments in the book in which an event of some kind is evoked or announced which was already in place from August 1958 explains as follows

It is not a fiction [Ce nrsquoest pas une fiction] although he is unable [bien qursquoil ne soit pas capable] to use the word truth to refer to it all [agrave propos de tout cela] Something happened to him [Quelque chose lui est arriveacute] and he cannot say that it was true nor the opposite Later [Plus tard] he thought the event [lrsquoeacuteveacutenement] consisted in the way in which it was neither true [vrai] nor false [faux]101

Though it is sometimes taken to be an authoritative metatextual statement on the part of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (or sometimes even its author) regarding the fictional or non-fictional complexion of the text as a whole the status of this fragment is far from certain


First in so far as it advances a proposition about the truth untruth or non-truth of this unnamed event it is impossible to tell whether the fragment is itself part of that event or not Is it an instantiation of the rule it is describing or in describing that rule is it somehow able to step outside it in which case the rule might be deemed in fact to be anything but a rule If the fragment is true in other words it would appear to contradict what it says (or be contradicted by it) in which case its status might be deemed to be imponderable at best In turn if the fragment is already subject to a rule of undecidability being neither true nor untrue but something else and in that regard already an event it would seem empty of metatextual reliability in which case it would after all be an instantiation of what it describes And so on

Writing in Blanchot as Foucault observed in lsquoLa Penseacutee du dehorsrsquo a fortiori when it encounters the fragmentary is often traversed by such Cretan liar effects Whenever in a text there is mention of truth or untruth it seems writing invariably withdraws from itself to cast doubt on its own thinking or inherited terms of reference The effect is accentuated further by the untotalisable structure of the fragmentary And it is complicated here by the language used in Blanchotrsquos tantalising fragment For it is impossible to identify with confidence the actual referent of the first of its three sentences What is it that the words ce and cela (it this that) actually name Like other deictics and like Blanchotrsquos very first opening word (ici) they point beyond the borders of the text while also pointing to themselves in either case however in the absence of any finite context owing to the fragmentary configuration of the text reference is left hanging Matters are exacerbated by the expression quelque chose which is something of a minor anomaly in modern French grammar Though the noun chose (thing) is in the feminine the compound quelque chose (something) in so far as it names something indeterminate is treated as a neuter that is since French has no third gender as such as a word in the masculine Something happened the reader learns but the language of that something defies binary categorisation and resists properness property and meaning102

Blanchotrsquos use of tense has similar implications The fragment begins in the present but then changes to the French past historic or passeacute simple With the help of the expression plus tard (with which it will be remembered Le Dernier Homme had formerly ended without ending to vertiginous effect) the shift in time introduces a


minimal degree of narrative sequentiality Paradoxically however and by recourse to a disorientating chiasmus it is this later time forcibly closer to the living present that is described in the passeacute simple while the earlier time now relegated to time past remains in the present What was is left in the present and what now is is given in the past historic Despite appearances to the contrary then rather than privileging lived immediacy the present becomes a function of undecidable repetition an effect of that which no longer occurring in the present belongs to time only in so far as it is simultaneously outside of time and manifests an origin only in so far as the origin is a radical impossibility of origin Temporal deferral expressed in the fragment becomes an expression of deferred temporality In this respect it is no surprise to learn that in 1958 when these lines first appeared in print the verbs in Blanchotrsquos first two sentences were in the imperfect or pluperfect and the present entirely lacking lsquoIt was not a fiction [Ce nrsquoeacutetait pas une fiction]rsquo the fragment initially read lsquoalthough he was unable [bien qursquoil ne fucirct pas capable] to use the word truth to refer to it all Something had happened to him [lui eacutetait arriveacute] and he could not [ne pouvait] say that it was true nor the oppositersquo103

If this early fragment seems confident that at least something has happened later in the book the language of that arriving is placed under greater scrutiny not to say withdrawn entirely This occurs in a sequence of four dispersed fragments slowly growing in length and in complexity as they are repeated and reprised over some seven or so pages The most extensive iteration is the last It runs

That unvarying speech [Cette parole eacutegale] he hears single without unity [unique sans uniteacute] the murmur of one alone as of a multitude bearing forgetting hiding forgetting

An affirmation that by turning them aside attracts all wordslsquoIs that happening [Estshyce que cela arrive]rsquo ndash lsquoNo that

is not happening [cela nrsquoarrive pas]rsquo ndash lsquoSomething is coming however [Quelque chose vient cependant]rsquo ndash lsquoIn the waiting that immobilises [arrecircte] and allows [laisse] all comingrsquo ndash lsquoSomething is coming coming outside of waiting [venant hors de lrsquoattente]rsquo ndash lsquoWaiting is the calm trail [la calme laisseacutee] that leaves in the future [laisse en son avenir] everything that comesrsquo104

What is the difference a reader might ask between an unnamed unspecified event that prompts the question but then does not


arrive and one that similarly repeating the question is nevertheless said still to be coming Blanchotrsquos fourth fragment goes some way towards explaining the enigma To arrive obviously implies a destination a point in time or space at which it is possible to decide whether or not something has indeed arrived To come on the other hand suggests an imminence or immobility that cannot be resolved completed or identified as such For something to arrive or not in other words it must in some sense be expected whereas to come suggests that whatever comes if it comes is always and forever futural irreducible to possibility or to presence accessible to words only in so far as it remains inaccessible to them and only ever in evidence if at all as a trace trail or erasure remembering only its own forgetting announcing neither something nor nothing and leaving in its wake only an unfulfilled promise No property or propriety attaches itself therefore in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli to the event that comes if it comes no concealed or unconcealed truth in other words and no final appeal to the visible or invisible

To think or experience in this way the (fragmentary) event of (fragmentary) writing that was LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was inevitably to renew Blanchotrsquos already long-standing engagement with Heidegger and with the latterrsquos thought of Ereignis or event of appropriation as explored in the years immediately preceding LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli in such texts as Identitaumlt und Differenz and Unterwegs zur Sprache105 Indeed when Blanchot returned to Heidegger in 1980 and considered anew what was gathered under the heading of Ereignis it was to query and challenge albeit not for the first time the privileged relationship between Being and light or luminosity in Heideggerrsquos thinking and the reference to the proper that for Heidegger lay hidden in the very possibility of (the word for) the event and that for Blanchot far from the fragmentary was more akin to a kind of metaphysical nostalgia for the origin lsquoWhat is the justificationrsquo he asked lsquofor the relationship Heidegger posits between Ereignis the usual meaning of which is ldquoevent [eacuteveacutenement]rdquo Eraumlugnis to which he links it (in a decision sanctioned by Duden the famous German dictionary Eraumlugnis is an archaic term in which one can readily make out the word Auge eye which therefore appeals to the gaze [regard] and suggests being may be thought to have regard for us [lrsquoecirctre nous regarderait] and which once again relates being and light) and Ereignis analysed in such a way that the word eigen ldquoproperrdquo is separated from it so much so that ldquothe eventrdquo becomes


that which is responsible for the advent of our ldquomost properrdquo being (Duden rejects however the etymological connection between eigen propre and Ereignis)rsquo lsquoWhat is surprising herersquo Blanchot concluded in an unusually stern rebuke lsquois not the arbitrariness but on the contrary the work of mimesis the semblance of analogy and the appeal to unreliable knowledge making us the dupes of a kind of transhistorical necessityrsquo106

Blanchotrsquos treatment of the event which mysteriously-unmysteri-ously and without arriving nevertheless comes to LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli gives further proof of the singularity of his thinking and its divergence from that of Heidegger With regard to waiting it will be remembered it was enough in order to complicate Heideggerrsquos presentation for Blanchot to insist on the necessary possibility of that quasi-reflexive recursive or repetitive fold according to which implicit in all waiting was a waiting for waiting and as a result of which all possibility was haunted that is both maintained and overwritten by impossibility And what was true of waiting Blanchot went on to show was equally the case in respect of forgetting For what was it that happened when it was the turn of forgetting to be forgotten The following exchange between unnamed voices provides a clue

lsquoDo you believe they remember [qursquoils se souviennent]rsquo ndash lsquoNo they forget [ils oublient]rsquo ndash lsquoDo you believe that forgetting [lrsquooubli] is the way they rememberrsquo ndash lsquoNo they forget [ils oublient] and retain nothing in that forgetting [ils ne gardent rien dans lrsquooubli]rsquo ndash lsquoDo you believe what is lost in forgetting may be preserved in the forgetting of forgetting [que ce qui est perdu dans lrsquooubli soit preacuteserveacute dans lrsquooubli de lrsquooubli]rsquo ndash lsquoNo forgetting is indifferent to forgetting [lrsquooubli est indiffeacuterent agrave lrsquooubli]rsquo ndash lsquoIn that case we shall be miraculously deeply eternally forgottenrsquo ndash lsquoForgotten without miracle without depth without eternityrsquo107

In defending the need for a Ruumlckschritt from metaphysical thinking to a more intimate or originary relation to Being Heidegger was necessarily reliant on the proposition that metaphysics from the outset was a consequence of the withdrawal and forgetting of Being to the benefit of beings and of the forgetting of that forgetting In order to embark on this step back it was necessary obviously enough


to begin by forgetting this original forgetting in order then to retrieve originary pre-metaphysical thought from the oblivion of more than two millennia But how far was it possible to forget forgetting and forget the forgetting of forgetting and in so doing uncover in memory a memory of the origin The task was anything but straightforward Heideggerrsquos answer to the question was however simple enough Spinning a fresh etymological web by way of the archaic Gedanc he gathered up together with their various cognates the words denken to think danken to thank and Gedaumlchtnis memory in order to affirm their primordial originary unity lsquoIn Gedancrsquo he wrote

rest both memory [Gedaumlchtnis] and thanks [Dank] and have their being [Wesen] Initially lsquomemoryrsquo [Gedaumlchtnis] did not at all mean the power of retention [Erinnerungsvermoumlgen the capacity for memory as interiorisation within the self] The word names a whole mental disposition [Gemuumlt] in the sense of a constant intimate gathering [Versammlung] upon that which speaks essentially to all thoughtfulness Memory originally means something rather like devotion [Anshydacht Heideggerrsquos spelling reinforces the kinship with the expression denken an to think of ] the unremitting concentrated abiding with [Bleiben bei ] and not just with that which is past [beim Vergangenen] but likewise with that which is present [beim Gegenwaumlrtigen] and with that which may come [was kommen kann] That which is past present and to come appears in the unity of an always proper pre-sencing [in der Einheit eines je eigenen Anshywesens Heidegger detaches and emphasises the preposition]108

Thinking then was anamnesis just as truth for Heidegger on the conjectural evidence of Heraclitus was ashyletheia un-forgetting an attentive regathering of that which in the past in the present and in the future under the auspices of presencing had always already gathered itself109 Once again this was to assume that originary gathering necessarily took precedence over fragmentary dispersion and that having been forgotten (and its forgetting forgotten) the origin nevertheless somehow remained secretly intact and might therefore emerge anew as the ground on which to readdress the truth of Being110 The belief in other words was that forgetting was not only a form of memory but one that might be circumscribed within given limits and boundaries But from the perspective of


LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli this much was far from clear For Blanchot to forget forgetting was not to accede by dint of the positivity born of a double negative to the foundational durability of memory It was much rather to be exposed twice over to an erasure But this erasure of an erasure did not culminate in anything present but in the radicality of a redoubled deletion which if it forcibly left a trace was irreducible either to being or to non-being and might be addressed only under the auspices of what Blanchot from 1958 onwards as we have seen largely in response to the experience of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli had begun calling the neuter Forgetting argues Blanchot was necessarily without term For if it had a term either a beginning or an ending archegrave or telos it would not be forgetting at all but merely a partial or provisional lapse of memory lsquo You will not find the limits of forgettingrsquo says one brief abyssally detached fragment lsquohowever far you may be able to forgetrsquo111 Forgetting was in principle endless and far exceeded whatever it might be possible to remember or forget but which as such was radically irretrievable Its allegiance was not to its own possibility therefore but to the impossible not to the origin but to the dispersion that resisted all origin There was however nothing negative about forgetting It was a radically neutral infinitely powerful infinitely weak blankly infinite or infinitely blank movement of effacement that could not be negated restricted or put to work but only ever affirmed and reaffirmed in its perpetual withdrawal as an erasure of every trace and the trace of that erasure lsquoForgettingrsquo says LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli at its chiasmic mid-point lsquothe latent gift [le don latent]rsquo112

Time and again LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli makes the point that all writing as it reaches its limits is traversed that is both sustained and dispersed by something which is neither something nor nothing neither visible nor invisible neither hidden nor manifest and thus neither true nor untrue but inseparable from the demand of the fragmentary To say this however Blanchotrsquos text has recourse to a surprising term one which acquires in the process the provocative status of a nonce-word always already displaced by what it seems to exclude and which Blanchotrsquos writing infuses with singular intensity both strength and weakness That word is preacutesence presence not presence however as joined-disjoined hierarchically to the present as maintained by the Heideggerian ontological difference113 but presence in so far as it exceeds overwrites and interrupts any present which explains how on occasion and in affirmative manner as we


have seen Blanchot can write lsquopresence without present [preacutesence sans preacutesent]rsquo how returning to the motif of the latent gift he can refer to lsquothe present [le preacutesent] that forgetting might be said to give them presence free of any present [la preacutesence libre de tout preacutesent] without relation to being [sans rapport agrave lrsquoecirctre] turned aside from all that was possible and all that was impossiblersquo or how elsewhere as noted earlier the word presence can contrive to suspend or erase itself with the aid of a privative prefix or a pair of quotation marks114 ndash all of which suggests that essential to Blanchotrsquos use of the word far from the living immediacy customarily attributed to it was somehow the reverse ie that presence releasing itself from present being inscribed itself in writing only in so far as it was always already effaced and bearing as its signature the mark of that disappearance was now the absent memory of itself not as enduring proximity but as evanescent erasure

This ghostly neutralisation of presence its suspension displace-ment and affirmative reinscription haunts LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli as might be expected in the manner of a spectral presence Take for instance the following passage concluding one of the longest fragments in Blanchotrsquos text restaging the deferred or interrupted scene of its protagonistsrsquo encounter in the course of which what comes to be invoked as that which requires waiting and forgetting alike is the secret without secret of presence

[ ] An instant later however pulling up short and looking lsquoBut this presencersquo

Going towards presence towards which they cannot go And yet put in relation [rapporteacutes] with all that comes by presence and thereby turned towards it Always more turned aside in this turning aside [deacutetourneacutes en ce deacutetour]

lsquoWhy do you [tu] want to wake from this presence of which I hear you speakingrsquo ndash lsquoPerhaps in order to fall asleep in that waking Moreover I do not know if I want it and you [vous] do not want it either perhapsrsquo ndash lsquoHow should I want it Where I stand there is nothing I can want I am waiting that is my role inside of waiting going towards waitingrsquo ndash lsquoWaiting waiting what a strange wordrsquo

lsquoWhere are they waiting Here or outside of here ndash lsquoHere that delays them outside herersquo ndash lsquoIn the place where they are speaking or the place of which they are speakingrsquo ndash lsquoThat is the force of


waiting maintained in its truth to lead wherever one waits to the place of waitingrsquo ndash lsquoIn secrecy without secrecyrsquo ndash lsquoIn secrecy in plain view of allrsquo

lsquoAnd did death [la mort] come quicklyrsquo ndash lsquoVery quickly But dying [mourir] is longrsquo

Speaking in place of dying [mourir]Immortal in the instant of dying [lrsquoinstant de mourir]

because closer to death [la mort] than mortals present to death [la mort]

lsquoThey cannot die for want of a futurersquo ndash lsquoPerhaps so but nor can they be presentrsquo ndash lsquoThey are not present all there is of them is the presence into which they are disappearing slowly timelesslyrsquo ndash lsquoAn impersonal presence [une preacutesence sans personne] perhapsrsquo ndash lsquoA presence in which they are effaced the presence of effacementrsquo ndash lsquoForgetting forgottenrsquo ndash Forgetting has no purchase on presencersquo ndash lsquoWhich does not belong to remembering [Laquelle nrsquoappartient pas au souvenir]rsquo115

Presence in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli being neither something nor nothing and belonging neither to being nor to non-being remains paradoxically inaccessible As Blanchot insists it far exceeds whatever might be deemed to be present or absent The formulation is a provocative one it was however not alone in Blanchotrsquos writing Elsewhere too as we have seen the writer took care to insist on the radical dissymmetry between presence and the present A key resource in allowing this thought to take shape Blanchot suggested in LrsquoEntretien infini was to be found in a celebrated fragment from Pindar (Fr 169) as translated by Houmllderlin around 1805 and given by the poet the prophetically Blanchotian title lsquoDas Houmlchste [The Most High]rsquo Houmllderlinrsquos version of Pindarrsquos text not published till more than a century after it was first written read as follows lsquoDas Gesez [nomos] Von allen der Koumlnig [basileus] Sterblichen und Unsterblichen das fuumlhrt eben Darum gewaltig Das gerechteste recht mit allerhoumlchster Hand [The Law Of everyone the King mortals and Immortals which is just why It mightily guides The rightest right with the most highest hand]rsquo In a densely suggestive commentary attached to his translation in lines Heidegger would later cite in a famous essay on Houmllderlinrsquos unfinished Pindaric hymn lsquoWie wenn am Feiertage [As when on a holiday ]rsquo that very


essay that Blanchot was ostensibly reviewing in his 1946 Critique article the poet offered the following gloss

The immediate [Das Unmittelbare] strictly speaking is impossible for mortals as it is for the immortals a God must distinguish different worlds according to his nature since heavenly goodness because of itself must be sacred unalloyed Man as a knowing creature must also distinguish different worlds because knowledge is only possible through opposition For this reason the immediate [das Unmittelbare] is strictly speaking impossible for mortals as for immortals

Strict mediacy [Die strenge Mittelbarkeit] is however the law116

returning in 1969 to an essay on the work of Yves Bonnefoy first published ten years earlier Blanchot added a long page of text in which he in turn explicated Houmllderlinrsquos gloss

lsquoThe immediate excluding all that is immediate as well as all mediationrsquo this tells us something about presence itself Immediate presence is the presence of what cannot in any way be present the presence of the non-accessible presence excluding or overwhelming [deacutebordant] all present Which is also to say the immediate overwhelming all present possibility infinitely by dint of its very presence is the infinite presence of what remains radically absent a presence always infinitely other in its presence presence of the other in its alterity non-presence What can we conclude from these propositions Nothing for the moment Except that (1) when inquiry is made into immediate presence in the attempt to retain in thought the immediate as fundamental upheaval [eacutebranlement fondamental] the aim is not to privilege direct relation whether as mystical or sensuous contact vision or effusion (2) if lsquothe immediate strictly speaking is impossible for mortals as it is for the immortalsrsquo it is perhaps that impossibility mdash a relation escaping power or possibility [pouvoir] mdash is the form of all relation with the immediate (3) lastly mdash and here we are approaching the decisive issue mdash if the immediate is presence of that which overwhelming excluding all present is infinitely absent the only relation with the immediate may be thought to be a relation reserving an infinite absence an interval which would however not mediate (ought never to serve as intermediary)117


recalling several similar formulations from the early 1960s this later commentary explains how the only relation to what Blanchot calls presence is a relation without relation in the form of a turning aside and how it is from presence that come (without ever arriving) the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of waiting and forgetting in their quality as parallel encounters with the spectral future and the inaccessible past And in so far as it is necessarily an experience of the limits of language as Blanchotrsquos writing insists throughout presence is also an exposure to death and dying since dying is that for which one always waits and death that which one has always already forgotten But if death as a result is that to which one is always already present it is also what deprives one of any present which is why in the terms of Pindarrsquos fragment revisited by Houmllderlin it is like a founding law equally inaccessible to gods and to men alike to the first because being immortal they are condemned never properly to die and the second because being mortal they are condemned never properly to die either

It is here that the crucial fault-line between Blanchotrsquos and Heideggerrsquos understanding of language may perhaps best be situated It will be remembered that for the latter lsquoto reflect on language means [heiszligt signifies and requires] to arrive [gelangen] at the speaking of speech in such a way that it occurs [sich ereignet] as that which grants an abode [Aufenthalt] to the essential being of mortals [dem Wesen der Sterblichen]rsquo118 For the former on the other hand just as there can be no abiding in death so there is no abiding in language The event that comes if it comes born by presence in so far as presence escapes the present and disperses all property propriety or appropriation belongs neither to manifestation nor to concealment It neither enacts nor corresponds to any truth or untruth lsquoWhat is hidden opens itself to waitingrsquo LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli explained lsquonot in order to be disclosed [deacutecouvert] but to remain hidden within itrsquo lsquoWaitingrsquo it went on lsquodoes not open does not close An entering into a relation that neither welcomes nor excludes Waiting is foreign to the self-concealingself-revealing movement of things [au mouvement se cachershyse montrer des choses]rsquo And it added lsquoTo whoever waits nothing is hidden He is not close to the things that show themselves In waiting all things are turned back towards their latent statersquo119

In saying this Blanchotrsquos writing once more found itself drawing on Heraclitus not a Heraclitus from whom a fully formed


concept of the fragmentary might be derived but a Heraclitus who nevertheless announced a thinking of the fragmentary as that which interrupting being and non-being alike made it possible Blanchot put it in 1969 countersigning and extending his original July 1960 text to approach lsquothe absence of work [lrsquoabsence drsquoœuvre] in which discourse ceases so that there may come [pour que vienne] outside speech [hors parole] outside language [hors langage] the movement of writing under the attraction of the outsidersquo120

As with these words Blanchot prepared to step beyond even the tenuous narrative idiom of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli what then was this writing that came from the outside and how might it be explored and affirmed

notes

1 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 217 translation mine Compare Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 50ndash1 Awaiting Oblivion 24

2 There were thirty-three contributors in all including in addition to those mentioned Hans-Georg Gadamer Beda Allemann Walter Jens Werner Heisenberg Ilse Aichinger Hans Arp Guumlnter Eich Helmut Heissenbuumlttel and Ernst Juumlnger All three French texts (by Beaufret Blanchot and Char) were given in the original French without accompanying translation Charrsquos was printed in facsimile and Braque supplied an artwork reproduced in the volume On reception of Heidegger in France during the postwar period see Janicaud Heidegger en France I 81ndash184 Beaufret first met Heidegger in Freiburg in September 1946 and when Heidegger visited France for the first time at his invitation in 1955 Char and Braque were among those the philosopher expressed a particular desire to meet

3 See Blanchot lsquoPenser lrsquoapocalypsersquo letter addressed to Catherine David (10 November 1987) Le Nouvel Observateur 22ndash28 January 1988 77ndash9 Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 155ndash63 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 119ndash23 Blanchot adds in the letter prompted by the controversy surrounding French publication of Victor Fariasrsquos Heidegger and Nazism (1987) that it was only on receipt of Guido Schneebergerrsquos Nachlese zu Heidegger in 1962 that (like others) he became aware of the full extent of Heideggerrsquos prewar involvement with the Nazi party


4 See Blanchot lsquoLa Parole ldquosacreacuteerdquo de Houmllderlinrsquo Critique 7 December 1946 579ndash96 with slight modifications the essay reappears in La Part du feu 115ndash32 The Work of Fire 111ndash31 I examine Blanchotrsquos reading of Heidegger on Houmllderlin in my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 77ndash91

5 raymond Queneau in a diary entry for December 1950 reports as follows lsquoHeidegger says he found Bataillersquos article on Houmllderlin very striking and feels great affinity with him [qursquoil se sent tregraves pregraves de lui] Sonia [sc Orwell who knew Bataille well] wires Bataille to congratulate him But the article was by Blanchotrsquo See Queneau Journaux 1914ndash1965 edited by Anne Isabelle Queneau (Paris Gallimard 1996) 737 Oddly the volume editor glosses the anecdote by referring the reader not to the 1946 article but to Blanchotrsquos essay lsquoLa Folie par excellence [Madness par excellence]rsquo which did not appear in Critique till February 1951 Bataille recalls the misunderstanding in a letter to Jeacuterocircme Lindon shortly before his death in Bataille Choix de lettres 1917ndash1962 edited by Michel Surya (Paris Gallimard 1997) 582ndash3 Blanchotrsquos response to the news of this mistaken identity which he also received from Queneau was one of sheer delight at what the misunderstanding said about friendship in particular his own friendship with Bataille and about the essential anonymity of writing On Blanchotrsquos reaction see Monique Antelmersquos testimony lsquoIl comprenait tout et jamais nrsquoaccusaitrsquo Le Magazine litteacuteraire 424 October 2003 32 on Blanchotrsquos friendship with Sonia Orwell see Blanchot Lettres agrave Vadim Kozovoiuml (Houilles eacuteditions Manucius 2009) 113ndash4 (letter dated 27 January 1984)

6 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 133 translation mine

7 Heidegger Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen Neske 1957) 209 The Principle of Reason translated by reginald Lilly (Bloomington Indiana University Press 1991) 128 translation modified

8 This has led some critics perhaps most notably Timothy Clark in his Derrida Heidegger Blanchot (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1992) to go so far as to claim that lsquosome of [Blanchotrsquos] reacutecit [LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli] is practically a French translation of fragments from Heideggerrsquo (91) Clark points in particular to the apparent similarities between Blanchotrsquos Festschrift contribution and Heideggerrsquos dialogue lsquoZur Eroumlrterung der Gelassenheit [Conversation on a Country Path]rsquo first written in 1944ndash45 but not published till 1959 almost a year after the appearance of Blanchotrsquos first text entitled lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo in Botteghe Oscure and in all likelihood therefore some time after the writing of the Festschrift piece He also


suggests that Blanchotrsquos fragment lsquo In waiting all speech having become slow and solitary [Dans lrsquoattente toute parole devenue lente et solitaire]rsquo found both in the 1958 Botteghe Oscure text and in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli in 1962 (but not in the Festschrift piece) contains a conscious echo of Heideggerrsquos statement lsquoIn thinking each thing becomes solitary and slow [Im Denken wird jeglich Ding einsam und langsam]rsquo from lsquoAus der Erfahrung des Denkens [The Thinker as Poet]rsquo first published in 1954 though one might with equal justification point to the striking differences between the two texts Dominique Janicaud for his part in Heidegger en France I 206ndash7 maintains that such resemblances that may exist between Blanchotrsquos lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo and Heideggerrsquos own semi-fictional dialogues are at best superficial arguing instead that lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo is much rather a lsquodisconcerting expropriation of the thinkerrsquos [ie Heideggerrsquos] fondest words and on his own ground rsquo

9 Blanchot born in 1907 was almost precisely eighteen years Heideggerrsquos junior On these dates and their importance in general for Blanchot see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 373ndash4 and lsquoLrsquoanniversaire ndash la chancersquo Revue des sciences humaines 253 1 1999 173ndash82 The author of these lines I may add was born ndash on 21 September

10 LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli would be much exercised in turn by the question of the possibility or impossibility of the gift See for instance Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 112 Awaiting Oblivion 58 where the following exchange takes place lsquoldquoGive me thatrdquo ndash ldquoI cannot give you what I do not haverdquo ndash ldquoGive me thatrdquo ndash ldquoI cannot give you what is not in my power If need be my life but this thing rdquo ndash ldquoGive me thatrdquo ldquoThere is no other giftrdquo ndash ldquoHow might I manage to do itrdquo ndash ldquoI donrsquot know All I know is that I am asking you for it and will ask you for it till the endrdquorsquo translation modified

11 See Martin Heidegger Sein und Zeit (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer 1986) 261ndash2 Being and Time translated by John Macquarrie and Edward robinson (Oxford Blackwell 1962) 306

12 Heidegger Sein und Zeit 250 258ndash9 Being and Time 294 303

13 Heidegger Sein und Zeit 262 Being and Time 307 emphasis in the original

14 Heidegger Sein und Zeit 337 Being and Time 386ndash7 Together with numerous other commentators Blanchot acknowledges that the words authentic and inauthentic (as used by Macquarrie and robinson) do not properly map onto Heideggerrsquos use of eigentlich and uneigentlich I have nevertheless retained them here for reasons of consistency That translation remains however a lsquosuperficialrsquo one


as Blanchot puts it Elsewhere he goes further with more radical effect claiming that lsquoIf ever in the whole of language there is a word that is inauthentic it is surely the word ldquoauthenticrdquorsquo See LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 153 180 98 The Writing of the Disaster 98 117 60 translation modified

15 See Bataille lsquoHegel la mort et le sacrificersquo Œuvres complegravetes XII 326ndash45 lsquoHegel Death and Sacrificersquo translated by Jonathan Strauss Yale French Studies 78 1990 9ndash28 I discuss the interplay between the philosophical and the fictional in this essay in my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit 63ndash9

16 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 217 translation mine Compare LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 50ndash1 Awaiting Oblivion 24ndash5

17 See Blanchot La Condition critique 457ndash9 lsquoOh All to Endrsquo translated by Leslie Hill The Blanchot Reader 298ndash300 Beckettrsquos LrsquoInnommable (The Unnamable) it may be remembered is one of the last texts discussed in Blanchotrsquos Le Livre agrave venir 256ndash64 The Book to Come 210ndash17


19 Almost two years earlier dealing with this very question in a footnote to an essay on Mallarmeacute first published in November 1957 Blanchot had discreetly voiced his reservations regarding Heideggerrsquos privileging of the self-contained Grundwort lsquoIt could be noted herersquo he wrote lsquothat the attention [attention] paid to language by Heidegger which is of an extreme urgency is an attention [attention] to words considered on their own [agrave part] and concentrated in themselves to various words taken to be fundamental [fondamentaux] and tormented to the point that the history of their formation is made to disclose the history of Being ndash but never to relations between words and even less to the prior space these relations imply the originary movement of which alone makes it possible for language to be deployedrsquo Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 286 The Book To Come 265ndash6 translation modified In writing lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Blanchot was no doubt particularly attentive one might say to this movement of language that was otherwise and more radical than Being




22 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 217 218 translation mine Compare LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 96 Awaiting Oblivion 50

23 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 224 translation mine

24 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 148 Basic Writings 355

25 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 171 Poetry Language Thought translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York Harper amp row 1971) 176 translation slightly modified

26 Heidegger Heraklit 268

27 On the interpretation of LόgsV (in Heraclitus) as lsquothe original assemblage of the primordial gathering from the primordial Laying [die urspruumlngliche Versammlung der anfaumlnglichen Lese aus der anfaumlnglichen Lege]rsquo see Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 207ndash8 Early Greek Thinking translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A Capuzzi (New York Harper amp row 1975) 66 On the difficulties posed by the motif of Versammlung in Heidegger see Derrida Spectres de Marx (Paris Galileacutee 1993) 56ndash7 Specters of Marx translated by Peggy Kamuf (London routledge 1994) 34 and the interview with Derrida by Dominique Janicaud Heidegger en France II 116ndash19 An important role in Derridarsquos (re-)thinking of Heidegger may be attributed to Blanchot as Michel Lisse suggests in his LrsquoExpeacuterience de la lecture 2 Le glissement (Paris Galileacutee 2001) 79ndash87


29 Heidegger Wegmarken 411ndash12 Pathmarks 310ndash11 Blanchot recalls Heideggerrsquos suggested recourse to this device in his September 1958 Nietzsche essay and indeed amplifies the point in LrsquoEntretien infini 226 The Infinite Conversation 150 On both occasions Blanchot was strictly speaking mistaken in claiming that Heidegger uses the St Andrewrsquos cross for both lsquothe word being [ecirctre]rsquo and lsquothe word nothingness [neacuteant]rsquo True having employed it for the first Heidegger then suggests that lsquonothingness [das Nichts] would have to be written and thought in that way toorsquo Blanchotrsquos error is nevertheless revealing what it shows is that having been adopted in the one instance there was no compelling reason following the thought of the neuter why the device could not be generalised to all other possible cases

30 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 69 Awaiting Oblivion 35 translation modified Derrida comments on this fragment in Parages 92ndash3 Parages 85ndash6



32 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 223 translation mine This fragment is one of a small number reprised in both texts entitled lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo as well as LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli itself Compare lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Botteghe Oscure XXII August 1958 30 and LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 64 Awaiting Oblivion 32

33 Heraclitus Fr 91 as given by G S Kirk J E raven and M Schofield The Presocratic Philosophers 195 translation slightly modified for consistency For further discussion on the fragment see G S Kirk Heraclitus The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1962) 381ndash4 T M robinson in his edition of Heraclitus Fragments (Toronto University of Toronto Press 1987) 55 proposes the following version (all interpolations the translatorrsquos) lsquo[For according to Heraclitus] it is not possible to step twice into the same river nor is it possible to touch a mortal substance twice in so far as its state is concerned But thanks to (the) swiftness and speed of change it scatters (things) and brings (them) together again [(or rather it brings together and lets go neither lsquoagainrsquo nor lsquolaterrsquo but simultaneously)] (it) forms and (it) dissolves and (it) approaches and departsrsquo

34 Cleacutemence ramnoux Heacuteraclite ou lrsquohomme entre les choses et les mots (Paris Les Belles Lettres 1959) 221ndash2 Blanchotrsquos article paying tribute to ramnoux which first appeared in January 1960 is reprinted with minor changes in LrsquoEntretien infini 119ndash31 The Infinite Conversation 85ndash92 There had of course been several earlier French translations of Heraclitus with which Blanchot may have been familiar including the version by Yves Battistini prefaced by Char in 1948 as well as the more recent rendition of Les Fragments drsquoHeacuteraclite drsquoEacutephegravese (Paris Estienne 1958) by Kostas Axelos one of the editors of the journal Arguments which had published Blanchotrsquos lsquoQursquoen est-il de la critiquersquo in the early part of 1959 and who in Heacuteraclite et la philosophie (Paris Minuit 1962) 50ndash1 offers the following more explicitly dialectical version of Fr 91 lsquoOn ne peut pas entrer deux fois dans le mecircme fleuve Elle se disperse et se reacuteunit de nouveau [toute chose mortelle] srsquoapproche et srsquoeacuteloignersquo

35 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 127 The Infinite Conversation 89 translation modified Compare ramnoux Heacuteraclite 22ndash4

36 Levinas Le Temps et lrsquoautre (Paris Presses universitaires de France [1948] 1983) 28 Time and the Other translated by richard A Cohen (Pittsburgh Duquesne University Press 1987) 49


The reference to Plato is to Cratylus 402a though Levinas is evidently also thinking of Aristotle Metaphysics Book G 1010a where Cratylus a follower of Heraclitus is reported to have criticised the latter lsquofor saying that it is not possible to step into the same river twice for he himself [Cratylus] considered that it is not possible even oncersquo See Aristotle Metaphysics Books G Δ and Ε translated by Christopher Kirwan (Oxford Oxford University Press 1993) 19

37 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 89 Awaiting Oblivion 46 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 124 The Infinite Conversation 88 In Ecce homo Nietzsche too was minded to find in Heraclitus a likely precursor ndash of Zarathustrarsquos doctrine of eternal return see Nietzsche KSA 6 313 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings 110


39 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 219 Early Greek Thinking 76 translation modified A year earlier already lecturing on Heraclitus (in Heraklit 122ndash3) Heidegger had been more explicit in addressing the politics of this epochal turn lsquoldquoWerdquo ndash but then who are wersquo he asked lsquoHow do ldquowerdquo manage to have history at our disposal and gain access to the beginning of the essential destiny of our history How do we manage at all even to lay claim to this history as our ownrsquo A few lines later he offered this answer lsquoThe planet lies in flames The essence of man is out of joint Only the Germans assuming that they can locate and preserve ldquowhat is Germanrdquo can provide an awareness of world history This is not presumptuousness rather a knowledge of the need to resolve a fundamental distress [von der Notwendigkeit des Austrages einer anfaumlnglichen Not]rsquo


41 T M robinson Heraclitus Fragments 45 Hermann Diels Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker edited by Walther Kranz 3 vols (Berlin Weidmann 1951) I 167 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 272 Early Greek Thinking 121ndash2


43 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 125 The Infinite Conversation 88 translation modified compare ramnoux Heacuteraclite ou lrsquohomme entre les choses et les mots 213



45 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 125 122 The Infinite Conversation 88 87 translation modified

46 Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 249 Early Greek Thinking 102 Heidegger gives a more detailed account of the question of fragmentation in Heraklit 35ndash9


48 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 131 The Infinite Conversation 92 translation modified As noted in Chapter One Blanchotrsquos quotation is from Heraclitus Fr 93


50 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 50ndash1 Awaiting Oblivion 24 where the portion of text cited in my epigraph reappears preceded by the sentence lsquoSince when had he been waitingrsquo and with the following not insignificant codicil lsquoHe realised the only reason he had written was to respond to the impossibility of waiting What was said had therefore to do with waiting [avait donc rapport agrave lrsquoattente] This insight [Cette lumiegravere] crossed his mind [le traversa] but did no more than cross itrsquo translation modified A detailed inventory of the fragments given in Blanchotrsquos tribute to Heidegger shows that they return sometimes in modified form in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli on the following pages 51 50 96 97 97ndash8 95 98 99 100 47ndash8 45 108 108ndash9 85 107 52ndash6 53 78 60 84 52 93 51ndash2 77 68 67 90 81 83

51 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Botteghe Oscure XXII August 1958 22ndash33 Fragments derived from this version reappear in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli on the following pages 7ndash13 16ndash18 19ndash21 26ndash7 31ndash4 38 44ndash5 47ndash8 49 50ndash1 52ndash3

52 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 7 Awaiting Oblivion 1 translation modified The implications of Blanchotrsquos opening have attracted much attention on the part of critics See for instance Daniel Wilhem Maurice Blanchot la voix narrative (Paris Union geacuteneacuterale drsquoeacuteditions 1974) 147ndash61 Brian T Fitch Lire les reacutecits de Maurice Blanchot (Amsterdam rodopi 1992) 74ndash85 and John Gregg Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton Princeton University Press 1994) 132ndash8

53 On the shifting structure of deictics see roman Jakobson Selected Writings vol 2 (The Hague Mouton 1971) 130ndash147 and Emile


Benveniste Problegravemes de linguistique geacuteneacuterale (Paris Gallimard 1966) 252ndash3 Problems in General Linguistics translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables University of Miami Press 1971) 218ndash9 As Benveniste shows such expressions acquire properly specific meaning only within the performative context of their utterance Since no fictional text can root itself without remainder in any given existential context a doubt or uncertainty will always affect their referential status

54 On mise-en-abyme as endless process of referral without arrival or truth see Derrida La Disseacutemination 257ndash317 Dissemination 227ndash85 and on the necessarily untotalisable movement of reflexivity as such rodolphe Gascheacute The Tain of the Mirror Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 1986)

55 On Blanchotrsquos use of a similar strategy elsewhere in his reacutecits see Wilhem Maurice Blanchot la voix narrative 139 In insisting on this multiplicity of textual place it may be that Blanchot still had Heidegger in mind at any rate Heideggerrsquos claim made in the course of a long essay on the poet Georg Trakl which Blanchot is almost certain to have read when it first appeared in 1953 to the effect that the task of thinking in response to the poem is to ask after the locality of the place (Ortschaft des Ortes) in which and from which the poem speaks and speaks (of) Being But in these circumstances what is it Heidegger asks to think the place lsquoOriginallyrsquo he replies lsquothe word ldquoplacerdquo [Ort] refers to the point of a spear Everything converges at this point The place gathers everything together at its highest its most extreme [versammelt zu sich ins Houmlchste und Aumluszligerste] That which gathers [Das Versammelnde] penetrates [durchdringt] and permeates [durchwest] everything The place that which gathers [das Versammelnde] collects [holt zu sich ein] and preserves what it has collected [verwahrt das Eingeholte] not in the way of a closed container but in such a manner that it [ie the place] shines through and illuminates that which has been gathered [das Versammelte] and only thus releases it into its own essence [in sein Wesen entlaumlszligt]rsquo See Heidegger Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen Neske 1959) 37 On The Way to Language translated by Peter D Hertz (New York Harper amp row 1971) 159ndash60 translation modified


57 See Blanchot Aminadab (Paris Gallimard 1942) 9 Aminadab translated by Jeff Fort (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press


2002) 1ndash2 In the opening pages of the novel the protagonist Thomas catches sight of a young woman in a house opposite The text continues lsquoThe young woman as though she had realised he was waiting for something [comme si elle se fucirct rendu compte de cette attente] made a small sign with her hand which was like an invitation immediately afterwards closed the window and the room fell dark againrsquo translation modified After a paragraph break the story picks up once more lsquoThomas was most perplexed Was it possible to consider this gesture as a true appeal to him [un appel veacuteritable] It was a friendly wave rather than an invitation It was also a kind of gesture of dismissal [congeacutediement]rsquo translation modified There is similar speculation about the pairrsquos relationship in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 117ndash20 Awaiting Oblivion 61ndash3

58 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 8 Awaiting Oblivion 2 translation modified readers of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli familiar with Le Dernier Homme may also be prone to a sense of deacutejagrave vu or more accurately deacuteja lu In the earlier story too alongside many other similar textual echoes the female protagonist occupies a room lsquowhere the corridor began to turn [ougrave tournait le couloir]rsquo (Le Dernier Homme 78 105 The Last Man 46 62 translation modified)

59 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 11ndash12 Awaiting Oblivion 3 translation modified The words the man writes are these lsquoldquoItrsquos the voice that has been entrusted to you [qui trsquoest confieacutee] not what it says What it says all the secrets you are gathering up and transcribing to give them their due [les faire valoir] these you must gently lead despite their attempts at seduction back towards the silence you first drew from themrdquorsquo




63 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 22 Awaiting Oblivion 9 translation modified Compare Blanchot Au moment voulu 108 lsquoWhen The Time Comesrsquo translated by Lydia Davis The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 239 where the narrator observes lsquoThis sentence made a great impression on me It was as though I could see a light spurting from it I had touched a point of startling luminosity A sentence more a slippage a picture not yet framed a movement of sparkling brightness that shone in quick dazzling bursts and this was no calm


light but a sumptuous and capricious chance the moodiness of light itselfrsquo translation modified

64 See Benveniste Problegravemes de linguistique geacuteneacuterale 333 Problems in General Linguistics 286 Benvenistersquos essay lsquoLa Notion de laquo rythme raquo dans son expression linguistique [The Notion of ldquorhythmrdquo in its Linguistic Expression]rsquo suggests that Greek ruqmόV as derived from Heraclitus was lsquothe most appropriate term to describe ldquodispositionsrdquo or ldquoconfigurationsrdquo without fixity or natural necessity and arising from an arrangement always subject to changersquo It is cited to this effect by ramnoux who proposes in her turn the phrase lsquoshifting configuration [configuration changeante]rsquo in her Heacuteraclite ou lrsquohomme entre les choses et les mots 456 It was no doubt there that it was first encountered by Blanchot who draws on the essay citing ramnouxrsquos paraphrase in LrsquoEntretien infini 127 The Infinite Conversation 89 and LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 172ndash3 The Writing of the Disaster 150n19


66 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 98ndash9 Awaiting Oblivion 51ndash2 translation modified Compare lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 219 Between 1959 and 1962 Blanchot makes both deletions and additions and replaces the first-person plural (lsquowersquo) originally found in several of the fragments with an anonymous third person (lsquohersquo)

67 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 310ndash11 The Infinite Conversation 209ndash10 Compare Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 145 162 Awaiting Oblivion 77 85

68 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 21 51 69 Awaiting Oblivion 9 24ndash5 35 translations modified

69 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 14 15 35 Awaiting Oblivion 5 16 translations modified

70 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 19 75ndash6 76 89 Awaiting Oblivion 7 38 38 46 translations modified

71 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 310ndash11 The Infinite Conversation 209 lsquoLimit-experiencersquo Blanchot writes lsquois experience itself thought thinks that which does not allow itself to be thought thought thinks more than it is capable of thinking in an affirmation that affirms more than can be affirmed This more is experience affirming only by an excess of affirmation and in this excess affirming without anything being affirmed finally affirming nothing An affirmation in which everything escapes and which


itself escapes and escapes unity This is even all one can say about it it does not unify nor allow itself to be unifiedrsquo emphasis in original translation modified



74 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 13ndash14 120 Awaiting Oblivion 4ndash5 62ndash3




78 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 96 Awaiting Oblivion 50 lsquoWaitingrsquo says LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli lsquoimperceptibly changed words [paroles] into questionsrsquo translation modified The same pronouncement in rather different form had already appeared in the version of lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo given to Heidegger in Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 217

79 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 27 111 Awaiting Oblivion 12 58 translations modified

80 See for instance Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 73 The Infinite Conversation 51 lsquondash A strange relation [rapport] that consists in there being [en ce qursquoil nrsquoy a pas] no relationrsquo as one of Blanchotrsquos interlocutors puts it lsquondash Which therefore consistsrsquo rejoins the other lsquoin preserving the terms in relation from what would adulterate [alteacutererait ie change for the worse] them in that relation which therefore excludes ecstatic identification [la confusion extatique] (that of fear) mystical participation but equally appropriation all forms of conquest and even the taking [prise] which in the end is what comprehension always isrsquo translation modified Though Blanchotrsquos account of relation without relation is strongly inflected by his reading of Totaliteacute et infini in the early 1960s it is worth acknowledging that the paradoxical status of relations between the sexes it implies had long been a feature of Blanchotrsquos critical thinking witness his interpretation of Benjamin Constantrsquos Adolphe in La Part du feu 221ndash37 The Work of Fire 226ndash43 and of Marguerite Durasrsquos Le Square in Le Livre agrave venir 185ndash94 The Book To Come 150ndash8 For Levinasrsquos own rather summary


reading of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli see Levinas Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier Fata Morgana 1975) 29ndash42 Proper Names translated by Michael B Smith (London Athlone 1996) 140ndash9

81 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 155 Awaiting Oblivion 81ndash2 emphasis mine translation modified

82 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 45 132 149 Awaiting Oblivion 21 132 79 translation slightly modified For lsquothe vehement movement that allowed her to be an impassioned voice [une voix passionneacutee] even as she remained a motionless and impassive body [un corps immobile et impassible]rsquo see LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 57 Awaiting Oblivion 28 Some pages earlier she admits that lsquoldquoWhen I speak to you it is as though the whole part of me which covers and protects me were to have abandoned me and left me exposed and very weakrdquorsquo See LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 23 Awaiting Oblivion 10 translation modified

83 See Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 12 37 150 Awaiting Oblivion 4 17 79

84 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 155ndash6 Awaiting Oblivion 82 translation modified This is the phrase used by Blanchot to acknowledge Beckettrsquos admiration for the book see Blanchot La Condition critique 458ndash9 (p 458) The Blanchot Reader 298ndash300 (p 299) On the link Blanchot makes elsewhere between women and affirmation see Derrida Parages 258ndash65 Parages 241ndash8

85 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 155 Awaiting Oblivion 82 translation modified The fragment as a whole so to speak serves as a perhaps timely reminder that the political issues with which Blanchot was manifestly concerned in the late 1950s and early 1960s were not without leaving a trace on LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli which as mentioned earlier would have appeared in bookshops at precisely the same time as Blanchotrsquos essay lsquoLrsquoIndestructiblersquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise

86 Blanchot LrsquoArrecirct de mort 127 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 186 emphasis in the original translation modified English having to choose between the personal and the impersonal cannot adequately render the ambiguity of elle (meaning both she and it) in these lines On this double meaning of Blanchotrsquos use of the feminine pronoun see Derrida Parages 74ndash5 Parages 66ndash7 The closing pages of Le Dernier Homme explore much the same ambiguity extending it now to the male narrator and the female protagonist alike both of whom come to language and thinking as radical singularities exceeding all anthropomorphic (and anthropocentric) embodiment


87 On the quasi-transcendental status of lsquoViensrsquo and lsquoVenezrsquo in LrsquoArrecirct de mort and elsewhere see Derrida Parages 19ndash24 Parages 11ndash16 Drsquoun ton apocalyptique adopteacute naguegravere en philosophie (Paris Galileacutee 1983) 91ndash8 lsquoOf an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophyrsquo translated by John P Leavey Jr in Derrida and Negative Theology edited by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany SUNY Press 1992) 64ndash7 The motif as we shall see in the next chapter is repeated in Le Pas aushydelagrave 185 The Step Not Beyond 135





92 See Derrida Ulysse grammophone (Paris Galileacutee 1987) 123ndash43 Acts of Literature edited by Derek Attridge (London routledge 1992) 296ndash309 Compare Parages 21 Parages 13


94 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 310 311 The Infinite Conversation 209 210



97 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 49 Awaiting Oblivion 23ndash4 translation modified


99 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 162 Awaiting Oblivion 85 translation modified Compare Heraclitus Fr 123 as rendered by G S Kirk J E raven and M Schofield The Presocratic Philosophers 192 lsquoThe real constitution is accustomed to hide itself [fύsiV krύptesqai fileϊ]rsquo For Heideggerrsquos rather different translation and commentary with which Blanchot was no doubt familiar see Heidegger Einfuumlhrung in die Metaphysik (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer 1953) 87 Introduction to Metaphysics translated by


Gregory Fried and richard Polt (New Haven Yale University Press 2000) 121 It was not for nothing that ramnouxrsquos study which is principally concerned with the unity of opposites in Heraclitus (that lsquothings taken together are wholes and not wholes something which is being brought together and brought apart which is in tune and out of tunersquo and that lsquoout of all things there comes a unity and out of a unity all thingsrsquo as Fr 10 had it in the version given by Kirk raven and Schofield 190) was also subtitled LrsquoHomme entre les choses et les mots Man Between Things and Words



102 Compare Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 440 The Infinite Conversation 299 on the perverse advantages resulting from the lack of a proper neuter gender in French

103 Blanchot lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo Botteghe Oscure XXII August 1958 25

104 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 158 Awaiting Oblivion 83 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 151 152 153 Awaiting Oblivion 80 (twice) 81

105 See for instance Heidegger Identitaumlt und Differenz (Stuttgart Neske 1957) 24ndash5 Identity and Difference translated by Joan Stambaugh (New York Harper amp row 1974) 36ndash7 and Unterwegs zur Sprache 256ndash68 On The Way to Language 125ndash36 Ereignis here is rendered into English as Appropriation

106 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 152ndash3 The Writing of the Disaster 97ndash8 translation modified On the larger polemic against the long-standing philosophical privilege of vision which hinges in part on what Blanchot took to be the irreducibility of Heraclitus to that tradition see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 35ndash45 The Infinite Conversation 25ndash32


108 Heidegger Was heiszligt Denken 92 What is Called Thinking 140 emphasis in the original translation modified

109 In LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 147ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 94ndash5 Blanchot would again signal his deep reservations regarding what he describes as Heideggerrsquos lsquonaiversquo recourse to cod etymology (not unlike that of Hegel added Blanchot with more than a hint of mischief) pointing out that Plato in the Cratylus (421b) had already proposed reading the word not as ashyletheia or


unhiddenness as Heidegger in Sein und Zeit 219 Being and Time 262 famously does with the help of Heraclitus Fr 1 (lsquoFor although all things happen according to this Logos men are like people of no experience even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleeprsquo after Kirk raven and Schofield 187) but as aletheia or lsquodivine errancy [errance divine]rsquo

110 As William S Allen puts it in Ellipsis Of Poetry and the Experience of Language After Heidegger Houmllderlin and Blanchot (Albany SUNY Press 2009) 39 lsquoWhat is forgotten [according to Heidegger] may not be available to be recalled but this lack punctuates thought and thus leaves a mark of forgetting which itself cannot be forgotten even if it cannot be recalledrsquo emphasis in the original


112 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 87 Awaiting Oblivion 45

113 Compare for instance Heidegger Unterwegs zur Sprache 122 On The Way to Language 30 lsquoThe purposersquo says Heideggerrsquos Inquirer (a thinly veiled version of himself in the guise of questioning thinker) in his 1953 lsquoDialogue on Languagersquo lsquowas and is to bring to light [zum Vorschein zu bringen] the Being of beings [das Sein des Seienden] admittedly no longer in the manner of metaphysics but such that Being itself comes into the light [zum Scheinen kommt] Being itself ndash that is the presence of the present [das Anwesen des Anwesenden] ie the twofold [Zwiefalt] of the two by virtue of their simple oneness [aus ihrer Einfalt] This is what makes its claim on man calling him to its essential beingrsquo translation modified

114 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 98 103 Awaiting Oblivion 51 54 translations modified Already in 1957 in Le Dernier Homme 50ndash1 The Last Man 28 the narrator set down his impressions of the eponymous protagonist in similar terms lsquoas though all there had been of him were his presence [preacutesence] which did not let him be present [ecirctre preacutesent] a vast presence that he himself appeared unable to fill as though he had disappeared into it and it had absorbed him slowly eternally [lentement eacuteternellement] ndash an impersonal presence [preacutesence sans personne] perhapsrsquo translation modified

115 Blanchot LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli 139ndash40 Awaiting Oblivion 73ndash4 translation modified In this fragment there are again numerous


explicit echoes of Le Dernier Homme compare for instance Le Dernier Homme 51 52 58 141 The Last Man 28 29 33 85

116 Houmllderlin Hyperion Empedokles Aufsaumltze Uumlbersetzungen 769ndash70 lsquoHoumllderlinrsquos lsquolsquoPindar Fragmentsrsquorsquo rsquo translated by Jeremy Adler Comparative Criticism 6 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1984) 43 Houmllderlinrsquos commentary is cited by Heidegger in his Erlaumluterungen zu Houmllderlins Dichtung Gesamtausgabe 4 (Frankfurt Klostermann 1981) 61ndash2 Elucidations of Houmllderlinrsquos Poetry translated by Keith Hoeller (Amherst Humanity Books 2000) 83ndash4 For further discussion of Houmllderlinrsquos version see Thomas Schestag lsquoThe Highestrsquo translated by Georgia Albert in The Solid Letter Readings of Friedrich Houmllderlin edited by Aris Fioretos (Stanford Stanford University Press 1999) 375ndash411 I examine Blanchotrsquos use of Pindarrsquos fragment in my lsquoldquoNot In Our Namerdquo Blanchot Politics the Neuterrsquo Paragraph 30 3 141ndash59


118 Heidegger Unterwegs zur Sprache 14 Poetry Language Thought 190 translation modified


120 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 45 The Infinite Conversation 32 translation modified In revising the last page or so of this dialogue first published as lsquoLa Marche de lrsquoeacutecrevissersquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise for July 1960 some three months after lsquoEntretien sur un changement drsquoepoquersquo Blanchot significantly reworked its language Where in 1960 for instance he spoke of a turn of language which lsquois not foreign to this turning which is the turning of history and which is essentially taking place nowrsquo so in 1969 he changed his text to refer to lsquothe turning of ldquohistoryrdquo [lrsquolaquo histoire raquo] and which is essentially taking place now aside from any present [agrave lrsquoeacutecart de tout preacutesent]rsquo In 1960 similarly he first wrote that lsquothis ldquonot yetrdquo does not refer back to an ideal language that superior Word of which our human words may be thought to be an imperfect imitation but constitutes the very presence [preacutesence] of speaking this to come [agrave venir] that is every truly present word [toute parole vraiment preacutesente] and which is all the more present [preacutesente] in that it designates and commits the future [le futur] which is also a future to be spoken rsquo Nine years later the passage was revised to read as follows lsquothis ldquonot yetrdquo does not refer back to an ideal language that superior Word of which our human words may be thought to be an imperfect imitation but constitutes the


very decision [deacutecision] of speaking in its non-presence [en sa nonshypreacutesence] this to come [agrave venir] that is every word held to be present [tenue pour preacutesente] and which is all the more insistent [insistante] in that it designates and commits the future [le futur] which is also a future to be spoken rsquo What Blanchot was doing in making such far-reaching changes to his text it may be argued rather than changing his mind or keeping up with fashion was to readjust his philosophical or critical language to the experience of writing explored in and by LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli and in response to a demand that beyond any particular or given vocabulary was already futurally present so to speak in that writing

3

An interruption

I

From threshold to threshold

uml [ ] How indiscreet and heavy-handed it would be to speak of the threshold as though it were death itself After a fashion and from the outset we have always known death to be only a metaphor designed to help us achieve some crude representation of the idea of a limit when in fact the limit excludes all representation all lsquoidearsquo of a limit


Le Pas aushydelagrave opens with a brief one-line preamble carefully detached from the rest of the text and consisting of a solitary exhortation In courteous yet uncompromising terms it enjoins as follows lsquoLet us enter into this relation [Entrons dans ce rapport]rsquo2 But like other opening sentences in Blanchotrsquos work this seemingly forthright ceremonial flourish rapidly proves imponderable Its interruptive force is soon undermined by its recursive weakness For who or what is the first-person voice which proposes that he she or it (and those for whom it claims to speak) should enter into this enigmatic relation if not a voice already fully implicated in that relation If so and given that one can enter into a relation only by not yet being party to it the address would appear at worst redundant at best impossible And likewise for whom is the invitation intended if not those readers of Le Pas aushydelagrave whoever they may be who by virtue of having just read this brief opening phrase are similarly already engaged in this relation to which they are being called


If so Blanchotrsquos beginning would appear to defeat itself and lapse into circularity not once but twice over The present moment in which the injunction may be thought to be issued or received is elided and effaced overwritten by an event or an encounter ndash an entry into relation with words ndash which belonging to the future has nevertheless already occurred and belonging to the past is yet somehow still to come The reader may not yet have properly entered into relation with Le Pas aushydelagrave but at the same time it is already too late reading is a task that speaks only to the future but it does so with langage that is always already past

Not unlike the opening of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli then the beginning of Le Pas aushydelagrave is anything but a beginning It is already a fait accompli The scene evoked by the text in so far as it is a scene is not a point of origin but already the spectral effect of a movement of repetition and return extending back into the past and forwards into the future (Later Le Pas aushydelagrave will speak of a house haunting its ghosts lsquohere and therersquo it adds lsquoa threshold for want of solid ground [un seuil agrave deacutefaut de sol]rsquo3) Little wonder then that turning aside from indicative temporality and putting itself beyond the jurisdiction of truth or untruth Blanchotrsquos preamble should express itself in the imperative in response to some earlier query or challenge from which it derives its necessity but which is nowhere explicitly voiced True by doing what it says and saying what it does by instituting relation by the very gesture of invoking it Blanchotrsquos opening may be thought to offer a prime example of a performative utterance endowed with illocutionary force As such however the only performance to which it gives rise is the (absent) event of its own occurrence rather than properly framing the work as a work Blanchotrsquos preamble leaves it suspended on its threshold with the surplus necessity of the literary text its lsquoneacutecessiteacute de surplusrsquo as Le Pas aushydelagrave calls it more than a hundred pages later leading to nothing stable determinable with confidence as either literature or philosophy but only to the fractured indecision of the fragmentary lsquoWhence the appeal to a disintegrating repetitive demand [une exigence morcelante reacutepeacutetitive]rsquo the text explains lsquothe three blows [les trois coups] in traditional theatre that claim to announce something is about to happen whereas more likely they echo down the eternal empty tomb [alors qursquoils retentiraient dans lrsquoeacuteternelle tombe vide]rsquo4

If Blanchotrsquos opening withdraws its status as a beginning by dint of its aporetic recursiveness it complicates its self-presentation (and

An IntErruPtIon 173

the presentation of all that follows) in another way too For like any threshold literal or metaphoric Blanchotrsquos initial injunction is both part of the space to which it urges access and yet necessarily distinct from it It is not simple but double not self-identical but internally divided In Le Pas aushydelagrave this dual Janus-like status (Janus is the god of thresholds presiding over all entrances and exits) is signalled and reinforced by a further singular if oddly absent trait which is that Blanchotrsquos incipit is the only fragment in the whole of the book (which by that token is arguably less or more than the whole it appears to be) not to be preceded by the characteristic diamond-shaped icon (uml) detaching each of the other fragments in the volume from their surrounding context In other words of the 416 (or perhaps better the 1 415) uneven and unequal passages of text making up Le Pas aushydelagrave which range in length from a few words to five and a quarter pages only one the very first (and also the shortest) is set aside from the others by virtue of not being separated from them by any explicit typographical device (other than a slightly more generous use of line spacing) which has the paradoxical effect of rendering it absolutely unique while also making it radically indiscernible It is marked so to speak to the precise extent that it is un-marked remarkable for being unremarkable different by dint of being indifferent

To this unusual set of affairs a number of responses are possible On the one hand like any heading title or subtitle Blanchotrsquos opening injunction may be thought to enjoy some kind of hierarchical even transcendental precedence over the 415 fragments that come in its wake as though it were in itself a kind of paraphrase or translation of the diamond motif consistently used elsewhere in the book thus inviting the reader to treat the remaining 180 pages of Blanchotrsquos book as a lengthy commentary on that opening address In that case if one wanted to sum up Blanchotrsquos text it would be enough that is both more and less than enough to cite or quote (in so far as it is possible) the repetitive differentiated yet radically unpronounceable scriptural icon that like some iterative signature appears 415 times in the book On the other hand in all relevant respects Blanchotrsquos opening fragment would seem to differ little if at all from the 415 others alongside which it is summoned to appear implying that any presumed hierarchy separating the one from the many is at best a lure and that between the apparent absence and presence of a typographical mark or marker the difference is


negligeable insignificant non-existent even not least because these two possibilities are versions of the same resulting from the fact that to write as Le Pas aushydelagrave puts it is to proceed by erasure as much as by inscription lsquo Effaced [Effaceacute] before being writtenrsquo the reader is told in words that are not without recalling LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli lsquoIf the word trace can be accepted [accueilli received welcomed] by us it is as the index [index index forefinger] that may be said to indicate as erased [ratureacute] what was however never traced All our writing ndash belonging to us all and were it ever the writing of everyone ndash would be thus the concern [souci] for what was never written in the present but in a past to come [un passeacute agrave venir]rsquo lsquo Writingrsquo the text later adds lsquois not designed to leave traces behind [laisser des traces] but to efface by traces all traces to disappear into the fragmentary space of writing more definitively than one disappears into the tomb or put another way to destroy destroy invisibly without the din [vacarme] of destructionrsquo5

There is further evidence of this constitutive evanescence of the trace elsewhere in Le Pas aushydelagrave too This is clear from the treatment given not to the exhortation that opens the book but to the plea that brings it to an end which is also in the imperative albeit this time in the second person singular the phrase lsquoDeliver me from the overlong burden of speech [Libegravereshymoi de la trop longue parole]rsquo Like the opening preamble this closing rejoinder had also appeared earlier in print in a much shorter version of both beginning and ending of Blanchotrsquos text alongside a selection of eighteen other fragments the majority of which in a different order reappeared in Le Pas aushydelagrave three years later6 But while the phrase lsquoEntrons dans ce rapportrsquo appears at the head of both texts without the customary diamond-shaped icon the opposite was the case with this strangely self-defeating lsquoLibera mersquo In 1970 given the task of signing off Blanchotrsquos prepublication tribute to Klossowski it likewise appeared without any typographical marker Three years later however finalising the text for Le Pas aushydelagrave Blanchot now added (or restored) the diamond-shaped icon giving the bookrsquos valedictory threshold the same status as the 414 fragments preceding it While in 1970 this final fragment had stepped beyond the boundaries of Blanchotrsquos text delimiting it in much the same way as the opening preamble had endeavoured to do so in 1973 that parting shaft was withdrawn into the book which as a result now began to overspill its own margins

An IntErruPtIon 175

Indeed as though in recognition of the bookrsquos strange exteriority to itself this final plea had already appeared once before in Le Pas aushydelagrave roughly a third of the way through the text7 But as it announced the end in this way before its appointed time more than a hundred pages before it was properly due Blanchotrsquos clausula presented itself not in roman type as it had in 1970 and continued to do so at the foot of the last page of Le Pas aushydelagrave but in italics as though it were already aware of its status as a quotation an entreaty already disabled by its aporetic frailty in so far as it is a secret to nobody that to ask in words to be released from the burden of speaking is manifestly not to put an end to words but to testify instead at one and the same time to their supreme authority and irredeemable impotence Just as the beginning of Le Pas aushydelagrave is not a proper beginning then for at least two reasons so the same goes for its purported ending which not only arrives prematurely but in the end when it does arrive arrives without arriving To begin to end is to encounter a threshold but to step beyond that threshold as one must Le Pas aushydelagrave suggests is to face the prospect of being perpetually immobilised arrested or frozen ndash stopped dead ndash in onersquos tracks Not for nothing does the book therefore spend many pages exploring what it calls lsquothe circle of the lawrsquo that paradoxical structure inseparable from writing itself which holds that lsquothere must be crossing [franchissement] for there to be a limit but only the limit in as much as it is uncrossable [infranchissable] prompts one to cross it [appelle agrave franchir] affirms the desire (the false step [le faux pas]) which in its unpredictable movement has always already crossed [franchi] the linersquo8

It may be then that the fragmentary implies finality finality itself however says Le Pas aushydelagrave is inseparable from infinite incompletion This much is already audible in the closing entreaty itself which as readers familiar with Catholic liturgy or with such well-known choral works as Gabriel Faureacutersquos D Minor Requiem of 1887ndash90 will know is indeed a quotation at least in part For it contains unmistakeable echoes of the Office of the Dead that service of prayers recited immediately after the requiem Mass in the voice of the deceased (on whose behalf the choir enters a plea for mercy upon the Last Day) which in the original Latin begins lsquoLibera me Domine de morte aeternarsquo lsquoDeliver me O Lord from death eternalrsquo To this canonic text Le Pas aushydelagrave makes at least two significant changes First all mention of God or other transcendent power is


pointedly removed Its address is therefore radically suspended and in the absence of divine presence emphasis is displaced from the transcendent to the immanent such that it can now fall only to words to deliver the speaker from the burden of speaking were it not that they are the source of the speakerrsquos distress in the first place This is the second shift brought about by Blanchotrsquos recasting of the liturgical text In place of the religious predicament of everlasting death now stands the secular burden of overlong speech endlessly prolonged The contrast is a powerful one But this is more than just a potentially contentious reversal of Catholicism into atheism it is rather that what is found to precede the one and the other enabling and disabling each in turn is language that repetitive tracing which being neither present nor absent simultaneously both offers and withdraws the possibility of endings and ends

Many years earlier accompanying Hegel at least some of the way Blanchot had drawn attention to the inextricable bond between language and death It was not only that words in order to function at all need to be able to exist in the absence of what they name more fundamentally it was that language in general is necessarily synonymous with a capacity to negate that is to destroy and abolish in their flesh and facticity those very entities things beasts people which it was the task of language to render intelligible which it could do only by converting them into conceptual abstractions and thereby ironically annihilating them lsquoIt is thus entirely accuratersquo Blanchot concluded in 1947 lsquoto say that when I speak death speaks in me [la mort parle en moi]rsquo And he went on

The fact that I speak [Ma parole] gives notice that death at this very moment is let loose in the world that between me who am speaking and the person [lrsquoecirctre] I am addressing death is suddenly there [a brusquement surgi] it is between us as the distance that separates us even as that distance prevents us from being separated too since contained in it is the condition for all mutual understanding [entente] Only death allows me to grasp [saisir] that which I want to reach within words it is the sole possibility of their meaning [sens] Without death everything would collapse into absurdity and nothingness9

But if language made death possible Blanchot continued now cleaving to the side of Levinas by that very same logic it also made

An IntErruPtIon 177

it impossible lsquoSuchrsquo he wrote lsquois the paradox of the final hour [lrsquoheure derniegravere]rsquo a reversal he detailed as follows

Death works with us in the world as the power that humanises nature that raises [eacutelegraveve] existence up into being it is that part of us that makes us most human it is death only in the world man [lrsquohomme ie homo not vir] knows it only because he is human and he is human only because death is his destiny [parce qursquoil est la mort en devenir] But to die is to shatter [briser] the world it is to ruin [perdre] humanity and annihilate being it is thus also to ruin [perdre] death and ruin that which in death and for me [pour moi] made it into death So long as I am alive I am a mortal human [un homme mortel] but when I die ceasing to be human I am no longer mortal I am no longer capable of dying and the prospect of death [la mort qui srsquoannonce] horrifies me because I can see it for what it is no longer death but the impossibility of dying10

What occurs then or perhaps better refuses to occur in death Blanchot argues is not the end as such but the endlessness of the end time outside time deferral without term repetition without presence In a sense this was nothing new Humans have always known this which is why according to Blanchot the theme of deathrsquos impossibility in the form of an obstinate belief in rebirth reincarnation or resurrection already occupies a prominent place in different religions Kafka through his knowledge of the Kabbala and other mid- or far-Eastern sources was one notable beneficiary of this tradition which found expression in such narratives as Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) Der Jaumlger Gracchus (The Hunter Gracchus) Das Schloszlig (The Castle) Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared) or Der Prozeszlig (The Trial) As Blanchot went on to elaborate

A man enters the night but the night culminates in waking and lo he has been turned into vermin [le voilagrave vermine] Or else the man dies but in reality he is alive he goes from town to town borne on rivers recognised by some helped by none with the error of ancient death sniggering [ricanant] at his bedside his is a strange condition he forgot to die [il a oublieacute de mourir] But another believes himself to be alive but only because he forgot he was dead [il a oublieacute sa mort] and yet another knowing himself


to be dead struggles in vain in order to die death is somewhere else [lagraveshybas] the great castle that cannot be reached and life was somewhere else too that native land abandoned on the basis of a malicious rumour [sur un faux appel] and now there is nothing left to do but to struggle to work in order to die completely but to struggle is still to be alive and everything that brings one closer to the goal makes the goal unreachable11

Between the implicit Judaism of Kafkarsquos literary protagonists and the explicit Catholicism of those souls in limbo on whose behalf the Libera me is proffered the differences are obviously many In Blanchotrsquos treatment of them there is however a shared realisation Both here and there as each journeys interminably towards the day of judgement (lsquoThat day the day of wrath calamity and misery that terrible and exceedingly bitter dayrsquo the Libera me calls it) it is to words that the task of securing or confirming that term is entrusted in the knowledge however that just as words possess no beginning so they are without end In either case as among others Beckettrsquos LrsquoInnommable contended there remains no alternative but to go on time after time beyond possibility beyond death itself in the forlorn endeavour to reach a final destination As it reprises the Libera me then Le Pas aushydelagrave reclaims the canonic liturgical text for something other than a desire for divine intercession Its tactic is double For even as it overturns the traditional formula and effaces by omission the appeal to transcendence it also reaffirms the prayer and reinscribes within the liturgical text the impossibility of dying upon which in its hopes for resurrection knowingly or unknowingly Christianity always already depends And roughly a quarter of the way through the book dispensing with any main verb suspending itself as it advances while refusing to accredit any teleological literary philosophical or religious frame once more saying what it does as it does what it says thereby describing itself as well as all other literary pronouncements Le Pas aushydelagrave observes thus lsquo Speech [Une parole] without presence the perpetuity of dying [mourir] the death eternal [la mort drsquoeacuteterniteacute] from which the requiem Mass [le chant drsquoEacuteglise] calls powerfully for us to be delivered acknowledging in it the space or speech always bereft of God that is delivered from presencersquo12

To read Le Pas aushydelagrave is to be confronted throughout in this way with the perverse Janal logic of the threshold Blanchotrsquos incipit

An IntErruPtIon 179

and explicit are not however the bookrsquos only thresholds upon which reading is forced to linger even as it takes a step beyond Indeed as far as Le Pas aushydelagrave is concerned and just like LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli each and every fragment already constitutes a threshold where reading repeatedly both begins and ends according to the reiterative infinity of continual interruption And even before it properly opens the book already announces itself to its reader as convention dictates by marking another threshold in the form of the authorrsquos name and the bookrsquos title The function of the bio-bibliographical information grudgingly provided in this way (Maurice Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave) is not hard to understand Combining a supposedly singular title with a supposedly verifiable signature it supplies the volume in principle at least with the unity and identity it requires in order to be recognised by law and to be attributed to the author as his or her intellectual property for which he or she is legally responsible and in which he or she expresses heart-felt opinions views or ideas13 In this sense the mention of author and title on a bookrsquos cover already constitutes something of a pre-emptive reading The bookrsquos contents are quickly presumed to be an extension of the living presence identified on the title page and this more than anything explains perhaps why Le Pas aushydelagrave like LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre in its turn is so often approached by interpreters as a relatively disordered eminently quotable collection of thoughts and reflections emanating from its prestigious and renowned author But if Blanchot is right that language is inseparable from death and dying and if it is true that the writerrsquos concern for the incommensurable duplicity of lifersquos ending is his most compelling preoccupation his abiding signature if one will to whom or to what may the signature at the head of Le Pas aushydelagrave be in fact thought to belong

Within a page or two of its opening after three unequal fragments touching on the dissymmetrical proximity between thinking and dying and the strangely epochal temporality of writing (lsquooutside of time within time [hors temps dans le temps]rsquo)14 Le Pas aushydelagrave begins sketching an answer to the question It does so in the first instance by marking another threshold in the text one that has often been taken by critics to represent a rare moment of retrospective autobiography on Blanchotrsquos part To an extent as we have already seen these early fragments are given over to a critical restaging of Husserlrsquos bracketing of worldly experience by means of the phenomenological epocheacute But Blanchotrsquos revisiting of his past intellectual itinerary does


not confine itself to that philosophical gesture It steps beyond the horizon of phenomenology to address a rather different experience given as follows

uml Where does it come from [Drsquoougrave vient cela] that wrenching power [cette puissance drsquoarrachement] of destruction or change [de destruction ou de changement] in those first words written facing the sky in the solitude of the sky words by themselves without future and without expectation lsquohe ndash the searsquo [laquo il ndash la mer raquo]

It is assuredly satisfying (too satisfying) to think that by the mere fact that something resembling the words lsquohe ndash the searsquo comes to be written [srsquoeacutecrit] with the exigency resulting from them and of which they are the result there somewhere comes to be inscribed [srsquoinscrit] the possibility of a radical transformation be it for a single individual that is of his or her abolition [suppression] as a personal existence The possibility nothing more

Do not draw [Ne tire] any conclusion from these words written one day (which were or at the same time might just as easily have been other words) nor even from the demand of writing [lrsquoexigence drsquoeacutecrire] supposing that you were entrusted with it as you persuade and sometimes dissuade yourself that you were all that you might be thought to remember about it would only serve to unify in presumptuous fashion an insignificant existence but one nevertheless somewhat withdrawn (by the proposition of this demand of writing itself) from all unity Do not hope if that is what you are hoping (there are reasons for doubting it) to unify your existence and introduce some coherence into it in the past through writing that disunifies [qui deacutesunifie]15

Now throughout modernity as personal diary occasional essay working draft commonplace book or undeveloped anecdote fragmentary writing has long been associated as it is say in the fragmentary texts of roland Barthes with confessional introspection and self-reflexivity16 In the passage just quoted Blanchot might easily be thought to be continuing in similar vein and few are the readers who will not have recognised in the words lsquoil ndash la merrsquo given twice over in the passage a memory of the opening sentence of Thomas lrsquoObscur that very first book which in 1941 launched Blanchotrsquos career as a writer of fiction and no longer solely as a

An IntErruPtIon 181

political or literary commentator and which in both the roman of 1941 and the abbreviated reacutecit of 1950 begins lsquoThomas sat down and gazed at the sea [Thomas srsquoassit et regarda la mer]rsquo17 Admittedly that inaugural sentence is not rendered as itself but rather as an interrupted vestigial trace from which the protagonistrsquos name and all temporally specific verbal activity have been removed overwritten by an unpronounceable supplementary dash or stroke of the pen implying both an erasure and a reinscription So as this first significant threshold in Blanchotrsquos writing career is remembered it is immediately followed by another threshold that challenges the confidence invested in the first and opens as a question the relationship between writing and (auto)biography on which the earlier memory appeared to rest True enough in Blanchotrsquos recasting of that earliest incipit there is a remainder the now anonymous personal (or perhaps better impersonal) pronoun il incorporating both the masculine he and as the text goes on to argue the fanto-matic neuter it not available as such in the French gender system and la mer the sea (with its homophonic maternal shadow la megravere) that liquid amniotic medium into which Thomas in the original novel lets himself slip as though into the limitless waters of a new-found artistic idiom But as it revisits its authorrsquos literary rebeginnings or rebirth in this way Le Pas aushydelagrave is at pains to dramatise that early conversion less as a defining personal choice than as a moment of radical expropriation at no point in this particular fragment for instance does the text turn to the first-person pronoun preferring instead to address itself or its author in the second-person singular (as tu a word that for Mallarmeacute as we have seen carried with it the spectral alternative of that which was consigned to silence ie tu) and it takes particular care in modestly self-deprecating terms to qualify all that might suggest that what occurred (or did not occur) was anything more than a contingent even trivial if indisputably all-consuming experience

It could of course be objected that in signing his own text even in this admittedly self-effacing manner Blanchot is nonetheless guilty of contradicting and fatally undermining the doctrine of authorial impersonality of which he was elsewhere a notable exponent To do so however would be to misunderstand the structure of signatures in general Any writer even one committed to maintaining total fidelity to autobiographical experience and intent on signing as forcefully as possible the text that appears under his or her name is


from the outset necessarily expropriated by the activity of writing But far from constituting an obstacle to autobiographical writing this structure of ex-appropriation as Derrida calls it is its necessary precondition18 Autobiography in other words is only possible in so far as like the Hunter Gracchus as she or he writes the writer is in the position of one already dead bereft of presence excluded from the world exposed to the impossibility of dying This was already the lesson that Blanchot in 1947 took from a reading of Michel Leirisrsquos autobiography LrsquoAcircge drsquohomme What Leirisrsquos confessional text demonstrated he observed was lsquohow in the depths of the I [au fond du Je] and constantly inseparable from it in the very fear it inspires and the anguish it produces the He of death [le Il de la mort] offers itself with its marble-like eternity and chill impassivityrsquo19 A quarter of a century later radicalised and condensed the thought remained the same and reappears on the threshold of Le Pas aushydelagrave as follows

uml Death being that to which we are not accustomed [habitueacutes] we approach it either as the unaccustomed [lrsquoinhabituel] that fills us with wonder [qui eacutemerveille] or as the non-familiar [le nonshyfamilier] that fills us with horror [qui fait horreur] The thought of death does not help us think death does not give us death as something to think Death thinking [la penseacutee] so close to each other that thinking we die if dying we are dispensed from thinking [nous nous dispensons de penser] every thought would then be mortal each thought a last thought20

Death then which presides over all thinking is nevertheless in-accessible to thinking and to endeavour to think death is to be confronted with intimate extremity ultimate possibility and impossibility alike Thinking too as it reaches towards its constitutive limits and encounters the limitlessness of what cannot be thought falls subject to the same aporia each thought too is suspended on the limit double proof of not only deathrsquos simultaneous possibility and impossibility but of that of thinking too And what goes for thinking plainly also goes for writing lsquoTo die to sleep ndash To sleep ndash perchance to dreamrsquo

The name of an author that appears on the cover of a book just like the implicit or explicit signature that appears within the text authorised by that name does not guarantee presence power or

An IntErruPtIon 183

even responsibility It supplies the reader with a singular distinctive name but the name is empty and is always already traversed by the prior namelessness that making the name both possible and necessary disables it as a sign of identity My name may be deeply personal to me but it always already belongs to others who may equally well use it to name a person who is somebody other than me entirely ndash but who at the same time may also be myself All names in this sense are no more than fitful fleeting traces and they are a deferred tribute to the anonymity of those whose living and dying they announce or recall So when Blanchot inscribes Le Pas aushydelagrave with his name and offers in the body of the text a cryptic vestige of his writing career it is not to lay proprietorial claim to the text but to bear witness to an impending death that has always already occurred The covert reference to Thomas lrsquoObscur may lend Le Pas aushydelagrave the status of a partial autobiography as both Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe suggest apropos of LrsquoInstant de ma mort (which the text entitled Le Pas aushydelagrave in a sense already contains while being contained by it)21 a more fitting appellation however would be autothanatography22

If language then is a graveyard it is a graveyard peopled with phantoms ghosts and revenants And more radical than any name which it simultaneously withdraws and supplements is the parenthetic and parenthesising movement of what standing in for the neuter Blanchot in rewriting the opening line of Thomas lrsquoObscur calls the (il) translatable only with difficulty into English as (it) or (he) the laconic emptiness and impersonality of which even as it exceeds all naming as such is presupposed by each and every name To write at all in this sense as Beckettrsquos work again bears witness is to confront that which remains forever nameless and unnamable As a later fragment in Le Pas aushydelagrave explains

uml Anonymity after the name is not anonymity without a name Anonymity does not consist in objecting to the name while relinquishing it Anonymity posits the name leaves it empty as if the name were only there to let itself be traversed by what the name does not name the non-unity and non-presence of the nameless (it) which designates nothing but awaits what lies forgotten in the name is some help in inquiring into this requirement for anonymity [cette exigence drsquoanonymat] Would it however be enough simply to say that (it) without having value or meaning


in itself might be thought to allow everything that is inscribed in the name to be affirmed in an always different determination Or put another way to attribute to the name the function of an lsquoanalogonrsquo a mode of absence in which all images might be held the emptiness of a symbol always ready to be filled with various possible meanings and itself always in abeyance (it) is not such that it might only receive the indeterminacy of its proper meaning by allowing itself to be determined by whatever in addition to it might be said through using it (in the same way perhaps that the word being is illuminated by the light of emergent meaning when it is uttered but only if something that is or might or might not be ndash this always happens but might not happen ndash comes to meet it in language and thereby obscures and recovers it without covering it up) (it) welcomes the enigma of being which is unable however to appease its own enigma (it) is spoken without there being any position or deposition of existence without presence or absence affirming it without the unity of the word coming to release it from the in-between where it is disseminated (it) is not lsquothatrsquo [laquo cela raquo] but the neuter which marks it (just as (it) calls upon the neuter) returns it to the displacement without place that deprives it of any grammatical place a kind of progressive lack [sorte de manque en devenir] between two several and all words thanks to which they interrupt each other and without which they would signify nothing but which disturbs them constantly even into the silence in which they fade Anonymity is borne by (it) that always speaks the name forgotten in advance23

If anonymity is the only proof of a name in other words it is because each and every name is simultaneously proof of its essential anonymity

II

A step further

uml Taking three steps stopping falling and immediately regaining his balance in this fragile fall


An IntErruPtIon 185

If one of the key resources of Le Pas aushydelagrave is to subject its explicit or implicit authorial signature to the critical effects of the neuter the treatment it reserves for its own title and accordingly for its own thematic stability is no less radical Already from the outset Blanchotrsquos title exhibits an abyssal turn Any title in order to identify the book it names must be part of that book and yet step beyond its borders In this sense any title would merit being called a step beyond ndash albeit that by that very token it would necessarily not yet be a step beyond but remain suspended on the edge as a necessary but always deferred threshold perpetually to be crossed in reading were it not that any reading before moving beyond a text is bound always to falter The name Le Pas aushydelagrave then in so far as it is a title is necessarily a step beyond in so far as it is a title however it is also anything but a step beyond only a threshold that closing the book also opens it The notorious double meaning of the word pas confirms this for what is here a step (pas from Latin passus meaning step) is there a not (pas from Latin passus meaning barely a step at all) Either way no step is ever simple achieved on one foot alone but always the result of a double movement here and there forwards and back right and left the one with the other the other with the one

In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that the syntagm le pas aushydelagrave in the course of this book entitled Le Pas aushydelagrave appears not once nor even twice but seven times over making eight in all the symbol or cipher for infinity And each of those successive occurrences displays something of the same unequal gait that one of Blanchotrsquos fictional interlocutors in 1960 called as we have seen la marche de lrsquoeacutecrevisse referring to the way crayfish according to La Fontainersquos famous Fable advance only by retreating lsquondash Here againrsquo says Blanchotrsquos essay lsquowe have the oddity [bizarrerie] of this turning towards [tour vers ] that is a turning aside [deacutetour] Who wishes to go forwards must go sidewaysrsquo25

Throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave as its title is repeated cited invoked or displaced the movement of reading or writing then is neither progressive nor regressive but lateral and oblique This much is apparent from each of the singular iterative occurrences of the phrase in Blanchotrsquos text First up towards the beginning of Le Pas aushydelagrave in the guise of a supplementary opening threshold comes something resembling a definition albeit a conjectural one written largely in the conditional and addressing the step beyond as a kind of


eventless event that interrupting time does not negate temporality but irreducible to its presence and absence both enigmatically sets it aside even as it penetrates to the epochal core of temporality in general

uml Time time the step beyond [le pas aushydelagrave] that does not occur within time may be said to take us [conduirait] outside time [hors du temps] without this outside [dehors] being timeless [intemporel] but where time may be said to fall in a fragile fall [chute fragile] in accordance with this lsquooutside of time within timersquo towards which writing would draw us were we allowed having disappeared from ourselves to write in the secrecy of ancient fear [sous le secret de la peur ancienne]26

Some twenty pages later in the course of a series of fragments devoted to the paradoxically temporal-atemporal status of the thought of eternal return Blanchot provides a second gloss He does so however indirectly and almost as an afterthought by way of a parenthetic interjection and the uncertain grammar of a phrase placed in apposition with the result that the step beyond is shorn of its commanding authority as a title and bound instead to a tortuous sequence of alternative at times paronomastic formulations

uml In a certain sense the law of return ndash the Eternal return of the Same ndash immediately one has drawn nearer to it by way of the movement that comes from it and which would be the time of writing if one did not also have to say and before all else that writing holds the exigency of return this law then ndash outside law ndash may be thought to lead us to accept [assumer] (that is suffer by dint of the most passive passivity the step beyond [de par la passiviteacute la plus passive le pas aushydelagrave]) the temporality of time in such a way that suspending or causing to disappear all present and all presence it would also cause to disappear or suspend the authority or foundation on the basis of which it is expressed Such would be the movement of irreversibility that as such is always reversible (the labyrinth)27

Having perhaps already lost their way in this dizzying verbal maze readers then have to wait more than 100 pages (in this book which in its French edition numbers less than 200) to encounter a

An IntErruPtIon 187

third avatar of the volumersquos guiding motif Once more however it comes in the form of a digressive aside with the supplementary insertion of a pair of quotation marks the effect of which is to set the expression at a distance from itself thereby disabling it so to speak and allowing the fragment in which it figures to contest it even withdraw it entirely At issue is the question of the possibility or impossibility of suicide a topic explored at length by Blanchot in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire but given fresh urgency in the wake of Paul Celanrsquos death by drowning (and presumed suicide) in April 1970

uml Suicide a temptation of defiance so far-reaching and so clear (too clear) that it seems difficult ndash almost embarrassing ndash to resist it An act of transgression a prohibition not declared by any law or by lsquonaturersquo but by the mortal indecision of the act itself a prohibition breached even as affirmed a transgression effected even as abolished and the passage of transgression ndash the lsquostep beyondrsquo [le laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo] in which there is however no stepping beyond [lagrave ougrave cependant lrsquoon ne passe pas] ndash symbolised dangerously offered by way of lsquopersonal representationrsquo the one who has passed away [le treacutepasseacute the departed] as the phrase goes28

If the step beyond in respect of the temptation of suicide proves a strangely inappropriate misnomer no sooner advanced than withdrawn this is also because the step beyond is always improper does not and cannot occur as such but has always already suspended itself in its non-occurrence In this sense the step beyond is a name for what Blanchot here calls the strangely lsquonormal anomaly [une anomalie normale]rsquo of death and dying in general so to speak and it is in this connection that Blanchot has recourse to the term for a fourth time in the book It is again written within quotation marks that is at once proposed and withdrawn and on this occasion doubly reserved by a verb put in the conditional

Even when dying [mourir] seems to engulf being [remplir lrsquoecirctre] so much so that we declare a person not without awkwardness to be dying we do not know faced with the strangeness of what is still undecided what fate is reserved for those of us who remain there unable to do anything [deacutesœuvreacutes] near to this


place where chance plays itself out witnessing non-presence and deeply affected in our most intimate fidelity our relation in ourselves to a subject And as convention dictates we busy ourselves doing nothing we help the living [le vivant] and help them to die [nous lrsquoaidons agrave mourir] but do not help with dying [nous nrsquoaidons pas le mourir] something there occurs in the absence of all else and by default something that does not occur which might be termed the lsquostep beyondrsquo [qui serait le laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo] which does not belong to duration repeats itself without end and separates us ourselves (as witnesses to what eludes all witnessing) from any appropriateness [convenance] or any relation with a Self [un Moi] as the subject of a Law29

This pattern of withdrawal and suspension of the step beyond (as barely a lsquostep beyondrsquo at all) having now been established Blanchotrsquos fifth use of the term is able to countersign its neutralisation once more which it does precisely by evoking the intervention of the neuter as that which precedes in affirmative manner both assertion and negation alike lsquouml What might be thought to respond or correspond to the neuterrsquo we read

is the fragility of what is already breaking [la fragiliteacute de ce qui deacutejagrave se brise] a passion more passive than any passivity [passion plus passive que tout ce qursquoil y aurait de passif] a yes that has said yes [oui qui a dit oui] prior to all affirmation as if the passage of dying [le passage de mourir] had always already passed preceding consent To the neuter mdash this name without name mdash nothing responds or corresponds [reacutepond] except a faltering response [la reacuteponse qui deacutefaille] that has always been on the point of responding [a toujours failli reacutepondre] and always failed in its response [failli agrave la reacuteponse] never patient enough to lsquostep beyondrsquo [laquo passer aushydelagrave raquo] without this lsquostep beyondrsquo [ce laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo] taking place30

Throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave as this last quotation emphasises Blanchot plays insistently on the paronomastic or homophonic doubling of pas (as step together with the negative not) with the words passeacute (past time) passif or passive (passive) passiviteacute (passivity) passage (passage) and passion (passion) The next sixth instance of the appearance of le pas aushydelagrave in Le Pas aushydelagrave is a

An IntErruPtIon 189

case in point with Blanchot now also adding a question mark to the parenthesis and quotation marks employed earlier

The lsquopassrsquo of the entirely passive [le laquo pas raquo du tout agrave fait passif] mdash the lsquostep beyondrsquo [le laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo ] mdash is more the folding back [repliement retreat withdrawal] as it unfolds [se deacuteployant] of a relation of strangeness neither suffered [subie] nor accepted [assumeacutee] A transgressive passivity a dying [mourir] in which nothing is suffered nothing acted upon which does not concern [ne concerne pas] and takes on a name only in its neglect of the dying of others [que par le deacutelaissement du mourir drsquoautrui]31

The last occurrence in the book appearing some thirteen pages before the end reprises much of what has gone before It again names the step beyond as a movement that incapable of being experienced as such necessarily suspends itself

uml Misfortune [Le malheur] perhaps we would suffer [subirions] it if it were to strike us on our own but it always affects the other in us and affecting us in others [en autrui] sets us aside [nous eacutecarte] to the point of that most passive passion in which our identity now lost no longer allows us to suffer it but only to identify with it albeit there is nothing identical with it and to go without identity and without any possibility of acting towards the other who is always the one affected by misfortune just as whoever is affected by misfortune is always the other a movement that is never complete [qui nrsquoaboutit pas] but like the lsquostep beyondrsquo of the entirely passive [le laquo pas aushydelagrave raquo du tout agrave fait passif] to which we may be said to respond in dying [en mourant] offers itself as its own transgression as though dying [mourir] outside of us [hors de nous] dedicated us [nous consacrait] to the other even as it gives us the slip and makes certain we do not find our way back again [tout en nous perdant en chemin et en nous retenant en cette perte]32

Seven times over then in the course of Le Pas aushydelagrave the title of the book this identifying threshold of reading and writing in which the fabric of the work would usually be gathered together in accordance with the law that dictates such things is subjected to a repetitive movement of qualification displacement


and effacement the effect of which far from promoting developing and thus imposing the step beyond as the volumersquos preferred conceptual horizon is to weaken it set it aside and suspend it even as it is maintained in the text like the forgotten memory of its own erasure In this way rather than conceptualising the step beyond Blanchotrsquos sevenfold recitation traces and retraces the movement of marking and re-marking interruption and dispersion addressed by the strange formula of the lsquostep beyondrsquo itself In this respect no special privilege attaches to the step beyond In so far as it marks the epochal interruption that necessarily occurs ndash occurs without occurring ndash in the article of death it is one signal case among many of the neutralising effects of the fragmentary What it demonstrates is how the step beyond (and Le Pas aushydelagrave) can neither aspire to transcendence nor remain content with immanence for it is that very division that very opposition which has for so long dominated thinking that the neuter arrests and puts into question As it does so under the auspices of the fragmentary it affirms the irresistible weakness of a kind of inescapable epochal exigency the implications of which Blanchot describes as follows in part of what is not by chance the longest fragment in the book

The Neuter a paradoxical name it barely speaks is a mute word simple yet always veiling itself always displacing itself outside its meaning operating invisibly on itself without ceasing to unravel in the immobility of its position that repudiates depth It neutralises neutralises (itself) thereby evoking (but no more than evoking) the movement of Aufhebung but in so far as it suspends and retains retains only the movement of suspending that is the distance it creates by virtue of the fact that in occupying the terrain it makes it disappear The Neuter then designates difference in indifference opacity in transparency the negative scansion of the other that cannot reproduce itself except through the attraction of the one duly turned aside [conjureacute] ie omitted Even the negation of the Neuter is removed [deacuterobeacutee]33

The step beyond this figure of the impossibility of transcendence and immanence alike in what it says and in what it does is neither a dialectic nor an anti-dialectic but a demand to think otherwise Which is not to say that it is more hospitable to a thinking of Being For if the neuter shadows and interrupts speculative dialectics it also

An IntErruPtIon 191

ghosts and sets aside ontology including Heideggerian fundamental ontology with similarly corrosive and far-reaching consequences As Blanchot continues

The neuter that may be thought to mark lsquobeingrsquo [lrsquoecirctre] does not therefore return it to the crudity of non-being [la grossiegravereteacute du nonshyecirctre] but has always already dispersed being itself [lrsquoecirctre mecircme] as that which never pretending to be either this or that also refuses to present itself in simple presence graspable only in apophatic fashion under the protective veil of the negative For if being [lrsquoecirctre ie Heideggerian Being or Sein which Blanchot here does not capitalise] is read or written in the neuter it is not however that the neuter takes precedence over being [prime lrsquoecirctre] nor only that being [lrsquoecirctre] may be said to be given [se donnerait] beneath the veil of the difference between being [ecirctre] and beings [eacutetant] being neither being nor beings (rather the further side of both [lrsquoaushydelagrave des deux] or the hither side of the space between [lrsquoen deccedila de lrsquoentreshydeux]) but rather that the neuter exorcises it [le conjure] by gently dissuading it from all presence even negative presence neutralising it to the point of preventing it from calling itself the being of the neuter [lrsquoecirctre du neutre] even as it plunges it [tout en lrsquoentraicircnant] into the infinite erosion of negative repetition34

What is affirmed here with respect to the Neuter or neuter as Blanchot writes it now dropping now reinstating the capital letter is not the transcendental prerogative of any single name or conceptual figure For what was also announced in the neuter was the repetitive dispersion irrepressible multiplicity and nomadic dissidence of the fragmentary its kinship therefore with one of the most elusive and intractable of all past and future thoughts interrupting philosophy and literature alike the thought of eternal return

III

the law of return

uml Nietzsche (if his name serves to name the law of Eternal return) and Hegel (if his name invites us to think presence as all and the all as presence) allow us to sketch out a mythology Nietzsche


can only come after Hegel but it is always before and always after Hegel that he comes and keeps coming Before because even thought as the absolute presence has never gathered within itself the completed totality of knowledge presence knows itself to be absolute but its knowledge remains relative knowledge since it has not realised itself practically and it therefore knows itself only as a present unfulfilled in practice unreconciled with presence as all in that sense Hegel is still only a pseudo-Hegel And Nietzsche always comes after because the law of which he is the bearer supposes the completion of time as present and in this completion its absolute destruction such that Eternal return now affirming the future and the past as the only instances of time and as identical and unrelated instances thus liberating the future from all present and the past from all presence shatters thought to the point of this infinite affirmation what will return infinitely in the future will be that which could never in any form be present just as what returned infinitely in the past was that which in the past never in any form belonged to the present either Such henceforth for Nietzsche is the exigency to be lived and thought And writing alone can respond to such an exigency on condition that discourse as logos having completed itself deny it any foundation on the basis of which it might declare or sustain itself and expose it to the threat and vain prestige of what nobody would henceforth dare call the madness of writing [eacutecriture folle]


As it stepped back and forth over its various thresholds it was perhaps not surprising that Le Pas aushydelagrave should find itself returning once again seemingly for the very first time to a singular predecessor for whom the philosophical as thought and as text was always more or less than what it seemed and was at any event more incisively embodied not as concept but as dance Nietzsche36 As we have seen Nietzsche had long been a significant presence for Blanchot But from 1967 onwards as the closing chapters of LrsquoEntretien infini testified further impetus was given to French rediscovery of Nietzsche by the appearance of new translations now based on the authoritative Colli and Montinari text and incorporating extensive amounts of previously unpublished fragmentary material Of particular interest to Blanchot as he put the finishing touches to LrsquoEntretien infini

An IntErruPtIon 193

were Nietzschersquos hitherto unavailable 1881 Froumlhliche Wissenschaft notebooks recently translated by Klossowski which recorded the thinkerrsquos own immediate response to the ecstatic experience in Sils-Maria in August 1881 (lsquo6000 feet above sea level and at a much greater height above all human thingsrsquo) on which Blanchot drew for much of his own account likewise written in fragmentary form of Nietzschersquos thought of eternal return37

Though Blanchotrsquos responsiveness to Nietzsche was at its most intense in Le Pas aushydelagrave published four years after LrsquoEntretien infini his engagement with Nietzschersquos writing carried on through the 1970s culminating in particular in two sequences of fragments in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre based on extracts not only from relatively well-known works such as Morgenroumlte (Daybreak) Jenseits von Gut und Boumlse (Beyond Good and Evil) and Die Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morality) but also from Nietzschersquos Autumn 1887 notebooks that had at last also appeared in French mid-way through the decade in a version for which Klossowski was again responsible38 revisiting these texts or encountering them for the first time and well aware of past and present controversies affecting reception of Nietzsche Blanchot was especially attentive to those aspects of Nietzschersquos writing that were felt by him to make a timely-untimely ethico-political intervention These included the thinkerrsquos still potent attacks on Christianity his deep-seated hostility to all forms of transcendence his denunciation of religious enthusiasm and arguably less well known to contemporary readers his polemic in favour of the Jews as well as against them As this last point suggests notwithstanding Nietzschersquos uncompromising assault on the moral self which Blanchot elsewhere largely endorses the question of his ndash hyperbolic ndash responsibility for his heirsrsquo use or abuse of his thinking remained an important issue39 Adding his own name to an already long-running debate Blanchot aligned himself with the view that the thinkerrsquos invective against the Jews the result of an uncritical reliance on nineteenth-century Christian propaganda was primarily directed less at Judaism itself than at Christianity as a kind of Pauline perversion of Judaism Some of the opinions voiced by Nietzsche were nevertheless deeply questionable At the same time it was also the case Blanchot maintained now coming to the thinkerrsquos defence that Nietzschersquos many lsquodubious remarks [remarques douteuses]rsquo fell far short of the notorious politicised antisemitism professed notably by the philosopherrsquos


sister and brother-in-law lsquoWhenever antisemitism turns into some-thing systematic or an organised movementrsquo Blanchot explained lsquo[Nietzsche] rejects it with horrorrsquo and he added rhetorically lsquoWho does not know thisrsquo40

Without pausing to comment explicitly on the strength or relevance of this last qualification Blanchot in the fragments that immediately precede took care to delimit Nietzschersquos comments on the Jews This he did by inserting just before the second of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastrersquos two clusters of textual material dealing with Nietzsche a series of seemingly unrelated other fragments The first of these is in the form of an elliptical commentary on a remark by rabbi Pinchas (or Pinhas) of Koretz (1726ndash91) one of the closest disciples of the Baal Shem Tov taken from Buberrsquos Tales of the Hasidim and asserting the need to show lsquomore loversquo towards whoever was wicked or full of hate in order writes Blanchot now paraphrasing Buber lsquoto compensate with our love for the lack of love for which that person is responsible and which causes a ldquoriftrdquo [ein Riszlig says Buber a tear or split in the Shekhinah or Divine Presence] in the powers of Love which it is necessary to repair on his behalfrsquo But what might this mean in concrete terms Blanchotrsquos answer is Levinasian in language though it is also decidedly critical of that stereotypical overly pious respect for undifferentiated others mistakenly attributed to Levinas by some of his commentators It is that lsquo[w]ickedness hatred [ ] are not characteristics of the Other [Autrui] who is precisely the destitute the abandoned and the helpless If one can speak of hatred or wickedness it is in so far as it is through them that evil [le mal] also affects others [des tiers third persons] which is why justice demands refusal resistance and even the use of violence designed to combat [repousser] violencersquo41 Justice then was paramount and in resisting evil politics took priority over ethics To reinforce the point Blanchot followed it up with a quotation from Lenin credited by Henri Guillemin the left-wing Catholic popular historian and literary critic with the proposition (amply confirmed with catastrophic consequences by subsequent Soviet developments) that even lsquothe slightest hint of antisemitism professed by any group or individual proves the reactionary nature of that group or individualrsquo This in turn was followed by a further apparently unconnected fragment announcing that lsquo[t]o keep silent [Garder le silence] is what without realising we all wish for in writingrsquo after which Blanchot then transcribed

An IntErruPtIon 195

a brief extract from the famous words of the prophet Job forced to humble himself before God to whom he confesses lsquoBehold I am vile what shall I answer thee I will lay mine hand upon my mouth Once I have spoken but I will not answer yea twice but I will proceed no furtherrsquo drawing from Blanchot who quotes only the second half of Jobrsquos response the remark lsquoThis is perhaps what is meant by the repetition of writing repeating what is extreme [lrsquoextrecircme] to which there is nothing to addrsquo42

By way of these elliptical and sometimes enigmatic fragments (many more of which might be adduced) a complex strategy of reading comes into view It was in four key parts First crucial to Blanchotrsquos return to Nietzsche was the belief that nothing in the thinkerrsquos writings could or should be taken away but equally nothing added rejected then was any attempt to systematise Nietzschersquos writing any attempt on the part of commentators of either right or left to subordinate it to any political religious or other ideology and similarly any desire to minimise its many contradictions or ambiguities Second it therefore followed that Nietzschersquos words were such that they might be thought already to speak for themselves which was also to say as Nietzsche was at pains to argue not only that they resisted reduction to any single perspective but also that by that very token they were themselves infinitely interpretable Third as Blanchotrsquos elision of Jobrsquos reply to God implied it was essential to remember that no word stood alone and that to interpret any fragmentary writing meant paying equal attention both to the text and context of what was written and to the silence inseparable from writing to which as Blanchot observes the latter was secretly dedicated43 Finally just as writing was subject to no guarantees so reading had to accept it was without safeguards either Both represented infinite tasks incapable of securing ultimate or definitive conclusions And as he went on to review a selection of largely admiring unpublished remarks about the Jews from 1887 just over a year before Nietzschersquos final breakdown Blanchot cautiously opening a parenthesis summed matters up as follows lsquo(Nietzschersquos thinking is not without its dangers that is true Before all else this is what he tells us whenever we think we should expect no rest [si nous pensons pas de repos])rsquo44

Though not formulated as such at the time the implications of such restlessness (affirmation of the fragmentary probing disbelief tireless questioning hyperbolic responsibility) were already at


the heart of Blanchotrsquos engagement with Nietzsche in the period following LrsquoEntretien infini As we have seen some of the first sections of Le Pas aushydelagrave to appear did so in 1970 in a special issue of the journal LrsquoArc in honour of Klossowski to whose Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux bringing together essays and translations completed during the previous six years Blanchotrsquos contribution paid homage In presenting these early fragments in LrsquoArc Blanchot was able to recycle the dedication used a short while before in LrsquoEntretien infini suggesting that the two tributes were written at much the same time45 In other ways too Le Pas aushydelagrave picked up where LrsquoEntretien infini had left off and Blanchot returned to several aspects of Nietzschersquos thought which he had begun to broach four years earlier notably in response to Heidegger These included perhaps most importantly of all the complex relationship between philosophy art literature and the fragmentary in Nietzsche and by extension in Blanchotrsquos own writing Then there was the far-reaching question of the status and meaning of Nietzschersquos experience and doctrine of eternal return which Heidegger while declaring it inseparable from the concept of will to power had nevertheless relegated to a final chapter in the history of metaphysics yet which for Blanchot as we have seen bore importantly not only on the epochal question of the fragmentary but also on that thought of the neuter which had been a major concern of the writerrsquos thinking for a decade and more And not far behind given particular urgency by the political situation of the French Fifth republic in the early 1970s to which Blanchot was far from indifferent was the question of nihilism ndash the question of the future and of the past of history responsibility and alterity ndash that Nietzsche had bequeathed to all who came after and in which Blanchot as a reader of Loumlwith Heidegger and numerous others had long recognised the burden or address of eternal return albeit that following a promise made in LrsquoEntretien infini he now took care to suspend then abandon the belated latinate word itself judging it to be a misleading lure an obstacle to the task of thinking46

Having set aside its more explicitly metaphysical philosophical ambitions in 1966 and passing in silence over much that was still part of Nietzschersquos intellectual legacy including the will to power the figure of the overman or the transvaluation of all values it was here most particularly with the thought of eternal return itself that the rereading of Nietzschersquos work in Le Pas aushydelagrave may be

An IntErruPtIon 197

said to begin or perhaps better begin again In the whole of Le Pas aushydelagrave however Nietzschersquos name is explicitly mentioned in only nine of the bookrsquos 416 fragments occurring principally in the opening third of the volume and nowhere unlike LrsquoEntretien infini or LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre are any specific texts by Nietzsche actually quoted47 On the other hand in a slightly greater number of fragments reference is made to lsquoEternal return [LrsquoEacuteternel Retour]rsquo or lsquoThe Eternal return of the Same [LrsquoEternel Retour du Mecircme]rsquo duly capitalised as though it were in itself a proper name and as though the thought therefore had subtly taken the place of the thinker whose only claim to that recurrent signature after all was on the basis of its anonymity an anonymity that in Blanchotrsquos words as we have seen was already given in the name itself lsquoWhen we sign our namersquo he explained lsquoaffirming our identity we become responsible far beyond this sign to the point that this responsibility has always already set us aside [depuis toujours eacutecarteacutes] signing to disappropriate us like a forger who rather than passing himself off as genuine [vrai] reveals the genuine to be a forgery itself [ferait eacuteclater le vrai en faux]rsquo48 In this sense the Nietzsche at stake in Le Pas aushydelagrave was less the singular historical individual bearing that onomastic marker than already the nameless expropriated cipher radically synonymous with the experience of return revealed at Surlej for which he nevertheless stood absolute warranty becoming as he did so the modest but ineluctable understudy (and hostage) of lsquoevery name in historyrsquo as he put it in that celebrated January 1889 letter to Jakob Burckhardt

Explication of the thought of eternal return in Nietzschersquos published writings is notoriously elusive and its elucidation often veiled and indirect Like other readers Blanchot had no doubt long been familiar with aphorism sect341 from Die Froumlhliche Wissenschaft one of the best-known and most explicit passages in which in cautiously guarded and pointedly hypothetical terms Nietzsche staged the challenge of this lsquoheaviest of weightsrsquo (lsquoDo I talk like someone who has had a revelationrsquo he bluffly remarks in an unpublished fragment cited by Blanchot in 1969 lsquoIf so despise me and pay me no heedrsquo49) It famously runs as follows

What if some day or night a demon [Daumlmon] were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you lsquoThis life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and


innumerable times again and there will be nothing new in it but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you all in the same succession and sequence mdash even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment [dieser Augenblick cet instantshyci translates Klossowski] and I myself [ich selber moishymecircme] The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again and you with it speck of dustrsquo Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment [einen ungeheuren Augenblick un instant formidable] when you would have answered him lsquoYou are a god and never have I heard anything more divinersquo If this thought gained power over you as you are it would transform and possibly crush you the question in each and every thing lsquoDo you want this again and innumerable times againrsquo would lie on your actions as the heaviest of weights Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life in order to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal mdash 50

There is no doubting the fervour and intensity of these words and few readers can have been surprised to find Nietzsche seven years later in Ecce homo reaffirming the thought of eternal return as lsquothe absolutely highest formula of affirmation [diese houmlchste Formel der Bejahung] it is possible to attainrsquo51 Blanchot in turn seems to have concurred lsquoThe ldquorerdquo of returnrsquo he noted in Le Pas aushydelagrave lsquoinscribed like the ldquoexrdquo the opening of all exteriority as if return far from bringing exile to a close marked it [marquait lrsquoexil] the beginning in its rebeginning of exodus To come back would be to come anew [de nouveau] to ex-centre oneself [srsquoexshycentrer] to wander [errer also means to err] What alone remains is nomadic affirmationrsquo52 Admittedly this much was far from self-evident For perhaps the most vertiginous feature of eternal return captured in the figure of the circle (lsquoannulus aeternitatisrsquo Blanchot wrote in 1969 again drawing on Nietzschersquos 1881 notebooks)53 was its ineradicable reversibility that from one moment to the next presence might give way to absence and the wild intensity of the mountains to the bleak devastation of the abyss ndash and vice versa Already for Nietzsche this was no doubt why eternal return was premised

An IntErruPtIon 199

simultaneously on the exacerbation of nihilism and the prospect of its overcoming Between the nihilism it purported to combat and the redemption it seemed to promise the gap was accordingly a narrow one lsquoThe thought of eternal return of the samersquo Heidegger put it in 1937 lsquois only as this overcoming thought [ist nur als dieser uumlberwindende Gedanke] The overcoming [Uumlberwindung] has to cross this seemingly narrow gulf since it connects things that being the same in one way thus appear identical [denn sie besteht zwischen solchem was sich auf eine Weise gleicht daszlig es als dasselbe erscheint] On the one side stands all is nothing all is indifferent so that nothing is worthwhile everything is the same [alles ist gleich] On the other side stands everything returns each moment matters everything matters everything is the same [alles ist gleich]rsquo54

Absolutely crucial here is the possibility or constitution of the moment of that Nietzschean Augenblick which is also the blink of an eye which therefore opens (infinitely explains Nietzsche) only in order to close again almost immediately after and repeat itself opening and closing again and again In that movement all selfhood is lost undone by the gyrations of an uncontrollable wheel and the moment in its brevity its infinity its essential wandering rules supreme were it not that the moment itself is anything but self-identical or self-present as the future author of LrsquoInstant de ma mort was only too aware For there are unmistakeable similarities between that still discreet or clandestine experience and Blanchotrsquos writing or rewriting of Nietzschersquos dark illumination similarities that echo perceptibly throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave confirming perhaps as LrsquoInstant de ma mort suggests how the one is the impossible memory or anticipation of the other Nietzsche for his part in drawing the more explicitly philosophical consequences of the experience at Surlej began by reminding himself and any future readers of the dubious conformist and essentialist assumptions of science society and metaphysics He went on

The species is the coarser error the individual [das Individuum Nietzschersquos term is not gender-specific] the subtler error who comes later It struggles for its existence for its new taste and for its relatively singular relationship to all things mdash it considers these better than common taste and despises it It is bent on domination But then it discovers that it too is something ever


changing and possesses an ever changing taste its subtlety uncovers the secret that there is no individual that in each briefest moment [im kleinsten Augenblick dans le moindre instant writes Klossowski] it is something different than in the next and that its conditions of existence are those of a multiplicity of individuals the infinitely brief moment [der unendlich kleine Augenblick lrsquoinstant infiniteacutesimal] is the higher reality and truth a lightning flash emerging from the eternal flow So it learns how all pleasurable knowledge relies on the coarse error of the species the more subtle errors of the individual and the most subtle error of the creative moment [dem feinsten Irrthum des schoumlpferischen Augenblicks la plus subtile de toutes les erreurs celle de lrsquoinstant creacuteateur]55

No wonder then that in order to explicate eternal return some commentators have been drawn to emphasise the essential presence of eternal returnrsquos abiding protagonist the self lsquoWith this thought [of eternal return]rsquo says Heidegger lsquowhat is to be thought [was zu denken ist] by virtue of the way it is to be thought [durch die Weise wie es zu denken ist] recoils onto the thinker and assails him only however in order to draw him into that which is to be thought To think eternity requires to think the moment [Augenblick] that is to reposition oneself in the moment of selfhood [in den Augenblick des Selbstseins the moment of being-self] To think the return of the same demands a confrontation [Auseinandersetzung a settling of differences] with the ldquoeverything is the same [alles ist gleich]rdquo the ldquoit is not worthwhile [es lohnt sich nicht]rdquo with nihilismrsquo56 To contend with nihilism then it was necessary to decide on the basis of an experience of self But what this also meant from Heideggerrsquos perspective was that eternal return however much it sought otherwise was irrevocably wedded to a (metaphysical) proposition regarding beings in general (and premised on a forgetting of Being) However much it claimed to be an overcoming of nihilism it remained tightly held within its orbit lsquoThe fact that in thinking the thought of the eternal return of the same what is to be thought recoils onto the thinker and draws him into the thoughtrsquo Heidegger added lsquois not primarily because the eternal return of the same is being thought [gedacht wird] but because this thought thinks being[s] as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen] A thought of this type is called a ldquometaphysicalrdquo thoughtrsquo57 And in so far as it

An IntErruPtIon 201

was a metaphysical thought Heidegger argued it was dependent on a forgetting of Being and as such deeply complicit with what Nietzsche himself termed nihilism lsquoNihilism there is no purpose no answer to the question ldquowhyrdquorsquo the latter wrote in Autumn 1887 So lsquowhat is the meaning of nihilismrsquo he went on in a phrase Heidegger was fond of quoting lsquondash that the highest values are being debased [raquo daszlig die obersten Werte sich entwerten laquo]rsquo58 This was not to say nihilism was simple it had several forms active as well as passive according to whether it was an embodiment of strength or weakness authority or submissiveness both of which however had in common their status as acts of will to power

This in a sense did not matter or in another sense mattered above all else For as far as Heidegger was concerned the thought of eternal return in its attempt to overcome nihilism was fatally compromised If on the one hand it was a bold attempt to reverse Platonism and to put an end to metaphysics by reconciling being with becoming Parmenides with Heraclitus it was only able to do this unwittingly or not within a philosophical framework deriving from Aristotle and grounded on an identification of the Being of beings with ousia Anwesenheit or presence Nietzschersquos step beyond metaphysics in other words was anything but a step beyond more a vertiginous balancing act relying on the very ground it believed it was destroying As Heidegger explained

Because Nietzsche approached the essence of Greek thought more immediately than any previous metaphysical thinker and because at the same time from start to finish and with the most unforgiving logic he thinks as a modern [neuzeitlich] it might appear that his thinking accomplishes a confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with the beginning of Western thought However in so far as it is still modern it is not the confrontation previously mentioned it turns instead inevitably into a mere inversion of Greek thought [zu einer bloszligen Umkehrung des griechischen Denkens] As a result of that inversion [Umkehrung] Nietzsche becomes all the more inextricably entangled in what is being inverted [das Umgekehrte] There is no confrontation no grounding of any fundamental position which steps beyond the original [aus der anfaumlnglichen Grundstellung heraustritt] so that it does not discard it but lets it stand in its singularity and solidity in order then with its help to draw itself up alongside59


Heideggerrsquos delimitation of Nietzschersquos thought was nothing if not decisive For his part however as we have seen Blanchot from the mid-1960s was increasingly attentive to that in Nietzschersquos text which escaped theme concept or discourse His treatment of the word or concept of nihilism already placed under erasure in LrsquoEntretien infini was a case in point For only once and without any explicit connection to Nietzsche Heidegger or other lsquogrand namersquo60 does the word even appear in the whole of Le Pas aushydelagrave It does so admittedly at a strategically important juncture midway through the volume in the course of a quizzical but telling passage in the third person poised undecidably between literary narrative and phenomenological description between the personal and the impersonal and carefully calculated to challenge canonic assumptions regarding the opposition between scepticism and hope or between hope as positive expectation and nihilism as proof of the nullity of hope But more is at stake here than decorative paradox or self-defeating dialectic for what Blanchotrsquos fragment undertakes to do is to dramatise or perhaps better de-dramatise thinking like the pas aushydelagrave itself as prior to transcendence and immanence alike that is determinable neither in respect of a teleological future nor in terms of abiding self-presence Blanchot puts it thus

uml He is too lacking in scepticism to hope [trop peu sceptique pour espeacuterer] He is not hopeful enough to settle for nihilism [srsquoarrecircter au nihilisme] The unknown without hope Anxiety [lrsquoangoisse] the non-guarantee [la nonshysucircreteacute that which is neither sure nor safe] that excludes the uncertainty of doubt that measure of decisiveness doubt still retains in order for it to be exercised

Inattentive as though in the power of constant attention A thought wakes [veille] which he cannot identify even knowing it well One could say it is there to disallow [interdire] mortal surprise being that surprise itself61

Hope then in so far as it corresponds to impatient desire and always already thinks it knows what to expect is its own worst enemy in order properly to hope in other words it is necessary to suspend all hope Nihilism too is likewise deceptive and in the guise of absence without value soon reveals itself to be a moment of substantified negativity and ontological stasis its reports on the death of God soon turning into deep nostalgia for His return

An IntErruPtIon 203

This temptation of nihilism is one to which Le Pas aushydelagrave refuses to succumb not least by turning aside the facility it represents There is no truth therefore in the rumour that Le Pas aushydelagrave is a melancholy rumination on nothingness ndash or on being The only ground available in fact to welcome the unknown Blanchotrsquos fragment suggests is anxiety but only because anxiety here is a radical absence of ground irreducible even to that hyperbolic doubt which as Descartes professed to show is the securest ground of all And if the fragile transcendence of the future already resists itself and demands to be resisted so the same is true of the apparent immanence of the present This too refuses to coincide with itself Mortal surprise in other words ndash surprise at being alive at dying at the possibility of the one and the impossibility of the other ndash necessarily withdraws from itself Only in so far as it remains outside itself can it be affirmed as what it is (or by that token is not) Such too by abyssal implication as this fragment itself suggests in its twofold response to hopes of the future and thoughts of the present is the fragmentary a suspension of transcendence and immanence alike in so far as both appeal to a living present in the future or in the past an erasure therefore that leaves by way of remainder a mere vestigial trace of itself determinable neither as something nor as nothing exceeding both being and non-being in its anonymity poverty and discretion

From Blanchotrsquos perspective despite its explicit questioning of the figure of the thinker as protagonist what Heideggerrsquos account failed to address was the possibility (or impossibility) of the writing of the thought of eternal return For everything hinged on that briefest of all present moments when thinking writing speaking might occur (or not) and it was this that Blanchot in much of Le Pas aushydelagrave sought to investigate For it was not true he argued that eternal return was reliant on that possibility of self or selfhood which for Heidegger was proof of the metaphysical status of eternal return as a proposition about beings in general and of its deep solidarity with the concept of will to power For Blanchot it was much rather the opposite ie that the Nietzschean self or subject even will to power was precisely what was suspended volatilised excluded by the experience of return The presence of the present moment in other words was radically compromised by return as such not least because the very concept of return lsquoas suchrsquo was already ruined in the impossible movement of return


In thinking the present moment otherwise in this way Blanchot was not alone He was aided and abetted in the early 1970s by two divergent but equally indispensable interlocutors The first was Derrida who in 1968 by way of provisional conclusion to an analysis of the ontological difference in Heidegger and by a bold radicalisation of all that was at stake in Heideggerrsquos formulation including the latterrsquos interpretation of Nietzsche suggested that lsquothere might be said to be a difference even more unthought [plus impenseacutee encore] than the difference between Being and beings [lrsquoecirctre et lrsquoeacutetant] Almost certainly it cannot be named as such any further in our language Beyond Being and beings this difference ceaselessly deferring (itself) would (itself) trace (itself) and this diffeacuterance would be the first or last trace if it were still possible here to refer to any origin and endrsquo lsquoSuch diffeacuterancersquo Derrida went on

might then make it possible and necessary already still to conceive [nous donnerait deacutejagrave encore agrave penser] of a writing without presence and without absence without history without cause without authority [sans archie] without telos and absolutely disruptive of all dialectics all theology all teleology and all ontology A writing exceeding everything the history of metaphysics has included in the form of Aristotelian grammegrave in its point its line its circle its time and its space62

The impact of these words on Blanchotrsquos own thinking when they were probably first read in the Autumn of 1968 is hard to overestimate They added significantly at any event to Blanchotrsquos appreciation of a second line of argument that would also bear importantly on his reading of Nietzsche For at the celebrated 1964 royaumont conference on Nietzsche breaking off from his work translating sections of Nietzschersquos Nachlaszlig and having already begun to prepare his French version of Heideggerrsquos two 1961 Nietzsche volumes Klossowski had launched a new and challenging reinterpretation of his own by emphasising how in its very articulation eternal return necessarily suspended dissolved and erased the present moment on the very repetition of which it appeared to rely63 Was there not therefore he asked lsquoan antinomy implicit in Nietzschersquos lived experience between the content revealed and the lesson of that content (as ethical doctrine) when formulated as follows act as if you had to relive your life [revivre] innumerable

An IntErruPtIon 205

times and will to relive your life innumerable times ndash since in any case you will have [il te faudra] to relive it and begin all over againrsquo64 If it was henceforth the task of the will to will necessity this could only culminate in a perverse self-abolition of the will itself that is not in its supreme transcending of necessity but in its absolute destruction at the hands of necessity And if necessity ruled unopposed it followed that it was also necessary to forget the revelation of eternal return itself which otherwise would hardly constitute a revelation and which imposed itself therefore on the thinker as a necessity by requiring its own forgetting its deletion or effacement lsquoHow does return not bring back forgettingrsquo Klossowski asked lsquoI not only learn that I (Nietzsche) find myself having come back to that crucial moment in which the eternity of the circle culminates just as the truth of necessary return is revealed to me but by that token I also learn that I was other than I now am by dint of having forgotten it and therefore that I have become another by learning it will I change once more and forget that I shall necessarily change during an eternity ndash until I relearn this revelation afreshrsquo65

lsquoThe emphasisrsquo concluded Klossowski lsquohas to be placed on the loss of given identity [la perte de lrsquoidentiteacute donneacutee]rsquo66 In this sense the death of God proclaimed by and in Nietzsche did not announce an epoch dominated by debilitating nihilism but instead according to Klossowski opened experience to an infinite series of possible ie virtual histrionic personas each of which had to be assumed exhausted declined the one after the other perpetually and without end following the logic of circulation dictated by eternal return And when revelation came as it was required to do Klossowski argued it therefore fell not to the one but to the proliferating many

At the moment [agrave lrsquoinstant] when Eternal return is revealed to me I cease being myself [moishymecircme] hic et nunc and am liable to become innumerable others knowing that I shall forget this revelation once outside of the memory of myself this forgetting forms the object of my present willing [mon preacutesent vouloir] since any such forgetting will be equivalent to a memory beyond my own limits and my current consciousness will be established only in the forgetting of my other possible identities

What memory is this The necessary circular movement to which I give myself [auquel je me livre] delivering myself


[me deacutelivrant] from myself If now I assert that I will it and that necessarily willing it I will have re-willed it I will only be extending my consciousness to this circular movement even if I identify myself with the Circle I will however never leave this representation behind on the basis of being myself in fact already I am no longer in the moment when the sudden revelation of Eternal return affected me67

In the experience of return then there was after all no moment no instant no Augenblick and thus no selfhood that was not always already traversed multiplied and expropriated as a fortuitous sequence Far from the present moment being the centre on which the circle turned Klossowski insisted was it not forgetting ndash as interruption erasure the trace of a trace ndash that was at once lsquothe source and indispensable condition for Eternal return to reveal itself and in one fell swoop transform everything including the identity of whoever it is revealed torsquo68 lsquoForgetting [Lrsquooubli]rsquo remarked Blanchot in reply in some of the last pages of LrsquoEntretien infini to be written radicalising Klossowskirsquos thought in the light of Derridarsquos recent work and not without recalling his own thinking some six short years earlier

releases the future [lrsquoavenir] from time itself [ ] Forgetting is the way in which lsquochaos sive naturarsquo opens that lsquochaos of everythingrsquo of which Nietzsche says that it does not contradict the thought of the circular path [la penseacutee du cours circulaire dem Gedanken des Kreislaufs in Nietzschersquos original text] But what more does he say lsquoExcept for return there is nothing identical [Abstraction faite du retour il nrsquoy a rien drsquoidentique Blanchot is condensing and forcing Klossowskirsquos more accurate rendering Quant agrave savoir si jamais abstraction faite de ce retour quelque chose drsquoidentique [irgend etwas Gleiches] a deacutejagrave eacuteteacute lagrave voilagrave qui est absolument indeacutemontrable]rsquo There is nothing identical except for the fact that everything returns

lsquoldquoEverything returns [Tout revient]rdquorsquo Blanchot concluded delivering a final rebuff to Heidegger lsquodoes not belong to the temporality of time It has to be thought outside of time [hors du temps] outside of Being [hors de lrsquoEcirctre] and as the Outside [comme le Dehors] itself which is why it can be called ldquoeternalrdquo or aevumrsquo69

An IntErruPtIon 207

But if the thought of eternal return this lsquosimulacrum of a doctrinersquo as Klossowski also calls it necessarily entails its own withdrawal how then to think it at all How to speak or write it But equally in its deferral its suspension its absolute futurity how not to be always already thinking it speaking it writing it

In spite ndash or more plausibly because ndash of this intractability these are the questions to which time and again Le Pas aushydelagrave forcibly returns explicitly and implicitly persistently entangling itself in abyssal fashion in the aporetics it strains to address Here testing translatability to the limit is the volumersquos first approach to the self-cancelling logic of return

uml The Eternal return of the Same the same [le mecircme] that is myself as the same [le moishymecircme what Nietzsche calls ich selber] in so far as the selfsame sums up the rule of identity that is my present self [le moi preacutesent] But the exigency of return excluding from time any mode of the present would never release [ne libeacuterait jamais Blanchotrsquos text probably in error has this in the imperfect not the conditional] a now [un maintenant] when the same [le mecircme] would revert to the same [au mecircme] to myself as the selfsame [au moishymecircme]70

Eternal return in other words makes sense if at all only if what returns is some kind of present allowing the same to be identified as the same ndash but what returns insists Blanchot in so far as it returns from the past or from the future cannot by definition ever be present In the fragment that follows Blanchot explores further the paralogical puzzle which then arises He therefore begins or repeats himself again

uml The Eternal return of the Same as if return [le retour] proposed ironically as a law of the Same [loi du Mecircme] in which the Same would rule supreme did not necessarily make time into an infinite game [un jeu infini] with two modes of entry [agrave deux entreacutees] (given as one and yet never unified) a future always already past a past always still to come from which the third instance the instant of presence excluding itself would exclude all possibility of identity

Under the law of return where between past and future nothing is conjugated [se conjugue] how then to leap [sauter] from the


one to the other when the rule is for there to be no passage even including a leap What is past it is said is the same as what is future In that case there would be only one modality or a double modality functioning in such a way that identity deferred [diffeacutereacutee] would regulate difference But that is what the exigency of return suggests it is lsquounder the false appearance of a presentrsquo that the ambiguity pastndashfuture may be said to separate invisibly the future from the past71

Notwithstanding the reference to Mallarmeacute now reread in the light of Derridarsquos lsquoLa Double Seacuteancersquo nothing here is certain Accordingly only two fragments later Le Pas aushydelagrave returns again as it obviously must to the enigma of this absent present

uml Assume a past assume a future with nothing that might allow passage from one to the other in such a way that the line of demarcation would demarcate them all the more clearly for remaining invisible expectations of a past [espeacuterance drsquoun passeacute] acceptance of a future [reacutevolu drsquoun avenir] All that would therefore remain of time would be this line to be crossed which has always already been crossed while yet remaining uncrossable [cette ligne agrave franchir toujours deacutejagrave franchie cependant infranchissable] and in relation to lsquomersquo nowhere to be found [non situable] The impossibility of situating that line this alone is perhaps what we may be said to call the lsquopresentrsquo

The law of return which supposes that lsquoeverythingrsquo is due to return seems to conceive of time as something completed the circle beyond circulation of all circles but in so far as it snaps [rompt] the ring at its mid-point it suggests a time not incomplete but on the contrary finite except in respect of the point which is now [ce point actuel] the only one which we believe we possess [que nous croyons deacutetenir] and which when missing [manquant] introduces an infinite breach [la rupture drsquoinfiniteacute] obliging us to live as though in a state of perpetual death72

It is here that the displacement effected by eternal return becomes perhaps easier to understand For numerous earlier commentators eternal return in Nietzsche corresponded to a desire on the thinkerrsquos part to redeem both the past and the future by restoring to them the present they necessarily excluded and thus to restage lifersquos many

An IntErruPtIon 209

problematic decisions as though they were recurring here and now in a kind of perpetual present as a radical challenge to the existence responsible for those decisions which according to Nietzschersquos hypothesis now found itself required to relive them again and again as though for the first time the better to differentiate between the active and the reactive and the better to nullify the second by reaffirming the first Not so however for Blanchot who offers a very different account of Nietzschersquos thinking He begins by detailing this initial canonic interpretation which runs as follows

When in a devastating revelation the affirmation of the Eternal return of the Same imposes itself upon Nietzsche it first of all seems that by giving it all the qualities [couleurs] of the past and all the qualities of the future it can but privilege the temporal demand of the present what I am living [ce que je vis what I am experiencing] today opens time into its furthest recesses [jusqursquoau fond] delivering it to me in this sole present as the double infinity that is thought to meet within it if I have lived it an infinite number of times if I am required to relive it an infinite number of times I am here at my desk for all eternity and in order to write it eternally all is present in this single repetitive moment without there being anything other than this repetition of Being in its Same [cette reacutepeacutetition de lrsquoEcirctre en son Mecircme]73

But if past and future excluded the present objected Blanchot it followed that eternal return could not then be accommodated within the present And what this implied was that far from being secured by eternal return it was Being in its Sameness that was in fact radically excluded by it As Blanchot immediately continued

Very quickly however Nietzsche entered into the thought [entra dans la penseacutee] that there was nobody at his desk nor any present in the Being of the Same [lrsquoEcirctre du Mecircme] nor any Being [Ecirctre] in its repetition The affirmation of Eternal return had resulted either in ruining time [la ruine temporelle] leaving him nothing else to think but dispersion as thought (the wide-eyed silence of the prostrate man in a white shirt) or perhaps even more decisively in the ruin of the present alone [la ruine du


preacutesent seul] now no longer available [frappeacute drsquointerdit banned or prohibited] and along with it the unitary root of the whole torn away [arracheacutee la racine unitaire de lrsquoensemble]74

But it was not that past and future were rendered indistinguishable and the present somehow annihilated making action decision or affirmation impossible Just like the doctrine of the ubiquitous all-consuming present nothing would be more conducive to nihilism An unthematised and unthematisable interruption remained suggesting that the present while no longer a moment of presence (or absence the effect of which would be the same) nevertheless corresponded to a disjunction or interval a finite trace traversed by the infinite and an ungraspable limit opening onto the limitless in much the same way that death this always imminent and always certain finality might give way to the interminable suspension of dying which no experience in the present can comprehend As another fragment has it again withdrawing from presence that which it advances by the ironic (and ironically ironic) expedient of a parenthesis lsquo(Even in the law of Eternal return the past cannot repeat the future as [comme] the future would repeat the past The repetition of the past as future releases it for a quite different modality ndash which may be termed prophetic In the past what is given as a repetition of the future does not give the future as a repetition of the past Dissymmetry is at work within repetition itself How to think dissymmetry on the basis of Eternal return That is perhaps the most enigmatic of all)rsquo75

But why is it that unlike Nietzsche for whom it was an abyssal thought fateful revelation and existential challenge Blanchot in glossing those selfsame texts albeit partly following Klossowski attributes repeatedly to eternal return the status of law76 The term is admittedly ambiguous and could be taken to refer either to inescapable natural necessity as in the case of the law of gravity or to some more specific cultural or social norm like say the law on murder In the present context given the necessarily incontrovertible (albeit unverifiable) character of Nietzschersquos thought of return few readers if any are likely to opt for the second of these possibilities And yet momentarily at least if only as an improbable fleeting alternative Blanchotrsquos recourse to legislative language cannot do other than evoke the spectral figure of some eternally present sovereign legislator responsible for enacting and guaranteeing the

An IntErruPtIon 211

law of return True enough from Nietzschersquos perspective any such hypothesis would be fanciful at best little more than a discredited vestige of Christian theology and there is no evidence to suggest Le Pas aushydelagrave might have thought differently77 But if assigning legal status to eternal return did not necessarily subordinate it to some transcendent origin it nevertheless and for that very reason still raised the question of the nature and extent of its authority and as in the case of all laws in general notwithstanding its apparent impossibility brought attention to bear on the further question of its prospective interruption suspension or transgression

Another aspect of Blanchotrsquos reformulation of Zarathustrarsquos teaching is also relevant In the expression lsquolaw of returnrsquo what is the grammatical hierarchy between the two constituent nouns Is it a case of return being governed by law or alternatively of law being governed by return Law as return or return as law In this equivocation lies the crux of the matter and the cause of that enigmatic dissymmetry between the past as repetition of the future and the future as repetition of the past repetition of course is not self-identical It always serves at least two masters Wearing the colours of the one it creates the possibility of recognition sense and regularity dressed in the livery of the other it produces otherness difference and irregularity And what is true of repetition must also apply to the law of return In other words if there can be no law without return in that the return of the law is what provides the stability required for the validity of any statute the reverse does not necessarily hold in that it is precisely the burden of return in so far as it always already precedes the law to undermine the stability of any statute Paradoxically then or perhaps not so paradoxically since what it prescribes is not sameness but difference not itself but that which is always other than itself not regularity but irregularity the law of return is inseparable from the necessary possibility of the suspension or interruption of all law In this sense it is barely a law at all or more accurately it is a law only in so far as it is re-marked by the necessary possibility of its own fragility In returning and in fulfilling itself the law of return is required to set aside all laws including itself The law then is always at least double able to affirm itself as authority only because authority has always already been breached If the ultimate sanction of law is death Blanchot later suggests and if it follows from this that death itself is the law then it is essential to remember that the law like death is nothing


present but always already an empty caesura an ultimate power of decision paradoxically dependent on the infinite indecision of what is beyond all power More radical and more imperative than any law it seems is the interruption of all law an interruption which as Derrida puts it apropros of La Folie du jour that 1949 story reissued under its new title only months before Le Pas aushydelagrave appeared (not for the first but already the second time) is the law or counterlaw of law itself78

This rethinking of the law of return as an interruption of all law has implications that extend far beyond a reading of Nietzsche Some of these as far as Blanchot was concerned as we shall see were political This explains alongside the general growth of interest in Nietzsche at the time why the theme figure motif or problematic of eternal return came to play such an important part in Le Pas aushydelagrave which was published at least in Blanchotrsquos estimation at a particularly decisive conjuncture in French postwar history The reason is not hard to understand For it was only in so far as there remained irreducible dissymmetry between past and future that it was possible at all to envisage a politics ndash a politics that is in Blanchotrsquos formulation turned not towards the future as a self-identical repetition of the past but towards the past as a transformative repetition of the future and premised not on the pursuit of power at all costs but on the promise of that which here and now remained forever to come Implicit within the law of return therefore as Blanchot frames it is the knowledge that without repetition there can be no past but that more importantly still without repetition there could be no future And the best proof of this he suggested was to be found not in the history of the world but in that vast archive of literary texts almost invariably written in the past in the deferral of all presence and yet for that very reason always available for that futural reading or rewriting Blanchot calls prophetic And what was true of writing in general added Blanchot was doubly true of the fragmentary ndash that writing that arising from the past never belonged to any present and which by interrupting the present was only ever to be encountered in the future

In these circumstances it is not surprising that by way of an answer to Blanchotrsquos own question as to how to reconcile eternal return with the dissymmetry of timersquos flow the fragment that immediately follows (it is the first so to speak in Le Pas aushydelagrave explicitly to do

An IntErruPtIon 213

so) is given over to a consideration of the fragmentary since what is most insistently at stake under the auspices of the fragmentary in the volume is the possibility (or impossibility) of its occurrence (or recurrence) as a kind of prophetic event in thinking and writing that in repeating the past was secretly engaged in announcing the future Whence the following radically aporetical pseudo-definition of the fragmentary under which Blanchot puts it lsquowriting falls [ ] when everything has been saidrsquo79 But this was not to suggest the fragmentary should be understood negatively as a remnant of some lost or promised totality A few pages later another fragment on the fragmentary reiterated the point repeating itself twice over in the process once more reaffirming that return far from endorsing identity always already implied departure from it

uml The demand of the fragmentary not being the sign of the limit [limite] as a limitation [limitation] of ourselves or of language in relation to life or of life in relation to language nevertheless offers itself withdrawing as it does so [srsquoy deacuterobant] as a play of limits a play that is not yet in relation with any kind of limitation The demand of the fragmentary a play of limits in which no limitation is in play the fragmentary a dissociation of limit and limitation in the same way that it marks a deviation [eacutecart] from the law such that this deviation is not captured [repris] or pre-empted [compris] by the law itself understood however as deviation80

Irreducible to phenomenality and to presence a radical exigency turned to the future but which had always already taken place a sign of finitude that was also an appeal to the infinite the fragmentary just like the doctrine without doctrine of eternal return was nothing if not an intervention into the philosophical It was however much more than this and throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave Blanchot sought to demonstrate as much by developing or better not developing but deploying fragmentarily in the wake of eternal return a kind of parallel philosophical discourse dedicated to what for over a decade he had been addressing in his writing as the neuter and which like eternal return inhabited traditional conceptuality to the precise extent it exceeded it lsquo It is always possible to inquire into the neuter [Nous pouvons toujours nous interroger sur le neutre]rsquo began the longest fragment of all in Le Pas aushydelagrave reprising words


commenced then abandoned some pages earlier and repeated again fifty pages further on strategically placed at the centre of the book extending over five and a half pages and offering itself to reading in the form of a brief essay or explanatory note It went on

The neuter is attested [affirmeacute] first of all by certain grammars As far as our own tradition is concerned Greek to is perhaps the first intervention surprising in its modesty [son peu drsquoeacuteclat its lack of brilliance] that marks with a sign admittedly only one among others the decision as to a new language a language later claimed [reacuteclameacute] by philosophy but at the expense of the neuter that introduces it81

The neuter then both in and beyond language in so far as it corresponds to that which makes philosophy possible is both essential to philosophy yet irreducible to it while philosophy in turn in so far as it requires the neuter in order to exist cannot but unfold as a sequence of failed attempts to appropriate the neuter for itself If philosophy then is a series of thwarted conceptual overtures to the neuter for its part inside and outside philosophy the neuter is what by definition cannot but elude the seductive wiles of conceptuality On this simple but provocative theme Blanchot offers in what follows a series of studied variations Philosophy is of course the domain of recognisable names and verifiable concepts lsquoThe neuter in the singularrsquo he remarks

names something that escapes all naming but without making any fuss [sans faire de bruit] without even the fuss of an enigma Modestly rashly we call it the thing [la chose Blanchot deliberately uses the most unspecific noun in the language not to be confused with objet object] The thing [la chose] because things evidently enough belong to another order and because they are what is most familiar allowing us to live in an environment of things but without them being transparent Things exist in the light [sont eacuteclaireacutees] but do not let light through were they themselves to consist of particles of light which they thereby reduce to opacity The thing like the it [le il the third-person masculine or neuter pronoun] like the neuter or the outside indicates a plurality that has as its distinctive feature [trait] that it singularises itself and as defect [deacutefaut] that it appears to reside in the indeterminate82

An IntErruPtIon 215

In so far as it is a name albeit a name for the nameless the neuter cannot coincide with itself as a concept In that sense it corresponds more to a kind of imperceptible self-resistance a thing or non-thing that has always already denounced any concession it may have made to the law of naming83 The neuter is accordingly perhaps better understood (though necessarily misunderstood) as a discreetly discrete familiar-unfamiliar mark a trace that cannot present itself lsquoas suchrsquo since by definition so to speak the neuter is neither one thing nor another neither lsquothisrsquo nor lsquothatrsquo neither itself nor another Its singularity (its remarkable difficulty too) is manifested most clearly (while remaining irreducible to all manifestation) by its capacity to re-mark (ie bring to the fore and push to one side to qualify and disqualify to displace and replace) each and every word utilised in its own exposition and by implication each and every word in this or any other language by means of a pair of parenthetic or paren-thesising quotation marks that putting them simultaneously inside and outside place words at an invisible distance from themselves making them apparent as though lsquobehind a window pane [derriegravere la vitre]rsquo as Blanchot puts it only two fragments earlier84 In this respect the neuter is not a regional property that applies to certain words only but a condition that is inseparable from the differential fabric of lsquolanguage ldquoin generalrdquorsquo as Blanchot calls it using inverted commas himself in so far as it extends beyond the already vast arsenal of words in the dictionary which it supplements with an always other now past now future trace lsquo Grafted on to every word the neuter [Greffeacute sur toute parole le neutre]rsquo explains Le Pas aushydelagrave oddly refraining whether by accident or design from providing a full stop or period and drawing on Derridarsquos remarks on textual and other grafts in La Disseacutemination where they serve as proof of the always other-than-same implicated in the same as a condition of possibility but by that token a condition of impossibility too and the reason why paradoxically as in the case of eternal return lsquothe Samersquo is never the same85

Beyond philosophical discourse to which it belongs only by not belonging what the neuter also implied was that no fragment could be allocated without remainder to any single genre Any word discourse or text might be (and forcibly always already was) a quotation presented as such but thereby turned aside from itself which was also to say that underlying each and every fragment in Le Pas aushydelagrave separating it from itself surrounding it with blankness


simultaneously erasing and reinscribing it was an inaccessible silence bereft of presence So just as some passages in the volume seemed dominantly philosophical in manner so the book was also traversed by numerous fragments offering themselves to reading according to other protocols too belonging provisionally perhaps to what just as provisionally might be called literature albeit that the word is never used in Le Pas aushydelagrave where its nameless name (in a gesture of abandonment metamorphosis or redemption) is overwritten by another disobedient synonym likewise corresponding to an experience of the limitless limits of language the word eacutecriture

IV

Voice without voice

uml The voice without voice a murmur hearing it no longer he did not know if he could hear it still at times a vibration so acute he was sure of it it was the scratching of chalk [le tracement grinccedilant de la craie] on slate


There was it followed always another way of writing without otherness being determined here in opposition to the same as its would-be transgression or back-handed endorsement nor the same posited in turn as self-identical or properly coincident with itself

For any reader of Le Pas aushydelagrave this much is already clear from the second page For it was there it will be remembered without reproducing them exactly repeating them therefore not as themselves but as always already different from themselves that the book recalled those inaugural words (lsquoil ndash la merrsquo) borrowed from the opening of Thomas lrsquoObscur and which in 1973 reappeared as though once more for the first time not only within silent quotation marks but also in italics In the first instance as French publishing conventions suggest this use of italics simply reinforced the status of the foregrounded text as quotation As far as Le Pas aushydelagrave was concerned however the recourse to italicisation was no localised or easily delimitable phenomenon In the pages that followed detaching themselves from the 240 or so texts predominantly

An IntErruPtIon 217

printed in roman and written for the most part in the present tense or in the conditional mood stood a further 173 or so fragments likewise of varying extent printed in whole or in part in italics and written largely in the imperfect or the pluperfect sometimes the present and frequently comprising lengthy stretches of dialogue between two or more unidentified interlocutors

That there is difference between these two styles or manners is readily apparent The actual principle of differentiation however in so far as one exists is anything but easily identifiable Some readers it is true have been tempted by prevailing intellectual fashion or a stereotypical representation of Blanchotrsquos writing career into the belief that the first lsquoromanrsquo style adopted in Le Pas aushydelagrave equates to something called philosophy or theory while the second lsquoitalicrsquo style belongs to something more akin to literary narrative or reacutecit But no sooner is this attempt at binary categorisation formulated than its inadequacy is plain to see The opposition between philo-sophy and literature theory and fiction is not only impossible to police with authority it is manifestly one-sided having its rationale in the dominant first term within each pairing which then restricts the second to being little more than a negative mirror image of the first In this way to think of the two typographical manners exhibited by Le Pas aushydelagrave roman here italics there as corresponding in turn to the philosophical and to the literary to theory and to fiction is to seek to subordinate the writing of Le Pas aushydelagrave to the hierarchical authority of the concept and to impose upon the text whether explicitly or implicitly a totalising dialectical unity entirely at odds with the radical dispersion affirmed throughout in and by the neuter and the fragmentary

The evidence of Le Pas aushydelagrave is anything but consistent with received binary or dualistic assumptions The relation between the bookrsquos two typographical styles is complex heterogeneous and often imponderable First of all alongside the many fragments that opt throughout for either roman or italic font there are several which have variable but simultaneous recourse to both styles of presentation the effect of which is to open a pocket of the one within the fabric of the other without this change being necessarily reflected in any shift in discursive genre with the result that the apparent contrast between the two styles is often suspended not to say effaced entirely Take for instance the page-long fragment towards the beginning of the volume that starts in italics with the


words lsquo By what right by what usurped power had he intended this meeting and intending it made it inevitable or on the contrary impossiblersquo only then nine lines further on pausing only to embark on a new paragraph without the change in typeface seeming to affect either tone or content to continue in roman as follows lsquoTo speak to desire to meet he realised that playing [jouant] with these three words (and thereby introducing the missing fourth in this zero-sum game [le jeu du manque a roulette term meaning the winning number is in the lower half]) he could not produce the one sooner than or in preference to [plus tocirct ou plutocirct] the two others except if to play it first was not to give it a leading role not even that of a card sacrificed by strategyrsquo87

Second there are numerous fragments in the book of which it appears that having declared their allegiance to one presentational style they might just as well have selected the other with the result that the adoption of any particular typographic convention seems more a result of chance than any generic or discursive necessity Witness among others these two brief fragments printed some three pages apart The first given in roman states lsquo The past (void) the future [le futur the future as being] (void) in the half-light [faux jour literally false light] of the present the only episodes to be inscribed in and by the absence of the book [lrsquoabsence de livre]rsquo to which the second agreeing with the first replies now in italics as follows lsquo The void of the future [futur] there death has whatever we have to come [notre avenir ie our future] The void of the past there death has its tombrsquo88 Italics in themselves moreover though their use is widespread are still not everything and on several occasions in the book Blanchot inserts quotation or speech marks into passages printed in roman and in italics splitting each from itself and again unsettling the boundaries between the two styles What difference in status or effect might there be for instance between a fragment in dialogue form where each exchange is given in quotation marks but printed in roman such as that which begins lsquo ldquoThe always appealing secret of life is that life which holds no secrets for us and has revealed all its possibilities still remains appealingrdquorsquo and continues in similar vein through three more undecidable changes of speaker or that which comes much later and begins by asserting lsquo ldquoI reject these words with which you address me this discourse into which you seek to entice me in assuaging tones the duration of your words one after the other by which you make me linger

An IntErruPtIon 219

in the presence of an affirmation and above all this relation you create between us by the simple fact of speaking to me even in my unresponsive silencerdquorsquo89 and goes on in that fashion again in roman for more than two whole pages ndash and the many admittedly more numerous dialogues of similar length tone and purport also given in quotation marks but printed throughout in italics

This is not to say that in complicating or suspending the contrast between its two typographical manners and resisting the reduction of their relationship to the familiar binary of the philosophical and the literary Le Pas aushydelagrave aims to merge the two within some single undifferentiated continuum On the contrary the differences between the two styles are accentuated without being made any less quizzical by the obstinate presence in the texts given in roman of various philosophical points of reference from Parmenides to Nietzsche albeit more as an object of persistent questioning than a source of authority and in the passages printed in italics by the recurrent deployment of incipient narrative elements involving two or more protagonists in a room or city In addition in so far as each singular fragment retains a differentiated textual mark or re-mark (as Derrida might call it) suggesting its attachment to one or other of the volumersquos typographical series ie as roman or italics (albeit that neither series can be properly categorised other than in terms of that trait of attachment or reshytrait as French has it meaning both its repetition and its withdrawal) so by definition as Derrida argues apropos of La Folie du jour that fragment cannot wholly be part of any category with the result that the textual re-mark ndash ie whether the text is printed in roman or in italics ndash not only separates each fragment from itself but also adds itself to each fragmented fragment as an evanescent supplementary trace as empty of significance as an unclaimed anonymous signature90 All this is readily apparent to any commentator quoting from Le Pas aushydelagrave in that it would appear at one and the same time to be both absolutely indispensable yet entirely superfluous to retain the original typography for while it is true that the only accurate quotation is a faithful one it is also the case that to extract a passage from its context is to render its original typographical presentation meaningless even more so when the significance that attaches itself to the typography used in the source text as in the case of Le Pas aushydelagrave is itself largely undecidable leaving the choice of roman or italics to linger in the readerrsquos mind as an unanswerable question absent memory or empty promise


In so far as each fragment in Le Pas aushydelagrave is marked or re-marked in one way or another then and in so far as the thematic or generic significance attached to that marking is impossible to determine and in so far as the effect of the mark or re-mark by supplying each fragment with a shadowy virtual double is to detach each fragment from itself so the effect of Blanchotrsquos use of roman and italic styles quotation marks and speech marks throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave is not to order the fragments that make up the book according to binary criteria nor conversely to neutralise the differences of language tense person tone syntax or motif between each fragment but to multiply the differences that affect each singular fragment in its relationship to itself and to its companions Just as there is no privileged hierarchy between that which appears in roman or in italics and that which does not so no fragment stands alone entire unto itself but joins in a perpetual movement of referral and deferral according to which each singular fragment of writing is bound to every other yet unbound from it overwriting the totalising logic of all books as such with a proliferating population of singularities lsquotogether and separate [ensemble et seacutepareacutes]rsquo91 as Le Pas aushydelagrave puts it referring in the first instance to the enigmatic figures that cross its pages but describing too the vertiginous turn of the words that evoke them And as repetition occurs between one provisional typographical series and the other as it does and must and as one fragment calls to another or others either in the same or a different typeface in a sequence of mute antiphonic exchanges reminiscent of the requiem Mass to which Le Pas aushydelagrave alludes as it ends without ending the result is not communion but circulation without centre or beginning or end and without the first last or any other occurrence of a motif in this or that manner being ever in a position to trump any subsequent or preceding instance(s) whether in the same style or not In such circumstances as the thought of eternal return had always already intimated repetition becomes radically resistant to any logic of identity or representation and only a foolhardy reader will take Blanchotrsquos fragments printed in italics to be the fictional presentation of discursive topics given in roman or vice versa

The dispersion affecting Le Pas aushydelagrave is not solely a function of its typographical presentation It is at work in other ways too Throughout the volume readers are given to encounter numerous texts both long and short which have as one of their traits the suspension or withdrawal of any determining context other than that

An IntErruPtIon 221

of the fragmentary which serves however not to root each textual entry within its immediate context on the page but rather to affirm the boundless multiplicity of potential and virtual contexts always available to each and every given fragment While each fragment is a finite trace in other words it is by that very token also a point of unforeseeable infinite departure The challenges for reading are accordingly formidable Whole sentences hang uncertainly in the void snatches of unattributed dialogue gesture inconclusively towards scenes or situations that are at best conjectural and a plethora of unfinished incomplete or otherwise interrupted phrases grope for an elusive main clause that might allow them properly to begin or to end There is likewise a frequent paucity of finite verbs and a corresponding proliferation of enigmatic nominative clauses bereft of temporality mood transitivity or syntactic hierarchy Names too are conspicuous by their absence and seem to have been supplanted almost everywhere by a series of mysteriously undefined third-person singular or plural pronouns while elsewhere words collide qualify or disqualify each other or turn back on themselves generating numerous paradoxical formulations at the very limit of intelligibility

There is however nothing negative about this questioning of the boundaries of discourse For what is explored and articulated in Le Pas aushydelagrave is an experience of language necessarily constrained and circumscribed by the limits of words themselves but where those limits in turn are constantly shown to be fragile and porous perpetually displaced and undone by the limitlessness which unavailable in any present nonetheless inhabits them still as an unspoken memory or secret promise Words while being everything it seems are also less than everything and always give way to that which while being inseparable from words is nevertheless irreducible to them and comes to experience as the trace of an always other word arriving from the past or from the future as different from what it is or was or will be This exposure to the limitlessness inherent in the tracing of any limit already in evidence for Blanchot in the doubling of deathrsquos possibility with the impossibility of dying of la mort with le mourir to which time and again the thought of the step beyond that is not a step beyond is addressed is what explains most persuasively perhaps the strangely elliptical and abyssal idiom used in so many of Le Pas aushydelagraversquos fragmentary movements Language here is perpetually double It says what it says so to speak but


also says infinitely more or infinitely less leading writer and reader beyond determinate meaning and requiring from each what one fragment reprising and reformulating LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli describes in italics as lsquo[a] double understanding [une double entente literally a double hearing] the noise of the city with its interpretable riches and always ready to be named then the same noise like the distant ebb and flow of breaking waves [comme une rumeur drsquoeacutecume] monotonous wild and inaudible with sudden and unpredictable crashing sounds [eacuteclats] as part of the monotonyrsquo92

To hear words at least twice over now in response to what they name now in response to the neuter or fragmentary that exceeds them as an otherwise than naming this then is the no longer simple task facing both reader and writer and testifying to the exacting singularity of an unprecedented experience of language Its demands are many Take the following brief tantalising entries again in italics of which it might be said that they provisionally adopt the form of the aphorism all the better to step beyond its closure lsquo He surprised himself [se surprenait caught himself unawares] ndash a melancholy surprise ndash hoping [agrave espeacuterer] fearing [agrave craindre] at the limit of these two wordsrsquo93 one reads In so far as it is impossible to tell who or what the subject of this sentence is or since the act concerned is empty of intent intention or intentionality even whether he she or it can justifiably be described as a subject at all it is apparent that verbs such as hope or fear even as they strain towards an implicit transitive object fall short of their goal which is to name hope and fear precisely because what inspires the greatest hope or the greatest fear cannot in fact without ceasing to be what they are be reduced to being the direct object of any verb Such words as hope and fear then which are ordinary humdrum words in so far as they are inseparable from the possibility of their hyperbolic intensification always exceed the limits of what they say rather than exhausting themselves within their given meaning they testify instead to their own suspension a suspension that even as the words seem in themselves to remain unchanged articulates itself as their simultaneous erasure and reinscription Words are admittedly defined by their limits but no sooner are those limits inscribed than they are necessarily overwhelmed by that which limits and exceeds them and in that sense lies outside language even as it is nowhere to be found except inside language and vice versa This movement in turn is not only what is said or spoken by Blanchotrsquos brief fragment

An IntErruPtIon 223

it is enacted and performed by it also For Blanchotrsquos text also catches itself and its own language unawares it too leaves behind a familiarity for which it might be appropriate to harbour melancholy thoughts were it not that here it is surprise itself that is melancholy surprise itself that is disappointed and surprise itself that fails as it must to take the measure of the limitlessness to which it is possible for Le Pas aushydelagrave to respond only by deploying then suspending the forcibly limited words available to address it And it is in similar fashion now adapted to the relation without relation between words and suffering and attending to the suffering that is simultaneously within words and yet beyond them that some ninety pages later in the continuing absence of any readily identifiable subject one encounters the laconic notation lsquo Listening [eacutecoutant] not to the words but to the suffering that from word to word without end traverses the wordsrsquo94

In such cases what is spoken and what remains unspoken are no longer placed in opposition Each is a function of the other its continuation by other means lsquo Silence I know you by hearsay [par ouiuml-dire]rsquo95 quips Blanchot at one point displaying in this tongue-in-cheek double entendre a wit and humour with which his work is rarely credited Elsewhere the same thought is expounded with a greater sense of deliberation lsquo He entersrsquo one reads in italics apropos of another unidentified protagonist lsquoand speaks with the words that are already there to welcome him experiencing equal difficulty [une peine eacutegale] in speaking and saying nothingrsquo96 There is it seems no path beyond language and silence except the path of language and silence itself If words trace a circle it is a circle that inscribes a limit but which as it returns upon itself evokes the limitless and suspends all truth and untruth Le Pas aushydelagrave says it as follows again refusing to attribute to any grammatical subject this voice which as the fragment insists is already nobodyrsquos voice lsquo Crossing vast distances the only one to hear not to hear voicing a voice the voice of nobody once more ldquoListenrdquo ndash ldquoListenrdquo In the silence something spoke something remained quiet Truth sends no news [ne donne pas de nouvelles]rsquo97

From this it follows too that in its dealings with the limits of language writing in Le Pas aushydelagrave eschews that circular anthropocentric logic of socio-sexual transgression much canvassed during the period immediately preceding its publication in the wake of a certain reading of Bataille as the defining telos of literature


For transgression argues Le Pas aushydelagrave is at best a deferred endorse-ment of the sacrosanct status of the law such that to transgress a law often amounts to little more than replacing it with another more powerful law and so on repeatedly ad infinitum lsquo The hope of transgressing the lawrsquo explains a fragment in italics lsquowas bound to the disappointment [deacuteception] which in this very movement of transgression led him to posit an equal law albeit one endowed with greater power which it was then necessary to transgress once more [agrave nouveau] without hope of achieving this except by positing once more [agrave nouveau] an ever greater law which made this infinite passage from the law to its transgression and from this transgression to another kind of law [une loi autre] the only infringement that might sustain the eternity of his desirersquo98 lsquo Transcendence transgression names too close to one another not to make us suspiciousrsquo comments another fragment some four pages further on this time in roman and asks rhetorically lsquoIs transgression not simply a less compromising way of naming ldquotranscendencerdquo by appearing to separate it from its theological meaningrsquo99 Transgression here is like a kind of melancholy negativity The law however like the law of return as Le Pas aushydelagrave knows is not so easily eluded And it reserves many surprises of its own For driving the hope of transgression suggests Blanchotrsquos fragment is not the virile aggression of sovereign will to power but rather disappointment disappointment that is at what transgression is able or better unable to achieve which in turn points to a failure on the part of the law itself premised on its precarious fragility from which it follows according to Le Pas aushydelagrave that were it not for the gift of grace no law would ever deserve respect Across several pages now in italics now in roman Le Pas aushydelagrave pursues the paradox as follows

The law reveals itself for what it is less the commandment that has death as its sanction but death itself wearing the face of law the death which desire (against the law) far from turning aside adopts as its ultimate aim [ultime viseacutee] desiring to the point of dying [deacutesirant jusqursquoagrave mourir] in order that death be it the death of desire remains the desired death the one that sustains desire just as desire crosses [transit] through death The law kills Death is always the horizon of the law if you do this you will die It kills whoever does not observe it and to observe it is also already to die to die to all possibility but as its observance mdash if

An IntErruPtIon 225

law is the Law mdash is nevertheless impossible and in any case always uncertain always incomplete death remains the only term [eacutecheacuteance a falling due by necessity and by chance] that only the love of death can turn aside for whoever loves death renders the law vain by making it lovable Such one may say is the detour of grace100

lsquoThe law says ldquoin spite of yourdquorsquo the fragment continues lsquoa familiarity of address [tutoiement] which points to nobody Grace says ldquowithout you [sans toi] without you being of any account and as though in your absencerdquo but this familiar address which seems only to designate the lack of anybody restores the intimacy and singularity of the relationrsquo lsquoChance [chance]rsquo it adds lsquoallies these two traitsrsquo101 If it is true then as another fragment has it some pages further on that lsquoto write is to seek out chance and chance is a seeking out of writingrsquo102 it is as though writing even as it falls subject to the law and to death also intervenes as an interruption of death and the law an interruption that far from corresponding to any dialectic of transgression is in the form of a law of interruption of which chance in that like eternal return it reconciles the necessary and the aleatory is but one always provisional name

But if the exposure to language called writing is an encounter with chance what of whoever is given to assume the task of writing Another fragment in dialogue form printed in roman enlisting Luther in support supplies if not an answer at least a further unfolding of the question lsquo ldquoWhy write that [avoir eacutecrit cela this act of writing if it is an act occurs in the past tense]rdquo ndash ldquoI could not do otherwise [je nrsquoai pu faire autrement]rdquo ndash ldquoWhy does this necessity of writing give rise to nothing that does not appear superfluous vain and always excessive [de trop]rdquo ndash ldquoThe necessity was already excessive in the constraint of lsquoI could not do otherwisersquo there is the even more constraining sense that the constraint does not contain its own justificationrdquorsquo103 In responding to chance then writing is little short of radical illegitimacy with even the principle of illegitimacy proving illegitimate in justifying the experience of writing lsquoldquoExperiencerdquorsquo Derrida famously wrote in De la grammatologie lsquohas always referred to a relation with some kind of presence whether that relation was in the form of consciousness or notrsquo104 and this setting aside of the word notwithstanding its significance for much of LrsquoEntretien infini explains its virtual absence from the


lexicon of Le Pas aushydelagrave where it is largely displaced or overwritten by such like-sounding terms as exigence extreacutemiteacute or exteacuterioriteacute This does not mean the term experience is nowhere to be found in Le Pas aushydelagrave It is however used on three occasions only each time so to speak under erasure as when one reads apropos of the fragmentary that lsquothere is no experience of it in the sense that one does not receive experience of it in any present form that experience if it were to take place would remain without a subject and exclude all present and all presence just as it would be excluded by them in turnrsquo105 ndash a formulation that would seem to suggest that it might or ought to be possible as Derrida suggested in 1967 to prise the word experience from its reliance on the present and on presence in which case it might be argued Le Pas aushydelagrave is concerned with little else than experience experience not however as experience of the world as such but of the words that in radically epochal manner are constitutive and excessive of all world It is no surprise then that various kinds of what otherwise might be called experience not far removed from what featured in the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit as moods or Stimmungen play a significant role in the compositional structure of Le Pas aushydelagrave where much space is given over to a lengthy meditation spread across multiple texts migrating back and forth between roman and italics and addressing what for want of a more adequate term might be called the motif of fear la peur

Like much else in Le Pas aushydelagrave fear is portrayed in the first instance less as a feature of Daseinrsquos responsiveness to the world than as an experience of language of words and of what lies behind between beneath or beyond qualifying disqualifying prolonging or exceeding them lsquoJrsquoai peurrsquo literally lsquoI have fearrsquo says French idiom and for Le Pas aushydelagrave the expression is a sign that fear is not an emotion attributable to the subjectivity or selfhood of whoever experiences it but is a case of dispossession (or better linguistic possession) of whoever is afraid with language using the first person to speak this fear even as it remains calmly detached as are all words from what it names lsquouml ldquoI am afraid [Jrsquoai peur]rdquo this is what he had occasion to hear him say barely had he crossed the threshold and what was frightening was the calm language [la parole calme] that seemed to make use of ldquomerdquo only in order for itself to be afraidrsquo106 lsquouml Calm language bearing fearrsquo107 rejoins another fragment two pages further on underlining beyond their apparent dissymmetry the inextricable bond between the pacirctir

An IntErruPtIon 227

(the passivity responsiveness and suffering) of words and the fear they provoke and sustain The predicament is not limited to any singular fragment voice or individual but extends across the gulf between them to which it gives abyssal definition ndash as an abyss Another fragment fifty pages later again in italics and without specifying whether the personal or impersonal pronouns it uses refer to words fragments or individuals reports lsquo Between them fear fear shared in common and through fear the abyss of fear over which they meet without being able to do so [sans le pouvoir] dying each one alone of fearrsquo108 lsquo They did not say ldquoI am afraid [jrsquoai peur]rdquorsquo a slightly later fragment explains lsquobut fear [la peur] Fear immediately afterwards began to fill [emplissait] the universersquo109

As Le Pas aushydelagrave proceeds these initial presentiments of fear quickly give way to an urgent flurry of fragmentary notations multiplying the implications Fear it seems this grounding disposition is less fundament than absence ndash and an absence of all fundament lsquouml He [Il an unspecified pronoun] bears fear fear does not belong to him fear unable to be transported without anyone to experience it denied [destitueacutee] to all fear the lack of fearrsquo110 proffers another fragment confirming that between fear and the lack of fear is no contradiction but the same plunging abyss ndash a trace of oblivion (lsquoFear as if he could remember the word which makes him forget everythingrsquo) a potential gift (lsquothe gift they would make us in the posthumous city the possibility of being afraid for them the fear given in the word fear fear not experiencedrsquo) and both the one and the other in so far as each is a response to the intractable strangeness of death and dying lsquoFear the fear that does not have death as its limit even the infinite death of others [autrui] and yet I am afraid for others who are afraid of dying who will die without me in the distance from this self which in vain might be said to take the place of their ownrsquo111 Fear then is boundless and mourning impossible Such too is the verdict of another entry this time printed in roman which struggles in even more convoluted fashion to articulate the double exigency of a fear of death that is without term and a fear for the otherrsquos death which is likewise premised on impossibility lsquo Fear we call it mortalrsquo it writes lsquowhereas in fact it conceals from us the death towards which it draws us but the fear that exceeds the self [le moi] in which it takes refuge even though the self is absent from whoever bears fear as it is from the language that expresses it turning us into foreigners to


ourselves this is always fear for someone [quelqursquoun] who does not allow anyone to approach them whom death has already turned away from our assistance which is nevertheless called upon and expectedrsquo112

Fear in other words can be neither limited nor contained and soon spreads to language in its entirety Another enigmatically anonymous exchange returning to the dissymmetry between the calm of words and the fear they express makes this clear lsquo ldquoItrsquos true I am afraid [jrsquoai peur]rdquo ndash ldquoYou say this so calmlyrdquo ndash ldquoSaying it however does not alleviate the fear on the contrary it is the word fear henceforth that makes me afraid having said it no longer allows me to say anything elserdquo ndash ldquoBut lsquoI am afraidrsquo too on the basis of this word [agrave partir de ce mot] which is so calm as nobody as though nobody were afraidrdquo ndash ldquoFrom now on it is the whole of language that is afraidrdquorsquo113 Immediately after however another fragment now in roman interjects as follows lsquoThis fear of languagersquo it says

it was incumbent upon him not to see in it anything other than the always available possibility that any word whatsoever belonging to that series of words which exist as such only by dint of belonging to language might turn back upon language to set itself apart and stand above it thereby taking control over it perhaps shattering it at the very least claiming to assign it a limit Fear does not mean that language might be thought to be afraid even metaphorically but fear is a piece [morceau] of language something that language might have lost and which would make it entirely dependent on this dead portion [cette part morte] entirely that is precisely by reconstituting itself without unity piece by piece as something other than a set of meanings Admittedly metaphor intervenes in the end to keep the possibility in suspense albeit by making it inoffensive that language might be something other than a process of meaning By metaphor the fear of language becomes the fear of speaking or the fear which being the essence of all speech would make all use of speech frightening just like any silence The fear of language the fear that strikes language when language loses a word which is then a surplus word a word too many fear God madness Alternatively the lsquoitrsquo [le lsquoilrsquo] displaced from its rank and role as subject114

An IntErruPtIon 229

If fear like God or like madness suggests Blanchot is the trace of an encounter with the uncertainty and danger of the limit where transcendence and exclusion meet the question arises as to the relation between that limit and the word that gestures beyond it How is it possible for one word among others to profit from exceptional ie sovereign or abject status The reason is from the perspective of Le Pas aushydelagrave that transcendence and immanence are likewise precarious fragile and impossible no word can step beyond all others but equally no word ever coincides wholly with itself The borders of language are not easy to trace and even less capable of being controlled or policed Each word is simultaneously too much and too little and what exists at the limit is both a proliferation and a vacancy

The paradox is one that Blanchot addresses elsewhere as arising from the structure of the neuter as a trace that countersigns in every trace the inalienable yet ghostly possibility of the perpetually other word of the perpetual otherness of each word and the perpetual insistence of that which in language and writing escapes all words Words do not name with certainty authority or identity What they do however as time and again they return is to repeat themselves as always different from what they were or are or will be And this is the conclusion without hope of conclusion to which the reader is led by Le Pas aushydelagraversquos intermittent trail of fragments on the intermittence of fear as repetition interruption and questioning lsquo And we do nothing but repeatrsquo we are told lsquoNocturnal repetition the repetition of whoever says is that what dying is what fear isrsquo Or two pages further on lsquo Is that what dying is what fear is Silent dread and the silence like a wordless cry [cri sans mots] mute and yet endlessly crying [criant sans fin]rsquo115 Fear then not coinciding with itself being without term or object corresponds to nothing present It belongs rather to time without time and has always already withdrawn into a distant unavailable and irretrievable past what towards both its beginning and its ending so to speak Le Pas aushydelagrave calls ancient fear lsquola peur anciennersquo intervening here to bear witness not to the plenitude of experience but more incisively and more insistently to an interruption of thought that following a seemingly endless hypothetical detour takes thinking to its limits where it is both constituted and deconstituted as such lsquo If it were enough for him to be fragile patient and passiversquo we read lsquoif fear (fear that nothing provokes) the ancient fear that rules over the city driving


human figures before it and which passes through him like the past of his fear this fear he does not experience if this were enough to make him more fragile still far beyond the awareness of fragility in which always he dallies but just as the sentence interrupting itself gives him only the interruption of a sentence that does not reach an end so fragile patience within the horizon of the fear that besets it speaks only of a recourse to fragility even when it startles thought making it fragile and unthinking [inconsideacutereacutee]rsquo116

The interruption of thought and the thought of interruption there is no better way perhaps of describing the intermittent narrative that often barely perceptible as such winds its way through Le Pas aushydelagrave emerging from time to time only as a tenuous evanescent and always already deferred promise of continuity Much of that fragmentary story or absence of story hinges on the bookrsquos numerous brief exchanges of dialogue between unspecified and anonymous interlocutors Dialogue of course is a theatrical novelistic and literary as well as philosophical manner and much of the intrigue of Blanchotrsquos writing for different voices comes from this impossibility of assigning it any single generic function And even though the dramatic mode and the literary convention adopted in these dialogues seem to locate them in some present tense or present moment of proximity and intimacy the effect in Le Pas aushydelagrave is exactly the reverse The living present of direct speech is suspended and interrupted not only by the distancing force of such devices as quotation marks or italics but also by the abyssal turn of many of Blanchotrsquos snatches of dialogue which referring to themselves necessarily defer their occurrence as though behind a glass with the effect as Blanchot puts it elsewhere not of curtailing the context of what was said but extending it beyond itself Witness the following detached moment taken from the early part of the book

uml lsquoYou will returnrsquo ndash lsquoI will returnrsquo ndash lsquoYou will not returnrsquo ndash lsquoWhen you speak like that I understand what it means I am here by way of return I am therefore not here and I gather that it may be said to have been long ago in a time so ancient that there has never been any present to correspond to it that you were herersquo ndash lsquoBut I am here you can see thatrsquo ndash lsquoYesrsquo he said gravely lsquoI am here so long as I forget it once remembering it once forgetting it and all the same allowing memory forgetfulness to open to close without anyone to remember or to forgetrsquo117

An IntErruPtIon 231

In exchanges such as these without it being possible to say with confidence whether they are anecdotal or essential fictional or non-fictional literary or philosophical dialogue and narrative are doubly exposed implicitly and explicitly to the law of return to which they owe their possibility As a result though they are written in the future the present the future perfect and the present perfect Blanchotrsquos words turn aside from the comforting lure of the living present putting it at a distance from itself and emptying it from within lsquoThere is no Present [il nrsquoest pas de Preacutesent] no ndash a present does not existrsquo118 Mallarmeacute famously put it referring to his own experience of the temporality of writing Le Pas aushydelagrave offers similar testimony Each time singular each time different Blanchotrsquos words carry reading far beyond the closure identity or self-presence of this or any other book Even as it interrupts or suspends the present then writing persists like a promise always coming never arriving always reaching beyond itself never taking up residence as that which is true or untrue

Which is also to say that Blanchotrsquos writing carries reading in another direction too implicit within the experience of language writing and narrative explored throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave towards an engagement with the outside in other words with politics For it is well known that during the time without time in which Le Pas aushydelagrave was being written nothing impinged more urgently on Blanchotrsquos concerns as a writer impossible to divorce from the demands made on thinking by a certain epocheacute than the demands made on thought by a certain socio-historical epoch

V

A politics of the fragmentary

uml In distress both the narrow procession [deacutefileacute] of their fragile common fall dead dying [mort mourant] side by side


Among the several tenuous and elliptical narrative threads crossing the pages of Le Pas aushydelagrave runs one sequence set in an unidentified city that on the evidence of its riverside second-hand bookstalls is


nevertheless easily recognisable as Paris lsquo It was like a perpetual subject of amusement [comme un eacuteternel sujet de plaisanterie] an innocent gamersquo begins one fragmentary exchange conducted in italics and goes on

lsquoDid you meet them in the streetrsquo mdash lsquoNot exactly in the street by the river [pregraves du fleuve] looking at the books [regardant les livres] then leaving or disappearing into the crowdrsquo mdash lsquoObviously enough and mostly young [jeunes] too I expectrsquo mdash lsquoYoungrsquo He was forced to pause on the word which went too far demanded or promised too much he did not concede it willingly until he allowed himself to reply lsquoYes young no other word will do but young without anything to turn their age into a moment of themselves or their youth into a characteristic of age young yet as though belonging to some other time therefore not so young as though youth made them very old [tregraves anciens] or too new [trop nouveaux] to be able to appear only to be youngrsquo mdash lsquoHow closely you observed them when did you have the time was it possible is it possiblersquo mdash lsquoIt wasnrsquot admittedly but nor was it possible to meet themrsquo120

The reference to Paris contained in these words was not simply geographical It was political too For in the minds of Blanchot and his readers Paris in the early 1970s was inseparable from the still vivid memory of the eacuteveacutenements of May 1968 which a mere five years before Le Pas aushydelagrave was published had seen the near collapse of the Gaullist Fifth republic and the emergence or re-emergence of a new or different kind of politics beyond the authority of the State and beyond the control of traditional political parties which found most potent expression in the ten million or so young people of different ages male and female alike workers students and others who for several weeks took possession of the cityrsquos factories and faculties and most symbolically of all its streets lsquobrightly lit animated and not servile [non serviles]rsquo as Blanchotrsquos fragment went on to describe them immediately after121 lsquoSince Mayrsquo the writer put it in a handbill dated 17 July protesting against what he claimed to be the illegal banning of eleven far-left organisations by Presidential decree the previous month but ignoring the more recent legislative elections which had resulted in a landslide victory for the right-wing Gaullist UDr lsquothe street [la rue] has reawoken it

An IntErruPtIon 233

speaks [elle parle] The transformation is a decisive one The street has become alive powerful sovereign [souveraine] again the place of all possible freedomsrsquo122 In that it belonged like the fragmentary to the radicalism of the outside youth according to Blanchotrsquos unidentified interlocutors in Le Pas aushydelagrave was not a symptom of irresponsible and immature extremism (Le Gauchisme maladie infantile du communisme [LeftshyWing Communism an Infantile Disorder] charged the ideologues of the French Communist Party at the time opportunistically recycling Leninrsquos famous 1920 polemic against the British ILP the German Spartacus League and other leftist opponents of the Bolsheviks) It was more like an affirmative absolute detached from all ontology and teleology and demanding to be read under erasure outside of time so to speak as proof of an aboriginal principle of unyielding disobedience to all constituted authority

It is of course now widely known that during the May eacuteveacutenements Blanchot played a fiercely uncompromising if forcibly modest role in his capacity as a member of the Comiteacute drsquoaction eacutetudiants-eacutecrivains on whose behalf he penned anonymously a series of collective declarations interventions and other fragmentary texts subsequently brought together in the broadsheet Comiteacute in October 1968 In one of those texts bearing the abyssal title lsquoTracts affiches bulletin [Handbills Posters Bulletin]rsquo Blanchot insisted that

[i]n May [en Mai] there is no book about May [sur Mai] not for lack of time or for the need lsquoto actrsquo but because of a more decisive obstacle writing is happening elsewhere [cela srsquoeacutecrit ailleurs] in a world without publishing dissemination is taking place [cela se diffuse] in confrontation with the police and in a certain manner with their help violence against violence [violence contre violence] This suspension [arrecirct] of the book is also a suspension [arrecirct] of history which far from returning us to a time prior to culture indicates a point far beyond culture and it is this most of all that provokes authority power the law May this bulletin prolong this suspension [arrecirct] even as it prevents it from being suspended [srsquoarrecircter] No more books [Plus de livre] no more books ever again [plus jamais de livre] as long as we remain in relation with the upheaval of the break [lrsquoeacutebranlement de la rupture]123


To write a book about May then as countless protagonists or observers of the eacuteveacutenements were later to do each competing with the other to provide an authoritative historical account of what had really occurred124 ndash this according to Blanchot was entirely to miss the point to overlook or purposely obscure the status of those events precisely as events whose singularity lay in the extent that they interrupted the predictable course of history and exceeded the totalising logic or logos embodied in the discursive order of the book this lsquoa priori of all knowledgersquo as Blanchot described it dominated by lsquothe continuity of a presence in which present past future are maintained in actuality [srsquoactualisent]rsquo125 The only response capable of meeting the challenge of the May events and reaffirming their contestatory force countered Blanchot was by way of a mode of writing that was avowedly fragmentary whose own status as an interruption of authority might alone take the measure of the always impending and radically ineliminable vacancy of power that for Blanchot was essential for the maintenance and survival of politics at all

As far as Blanchot was concerned May 1968 was not the first time that the demand of the political revealed itself in this fashion as a kind of epochal suspension or putting into parentheses of normative politics The political came into its own in other words only when the constitutional legitimacy of the State was put in question Like many of his contemporaries Blanchot had of course witnessed several such critical moments in postwar French history In the wake of the Liberation for instance as control passed from the collaborationist Vichy State which despite its illegitimacy was nevertheless considered by some to be Francersquos sole legal authority and in one fell swoop power was transferred to the hitherto clandestine resistance movement whose legitimacy conversely was in inverse proportion to its actual legality it was patent that legitimacy and legality were anything but synonymous and that a regime that professed to embody the latter should not necessarily be considered as having its basis in the former in the same way that a movement excluded from the second might nevertheless claim to enjoy the authority that derived from the first Between the one and the other there was therefore a gap a hiatus or a discontinuity liable to provoke numerous unexpected and often bitterly contested ironies of history as Paulhan among others in the period following the Liberation was quick to point out126

An IntErruPtIon 235

In subsequent decades too Blanchotrsquos thinking of the political continued to be informed by this awareness of the radical incommensurability between constitutive legitimacy and constituted legality the corollary of which if there was to be a politics at all was that it was urgent always to defend the former against the abuses perpetrated authorised and justified in the name of the latter The principle was implicit in all Blanchotrsquos political choices during those years It motivated for instance his mordant reaction to de Gaullersquos return to power in May 1958 supported by the right-wing military hostile to Algerian independence in what numerous critics on the left fearing the imposition of a proto-Fascist Franco-style dictatorship denounced as an unconstitutional coup drsquoeacutetat and which in Blanchotrsquos eyes in the words of a famous article in Le 14 Juillet a year later marked an lsquoessential perversionrsquo of the political process The formula took no account of the relative stability produced by the new regime The key argument according to Blanchot irrespective of all pragmatic considerations and no matter whether what was offered by the new administration was preferable or not to the available alternatives was that de Gaullersquos intervention in 1958 henceforth placed at the core of politics not a constitutive vacancy ie an interval interruption or absence which exceeding all constituted authority might alone be a source of constitutive legitimacy and thereby underwrite the possibility of a regime based on freedom equality and democracy but a pleromatic pseudo-sacred or idolatrous presence that of de Gaulle himself as providential saviour Here Blanchot drew the line lsquoProvidential [Providentiel]rsquo he argued lsquomeans designated by some kind of providence and affirming itself as providence The power with which a man of providence [un homme providentiel] is invested is no longer political power it is the power of salvation [une puissance de salut] Its presence as such is salutary effective by virtue of what it is and not what it will dorsquo127

lsquoThe crucial thingrsquo Blanchot went on lsquois this transformation of political power [pouvoir politique] into a power of salvation [une puissance de salut] Destiny is now in power not a historically remarkable man but some indeterminate power [quelque puissance] that is above his person the force of the highest values the sovereignty not of a sovereign person but of sovereignty itself in so far as it is identified with the collective possibilities of a destiny [les possibiliteacutes rassembleacutees drsquoun destin] What destiny For once


the answer is not hard to find it is the august affirmation beyond all historical accidents of a nation as destinyrsquo128 For many of Blanchotrsquos contemporaries including the nearly 82 of voters who chose to endorse de Gaullersquos new constitution in the September 1958 referendum it was of course precisely the man of destiny of June 1940 that they wished to find resurrected in the leader of May 1958 lsquoHistoryrsquo however Blanchot insisted lsquodoes not repeat itselfrsquo129 and more revealing in the writerrsquos view than any apparent similarity between these two dates and the historical political or constitutional crises they named was their profound difference emphasised a contrario so to speak by the appearance of Blanchotrsquos article in the third and final issue of Le 14 Juillet symbolically dated 18 June 1959 exactly nineteen years after de Gaullersquos famous broadcast on the BBC from London Whereas in 1940 modestly and almost impersonally de Gaulle had embodied the void that France in defeat had become offering the prospect of hope to the beleaguered nation so in 1958 according to Blanchot he did the opposite obfuscating the void thereby effecting an end to politics in order to do service instead as the mythic frontman for a far more sinister political turn in which pseudo-religious mystification went hand in hand with authoritarian repression political gangsterism and an increasingly centralised technocratic form of neocapitalist exploitation

As Blanchot took care to remind his readers however shortly after May 1968 and only two years before Le Pas aushydelagrave by including in LrsquoAmitieacute in 1971 an updated version of an intervention first published in the wake of the 1958 referendum there was an alternative130 Its watchword uncompromising and unyielding was refusal le refus lsquoAt a certain momentrsquo Blanchot wrote lsquofaced with public events we know that we must refuse [que nous devons refuser]rsquo lsquorefusalrsquo he went on lsquois absolute categorical It does not negotiate [ne discute pas] nor give its reasons [ni ne fait entendre ses raisons] This is why [Crsquoest en quoi] it is silent and solitary even when it is affirmed as it must [comme il le faut] in the full light of day [au grand jour]rsquo131 refusal for Blanchot then marked a limit But in the name of what overriding principles it might be asked what values what beliefs This is a question Blanchot pointedly does not answer ndash not because refusal was primarily an aesthetic gesture blind to the exigencies of political action nor because it had its origins in an anarchistic denunciation of all political power

An IntErruPtIon 237

in general nor because it corresponded to a purely oppositional rejection of the status quo as critics of Blanchotrsquos politics have sometimes charged Far more importantly it was because the possibility of refusal necessarily preceded any political decisions measures or statements it might be thought judicious to affirm For any constituted legal power to retain legitimacy according to Blanchot it was essential that it always remain possible to challenge defy or repudiate the law The legality of any political system in other words could only ever be provisional and if an administration were to command assent it followed that at a given point in certain circumstances all assent could and should be withdrawn and that without the constitutive necessity of this refusal or interruption of power politics would merely be another word for tyranny

refusal then was anything but a negative self-indulgent voluntaristic gesture As Blanchot was to insist in his defence of the campaign against the Algerian war a few years later it did not appeal to any prior moral or ethical duty enshrining a set of unimpeachable principles on which it could do no other than remain dependent More radically than this refusal was already in itself an affirmative inalienable and sovereign right reliant on nothing other than the interruption it performed and effected Possessing no power or property of its own it corresponded to a constitutive decision in the form of an impersonal interval caesura or legislative void on which all else turned132 In this sense refusal was not bound by any oppositional or confrontational dialectic and had no illusions about overcoming its adversary by superior force In fact it was largely the reverse Compared to the resources of State or police power refusal was modest weak and often mute Disobedience was its most potent resource and its greatest weapons the inviolate innocence of words or the dogged obstinacy of silence133 Paradoxically however as Antelme had come to realise in Buchenwald Gandersheim and Dachau with a radicality Blanchot quickly made his own this was why refusal could not be defeated no matter what repressive violence might be deployed against it Its strength in other words lay precisely in its weakness lsquoWhen we refusersquo Blanchot commented lsquowe refuse with a movement that is without contempt without exaltation and anonymous as far as possible for the power to refuse does not become effective [ne srsquoaccomplit pas] because it starts with us [agrave partir de nousshymecircmes] nor does it do so in our name alone but does so on the basis of a


very poor beginning [agrave partir drsquoun commencement tregraves pauvre] that belongs first of all to those who are unable to speak [ne peuvent pas parler ie are prevented from speaking]rsquo134

That refusal began not in plenitude but in penury and belonged to a time or space that while being political through and through was also not yet political in any normative sense explains why it became so important for Blanchot in 1958 to reject de Gaullersquos new constitution For it was a characteristic of some events he argued referring on the one hand to the Nazi Occupation and on the other to the much more recent putsch drsquoAlger of 13 May (when a cabal of French military leaders in Algiers sought to take power illegally in an attempt to preserve French colonial rule) that they did not need to be refused since they were in any case already part of a wider historical struggle and in that sense already refused themselves Their illegitimacy in other words was already flagrant and required no reflection no act of deliberation no decision on the part of those who found themselves implicated as citizens combatants witnesses or mere bystanders Quite different however were the steps taken by Peacutetain in July 1940 and by de Gaulle in May 1958 not only to help put an illegal non-constitutional end to a legal constitutional administration but also more disturbingly to lend that operation retrospective legitimacy by installing a regime claiming to embody and speak for the national interest closely identified with their own person Faced with these developments which required at least tacit endorsement by the population at large it was all the more essential in Blanchotrsquos eyes to refuse all complicity since this alone provided the basis for effective resistance135

As his response to these various crises testifies politics for Blanchot were not defined in the first instance in terms of economic interests nor with reference to overriding moral or ethical principles nor according to pragmatic criteria of success or failure efficiency or expediency The more fundamental and more urgent political question encountered by Blanchot as a writer (and radically inseparable from his writing) was the question of law of legitimacy and sovereignty or more accurately of legitimacy and sovereignty themselves as abyssal questions that is to say the fundamental question as to what preceded the law and exceeding it constituted and authorised it as such136 In this regard as Etienne Balibar argues there was nothing casual or inconsidered about Blanchotrsquos approach to politics It was a cogent exemplar of that influential

An IntErruPtIon 239

current of antinomian political thought that asserts among others that it is right and just to call the legal system to account in the name of a more demanding compelling original and always prior counterlaw137 This is precisely what Blanchot and his friends maintained in 1958 and it was the position they reiterated two years later in their best-known act of refusal the lsquoDeacuteclaration sur le droit agrave lrsquoinsoumission dans la guerre drsquoAlgeacuteriersquo which rather than urging French conscripts to defy the draft as some sympathisers had wanted chose instead with arguably more radical consequences to affirm not their duty but their absolute right to disobey desert or otherwise resist their subordination to abusive military authority refusal here was not just one political gesture among others It was an absolute last resort that as such was constitutive of politics in general As Blanchot explained in a clarification addressed at the time to the journalist Michel Cournot

At each decisive moment in the history of humanity a small group of people sometimes very numerous have always done what was necessary to safeguard the right to refuse lsquoWe cannotrsquo lsquoHere I stand I cannot do otherwisersquo this is the fundamental recourse regarding that right we must all remain vigilant vigilant that it should not be used loosely vigilant that reaffirmed and maintained it should remain what it is the ultimate recourse as the power to say no [comme pouvoir de dire non]138

It was therefore not simply that in given circumstances civil disobedience might be considered legitimate It was that all respect for the law depended on the necessary possibility of refusal All assent as well as dissent was governed by it lsquoThe gesture of insubordinationrsquo writes Balibar lsquois a return to that initial moment which conditions the very possibility of obedience as free consent There is a fundamental dis-obedience [deacutesshyobeacuteissance] that precedes and makes possible at one and the same time both the submission to authority law and instituted power in so far as it is the action of free men (in the words of the Declaration) and insubordination when it is warranted by the decay or disqualification of the authorities and the perversion of lawrsquo139

That there was inescapable dissymmetry between that which might be deemed properly legitimate and that which was merely legal between the sovereignty embodied in refusal on the one hand


and the tawdry opportunistic not to say corrupt reality of the status quo on the other ndash this for Blanchot as we have seen was nothing new The consequences were not however limited to political debate in France during the postwar period Already in the 1930s it was a regular part of the daily experience of whoever like Blanchot was drawn into the political sphere as journalist commentator or analyst For during that whole troubled decade a proliferating number of diverse political formations belonging to right or left competed with each other often violently and not always successfully in identifying and promoting a more compelling more authentic and more properly sovereign figure of political legitimacy Sometimes in earnest sometimes with calculating cynicism the aim was to refound and reground the political order not by fashioning a new belief in legality but by binding political legitimacy to this or that new figure of sovereign authority For who or what ndash nation party ideology or class ndash was the true agent of politics One after the other Blanchotrsquos contemporaries each made a choice putting their faith now in the consensuality and compromises of parliamentary democracy now in the revolutionary mission of the industrial proletariat under the leadership of the Third International now in the mystified nationalism and racial purity of the Volk gathered under the tutelage of a charismatic leader The variations were of course endless and the differences often huge But what these discourses all had in common in the face of the crisis in legitimacy increasingly inseparable from politics in general was the search for some founding myth that in times of economic and social crisis would dictate political action and might be invoked to justify it

The verbal energy and polemical zeal with which throughout the 1930s and in a variety of different publications Blanchot the political journalist returned to this issue of political legitimacy are remarkable But what is also clear is that during that whole turbulent period none of the so-called solutions mentioned above ever seems to have held much appeal for the writer Vigorously rejecting parliamentary democracy communism fascism and much else besides he turned instead to the only figure of sovereignty remaining still separated from itself however still absent and still mired in abject humiliation but which he fervently hoped might be restored to past greatness reawakened to immediacy and returned to commanding presence not unlike a sublime work of art the nation of France itself For the moment that possibility belonged however to the future as

An IntErruPtIon 241

the title of an article from November 1937 had it lsquoFrance nation agrave venir [France A Nation of the Future]rsquo140 In the meantime as Blanchot had put it in an impassioned article for La Revue franccedilaise four years earlier addressing his remarks at the time to a piece by robert Garric an older more staid representative of Catholic social thinking and having recourse to a formulation to which he would return a quarter of a century later albeit with an essential difference it was urgent to refuse without shrinking from the violence this might entail lsquorefusal brooks no conditionsrsquo he wrote lsquosave that of never recantingrsquo He then went on however to describe refusal not as a pure impersonal or anonymous caesura disjoining and enjoining a vacant space of interruption and impossibility as he would in 1958 but rather as the vehicle for a vaguely defined but unmistakeably theological spiritualistic even aesthetic conception of the human person lsquorebuffing the negations that come with consent and the constraints that come with acceptancersquo he wrote lsquorejecting what nullifies him including even a part of himself the rebellious spirit [lrsquoesprit rebelle] searches obstinately amidst these defeats and deaths for something that is proper to him [qui lui soit propre] and expresses him fully [et qui lrsquoexprime] [ ] His act of refusal casts aside everything that is not his own person [tout ce qui nrsquoest pas sa personne] and manifests him as a personal existence [comme une existence personnelle] the realisation of which is the final object and safeguard of refusal itselfrsquo141

Blanchotrsquos conclusion is revealing It clearly shows the point he had reached in his political thinking in the decisive year of 1933 By the same token it was indicative of the regressive assumptions the internal resistances and unthought obstacles that conditioned his thinking at the time For the Blanchot of 1933 unlike the writer of 1958 it was not refusal that was sovereign but in its stead an image ndash some would call it a myth or fantasy ndash of spiritual subjective transcendence doing service as a principle of political sovereignty to which the act of refusal itself was manifestly subordinate In this of course Blanchot showed himself to be a product of his times But as the decade wore on and as the lsquoanxious days of Munichrsquo (as LrsquoArrecirct de mort called them142) would later prove it became increasingly clear to all concerned that no transcendent self-identical political subject it whatever guise it might appear could arrest the onward rush towards catastrophe The sovereign figure of the people that the youthful Blanchot had sought ndash angrily challenging the


incompetence of its leaders resolutely defying the law on grounds of its paradoxical illegitimacy radically preferring direct involvement in politics to the alienating and manipulative representational principle of parliamentary democracy and the repressive authoritarianism of conventional political parties ndash became ever more unfindable leaving the writer with little option in his attacks on the status quo than to resort to a series of sporadic violently polemical rhetorical gestures (many of which he would no doubt regret in later years) and promote in the words of a subsequently notorious article of December 1937 the vain figure of the countercommunist counternationalist dissident who no longer believing in right or left and challenging the presuppositions of both had the forlorn ambition of reinventing the rules of the political game even as he continued in point of fact to bear witness to its essential failure143

Some twenty years later as the call for Algerian independence became ever more pressing and constitutional crisis was once more on the agenda it was again apparent that politics were too important to be left to politicians This was a sentiment Blanchot was not alone in articulating He acknowledged as much in April 1958 in an article on Mascolorsquos Lettre polonaise sur la misegravere intellectuelle en France anticipating what would soon become an enduring friendship with the bookrsquos author lsquoIt is truersquo he remarked lsquowhen two writers come together they never talk about literature (fortunately) their first words are always about politicsrsquo144 Vital political questions then obstinately remained How to write at such a time under such a regime How to release politics from the opportunism that had usurped its name How to resist abusive laws And how to safeguard political legitimacy when it had everywhere been appropriated by the machinery of State In the epochal suspension of politics what might be heard to speak and what did it demand by way of response

If these questions were in some cases the same as two decades earlier the answers they prompted were nonetheless radically different In the 1930s as Le Pas aushydelagrave would recall as we have seen Blanchotrsquos writing not least by force of circumstance was split into two divergent if parallel discourses each participating in a very different economy The first was journalistic was worked on during the day and sought to address the world as it was and intervene as circumstances or events required The second on the other hand had no fixed purpose took place at night and involved

An IntErruPtIon 243

putting the world into parentheses turning aside from its daytime presence in order to explore and display its constitutive vacancy By the 1950s if not already a decade earlier for perhaps essential as well as contingent reasons this double state of speaking as Mallarmeacute might have called it had long proven unsustainable with the result that the writer and the political commentator in Blanchot even as their texts remained contextually differentiated increasingly spoke with one voice There was difference in other words but no longer contradiction between Blanchotrsquos several idioms In 1984 writing to roger Laporte he would observe that if there was anything for which he might be blamed in the 1930s it was in allowing the divide between his daily journalism and his nocturnal work on Thomas lrsquoObscur to persist unchallenged145 What this suggests is that it was in the end the experience of writing which made it impossible for Blanchot to continue believing in the saving power of some self-identical figure of political sovereignty It made it impossible not to realise not only that sovereignty was without foundation but that the only conceivable sovereignty was precisely the infinite abyss of a lack of foundation And if the only law to which writing was susceptible was the law of its own interruption then the same necessarily held for politics too Twice over in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre now quoting a remark by Bataille probably dating from 1953 but not published till 1976 and dedicating it for his part to the neuter and the Other Blanchot would insist lsquosovereignty is NOTHINGrsquo It no longer corresponded as Bataillersquos original words had it to an object or thing and was irreducible to any form of subjective autonomy or presence It spoke instead wrote Bataille of lsquothe opening of art which always lies but without deceiving those it attractsrsquo146

The effects of the shift in Blanchotrsquos political thinking are readily perceptible albeit often elliptically and obliquely throughout Le Pas aushydelagrave By the late 1950s as we have seen refusal was no longer a vehicle for transcendent values but functioned instead as an impersonal and anonymous caesura It was therefore no longer a matter of seeking to restore sovereignty by founding it anew but of affirming and underwriting its radical absence of foundation In this the intervention of the fragmentary was crucial As the law of return suspended all normative belief in teleological technocratic progress while offering the promise of an always impending future released from nihilism what Blanchotrsquos writing of the fragmentary


now began to address as the abyssal ground without ground of the political far from any mythic figure of self-identical sovereignty was an unnamed differentiated multiplicity of mortal singularities for whom everything was political and politics everything ndash but for whom politics was simultaneously not all but always already exceeded by what no power could appropriate or incorporate as its own For if politics in a word was the administration of human finitude (material needs relations with others mortality) there was in human finitude something that no political order could claim to control which was dying itself that step beyond without step beyond inaccessible to all power or authority beyond the grasp of any subject never available to experience always already an interruption of experience If a citizen was a political subject it was only in so far as something in subjectivity or better irreducible to subjectivisation what Blanchot described as le mourir necessarily refused and resisted subjection by and to the law

Already in 1948 this had been the principal burden of Le TregravesshyHaut which Blanchot had also completed at a time of major constitutional upheaval The novel not only explored the relationship between human community politics and the law but also initiating an argument Le Pas aushydelagrave would radicalise further maintained that politics in so far as it corresponded to the realm of human power and possibility was everything but that it nevertheless had its limit inscribed at the very heart of Blanchotrsquos fiction which was none other than the fissure of impossibility beyond all presence announced in the perpetually imminent always already deferred dying of the novelrsquos first-person narrator and protagonist147 The knowledge of human finitude the recognition of the singularity of each in the face of death the affirmation of that essential vacancy of power from which legitimacy alone derived all this necessarily entailed an uncompromising commitment to the possibility of freedom equality and justice which it was imperative to seek to achieve by all means possible here and now and without delay But this was not all for radically inseparable from finitude as the necessary possibility of death was its other face which was precisely the necessary impossibility of dying This meant that the politics implied by Blanchotrsquos writing were necessary double having to do here with the limits of the possible there with the limit of the impossible148 Politics in other words could be divorced only at their peril from an otherwise-than-politics that excessive of all

An IntErruPtIon 245

representation or delegation was not a negation of the political nor its continuation by other means but marked the necessary displacement suspension or interruption of all political power in general However commanding it might become therefore the political was necessarily always traversed by an excess it could never subordinate to its authority and which was essential if politics this debt owed to the future were itself to have any future

Though they spoke with authority it followed that the tablets of the law were necessarily always already broken lsquoIf the prohibition ldquothou shalt not killrdquo writes itself only on tablets that are already brokenrsquo Le Pas aushydelagrave put it lsquoit is to make the Law suddenly predominate by substituting for the impossible encounter between what is forbidden and transgresssion the affirmation of sequential time (with a before and an after) in which there is first prohibition then acknowledgement of the prohibition then refusal by the guilty breachrsquo lsquoWhat do the broken tablets meanrsquo it asked lsquoPerhapsrsquo came the reply lsquothe fracture of dying [la brisure du mourir] the interruption of the present that dying [mourir] has always in advance introduced into time ldquoThou shalt not killrdquo obviously means ldquodo not kill whosoever in any case will dierdquo and means ldquofor that reason do not harm dying [ne porte pas atteinte au mourir] do not take decisions for what is undecided [ne deacutecide pas de lrsquoindeacutecis] do not say it is done assuming a right over ldquonot yetrdquo do not claim the last word is spoken time brought to an end the Messiah come at lastrdquorsquo149 The radical interruption of politics in other words could only be vouchsafed by a politics of radical interruption

The uncertain collectivity to which Le Pas aushydelagrave from time to time alludes is accordingly distended beyond all recognition Alongside the young of all ages it includes the dying and the dead and numerous strangers too flitting anonymously across Blanchotrsquos pages like so many ghosts from the past or the future not unlike those multiple spectral presences clamouring for justice on whom Derrida acknowledging and affirming an obligation to Blanchot would later insist in Spectres de Marx150 The contours of Blanchotrsquos city overwhelming any opposition between inside and outside are likewise impossible to delimit The book-filled room for instance in which Blanchotrsquos two interlocutors agree to meet is described at one point by a surprising lsquoperspectival disruption [deacuterangement de perspective]rsquo as extensive enough by dint of its vast emptiness for it to contain the whole city together with its


(Heraclitean) river and local inhabitants151 Whatever familiarity is occasionally offered by the text then soon dissolves into unfamiliarity For its part too the volumersquos migrant population is not only multiple detached from all forms of belonging but also essentially nameless as though the only reciprocity or solidarity between existences rendering each inaccessible to the other lay in the shared necessity of the impossibility of the possibility of dying Such it seems is the law without law interrupting itself even as it is deployed on which community to use a term deployed by Le Pas aushydelagrave only sparingly or in fine as though it were already little more than a quotation is not so much grounded as suspended less constituted than dissolved dispersed at its core by a sovereign resistance to all authority including its own and yet albeit for that very reason offering a prospect of solidarity or togetherness perhaps even of community nevertheless unavailable in any present Such is the enigmatic lesson of the closing sequence of Le Pas aushydelagrave which returns both reader and narrator to the scene glimpsed towards the beginning once again evoking those singular young people or youthful singularities without age or identity who had crossed the city in their absence

uml Coming towards us [vers nous] as though they were coming towards each other by virtue of the plurality that united them without manifesting unity their youthful return [leur jeune retour]

He thought saving the we [sauvant le nous] just as he believed he could save thought by identifying it with a fragile fall [la chute fragile] that their youthful return [leur jeune retour] would allow him while ceasing to be together (for a long time he had heard nothing more not even an echo that might have passed for approval or a confirmation of the daily meeting) to fall into community [tomber en communauteacute] A fragile fall ndash a common fall words always side by side [paroles toujours se cocirctoyant]

And he knew with a knowledge that was lost in time [gracircce au savoir trop ancien] worn away by the ages [effaceacute par les acircges] that these youthful names [les jeunes noms] naming twice over an infinity of times the one in the past the other in the future what may only be found on this side [ce qui ne se trouve qursquoen deccedila] and may only be found on the other [ce qui ne se trouve qursquoau delagrave] named hope disappointment Hand in

An IntErruPtIon 247

hand from threshold to threshold like immortals one of whom may be thought to be dying while the other is saying lsquomight I be with whom I shall die [seraisshyje avec qui je meurs]rsquo152

In so far as we are all promised to death so each of us belongs to the community of mortals But in so far as dying is never available as such to any one of us so each of us by dint of being mortal is also immortal traversed by a fissure of impossibility that interrupts all possibility of self-identical community That which we share in other words is what divides us As Blanchot later puts it in La Communauteacute inavouable half-repeating while already radicalising an exchange that had featured in Le Pas aushydelagrave and responding to the debate launched in February 1983 by Jean-Luc Nancy and continued and amplified by him three years later153 lsquo[c]ommunity is not the place of Sovereignty [de la Souveraineteacute] It is what exposes while exposing itself [Elle est ce qui expose en srsquoexposant] It includes the exteriority of being which excludes it an exteriority that cannot be mastered by thought even by giving it diverse names such as death the relation with others or else speech whenever it is not forced back into ways of speaking and thus does not allow any relation (of identity or alterity) with itselfrsquo154 Community then occurs only in so far as it does not occur It is no sooner grasped in words than necessarily lost incontrovertible proof not of the residual self-coincidence of humankind but of the exposure of existence to the abyssal inaccessibility of that which is nameless Community in so far as the word is worth maintaining at all (and Blanchot expresses his reservations on that count from the very opening pages of La Communauteacute inavouable155) is only thinkable by way of the fragmentary which is also to say that if all relation to the political passes by way of the fragmentary it is because the fragmentary in turn cannot do otherwise than pass by way of the political Fragmentary writing was therefore not merely affected by politics it shared with the political a common condition of possibility and impossibility Le Pas aushydelagrave is in this sense not only a volume marked with the memory of May 1968 it is also more importantly a text that sought to probe the political implications of May not however as an event that belonged solely to recent history but one that as Blanchotrsquos reading of Nietzsche had it even as it was perpetually returning from the past nevertheless remained still to come


VI

Burying the dead

uml lsquoDeath [La mort] is a release from death [la mort] ndash Perhaps only from dying [du mourir] ndash Dying is this weightlessness [leacutegegravereteacute] prior to all freedom [en deccedilagrave de toute liberteacute] from which there can be no freedom [dont rien ne peut libeacuterer] ndash That is what is so terrifying in death no doubt contrary to what the ancients used to think death does not have the resources to appease death it is as though it lived beyond itself [survivait agrave elleshymecircme] therefore in the powerlessness to be [lrsquoimpuissance agrave ecirctre] which it dispenses without that powerlessness [impuissance] taking over from the incompletion [inachegravevement] ndash the unfulfilment [inaccomplissement] ndash proper or improper to dying [mourir]rsquo


In his reply to Nancy Blanchot drew several times more on Le Pas aushydelagrave to reaffirm his own thinking (lsquonever interrupted but expressing itself only intermittentlyrsquo)157 on the question of communism not as a given state of affairs but as it already was in Marx as an overriding exigency and unfulfilled promise and its relationship to what in the closing pages of Le Pas aushydelagrave notwithstanding the problem of naming it posed he too like Nancy was willing to call community This is not to say his own thinking was necessarily at one with his interlocutor One of the explicit purposes of La Communauteacute inavouable was to question or at the very least complicate Nancyrsquos critical account of the thematics of sacrifice death and dying in Bataille158 lsquoCommunityrsquo observed Blanchot again silently adapting a fragment published ten years before lsquoin so far as it governs for each one for my benefit and for its own an outside-of-self [un horsshydeshysoi] (its absence) that is its destiny is the place of an undivided and yet necessarily multiple speaking [parole] such that it cannot develop in words [paroles] which is always already lost without use and without work and without glorying in that very loss Speech as a gift then but a gift that is entirely wasted [don en laquo pure raquo perte] and incapable of providing any certainty of its ever being welcomed by the other [par lrsquoautre] albeit that if not speech then at least the supplication to speak which carries

An IntErruPtIon 249

with it the risk of being rejected or neglected or not received is only possible because of the other [autrui]rsquo159 lsquoWhence the feeling [il se pressent]rsquo he concluded lsquothat community in its very failure is bound to a certain kind of writing [a partie lieacutee avec une certaine sorte drsquoeacutecriture] one that has nothing left to look for except the last words ldquoCome [familiar] come [familiar] come [formal] you [formal] or you [familiar] to whom [in the singular] no injunction prayer or expectation might apply [Viens viens venez vous ou toi auquel ne saurait convenir lrsquoinjonction la priegravere lrsquoattente]rdquo160

Measuring the imponderable largely untranslatable distance between the familiar second-person singular and the formal second-person plural exploiting the dissymmetry between a singular coming voiced in the imperative and the jussive language of normative convention or convenience these last words with one minor modification (the addition of the words lsquoou toirsquo) were indeed among some of the last words of Le Pas aushydelagrave in much the same way that in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli they might perhaps have also been among the first As far as La Communauteacute inavouable was concerned they did not however come alone For Blanchotrsquos rewritten fragment was also accompanied in La Communauteacute inavouable by a belated footnote welcoming Derridarsquos Drsquoun ton apocalyptique adopteacute naguegravere en philosophie (On an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy) published only a few months before Blanchotrsquos own slim volume and featuring a series of reflections on the quasi-transcendental status of lsquoComersquo (lsquoViensrsquo) intricately bound among others to a reading of the closing invocation from Le Pas aushydelagrave which Derrida had already cited in 1976 but he refrained from reproducing again in 1983 preferring to ghost it so to speak by reinventing its vocabulary and proposing instead in one of two extracts cited by Blanchot in his turn that lsquo[i]n this affirmative tone ldquoComerdquo marks in itself neither a desire [deacutesir] nor an order [ordre] nor a prayer [priegravere] nor a demand [demande]rsquo161 The effect of these exchanges now patent now secret was to create at the centre of Blanchotrsquos text a kind of shuttling motion between one text and another between text and response citation and recitation between Blanchot and Derrida and between Derrida and Blanchot between Blanchot and Blanchot even in dialogue with Bataille and Nancy not to mention Nietzsche Heidegger Levinas Duras and several others with the result that Blanchot in La Communauteacute inavouable as the bookrsquos title implies can no longer be found citing himself as an authority but returning


words borrowed misplaced turned aside and transformed in their fraternisation with others The only signatures that such fragments allow in other words are always already multiple and anonymous lsquoas thoughrsquo Blanchot had put it many pages earlier in Le Pas aushydelagrave dramatising the invocation inseparable from all writing and from all community lsquothere had rung out in muffled tones this appeal a nevertheless joyful appeal in the cries of children playing in the garden ldquoWho is me todayrdquo ldquoWhorsquos going to be merdquo And the reply joyful endless him him him [lui lui lui]rsquo162

To many readers no doubt the relationship traced by Blanchot between writing the political and the possible impossibility or necessary failure of community will appear rarefied at best In the second part of La Communauteacute inavouable in a context only superficially different from that explored in the first Blanchot endeavoured to meet that objection by evoking alongside a recent text by Duras itself concerned with the impossibility of dying and the relation of non-relation between its female and male protagonists a series of shared memories of political action notably during the eacuteveacutenements of May 68163 In the discussion Blanchot returns to the crucial question of political sovereignty For in what or in whom during the events of May as Le Pas aushydelagrave already had occasion to ask was sovereignty invested Blanchotrsquos response is in many ways surprising not least for its rejection of all conventional constitutive conceptions of political authority For what was held in common by those who participated in the eacuteveacutenements he argues was that they refused the primacy of any calculating prescriptive project and reinvented the political not as an extension of power but rather its decisive interruption As Blanchot explains

lsquoWithout projectrsquo that was the distinguishing feature both agonising [angoissant] and felicitous [fortuneacute] of an incomparable form of society which did not allow itself to be grasped which was not destined to endure or establish itself be it through the numerous lsquoaction committeesrsquo by which a disordered-order in a kind of vague specialisation pretended to itself to be what it was not Contrary to all lsquotraditional revolutionsrsquo the point was not merely to take power in order to replace it with something else nor to take the Bastille the Winter Palace the Elyseacutee or the National Assembly these objectives of little significance and not even to overthrow the old world order but to allow to manifest

An IntErruPtIon 251

itself outside of all utilitarian self-interest a possibility of beingshytogether [drsquoecirctre-ensemble] that restored to all the right to equality in fraternity by the freedom to speak [la liberteacute de parole] that brought everyone to their feet [qui soulevait chacun] Each had something to say sometimes to write (on the walls) whatever it might be mattered little Saying [Le Dire] took precedence over the said [le dit] Poetry was an everyday occurrence164

Writing speaking outside any requirement to be meaningful outside of all established criteria of truth untruth seriousness or lack of seriousness this then for Blanchot in 1968 was politics made present politics rendered innocent

The eacuteveacutenements of May 1968 were singular enough But they were not unique They had been preceded anticipated or announced Blanchot went on on 13 February 1962 by an earlier show of presence ndash presence without present he insisted quoting both Char and Nietzsche ndash that had likewise brought to the streets what the writer now italicising the word now putting it in quotation marks boldly called the people le peuple lsquoThe presence of the peoplersquo he wondered querying the second term just as he had done the first only a few lines earlier even as both seemed nevertheless unavoidable lsquoThere was already something suspect [il y avait deacutejagrave abus] in recourse to this facile word [ce mot complaisant]rsquo he agreed lsquoUnless of coursersquo he now continued lsquoit might be taken to mean not the forces in society as a whole ready for particular political decisions but in its instinctive refusal to assume any power its absolute suspicion of being identified with some governmental authority standing in for it [dans sa meacutefiance absolue agrave se confondre avec un pouvoir auquel il se deacuteleacuteguerait] therefore in its declaration of impotence [sa deacuteclaration drsquoimpuissance]rsquo165 Maintaining the word lsquopeoplersquo under erasure then as a kind of neutralised ndash that is both suspended and reinscribed ndash paleonym for what by dint of anonymity plurality and resistance was no longer a political subject in any received sense Blanchot glossed his recasting of the word by recalling the events of six years before

The presence of the lsquopeoplersquo in its limitless potency [puissance sans limite] which so as not to be limited agrees to do nothing [ne rien faire] I think that in the whole contemporary period there is no clearer example than that which affirmed itself in such sovereign


breadth [dans une ampleur souveraine] when there came together accompanying the funeral cortege of the victims of Charonne that motionless silent multitude on whose size there was no reason to put a figure since nothing could be added nor taken away it was there as a whole [tout entiegravere] not as something to be counted or numbered nor as any closed totality but in an entirety [dans lrsquointeacutegraliteacute] that exceeded any whole [tout ensemble] calmly imposing itself beyond itself [aushydelagrave drsquoelleshymecircme] A supreme potency [puissance suprecircme] because it included without feeling diminished its virtual and absolute impotence [impuissance] as was clearly symbolised by the fact that it was there like an extension of those who could no longer be there (those murdered at Charonne) the infinite that responded to the call of finitude and while opposing it followed in its wake166

In the discussion of Bataille some pages earlier Blanchot had once more drawn on Le Pas aushydelagrave to describe this vertiginous double logic of the finite and the infinite the possible and the impossible as the foundation without foundation of community For if birth and death were its necessary limits he argued this was not to say either margin could be determined as such Each was much more an encounter with the impossible with an essential and unavoidable interruption of presence and power in which community was simultaneously constituted and suspended Death in other words was always the dying of another and as such marked the fragile necessity but also the necessary fragility of community lsquoOne does not die alonersquo Blanchot pointed out adapting and abbreviating his 1973 text lsquoand if it is in human terms so necessary to remain alongside whoever is dying [drsquoecirctre le prochain de celui qui meurt] it is in order to divide up the roles albeit in derisory fashion and by the gentlest of prohibitions to keep from slipping away [retenir sur sa pente] whoever in dying is forced to confront [se heurte] the impossibility of dying in the present Do not die now [maintenant] let there be no now for dying ldquoNot [Ne pas]rdquo a very last word a warning turning to complaint the stuttering negative not [ne pas] ndash you will die [tu mourras]rsquo167 So if community was a possible word for solidarity in the face of death it was only in so far as such togetherness as thereby came to be created was suspended over an abyss as both an affirmation of radical equality to which it was necessary to respond by resisting oppression in every possible way

An IntErruPtIon 253

and an interruption of possibility that necessarily put beyond reach all forms of political identification subjection or communion

To accompany to their final resting-place the victims of State violence is of course a scene that has many impressive historical literary even mythological precedents In 1988 in order to provide perhaps a further interpretative frame to the thinking of politics both implicit and explicit in Le Pas aushydelagrave and La Communauteacute inavouable Blanchot to the surprise of many of his readers turned his attention to another text now forty years old for which he was prompted to write it seems a fresh authorrsquos blurb The text in question was Le TregravesshyHaut which he reintroduced to its audience after four opening paragraphs detailing the implications of a certain uncertain not to say impossible end of history by addressing its reader with a remarkable throwaway injunction less reminiscent of the dialectic of sacrifice placed by Hegel at the centre not to say the origin of speculative thought than of its dissident reversal or rupture as enacted in Houmllderlinrsquos 1804 translations from Sophocles in whose Antigone according to the poetrsquos Translatorrsquos Notes lsquowhat typifies the antitheosrsquo or tragic hero is that lsquoa character behaves in Godrsquos sense [in Gottes Sinne] as though against God [gegen Gott] and acknowledges beyond all law [gesetzlos] the spirit of the Most High [den Geist des Houmlchsten]rsquo168 It recommended as follows lsquoBut you reader forget all that ndash for here too is Antigone the pure virgin joining with her dead brother in order that the taboo against incest henceforth suspended may ruin equally both the ideal law and the natural law Abjection is love just as absolute liberty is absolute servitudersquo169

In deathrsquos extremity in other words all laws are interrupted save the (counter)law of interruption itself following which the sovereignty of refusal culminates in a refusal of all sovereignty and the radical exercise of mortal freedom is in the end inseparable from an intractable obligation to the mortality of all others

notes

1 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 75 The Step Not Beyond 52 translation modified The expression lsquofrom threshold to thresholdrsquo which recurs several times in Blanchotrsquos text forcibly carries with it the memory of Celanrsquos poem collection Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955) to which Blanchot refers in passing in LrsquoAmitieacute 213 Friendship 302


and which also figures importantly in Blanchotrsquos obituary tribute to the poet in Une voix venue drsquoailleurs 71ndash107 A Voice From Elsewhere 55ndash93


3 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 152 The Step Not Beyond 111 translation modified Oddly Lycette Nelson in her English version separates what is a single fragment given in italics into two separate texts one of which appears in roman As a result the English translation contains 417 fragments compared to 416 in the original French



6 See Blanchot lsquoLrsquoExigence du retourrsquo LrsquoArc 43 Winter 1970 48ndash53 The fragments contained in this 1970 text offered in homage to Klossowski correspond to passages appearing in Le Pas aushydelagrave 7 10ndash12 13ndash15 21ndash2 23ndash7 33ndash6 73 The Step Not Beyond 1 3ndash4 6 11ndash12 13ndash16 21ndash3 50


8 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 38 The Step Not Beyond 24 translation slightly modified

9 Blanchot La Part du feu 313 The Work of Fire 323ndash4 translation modified Contrary to a widespread misconception when Blanchot a few lines earlier quotes from Hegelrsquos 1803ndash4 Jena lecture course (first published in German in 1932) to the effect that lsquothe first act by which Adam gained mastery over the animals [se rendit maicirctre des animaux] was to impose names upon them [leur imposer un nom] that is he annihilated them [les aneacuteantit] in their existence [dans leur existence] (as existents [en tant qursquoexistants])rsquo he was not drawing on Kojegraveversquos famous Introduction agrave la lecture de Hegel edited by raymond Queneau (Paris Gallimard 1947) which he was meant to be reviewing at the time but which he failed even to mention apart from two brief perfunctory footnotes even though as witnessed by Bataillersquos request to Queneau on Blanchotrsquos behalf (in Bataille Choix de lettres 1917ndash1962 256) it is likely he had been given sight of the proofs of the volume nearly two years earlier A more likely source for the quotation is Jean Hyppolitersquos Genegravese et structure de lsquoLa Pheacutenomeacutenologie de lrsquoespritrsquo de Hegel 2 vols (Paris Aubier 1946) to which Blanchot likewise refers in a footnote and where the relevant passage from Hegel is reproduced (I 228) True

An IntErruPtIon 255

enough the translation given by Hyppolite differs significantly from that found in Blanchot Hegelrsquos original text reads lsquoDer erste Akt wodurch Adam seine Herrschaft uumlber die Tiere konstituiert hat ist daszlig er ihnen Namen gab dh sie als Seiende vernichtete und sie zu fuumlr sich Ideellen machtersquo (Hegel Jenaer Systementwuumlrfe 1 Das System der spekulativen Philosophie (Hamburg Felix Meiner 1986) 201) which Hyppolite scrupulously renders as follows lsquoLe premier acte par lequel Adam constitua sa domination sur les animaux est celui par lequel il leur donna un nom les niant comme eacutetant et les faisant ideacuteels pour soirsquo It is possible of course that Blanchot was quoting (loosely) from the original German or even as elsewhere citing from memory It is at any event striking that the wording given in La Part du feu emphasises the violence of Adamrsquos gesture redoubles the reference to animals as existents (rather than inferior creatures) and omits or deletes the crucial moment of idealisation in which Hegelrsquos sentence culminates Neither intervention is of course indifferent to the argument that follows Though there is little doubt that Blanchotrsquos account of Hegel was informed by a reading of Kojegraveve (and no doubt by many conversations with Bataille during the Occupation) it is unduly simplistic to assimilate his thinking during the latter part of the 1940s to that of the charismatic russian It is worth noting in this regard that when in lsquoLa Litteacuterature et le droit agrave la mort [Literature and the right to Death]rsquo he repeats Hegelrsquos famous proposition from the Preface to the Phenomenology that lsquothe life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation but rather the life that endures and maintains itself in it [Aber nicht das Leben das sich vor dem Tode scheut und vor der Verwuumlstung rein bewahrt sondern das ihn ertraumlgt und in ihm sich erhaumllt ist das Leben des Geistes]rsquo the text Blanchot follows (in making the claim that literaturersquos ideal is that historical moment ie the French revolutionary reign of Terror when lsquola vie porte la mort et se maintient dans la mort mecircmersquo) is not the paraphrase offered by Kojegraveve in his Introduction where one reads lsquola ldquovie de lrsquoEspritrdquo nrsquoest pas celle ldquoqui srsquoeffarouche devant la mort et se preacuteserve du ravage mais celle qui supporte la mort et se maintient en ellerdquorsquo but that found in Hyppolitersquos classic translation lsquoCe nrsquoest pas cette vie qui recule drsquohorreur devant la mort et se preacuteserve pure de la destruction mais la vie qui porte la mort et se maintient dans la mort mecircme qui est la vie de lrsquoespritrsquo See Hegel Werke III 36 Phenomenology of Spirit translated by A V Miller (Oxford Clarendon Press 1977) 19 La Pheacutenomeacutenologie de lrsquoesprit translated by Jean Hyppolite 2 vols (Paris Aubier 1939ndash41) I 29


and Kojegraveve Introduction agrave la lecture de Hegel 548 Blanchot La Part du feu 311 The Work of Fire 322

10 Blanchot La Part du feu 324ndash5 The Work of Fire 337 translation modified

11 Blanchot La Part du feu 325 The Work of Fire 338 translation modified Later in Le Pas aushydelagrave 123ndash4 The Step Not Beyond 89 Blanchot was prompted to put a more sceptical self-critical gloss on the ease with which death and writing are put in relation lsquoIf writing dyingrsquo he wrote lsquoare words that may be thought to be close to one another by dint of the distance at which they place themselves both equally incapable of any present it is clear that one cannot make do with simple ready-made statements putting into play simple relations and moreover too immediately full of pathos to maintain their relational character ndash statements such as when you speak it is already death that speaks or else you die writing and dying you write all formulations that end up showing how almost laughable it is to handle unequal terms without due precautions without the medium of silence or the lengthy preparation of a tacit development or better without removing from them their temporal characterrsquo translation modified


13 For a detailed analysis of the legislative function of title and authorial signature see Derrida lsquoPreacutejugeacutes Devant la loirsquo in La Faculteacute de juger (Paris Minuit 1985) 87ndash139 Acts of Literature 183ndash220


15 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 8 The Step Not Beyond 1ndash2 emphasis in the original translation modified

16 On fragmentary writing in Barthes which corresponds to a rather different approach to the neuter than in Blanchot see my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 126ndash31

17 Blanchot Thomas lrsquoObscur (Paris Gallimard 1941) 7 Thomas lrsquoObscur nouvelle version 9 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 55 translation modified On the distinction between the roman and the reacutecit inherited in part from the debate regarding the difference between Roman and Novelle in nineteenth-century German literature or the later redefinition of roman and reacutecit in the work of Andreacute Gide see Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 11ndash17 The Book To Come 5ndash10

An IntErruPtIon 257

18 On ex-appropriation in Derrida see Derrida Marges de la philosophie 367ndash93 Margins of Philosophy 309ndash30 Glas (Paris Galileacutee 1974) Glas translated by John P Leavey Jr and richand rand (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1986) Signeacuteponge (Paris Seuil 1988) 48ndash9 SigneacutepongeSignsponge translated by richard rand (New York Columbia University Press 1984) 56ndash7 and Points de suspension edited by Elisabeth Weber (Paris Galileacutee 1992) 57ndash8 Points translated by Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford Stanford University Press 1995) 52ndash3

19 Blanchot La Part du feu 248 The Work of Fire 254ndash5 translation modified


21 recounting in 1994 his near-experience of death at the hands of a russian-German firing squad some fifty years earlier Blanchot writes lsquoThere remained however at the very moment when the shots were about to be fired [ougrave la fusillade nrsquoeacutetait plus qursquoen attente] the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate liberated from life the infinite which opens Neither fortune nor misfortune Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond [le pas aushydelagrave]rsquo LrsquoInstant de ma mort (Paris Gallimard [1994] 2002) 15 The Instant of My Death 7ndash9 translation modified In this unusual reprise of Blanchotrsquos 1973 title within the fabric of the 1994 narrative it is as though both the one and the other both Le Pas aushydelagrave as a whole and LrsquoInstant de ma mort as a whole are each included within the other even as each in turn breaches all possibility of closure interiority wholeness

22 See Derrida Demeure Maurice Blanchot (Paris Galileacutee 1998) 69 The Instant of My DeathDemeure Fiction and Testimony translated by Elizabeth rottenberg (Stanford Stanford University Press 2000) 55 Lacoue-Labarthe Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable edited by Aristide Bianchi and Leonid Kharlamov (Paris Galileacutee 2011) 101ndash2 lsquoThe Contestation of Deathrsquo translated by Philip Anderson The Power of Contestation 147



25 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 45 The Infinite Conversation 32




28 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 134ndash5 The Step Not Beyond 97 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 94ndash107 The Space of Literature 95ndash107 On Blanchotrsquos response to Celanrsquos death see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 502ndash3 and my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 194ndash213







35 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 34ndash5 The Step Not Beyond 22 translation modified Blanchotrsquos closing phrase is most likely a reference to the famous passage in Platorsquos Phaedrus 275e discussed in Une voix venue drsquoailleurs 51ndash5 A Voice from Elsewhere 35ndash40 and by Derrida in La Disseacutemination 71ndash197 Dissemination 63ndash171

36 On philosophy as dance see Nietzsche KSA 3 635 The Gay Science 246 Le Gai Savoir 291 on Zarathustra as lsquodancerrsquo KSA 6 345 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings 131

37 See Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 415 416 417 418 The Infinite Conversation 278ndash9 279 280 compare Nietzsche KSA 9 496 496ndash7 519ndash20 523 Le Gai Savoir 364ndash5 365 387 390

38 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 162ndash5 188ndash90 The Writing of the Disaster 104ndash6 122ndash4 Compare Nietzsche KSA 3 53ndash4 83ndash4 117 5 72 218 393 and 12 398 494 521 564ndash5 Œuvres philosophiques complegravetes IV Aurore fragments posthumes deacutebut 1880shyprintemps 1881 translated by Julien Hervier (Paris Gallimard [1970] 1980) 49ndash50 73 104 Œuvres philosophiques complegravetes VII Parshydelagrave bien et mal La Geacuteneacutealogie

An IntErruPtIon 259

de la morale translated by Cornelius Heim Isabelle Hildenbrand and Jean Gratien (Paris Gallimard 1971) 69 190 332 Œuvres philosophiques complegravetes XIII Fragments posthumes automne 1887shymars 1888 translated by Pierre Klossowski (Paris Gallimard 1976) 65 140 161 197 Daybreak edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter translated by r J Hollingdale (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1997) 47 52 126 Beyond Good and Evil edited by rolf-Peter Horstmann translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2002) 48ndash9 160 On the Genealogy of Morality edited by Keith Ansell Pearson translated by Carol Diethe (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1994) 114

39 On Nietzschersquos liability for the falsified text of The Will to Power published after his death under his name for which he was not personally responsible see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 206 The Infinite Conversation 139 It is true that Blanchot first made the comment in August 1958 at a rather different point in the history of Nietzschersquos reception


41 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 186ndash7 The Writing of the Disaster 121 translation modified The reference is to the paragraph entitled lsquoMehr Lieben [More Love]rsquo in Martin Buber Die Erzaumlhlungen der Chassidim (Zuumlrich Manesse Verlag [1949] 2006) 233 Tales of the Hasidim translated by Olga Marx 2 vols (New York Schocken Books 1947ndash8) I 149ndash50 Blanchot reviewed the book in May 1964 in a passage later collected in LrsquoAmitieacute 257 Friendship 304ndash5 It is worth noting that in Buberrsquos original text the one who was deemed to be wicked full of hate and requiring of lsquomore loversquo was the questionerrsquos lsquorenegade sonrsquo Blanchotrsquos implicit objection to rabbi Pinchasrsquos remark seems to derive from an unwillingness to reduce politics to a mere (ethical) family affair It is worth noting too that the priority accorded to justice and the role of the third party or tiers are both deeply informed by Blanchotrsquos reading of Totaliteacute et infini

42 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 187ndash8 The Writing of the Disaster 122 emphasis in the original translation modified The biblical quotation may be found in Job 40 4ndash5 (Blanchot confines himself to quoting verse 5)

43 In this respect Blanchotrsquos approach to Nietzsche follows much the same logic as his interpretation of Sade as I argue in my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 161ndash84


44 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 189 The Writing of the Disaster 123 translation modified On the heterogeneity of the Nietzschean text (and of all texts) see Derrida Eacuteperons les styles de Nietzsche (Paris Flammarion 1978) Spurs Nietzschersquos styles translated by Barbara Harlow (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1979) It may be wondered why in 1980 when the issue of Nietzschersquos alleged antisemitism had been debated at length elsewhere (not least by Bataille who had vigorously rebuffed the charge as early as January 1937 in an issue of Aceacutephale explicitly devoted to the question of lsquoNietzsche and the Fascistsrsquo an extract from which is silently reproduced in LrsquoEntretien infini 204ndash5n1 The Infinite Conversation 448ndash9n2) Blanchot felt it necessary to return to the controversy It is possible however that in conceding and contextualising Nietzschersquos lsquodubiousrsquo remarks Blanchot was using the opportunity to respond obliquely to the damaging if entirely unfounded allegations of prewar antisemitism levelled against him the previous year by Jeffrey Mehlman in an article entitled lsquoBlanchot at Combat Of Literature and Terrorrsquo first published in MLN 95 4 May 1980 808ndash29 which he had been sent by its author and to which he had replied by letter (which Mehlman duly cites in the essay) the previous November But if so why so obliquely Plainly enough despite calls for him to do so by such hostile commentators as Tzvetan Todorov there was no compelling reason for Blanchot to exhume those 1930s political texts of his in order to comment on them in public (which is not to say he did not do so in private as an unpublished letter to roger Laporte from April 1987 referred to by Lacoue-Labarthe in Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable 117 would suggest) The only reason for returning to those prewar texts in order to comment on them publicly would be either to justify them in some way or to apologise for them But both gestures as Blanchot was well aware were equally trivial equally sterile and equally offensive to whoever might be thought to have suffered the consequences of what he may or may not have intended nearly half a century earlier Like Nietzschersquos own dubious remarks Blanchotrsquos early journalistic writings too and the wider archive of which they were part were best left to speak for themselves for good or ill This did not mean Blanchot wished to defend them or thought his early political writings were best left forgotten On the contrary far more crucial for Blanchot (and significant for contemporary readers) was the extent to which in all his subsequent thinking the writer had sought to take responsibility for what had been published under his name before the war by radically rethinking the political ideological and philosophical assumptions on which

An IntErruPtIon 261

those early articles and interventions were founded The evidence of several postwar texts including perhaps most notably Le TregravesshyHaut in 1948 as I argue in Bataille Blanchot Klossowski Writing at the Limit (Oxford Oxford University Press 2001) 181ndash206 is precisely that from the end of the Occupation onwards if not well before that date Blanchot had begun to rearticulate his relationship to the political with implications clearly legible among others as we shall see in Le Pas aushydelagrave LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre and elsewhere

45 Compare Blanchot lsquoLrsquoExigence du retourrsquo LrsquoArc 43 Winter 1970 48 and LrsquoEntretien infini 408 The Infinite Conversation 274

46 In a dialogue first published in January 1963 Blanchot has one of his two interlocutors observe lsquoAs for nihilism this dry and moreover Latin word [ce mot sec et latin par surcroicirct] I think it has ceased to sound in the direction of what it cannot reach So let us therefore cease using it to address what may be said to come to us from literature if indeed what comes from it were not always in some way held back within it and did not hold it back itself as though in abeyance [en retrait]rsquo see LrsquoEntretien infini 591ndash2 The Infinite Conversation 403 translation modified From this point on late in the compositional structure (if not the chronology) of LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchotrsquos usage of the term is sparing at best This is not to say that in eschewing the word nihilism Blanchot loses interest in the questions it raises Indeed as his account of eternal return clearly demonstrates nothing could be further from the truth In this sense there is little warrant for Shane Wellerrsquos claim in his Literature Philosophy Nihilism The Uncanniest of Guests (Houndmills Palgrave 2008) that lsquo[Blanchotrsquos] conception of literature and then of writing remains haunted by a guest [sc nihilism] that is located neither inside nor outside literature or writingrsquo (p 110) This is to imply that lsquonihilismrsquo is somehow a commanding even transcendental entity and not as Blanchot argues an unreliable and questionable because still ontological concept

47 Mentions of Nietzsche occur as follows Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 33ndash4 34ndash5 35ndash6 44ndash5 53ndash6 58ndash9 65ndash6 158 166 The Step Not Beyond 21ndash2 22 22ndash3 29ndash30 36ndash8 40 44ndash6 115ndash6 121 Admittedly this is not atypical of Le Pas aushydelagrave in general which contains very few explicit quotations and where the only proper names mentioned are those of Nietzsche Hegel Confucius Socrates Plato Parmenides Houmllderlin Dionysos Freud and God



49 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 415 The Infinite Conversation 278ndash9 compare Nietzsche KSA 9 496 Le Gai Savoir 364ndash5

50 Nietzsche KSA 3 570 The Gay Science 194ndash5 Le Gai Savoir 232 emphasis in the original translation slightly modified

51 Nietzsche KSA 6 335 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings 123 translation modified


53 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 418 The Infinite Conversation 280 Nietzsche KSA 9 520 Le Gai Savoir 387

54 Heidegger Nietzsche I 445ndash6 Nietzsche II 182 emphasis in the original

55 Nietzsche KSA 9 501ndash2 Le Gai Savoir 370 emphases in the original

56 Heidegger Nietzsche I 447 Nietzsche II 183 emphasis in the original translation modified

57 Heidegger Nietzsche I 448 Nietzsche II 184 translation modified

58 Heidegger Nietzsche II 45 Nietzsche IV 14 translation modified Heidegger comments on the phrase at length in Holzwege 218 Off the Beaten Track 166 Compare Nietzsche KSA 12 350 Blanchot had already quoted the phrase following Heidegger in 1958 in LrsquoEntretien infini 217 The Infinite Conversation 144 where it appears as lsquoQue les valeurs les plus hautes se deacutevaluentrsquo lsquoQue les valeurs suprecircmes se deacutevalorisentrsquo is the version preferred by Klossowski in his 1976 translation of Nietzschersquos Fragments posthumes automne 1887shymars 1888 28

59 Heidegger Nietzsche I 605 Nietzsche III 113 emphasis in the original translation modified



62 Derrida Marges de la philosophie 77ndash8 Margins of Philosophy 67 translation modified

63 Klossowskirsquos royaumont paper presented in July 1964 was first published in Cahiers de Royaumont Philosophie VI (Paris Minuit 1967) 227ndash35 and subsequently incorporated in his Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 93ndash103 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 56ndash66 Its importance was duly noted most particularly by Gilles Deleuze

An IntErruPtIon 263

(to whom Klossowskirsquos 1969 book was dedicated) in Diffeacuterence et reacutepeacutetition (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1968) 81n2 Difference and Repetition translated by Paul Patton (London Athlone 1994) 312n19 Klossowskirsquos translation of Nietzschersquos Le Gai Savoir first appeared in 1956 and he was also responsible as seen earlier for French versions of Nietzschersquos 1881ndash82 and 1887ndash88 Notebooks published in 1967 and 1976 respectively His version of Heideggerrsquos Nietzsche contracted as early as June 1962 finally came out in two volumes in 1971 In the early to mid-1960s the writer also brought out Les Lois de lrsquohospitaliteacute (Paris Gallimard 1965) a revised (ie repeated or returned) version complete with new preface and postface of his novel trilogy Roberte ce soir (1953) La Reacutevocation de lrsquoeacutedit de Nantes (1959) and Le Souffleur ou le theacuteacirctre de socieacuteteacute (1960) This was followed shortly after by Le Baphomet (Paris Mercure de France 1965) a fictional treatment of what in a letter to Jean Decottignies published in the latterrsquos Klossowski notre prochain (Paris Henri Veyrier 1985) 137ndash44 (p 139) the writer described as lsquothe theological consequencesrsquo of the theme of eternal return On the significance of Klossowskirsquos reinterpretation of eternal return for Blanchot witness the footnote added in 1969 to Blanchotrsquos 1958 essay lsquoPassage de la lignersquo in LrsquoEntretien infini 223 The Infinite Conversation 451n8 I described earlier some of the changes made to this essay when it was republished in LrsquoEntretien infini At the precise point where in 1969 he acknowledged the importance of Klossowskirsquos contribution Blanchot had originally reported that lsquo[o]ne of the changes in interpretation of Nietzsche is that this idea [of eternal return] is being taken seriously Karl Loumlwith who has produced a number of important books has done much to make us more aware of it and so too no doubt has the very movement of the present epoch which has prompted us to reflect on time the circularity of meaning the end of history the conception of technology considered as the return of the same in its constant rotation being as rebeginning [lrsquoecirctre comme recommencement]rsquo On republication in LrsquoEntretien infini the second part of the sentence was amended to read as follows lsquo so too no doubt has the very movement of the present epoch which has prompted us to reflect on time the circularity of meaning the end of history the absence of being as rebeginning [lrsquoabsence drsquoecirctre comme recommencement]rsquo





67 Klossowski Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 94ndash5 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 58 emphasis in the original translation modified

68 Klossowski Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 93 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 56 emphasis in the original translation modified

69 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 417ndash8 The Infinite Conversation 280 translation modified For the quotations from Nietzsche see KSA 9 519 528 523 Le Gai Savoir 387 395 390


71 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 21ndash2 The Step Not Beyond 11ndash12 translation modified




75 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 61 The Step Not Beyond 42 translation modified The dissymmetry between the past as a repetition of the future and the future as a repetition of the past might be thought to merit more than parenthetical attention ndash were it not that the parenthesis itself like other interventions of the neuter is itself a function of the dissymmetry it re-marks and without which as Nietzsche sometimes feared eternal return would revert to being a baleful avatar of nihilistic predetermination Blanchot was of course not alone in seeking to avoid that risk Deleuze whose work on Nietzsche Blanchot acknowledges in LrsquoEntretien infini without however engaging with it directly likewise endeavoured to resolve the dissymmetry for his part by claiming that eternal return is necessarily selective in so far as what returns Deleuze puts it is not everything but only that which is strong intense or affirmative enough to bear repetition As Deleuze writes in Diffeacuterence et reacutepeacutetition 381ndash2 Difference and Repetition 298ndash9 lsquo[t]o conceive eternal return as selective thought [la penseacutee seacutelective] and repetition in eternal return as selective being [lrsquoecirctre seacutelectif] this is the greatest test [eacutepreuve proof ordeal] Time has to be lived and conceived out of joint placed in a straight line which ruthlessly eliminates all who embark upon it who thereby appear on stage but repeat only once and for all Selection occurs

An IntErruPtIon 265

between repetitions those who repeat negatively those who repeat identically will be eliminated They repeat only once Eternal return is only for the third time the time of drama [drame] after the comic after the tragic (drama is defined as when the tragic becomes joyous and the comic the comic of the superhuman [du surhumain]) Eternal return is only for the third repetition in the third repetition The circle is at the end of the line Neither the dwarf nor the hero neither Zarathustra sick nor Zarathustra convalescent will return Not only does eternal return not make everything return it destroys [fait peacuterir] those who do not survive the ordeal [ne supportent pas lrsquoeacutepreuve] [ ] The Negative does not return The Identical does not return The Same and the Similar the Analogous and the Opposite do not return Only affirmation returns that is the Different the Dissimilarrsquo translation modified But how to differentiate between repetitions between repetition-as-identity and repetition-as-difference wonders Blanchot (and Derrida in La Disseacutemination will ask the same) Is it not that eternal return alongside so much else disables that opposition and that any recourse to selection is ultimately reliant on that post-Schopenhauerian subjectivity that Heidegger found to underpin Nietzschersquos reversal of Platonism If so it would explain Blanchotrsquos reluctance to follow Deleuze in constructing return as the basis for univocal ontology

76 On the necessity of return lsquoas universal law [comme loi universelle]rsquo see Klossowski Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux 94 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 57

77 See for instance Nietzsche KSA 3 600 The Gay Science 219 where one reads lsquoTo look at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and care of a god to interpret history in honour of some divine reason as continual testimony to a moral world order and to ultimate moral purposes to interpret onersquos own experiences as pious people have long interpreted theirs as if everything were providential everything a clue everything ordered and designed for the sake of the salvation of the soul all that is now finished has conscience against it and appears to every refined conscience indecent dishonest a form of mendacity effeminacy weakness and cowardice ndash with such severity as with anything we are simply good Europeans and the heirs of Europersquos longest and most courageous self-overcoming As we reject Christian interpretation in this fashion and condemn its ldquomeaningrdquo as a swindle [Falschmuumlnzerei] Schopenhauerrsquos question immediately comes at us in terrifying manner does existence have any meaning at all ndash a question that will take a few centuries to be heard fully and to its


proper measurersquo translation modified For Blanchot too eternal return was anything but an article of faith lsquoOne cannot believe [On ne peut croire] in Eternal returnrsquo observes one fragment before adding somewhat paradoxically lsquoThat is its sole guarantee its ldquoverificationrdquo Such in this far-off place [lagraveshybas] is the demand of the Law [lrsquoexigence de la Loi]rsquo See Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 25 The Step Not Beyond 14 translation slightly modified

78 On this whole question of law and counterlaw in La Folie du jour and more generally in Blanchotrsquos writing see Derrida Parages 233ndash66 Parages 217ndash49



81 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 101ndash2 The Step Not Beyond 72 translation modified Compare Le Pas aushydelagrave 97 149 The Step Not Beyond 69 109


83 For a brief but nonetheless suggestive philosophical account of Blanchotrsquos neuter see Nancy lsquoLe Neutre la neutralisation du neutrersquo Cahiers Maurice Blanchot 1 2011 21ndash4

84 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 101 The Step Not Beyond 72 translation modified Some pages later in Le Pas aushydelagrave 138 The Step Not Beyond 100 Blanchot repeats the motif again in italics to similar effect lsquo On the thresholdrsquo he writes lsquocoming from the outside perhaps the two young names like two figures of whom we cannot state for certain whether they are behind the window pane [derriegravere la vitre] on the inside on the outside since nobody other than those two who expect everything from us can tell where we arersquo translation modified As Derrida shows in Parages the motif of lsquola vitrersquo is a recurrent one elsewhere in Blanchot We shall encounter it again in Chapter Four

85 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 117 The Step Not Beyond 84 On grafts and grafting see Derrida La Disseacutemination 230 395ndash8 Dissemination 202ndash3 355ndash8


87 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 19 The Step Not Beyond 9ndash10 translation modified As though to prove the point Lycette Nelsonrsquos English version conspires to print the whole of the first paragraph in roman

An IntErruPtIon 267


89 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 68 159ndash61 The Step Not Beyond 46ndash7 116ndash8 translations modified

90 On the strange structure of the trait or re-mark of belonging (which itself does not belong and undermines any separation between the inside and the outside) as it affects Blanchotrsquos writing elsewhere see Derrida Parages 243ndash6 Parages 226ndash9 The use of roman and italics in Le Pas aushydelagrave also exploits the same paradoxical relationship between repetition and difference as Blanchotrsquos 1977 re-presentation of Le Dernier Homme as Le Dernier Homme nouvelle version discussed in Chapter One













103 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 170 The Step Not Beyond 124 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos use of Lutherrsquos watchword elsewhere see Blanchot lsquoCertes la question est traditionnellersquo Libeacuteration hors-seacuterie March 1985 64 lsquoThe question is certainly a traditional onersquo translated by Michael Holland Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 28


104 Derrida De la grammatologie 89 Of Grammatology 60 translation modified










114 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 84ndash5 The Step Not Beyond 59 emphasis in the original translation modified




118 Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes II 217



121 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 18 The Step Not Beyond 8 translation modified It may be wondered why Blanchot refrains from naming the city that features in the book An answer may be found in a letter to Marguerite Duras in Cahiers de lrsquoHerne Marguerite Duras 86 2005 54 giving his reactions to a draft version of her post-1968 apocalyptic novel Abahn Sabana David (Paris Gallimard

An IntErruPtIon 269

1970) subsequently dedicated to Blanchot and Antelme lsquoThere remains another difficultyrsquo Blanchot wrote lsquoabout which I will try to say something the words Prague China Castro others too Not for political reasons but because in a text where the absolute is at stake any immediately historical allusion becomes merely anecdotal and of little significancersquo In finalising her text in this and other respects Duras seems to have followed Blanchotrsquos advice See Marguerite Duras Œuvres complegravetes edited by Gilles Philippe 2 vols (Paris Gallimard 2011) II 1810

122 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 112 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 91 translation modified On the street as an instance of the impersonal the neuter and the outside see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 362ndash4 The Infinite Conversation 242ndash4 Some may be surprised at Blanchotrsquos recourse to the language of legality and law in condemning de Gaullersquos banning orders As we shall see it is however a key strategy on the writerrsquos part and one he uses elsewhere notably in the interview with Madeleine Chapsal in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 37ndash42 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 33ndash35 Despite the claims of some critics it shows that Blanchot was never an anarchist ie never opposed to the law qua law

123 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 119ndash20 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 95 translation modified readers of Blanchot will recognise in this piece the deliberate echo of the famous closing words of La Folie du jour lsquoUn reacutecit Non pas de reacutecit plus jamaisrsquo A year and a half later Blanchot did of course publish another book and several more were to follow But if LrsquoEntretien infini in the Autumn of 1969 concluded by evoking the lsquoabsence of the book [lrsquoabsence de livre]rsquo that Blanchotrsquos essays and articles could but designate in vain it was not only because the book was the lsquoruse by which writing approaches the absence of the bookrsquo (LrsquoEntretien infini 623 The Infinite Conversation 424) it was also because discreetly implicitly futurally the admission of failure was also a profession of hope

124 See Margaret Atack May 68 in French Fiction and Film (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) 7 lsquoMayrsquo writes the author lsquois a monstrous library There were 120 books published on the events by the end of October 1968 and it has never stoppedrsquo

125 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 621 622 The Infinite Conversation 423 translation modified

126 See for instance the fierce polemic surrounding the legacy of the clandestine resistance movement reflected in Paulhanrsquos famous Lettre aux directeurs de la reacutesistance (Paris Minuit 1952) 18ndash23


127 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 17 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 10 translation modified

128 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 18 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 10ndash11 translation modified

129 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 21 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 12 One might add that the reason why history does not repeat itself is that its very possibility turns on the movement of return ndash as that which repeats itself as always other than it was

130 For the original version of the article see Blanchot lsquoLe refusrsquo Le 14 Juillet 2 25 October 1958 3 and Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 11ndash12 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 7 All three issues of Le 14 Juillet are reproduced in facsimile as Le 14 Juillet (Paris Seacuteguier 1990) For the 1971 version of Blanchotrsquos article which comprises a number of minor but nevertheless significant changes see Blanchot LrsquoAmitieacute 130ndash1 Friendship 111ndash2 In his edition of Blanchotrsquos Eacutecrits politiques 1953ndash1993 (Paris Gallimard 2008) Eric Hoppenot reproduces the first manuscript page of the 1958 text in facsimile (p 4) but in the body of the volume (pp 28ndash9) rather misleadingly provides only the later revised text For the purposes of the present discussion reference will be made to the revised version given in LrsquoAmitieacute


132 Blanchot explains this crucial distinction between duty (devoir) and right (droit) in his interview with Chapsal in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 37ndash42 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 33ndash5 On the significance of the distinction see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 213ndash4

133 For Blanchotrsquos own account of the legal and judicial consequences of his involvement in the struggle against the Algerian War see Blanchot Pour lrsquoamitieacute (Tours Farrago 2000) 20ndash6 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 138ndash9 Eric Hoppenot in Eacutecrits politiques 1953ndash1993 83ndash7 also gives Blanchotrsquos notes of his interview with the examining magistrate


135 For many contemporaries given de Gaullersquos near-mythic status as Francersquos wartime saviour (ironically not unlike that of Peacutetain at the end of the 1914ndash18 war) Blanchotrsquos readiness to equate the position of Peacutetain in 1940 brought to power by the illegal self-dissolution of the Third republic with that of de Gaulle in 1958 brought to power illegally by the collapse of the Fourth republic was both shocking and provocative It was a comparison to which

An IntErruPtIon 271

he would nevertheless consistently return Ten years later in a piece published in Comiteacute (in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 107 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 89) he was to liken the position of lsquoevery writer and every artistrsquo implicated in the institutions of the Gaullist Fifth republic with that of intellectuals collaborating with Vichy between 1940 and 1944 In making the point he was perhaps also reflecting ruefully on his own lsquonaivetyrsquo in 1940 and 1941 (as he put it in 1993) in attempting by his involvement in the Vichy-sponsored Jeune France cultural association to lsquouse Vichy against Vichyrsquo as he explains in a brief memoir collected in La Condition critique 467ndash78 (p 469) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 134ndash43 (p 135) On the Jeune France episode see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 158ndash66

136 On the notion of counterlaw in Blanchot as the law of necessary impurity contamination and exposure to the other see Derrida Parages 233ndash66 Parages 217ndash49

137 See eacutetienne Balibar lsquoBlanchot lrsquoinsoumisrsquo in Blanchot dans son siegravecle 288ndash314 and for a contemporary reformulation of what is at stake Balibar Droit de citeacute (Paris Presses universitaires de France 2002) 17ndash22 As Balibar points out other prominent thinkers in that tradition which cuts across received oppositions between left and right (and in that sense perhaps goes some way towards explaining the logic governing Blanchotrsquos own political evolution) include such diverse and in many respects incompatible figures as Schmitt Benjamin Arendt and Agamben I return to Blanchotrsquos response to Benjamin and to his differences with Agamben in my next chapter Any reference to the work of Arendt on the other hand sauf erreur seems oddly absent from Blanchotrsquos writing and it would no doubt be interesting to examine why As for Schmitt no evidence to my knowledge has so far emerged to suggest Blanchot was familiar with his work or if he was what he may have thought of it notably in the light of Schmittrsquos role as apologist for the Third reich (to which Blanchot from the outset was implacably opposed) It is however worth noting that Schmittrsquos Legality and Legitimacy (Legalitaumlt und Legitimitaumlt 1932) was first translated into French in 1936 and there is every possibility Blanchot may have read the book at the time or may have encountered it or other texts by Schmitt in the original German Schmittrsquos proximity to Heidegger would have constituted a further reason for Blanchotrsquos interest At any event by the end of the 1930s Schmitt was sufficiently well known in radical French Catholic circles and among intimates of the Collegravege de sociologie for Klossowski for instance to cite The Concept of the Political (Der Begriff des Politischen 1932) in


the original German as an adversarial foil in an essay published in Esprit in December 1938 under the general rubric of lsquoFrench Prefascismrsquo barely two months following the Munich debacle (to which the journal was bitterly opposed) and less than a month after Kristallnacht For an account of Klossowskirsquos use of Schmitt in this context see Denis Hollier lsquoHostis hospes des lois de lrsquohostiliteacute agrave celles de lrsquohospitaliteacutersquo Traverseacutees de Pierre Klossowski edited by Laurent Jenny and Andreas Pfersmann (Geneva Droz 1999) 25ndash32

138 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 35 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 19 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos reference to Luther see Balibar lsquoBlanchot lrsquoinsoumisrsquo 297ndash8 and La Proposition de lrsquoeacutegaliberteacute (Paris Presses universitaires de France 2010) 354ndash5

139 Balibar lsquoBlanchot lrsquoinsoumisrsquo 297 emphasis in the original

140 See Blanchot lsquoLa France nation agrave venirrsquo Combat 19 November 1937 131ndash2

141 Blanchot lsquoLe Marxisme contre la reacutevolutionrsquo La Revue franccedilaise 28th year 4 25 April 1933 506ndash17 (p 516) emphasis in the original For readers at the time the reference to the human person (la personne) was a clear theological signal suggesting a conception of self that was irreducible to (liberal) individualism and (totalitarian) collectivism alike On La Revue franccedilaise edited by Jean-Pierre Maxence one of Blanchotrsquos regular associates during the early to mid-1930s see Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle Les NonshyConformistes des anneacutees 30 (Paris Seuil [1969] 2001) 60ndash7 Though Maxence professed a version of personalism the term soon became more closely identified with the thought of Emmanuel Mounier and the journal Esprit (with which Blanchot seems to have had few if any dealings at all) On the evolution of Esprit during the prewar and postwar period see Michel Winock lsquoEspritrsquo Des Intellectuels dans la citeacute 1930ndash1950 (Paris Seuil [1975] 1996)


143 See Blanchot lsquoOn demande des dissidentsrsquo Combat 20 December 1937 154ndash5 This was to be the last of Blanchotrsquos signed political articles in the extremist nationalist press In his capacity as reacutedacteur en chef of both publications Blanchot nevertheless carried on writing editorials and probably other material for the deeply conservative daily the Journal des deacutebats and the nationalist weekly Aux eacutecoutes into the Summer of 1940 For more details and the reasons why this parting shaft in Combat does not represent a turn to Fascism as some critics have hastily assumed see my

An IntErruPtIon 273

Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 39ndash41 44ndash6 and Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 101ndash2 151ndash7

144 Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 301 The Book To Come 247 In his Lettre polonaise (1957) later collected in his A la recherche drsquoun communisme de penseacutee (Paris Fourbis 1993) 65ndash122 Mascolo drew attention to what he saw as the dispiriting discrepancy between the inertia of the French political class and the very different climate in Poland following the liberalisation associated with the rise to power of Wladislaw Gomulka lsquoPolitics is our passionrsquo he wrote in a passage Blanchot would make his own lsquoBut if poetry is decidedly our sole passion [notre unique passion] it is also necessary to go further with the added force that comes from speaking under pressure and say that politics is our sole passion [notre unique passion] It is no different from poetry the one is nothing without the otherrsquo (p 107) On Blanchotrsquos association with Mascolo at the time see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 376ndash83

145 See Blanchotrsquos letter to Laporte dated 22 December 1984 reproduced in Nancy Maurice Blanchot Passion politique 61 During the 1930s he explained to his correspondent lsquoI was faced with a real dichotomy writing in the daytime in the service of this or that (not to forget that I also wrote for a famous archeologist in need of an amanuensis [un eacutecrivant]) and writing at night which set me apart [me rendait eacutetranger] from any exigency other than itself while changing my identity or directing it towards an ungraspable and anxiety-laden unknown If I was guilty of anything [Srsquoil y a eu faute de ma part] it was in that split [partage]rsquo

146 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 142 200 The Writing of the Disaster 90 131 Compare Bataille Œuvres complegravetes VIII 300 capitals in the original

147 On this reading of Le TregravesshyHaut see my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot 181ndash206 and for an account of the novel inflected by the aftermath of May 1968 see Georges Preacuteli La Force du dehors exteacuterioriteacute limite et nonshypouvoir agrave partir de Maurice Blanchot (Paris recherches 1977)

148 Compare for instance Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 38 48 The Writing of the Disaster 20 27

149 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 149 The Step Not Beyond 108 translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos recourse to the figure of the messianic in the next chapter

150 See Derrida Spectres de Marx 21ndash85 Specters of Marx 1ndash60


151 See Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 110 The Step Not Beyond 79 translation modified

152 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 186ndash7 The Step Not Beyond 136ndash7 translation modified For earlier use of the term communauteacute in Blanchotrsquos text see Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 87 The Step Not Beyond 61

153 See Nancy lsquoLa Communauteacute deacutesœuvreacuteersquo Aleacutea 4 February 1983 11ndash49 La Communauteacute deacutesœuvreacutee (Paris Christian Bourgois 1986) The Inoperative Community translated by Peter Connor Lisa Garbus Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1991)

154 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 25 The Unavowable Community 12 emphasis in the original translation modified Compare Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 180 The Step Not Beyond 132 It was of course the writer himself in that earlier phrasing who had suggested such diverse names for the exteriority of being as death the relation with others or else speech

155 See Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 9ndash10 The Unavowable Community 1ndash2



158 All the more curious in this respect is Nancyrsquos claim advanced in Maurice Blanchot Passion politique almost thirty years after the event that Blanchot in La Communauteacute inavouable had sought covertly to defend that politically dangerous view of community as fusional communion that Nancy in his February 1983 article had attributed to Bataille lsquoWhen the opportunity presented itself as a result of that issue of Aleacutearsquo Nancy writes lsquoof explicitly resuming a thinking of ldquocommunityrdquo which he may well have felt bound to keep private [discregravete] or even secret [Blanchot] took it in a direction ndash incidentally quite removed from my own not to say diametrically opposed to it ndash which conjured up in the darker recesses of community [faisait surgir dans le fond obscur de la communauteacute] a kind of ldquocommunionrdquo in several guises (erotic christological and literary) It is entirely possible that through the prism of the word ldquocommunismrdquo revisited he was restaging something of what in earlier times and in different terms he had found so compellingrsquo (p 31) But as the 1983 exchange shows (and as Blanchot makes clear in La Communauteacute inavouable

An IntErruPtIon 275

17ndash20 The Unavowable Community 7ndash8) the main disagreement lay elsewhere and had to do with Blanchotrsquos reservations about Nancyrsquos reading of Bataille not because Blanchot contra Nancy wished to cling to a vision of fusional communion but because in Blanchotrsquos eyes Bataillersquos thinking of the sacrificial precisely because it interrupted and suspended any dialectic of completion was already irreducible to what Nancy had sought to identify and question in his 1983 article the dream (or nightmare) of community as regressive pseudo-religious communion

159 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 25ndash6 The Unavowable Community 12 translation modified Compare Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 180 The Step Not Beyond 132 lsquoIf speech [parole] gives itself to the other [agrave lrsquoautre] if it is that gift itself this gift that is entirely wasted cannot give the hope it will ever be welcomed by the other received as a gift A speaking always exterior to the other in the exteriority of being (or not being) of which the other is the clue [lrsquoindice the mark] the non-placersquo emphasis in the original translation modified

160 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 26 The Unavowable Community 12 translation modified Compare Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 185 The Step Not Beyond 135

161 See Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable (Paris Minuit 1983) 26n1 The Unavowable Community translated by Pierre Joris (New York Station Hill Press 1988) 57n5 Compare Derrida Drsquoun ton apocalyptique adopteacute naguegravere en philosophie 93 Derrida and Negative Theology 65 emphasis in the original translation modified For Blanchotrsquos other brief extract see Derrida Drsquoun ton apocalyptique 77ndash8 Derrida and Negative Theology 57 For Derridarsquos explicit mention of the phrase from Le Pas aushydelagrave see Parages 46 Parages 38

162 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 16 The Step Not Beyond 7 translation modified Blanchot himself also re-cites this fragment in the essay lsquoQuirsquo (1989) in La Condition critique 440ndash3 Who Comes After the Subject edited by Eduardo Cadava Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York routledge 1991) 58ndash60 On that occasion in order doubly to make the point Blanchot also attributed it to Claude Morali who in the interim had borrowed it for the title of a book of his own to which Levinas contributed a preface Qui est moi aujourdrsquohui (Paris Fayard 1984)

163 See Duras La Maladie de la mort (Paris Minuit 1982) The Malady of Death translated by Barbara Bray (New York Grove Press 1986) I examine Blanchotrsquos commentary on the story in my


Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 213ndash32

164 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 52ndash3 The Unavowable Community 30 emphasis in the original translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos use of the Levinasian doublet of Saying (Dire) and said (dit) in the next chapter

165 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 54 The Unavowable Community 31 emphasis in the original translation modified 13 February 1962 was the date of the funeral of the eight anti-war demonstrators killed five days earlier following the violent intervention of the police at the intersection of the boulevard Voltaire and the rue de Charonne in Paris The cortegravege leading to Pegravere Lachaise cemetery is reported to have attracted more than half a million or so unofficial mourners Also present at the demonstration was Celan who remembered the event in a poem entitled lsquoIn einsrsquo Gesammelte Werke I 270 lsquoDreizehnter Feber Im Herzmund erwachtes Schibbolethrsquo it began before sounding the exact same note as Blanchot twenty years later lsquoMit dir Peuple de Paris No pasaraacuten [Thirteenth of February In the heartrsquos mouth An awakened shibboleth With you Peuple de Paris No pasaraacuten]rsquo On the poetrsquos involvement in the demonstration see Celan Die Gedichte Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe edited by Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 2003) 701 and on Celanrsquos use of dates here and elsewhere see Derrida Schibboleth pour Paul Celan (Paris Galileacutee 1986) 41ndash9 Sovereignties in Question The Poetics of Paul Celan edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York Fordham University Press 2005) 20ndash5 On the still controversial background to the demonstration see Jim House and Neil MacMaster Paris 1961 Algerians State Terror and Memory (Oxford Oxford University Press 2006) 247ndash52 As the authors point out it is sometimes argued that commemoration of the February protest serves the purpose of obscuring the memory of the much greater violence used by French police against mainly Algerian demonstrators the previous October which resulted in many more deaths and casualties The reasons for marking the February date on both Celanrsquos and Blanchotrsquos part had however little to do with commemoration far more with the task of affirming an effective yet anonymous and necessarily evanescent multiplicity to whom an act of uncompromising political refusal might be ascribed

166 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 55ndash6 The Unavowable Community 32 emphasis in the original translation modified

An IntErruPtIon 277

167 Blanchot La Communauteacute inavouable 22 The Unavowable Community 10 emphasis in the original translation modified Compare Le Pas aushydelagrave 148 The Step Not Beyond 108

168 Houmllderlin Hyperion Empedokles Aufsaumltze Uumlbersetzungen 917 Houmllderlinrsquos Sophocles translated by David Constantine (Tarset Bloodaxe Books 2001) emphasis in the original translation modified Antitheos in Houmllderlin used here to refer to Antigone herself notes Jochen Schmidt (p 1492) means lsquonot only ldquoopponent of the God [Gottesgegner]rdquo but also ldquocounter-God [Gegengott]rdquorsquo

169 Blanchot Le TregravesshyHaut (Paris Gallimard LrsquoImaginaire [1948] 1988) back cover The Most High translated by Allan Stoekl (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1995) dust jacket translation modified This blurb is admittedly not signed by Blanchot and doubts have been expressed as to its authorship researches have however shown that the text was based on a page by Blanchot typed and corrected by hand by the writerrsquos sister-in-law which would appear to vouch for its authenticity In subsequent printings of the novel at Blanchotrsquos instigation the text was nevertheless removed For Hegelrsquos influential reading of Antigone as a model of dialectical equalisation or reconciliation between symmetrically opposed legitimacies that of the family on the one hand and that of the State on the other see for example Hegel Werke XVII 132ndash3 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion edited by Peter C Hodgson translated by r F Brown et al 3 vols (Berkeley University of California Press 1985ndash8) II 664ndash5 Blanchotrsquos remark also incorporates a silent reference to Lacoue-Labarthersquos 1998 translation of Houmllderlinrsquos Antigone as well as to the writerrsquos 1978 essay on Houmllderlinrsquos version of the play in LrsquoImitation des modernes (Paris Galileacutee 1986) 39ndash69 Typography Mimesis Philosophy Politics edited by Christopher Fynsk (Stanford Stanford University Press 1998) 208ndash35 which Lacoue-Labarthe develops further in his Meacutetaphrasis suivi de Le theacuteacirctre de Houmllderlin

278

4

Writing ndash disaster

I

What is called disaster

uml Disaster beyond experience [inexpeacuterimenteacute] that which withdraws from all possibility of experience ndash writing at the limit It bears repeating disaster de-scribes [le deacutesastre deacuteshycrit] Which does not mean that disaster as a force of writing excludes itself is beyond writing [hors eacutecriture] outside text [un horsshytexte]


The word disaster deacutesastre which plays such an important role in reception of Blanchotrsquos work following the publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre in 1980 was not itself however a recent addition to the writerrsquos vocabulary Without ever being properly identical with itself the word had long exerted discrete albeit shifting pressure on the authorrsquos writing Already in the 1930s charged with fears or hopes of cultural and political upheaval the word suggesting dire nationalist outcomes was no stranger to Blanchotrsquos journalism2 And in the dark days of Summer 1940 as France was forced to confront defeat at the hands of the invading German forces it was most likely Blanchot who between 7 and 10 July was responsible for launching the front-page rubric in the Journal des deacutebats entitled lsquoAfter the Disaster [Apregraves le deacutesastre]rsquo which began by reminding its readers that lsquofor everyone in France who saw the disaster [le deacutesastre] coming who witnessed the tragic events in the course of which it unfolded who struggled in vain to warn and advise the grief is immensersquo3 By November 1945


however as roger Laporte first pointed out4 Blanchot had begun to deploy the word with rather different implications most notably in one of his earliest postwar critical interventions lsquoLa Lecture de Kafka [reading Kafka]rsquo Considering in that essay the extraordinary discrepancy between the reticence of Kafkarsquos work and the prolixity of its commentators Blanchot wondered whether the two were not somehow connected and lsquowhether Kafka himself had anticipated in such triumph such disaster [un pareil deacutesastre]rsquo lsquoKafkarsquos stories in the whole of literaturersquo he explained lsquoare among the bleakest the most inescapably fettered [riveacutes attached chained anchored] to absolute disaster [un deacutesastre absolu]rsquo lsquoAnd they are also the onesrsquo he went on lsquothat most tragically put hope on the rack not because hope is condemned by them but because it fails even to reach the point of being condemned However complete the catastrophe a slim margin remains ndash of which it is impossible to say whether it keeps hope intact or on the contrary dashes it for everrsquo5

A year later still exercised by the radical hopelessness to which Kafkarsquos writing gave expression yet without which hope itself would be no more than a forlorn memory Blanchot again resorted to the word referring now to lsquothe disaster [deacutesastre] and terrible final scenes of torture and deathrsquo bringing LrsquoEspoir Andreacute Malrauxrsquos novelistic lament for the Spanish republic to a despairing but nevertheless affirmative close6 Disaster on these terms then whether as literary predicament or political defeat was by its nature never total necessarily exceeded itself and always said more than it was possible to say In this as in other respects it bore the burden of that otherness of being later to be recast as an otherwise than being described by Levinas in a bold thought experiment from the same postwar years when using the exact same image as Blanchot he spoke of being lsquoinescapably fettered [riveacute]rsquo at night in the absence of all people and things to something resembling the absent presence of the dark exposed to the experience without experience of what in the early writings of Levinas and Blanchot alike came to be known as the incontrovertible retrocession of the il y a existence without world being without presence phenomenality without phenomena7

In June 1952 in an essay from Les Temps modernes that was later to form the closing chapter of LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire it was again an irremediable loss of origin that the word disaster served to name simultaneously binding and unbinding what it affected and finding


expression in that compulsion to repeat in which Freud found evidence of the disaggregating exigencies of the death drive lsquoYes we are bound to disaster [lieacutes au deacutesastre]rsquo remarked Blanchot lsquobut whenever failure returns it is essential to realise failure is nothing but this return Beginning again and again [Le recommencement] this force [puissance] prior to all beginning that is the error [lrsquoerreur the wandering] of our dyingrsquo8 Five years further on in November 1957 considering in Mallarmeacutersquos late work a similar double logic of manifestation and dissolution necessity and chance configuration and dispersion Blanchot again reached for the word lsquo[Mallarmeacutersquos] Un coup de deacutesrsquo he suggested using phenomenological language to address something already irreducible to phenomenology lsquoto whose certain presence our hands eyes and attention all bear witness is not only unreal and uncertain but can be what it is [ne pourra ecirctre] only in so far as the general rule which makes chance unavoidable [donne au hasard statut de loi] is breached in some region of being where what is necessary and what is fortuitous are both thwarted [mis en eacutechec] by the force of disaster [la force du deacutesastre]rsquo9

During the following decade the silent ripples of deacutesastre continued to radiate outwards In his dialogue on Antelme from April 1962 lsquouniversal disaster [lrsquouniversel deacutesastre]rsquo is the phrase used by Blanchot to describe the historical event of the camps albeit that here too disaster was nothing simple but bore the traces of its own delimitation its separation from itself even its reversal lsquoas if in man [lrsquohomme humankind]rsquo one of Blanchotrsquos speakers puts it lsquomore terrible [terrible] than universal disaster were the inexorable affirmation that always keeps him upright [lrsquoinexorable affirmation qui toujours le maintient debout]rsquo10 And writing anonymously in Comiteacute in the wake of the events of May 1968 which he had spent largely in the company of Antelme and others Blanchot once more had recourse to disaster to evoke a freshly revolutionary and resolutely aporetic idea of communism which he did in these provocative and peremptory terms lsquoCommunism cannot inherit This is essential cannot lay claim even to itself is required always to let the legacy of the ages however venerable become lost in the sand [se perdre] at least momentarily but in a radical way The theoretical hiatus is absolute the de facto break decisive Between the capitalist free-market world that is our own and the present of communismrsquos demand (present without presence) the link [le trait drsquounion literally a hyphen which both connects and separates] is


that of a disaster [drsquoun deacutesastre] of a star change [drsquoun changement drsquoastre]rsquo11

Here too then disaster was a function of a complex double movement It spoke of an exhaustion that was also an interruption an encounter with the finite that was also a passage to the infinite In the context it mattered little perhaps that the cod etymology that Blanchotrsquos words seemed to accredit (disaster signifying cosmic upheaval rather than as the dictionary suggests an event placed under the influence of an unpropitious star) confused cosmology with astrology politics with apocalypse or the historical with the messianic For if Blanchot was willing to subscribe to this etymological obfuscation as he does on several occasions in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre alongside repeated warnings not to take for granted the time-honoured association between etymon ie that which is true and the derivation of words it was because the distant glow of dis-aster in this sense that is separated from itself by an invisible hyphen came once more from Mallarmeacute who in a sonnet written in tribute to Edgar Allan Poe in 1877 had famously referred to the artwork or poem hewn from a meteorite and a remnant perhaps of some unknown far-off cosmic catastrophe as lsquoCalme bloc ici-bas chu drsquoun deacutesastre obscurrsquo lsquo[A] stern block here fallen from a mysterious disasterrsquo as the poet tried his hand at translating his own verse soon after12

The reference to Mallarmeacute in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ndash his name henceforth stamped on the words deacutesastre and eacutecrire alike (lsquoce jeu insenseacute drsquoeacutecrirersquo Blanchot recalls notably in the epigraph to LrsquoEntretien infini) ndash is both persistent and abyssal Twice over for instance in the course of the book Blanchot cites in italics another of the poetrsquos carefully chiselled sayings in which poetical political and philosophical motifs again combine and which in the version proposed by Blanchot asserts lsquoThere is no explosion but a book [Il nrsquoest drsquoexplosion qursquoun livre]rsquo13 In so far as they inscribed writing within both a political and a more- or otherwise-than-political future these were incisive and for Blanchot prophetic words They initially came about as the result of a dinner held on 9 December 1893 when Mallarmeacute and various friends were asked by a journalist to comment on the news that an anarchist bomb had exploded at the French National Assembly that evening The diverse responses to the event appeared in a special supplement of Le Journal the following day Mallarmeacutersquos actual words according to the manuscript were slightly different from those subsequently attributed to him What he finally


wrote that evening it seems was this lsquoI know of no other bomb than a book [Je ne sais pas drsquoautre bombe qursquoun livre]rsquo In 1930 the journalist involved Paul Brulat reported the phrase in his book Lumiegraveres et grandes ombres as follows lsquoThere is no other explosion than a fine book [Il nrsquoy a drsquoautre explosion qursquoun beau livre]rsquo Eleven years later in his influential biography of the poet which Blanchot had occasion to review at the time for the Journal des deacutebats Henri Mondor cites another version and has Mallarmeacute declare lsquoI am aware of no other bomb than a book [Je ne connais drsquoautre bombe qursquoun livre]rsquo while in 1953 in an unpublished essay on the poet that owed more than a little to a reading of Blanchot Jean-Paul Sartre reported likewise pausing merely to remove the literary flourish and give the phrase a more earthy or colloquial turn lsquoIrsquom unaware of any bomb other than a book [Je ne connais pas drsquoautre bombe qursquoun livre]rsquo14 In recasting Mallarmeacutersquos statement in 1980 it is hard to say whether Blanchot was misremembering the poetrsquos words or deliberately rephrasing them Perhaps more importantly however the various modifications undergone by Mallarmeacutersquos words were already proof of those words themselves ie that quotations like books however much they gather up meaning also have their fate more akin to their dispersion For in the lengthy trail it left down the years Mallarmeacutersquos literary bomb not only announced but also illustrated with self-instantiating logic the shattering centrifugal force of the explosion ndash the disaster ndash it evoked And as though doubly to prove the point when Blanchot came to incorporate into LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre the 1978 text in which his commentary on Mallarmeacutersquos remark had first appeared he chose to delete at least half of this already fragmentary text fragmenting it twice over as confirmation perhaps that disaster was not just a word but that every word was itself also a disaster and likewise every quotation too15

By 1980 disaster in Blanchot was therefore no solitary star but already a constellation travelling through the heavens turning on itself echoing the eternal silence of infinite space lsquoNothing will have taken place but the placersquo Mallarmeacute had it lsquoexcept perhaps a constellation [Rien nrsquoaura eu lieu que le lieu excepteacute peutshyecirctre une constellation]rsquo16 But this did not mean that steering a course by the stars was any simple matter For one thing Blanchotrsquos title LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was itself already multiple Admittedly this is true of any title in so far as it always refers to itself and to the work it allegedly presents the words Das Schloszlig (The Castle) for


instance name both the title of Kafkarsquos novel and that novel itself not to mention the mysterious edifice to which Kafkarsquos protagonist diligently seeks access But there was also more Not only was the word deacutesastre already a virtual quotation from Mallarmeacute by 1980 in the wake of Derrida and others much the same was also true of the word eacutecriture As a result alongside whatever else it might mean each word in Blanchotrsquos title also pointed to itself lsquowritingrsquo was writing and lsquodisasterrsquo itself disaster As for the phrase lsquolrsquoeacutecriture du deacutesastrersquo this too was a quotation from the volume called LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre where like much else in the book it is repeated twice that is both as itself and as other than itself as a kind of spectral parasite inhabiting or better (if one can say this) exhabiting the text not as identity but as otherness not as possibility writes Blanchot but as impossibility17

The grammatical relationship between the two nouns in the title also left ample room for speculation Was disaster to be thought as the object of writing or its subject or even both together Did disaster qualify writing or writing qualify disaster Was it the ambition of Blanchotrsquos text to write about disaster or was it already the case that disaster was responsible for writing And if these two grammatical structures could not be told apart this could only mean that if disaster was already writing then writing was already disaster But what in that case was meant by the word disaster By way of definition the (French) dictionary gives eacuteveacutenement funeste malheur grave deacutegacirct ruine eacutechec complet entraicircnant de graves conseacutequences ie fateful event serious mishap damage ruin complete failure resulting in grave consequences But what guarantee was there that Blanchotrsquos singular usage of deacutesastre inspired it seems by a fanciful etymology falls within the dictionaryrsquos jurisdiction The purpose of dictionaries after all is not to prescribe merely to describe Might it not be that Blanchot just like Mallarmeacute was exploiting the word disaster or disshyaster not for its accepted translatable meanings but for other more secret untranslatable reasons In any case what is it that constitutes the identity of a word if not its always different repetition in an infinite number of always other contexts Might it not be as deployed in Blanchotrsquos writing that the hidden freight of the word dis-aster interrupted and displaced with the help of this supplementary invisible unspoken hyphen was enough to release it from the burden of its conventional given meanings thereby redeem it so to speak and inscribe it otherwise It is at any event hard to decide what disaster or dis-aster in Blanchotrsquos text actually names


other than the very displacement it enacts as it separates the word from itself and seemingly attributes it to a new hitherto unspoken language But as such is it certain it evokes a catastrophic historical event as most readers of Blanchot perhaps too quickly have tended to assume Is it not just as plausibly an always prior trace no sooner inscribed than effaced always already withdrawn from itself a structure so to speak of essential dispersion without which all thought of history or catastrophe would be impossible How far might it be determined as any kind of negativity or positivity at all In other words is disaster in the world as part of the world or does it precede and exceed all worldliness as such If so what are the consequences for thinking writing speaking in the present

So many abyssal difficulties then face Blanchotrsquos reader from the threshold of the text But there is more to come First to greet the reader on the opening and on numerous subsequent pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre matching the enigmatic multiplicity of the bookrsquos title with the no less puzzling singularity of a mute typographical tally is something which is neither a letter nor a word at all but an unpronounceable non-verbal trace in the form of an icon or emblem Such devices it will be remembered are a common feature of Blanchotrsquos fragmentary texts In August 1958 in Botteghe Oscure the fragmentary character of the extract from the as yet unpublished LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli was announced by a five-branch star-like motif at the head of a number of component passages In the birthday tribute to Heidegger issued the following year Blanchot signalled the dispersed status of his text by attaching to each of the individual elements an initial cross while in the 1962 version of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli this initial disseminatory function was fulfilled by a different four-cornered icon And there is similar variation elsewhere The fragmentary texts in LrsquoEntretien infini displayed on both first and second publication a redoubled neuter sign A different solution however as we have seen was adopted for Le Pas aushydelagrave where the fragments (except for the very first) are signalled by a regular diamond motif ( ) though some earlier versions of texts carried alternate devices including at times no device at all Similarly but differently in another way previous versions of texts woven into LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ranging from the earliest the 1975 response to Levinas entitled lsquoDiscours sur la patiencersquo to the last of all the prepublication selection published in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise the Gallimard house journal barely


two months before the title appeared in bookshops all displayed a double rhomb-shaped symbol uml instead of the single device familiar to subsequent readers as though to indicate in advance to those readers that repetition always came first and singularity was never thinkable without prior doubleness or even duplicity18

It is hard to know whether the sheer diversity of typographical devices found in Blanchotrsquos fragmentary texts was deliberately calculated by the writer or arose as a result of the contingent preferences of sub-editors publishers or printers This however is arguably less important than it might seem What counts far more is the complex double function of these non-verbal typographical or scriptural markers First to the extent that they detach each piece of writing from that or those accompanying it and thereby allocate it a place in a textual series they confer on the work as a whole so to speak a certain kind of sequential structure and it is this that allows readers to recognise in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre for instance something more than a random collection of relatively short texts of varying length Organisation however as Barthes was wont to observe particularly where the fragmentary is concerned is only ever a certain form of disorganisation In this sense to gather up a given number of fragments within a larger whole while mitigating the dispersion of those discrete elements nevertheless by implicitly acknowledging it also accentuates it with the result that each piece of text separated from that which precedes or follows by a typographic device figures in the place it happens to occupy only as one among many as an otherwise anonymous contingent and provisional member of an enigmatically indeterminate class to which it belongs by chance more than by design and might easily be replaced by another Here it is easy to understand how for Blanchot as for others fragmentary writing soon came to be seen as an instantiation of what in Le Pas aushydelagrave is called lsquonomadic affirmation [lrsquoaffirmation nomade]rsquo19 At any event this repetitive marking and re-marking of the text amounts to a proliferating double signature it implies a degree of lsquofalsersquo unity as Blanchot calls it20 gathering up the text while all the more effectively compromising that unity by exposing the written page to the haphazard multiplicity of the (fragmentary) outside

Moreover while the repeated presence of the same recurrent typographical device at the head of each fragment announces the radical contingency of each item in the would-be collection it also


serves to emphasise the extent to which each item is at the same time radically irreplaceable irreducibly resistant to any form of aggregation The paradox is one that traverses all Blanchotrsquos thinking of the fragmentary what it demonstrates is how any counting of the many (the multiple the innumerable) must necessarily pass by way of an affirmation of the one (the singular the unique) and vice versa The infinite and the finite join together not as two complementary aspects of a dialectic but as differentiated repetitions of the same (and of the other) This explains why from one context to another one place of publication to another the typographical devices to which Blanchot has recourse in their very repetitiveness are so frequently subject to variation admittedly of seemingly trivial character were it not that here as elsewhere less is always more For even as each text is insistently inscribed within a given singular context it is apparent that any such placement qua placement is only provisional and necessarily impermanent In other words what the singularity of localised inscription brings with it paradoxically is an awareness of the necessary threat or promise of erasure Blanchotrsquos books of fragmentary writing offer themselves to reading as collections of text but what they collect is the radically uncollectable

The elongated four-cornered diamond- or rhomb-shaped device that appears at the head of each of the textual fragments that make up LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is therefore anything but decorative Moreover alongside its status as non-verbal trace or inscription it has numerous other possible connotations pictorial musical architectural nautical or simply geometrical For one it mirrors the figure of the lozenge first employed in heraldry (the word itself is said to derive from an Old French term for a stone slab or slate) It also recalls a device used it seems in plain-song notation and repeats a visual motif common in architectural design Being in the form of a rhombus ie in geometry an oblique equilateral parallelogram it also has in memory what in both French and English is known as a rhumb a nautical term referring says the OED to lsquothe line followed by a vessel sailing on one course or a wind blowing continuously in one direction or any one of the set of lines drawn through a point on a map or chart and indicating the course of an object moving always in the same directionrsquo a word as Blanchot was aware that had become current again in modern French as a result of the work of the poet and essayist Paul Valeacutery one of Mallarmeacutersquos most influential literary heirs who during the 1920s


published selections from his fragmentary early morning jottings under various titles one of which was Rhumbs lsquoWhy give this name to a collection of impressions and ideasrsquo Valeacutery asked in a prefatory note recalling the wordrsquos nautical connotations He went on to explain

Just as the needle of the compass remains fairly constant while the course to be followed changes so it is possible to see the whims or successive applications of our thinking the variations of our attention the ups-and-downs of our mental lives the distractions of our memory the diversity of our desires emotions and enthusiasms mdash as deviations [eacutecarts] from supposed constancy in the essential underlying intent of the mind a kind of self-presence [sorte de preacutesence agrave soishymecircme] distinct from each one of its moments The notes and opinions that make up this book were so many deviations [eacutecarts] from a certain privileged direction of my mind whence Rhumbs21

From Blanchotrsquos perspective these words were an encouragement but they also constituted a warning For like Schlegel (and it is revealing that the first explicit mention of Valeacutery in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre immediately follows a sequence of fragments devoted to Schlegel22) Valeacutery was a prime example of an author who had responded affirmatively to the challenge of fragmentary writing while retreating from its more radical consequences In the case of German romanticism and French literary modernism the reason for this was much the same it was that in the end the dispersion of the fragmentary for Schlegel and Valeacutery alike was too quickly identified with aphoristic self-reflexion and subordinated to the totalising embrace of subjectivity and the essential (dis)unity of consciousness and thought Fragmentary writing in other words coincided with its interruptions displacements swerves and digressions but this did not mean it was immune to the seductive appeal of prospective or retrospective unity On the contrary what it confirmed for Blanchot was that writing according to the fragmentary was not without numerous risks and dangers of its own

Blanchotrsquos cautious response to Valeacuteryrsquos fragmentary texts is clearly in evidence in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre where diverse passages from the authorrsquos published and unpublished notebooks are quoted by Blanchot in four separate fragments23 This number was almost certainly not due to chance And in each instance while


acknowledging the significance of Valeacuteryrsquos contribution Blanchot intervenes discreetly to imply the possibility of an alternative view or to dissent explicitly from what his predecessor had to say or to draw attention to the heterogeneity of Valeacuteryrsquos thinking not to disparage but to welcome its inconsistency Witness the following staged dialogue with the authorrsquos text

uml Valeacutery lsquoThe thinker is inside a cage and paces up and down indefinitely between four words [entre quatre mots]rsquo This is expressed pejoratively but is not pejorative repetitive patience infinite perseverance And the selfsame Valeacutery ndash is he the same ndash will go on to affirm in passing lsquoTo think To think ndash is to lose the threadrsquo A facile commentary surprise the interval discontinuity24

Four corners four sides four citations four words alongside this already insistent reference to the figure four another significant fourfold was also not far from the pages of Blanchotrsquos book For like the used in lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo in 1958 so too in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre the fourfold form of Blanchotrsquos rhumboid device pointed to further sustained engagement with Heidegger who also makes an explicit fourfold appearance in the book as the potent destinal thinker of aletheia Ereignis the es gibt and Sein zum Tode25 (readers of the 1947 meditation lsquoAus der Erfahrung des Denkens [From the Experience of Thinking]rsquo may also remember that for Heidegger lsquothinking is restriction to a thought that once stood still like a star in the heavens [wie ein Stern am Himmel der Welt]rsquo26) But Heideggerrsquos thought is also dispatched along a series of further ellipses by Blanchot who repeatedly crosses it with that of others (the Greeks Hegel Schelling Houmllderlin Nietzsche Levinas Derrida Celan too not forgetting Mallarmeacute and Valeacutery) lsquo To thinkrsquo he writes at one stage pursuing one of the bookrsquos more insistent motifs lsquomight be said to name (to call) disaster [nommer (appeler) le deacutesastre] as ulterior motive [comme arriegravereshypenseacutee an unspoken implicit thought]rsquo27 and it is hard not to recognise in this allusive reference to the senses of German heiszligen (meaning to be called and to call for something) ndash resembling so to speak the ulterior motive of this fragment itself ndash the distant trace of Heideggerrsquos Was heiszligt Denken (What Is Called Thinking) the title of which according to German idiom as we have seen turns precisely on that double meaning


even as Blanchot seeks to do the same but otherwise by exploiting in another language the idiomatic resources of deacutesshyastre

But though Blanchotrsquos formulation may sound Heideggerian there is arguably little here as elsewhere that is properly authentically attributable to that influential predecessor Notwithstanding a shared preoccupation with eschatology (ie the four last things death judgement heaven and hell) the writing of disaster has little in common with the fourfold or Geviert articulated by Heidegger which it will be remembered crosses heaven and earth mortals and immortals and places at their crucial intersection the thesis of deathrsquos possibility that lsquopossibility of impossibilityrsquo which Blanchot with Levinasrsquos help was so intent on setting aside overwriting it with the radically other proposition of lsquothe impossibility of all possibilityrsquo28 In this context the 224th fragment of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is crucial but in another way Falling shortly after the mid-point of the book (calculated in terms of the number of fragments) and shortly before that mid-point (calculated in terms of the number of pages in the volume) occurring therefore as a kind of double caesura it intervenes to disjoin Blanchotrsquos thinking from that of Heidegger precisely in respect of deathrsquos possibility in order to articulate a very different fourfold which the text aligns or declines as follows

uml The following names [noms both names and nouns] so many sites of dislocation [lieux de la dislocation] the four winds of spiritrsquos absence blowing from nowhere thinking when it is unbound [se laisse deacutelier unleashed loosened released] by writing to the point of the fragmentary [jusqursquoau fragmentaire] Outside Neuter Disaster return These names admittedly form no system and in their abruptness like a proper name that refers to nobody slip beyond all possible meaning [hors de tout sens possible] without this slippage itself making sense leaving only a sliding half-light [une entreshylueur glissante] that illuminates nothing not even this outside-meaning [ce horsshysens an absence of meaning that does not imply presence of meaning] whose limit is nowhere indicated [dont la limite ne srsquoindique pas] So many names which surrounded by devastation in a landscape ravaged by the absence that preceded them and which they would bear within themselves if emptied of all interiority they did not stand erect outside themselves [exteacuterieurs agrave euxshymecircmes]


(abyssal stones petrified by the infinity of their fall) are each like the vestiges [les restes] of another language [un langage autre] at once vanished and never uttered that we could not even try to restore without reintroducing them into the world or exalting them to the heights of some supra-world [un surshymonde] of which in their timeless clandestine solitude they might only be the unstable interruption the invisible withdrawal29

Four vectors inscribed upon an absent horizon making navigation impossible four winds bereft of pneumatological inspiration allowing no course to be struck four terms adding up to no system four names without alethic brilliance casting only the dimmest of dying glows to mark their disappearance four stone slabs like so many mementoes of obscure disaster and four tokens of an absent language resisting all presence retreating into non-identity like a dimly post-religious tetragrammaton In all this as witnessed by the figure four something nevertheless seems to endure not unity nor simple duality nor trinitarian synthesis but perhaps the space of a book albeit one henceforth exploded in which case what comes to occupy that space enabling as well as dismantling the closure of the book itself is writing as fragmentary open to the inside as well as the outside as repetition doubling and fourfold eacutecartement division erasure discard and dissolution And this in a word ndash the word is eacutecarter from popular Latin exquartare meaning to divide into quarters untie or undo ndash is what Blanchotrsquos repetitive four-cornered four-sided graphic device responding to the fourfold of dis-aster inscribes or performs not punctual unity or consistency but the explosive fracture of a fourfold cross crossing or crossing out a four-sided framing which is also a quartering or discarding a putting at a distance or placing to one side a disjoining or loosening a disassembling or suppression ndash without negativity

Does this nevertheless imply a privileging of the space of the book of literature of the realm still described oddly enough as the aesthetic What then is the status of the book as such Blanchot addresses the question in respect of Mallarmeacutersquos unrealised project of Le Livre in lsquoldquoIl nrsquoest drsquoexplosion rdquorsquo that fragmentary residue of a fragment already mentioned which carrying out the threat or promise to unity it embodied was not integrated fully into LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre but remains nonetheless linked to it albeit


only as the radical outside so to speak of a non-existent inside Blanchot writes

The explosion at a more determined level marks an act or effect of a real unreal action A book as the principle of meaning is the only principle of the dissolution of all meaning not in any covert manner but even invisibly like a bolt from the heavens by a disseminating flagrancy the blast [lrsquoeacuteclat] of which may be eclipsed yet without in its power of infinite rupture ceasing to affect (compromise) reserve latency lapses of time expectation of destruction30

Despite possible appearances to the contrary as we already know the four corners of the book promise no gathering they enact dispersion Indeed the very burden of fragmentary writing as it traverses the book is that it is simultaneously irreducible either to the presence or absence of any book This is confirmed by the fate that LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre reserves for its own fourfold status For though it recurs persistently through the text as we have seen the number four has only tenuous grasp on Blanchotrsquos writing of disaster In all the book contains 403 unnumbered fragments of wildly varying length (from four words to five and a half pages) each distinguished and separated from the others by a making 403 incisions in all which is to say 31 13 or 13 31 uneven and irregular inscriptions their sum strangely haunted by this double numerological palindrome exhibiting twice over the ghostly presence of the number four (3 thinsp1 thinsp4 and 1 thinsp3 4) yet totalling only an imperfect multiple of 4 or one from which precisely the figure one the spectre of unity has been deducted At one stage Blanchot cites Le Rhizome (by Deleuze and Guattari) precisely to this effect already underwritten by the logic of the fragmentary agreeing that lsquothe one is part of the multiple by always being subtractedrsquo31 The account then has yet to be closed the end yet to be reached

These 403 free-floating fragments are separated further from one another by the intermittent use of different typefaces roman here italic there supplemented and interrupted here and there by an uncertain mixture of the two with the relative rarity of italics (for the most part according to French typographical conventions reserved for quotations from other hands) mysteriously singularising


some 34 fragments as though to suggest they may be marked down to some other source voice genre or tone The rationale behind these variations if one exists is not however explained in the text though as in the case of Le Pas aushydelagrave most readers will be tempted to make sense of these differences in style by invoking this or that dominant interpretative paradigm fiction versus theory literature versus philosophy poetry versus prose and so on However mingling as they do in seemingly indeterminate fashion the citational with the non-citational (to the extent that the distinction may be maintained at all) it is soon apparent that all that can be said of Blanchotrsquos italics (or lack of them) is that they imperil each of these hermeneutic oppositions not by abolishing them but by turning each and every fragment whether in roman or italics into a singular question about its own context or contexts including perhaps most importantly of all the blank space or spacing (lsquothe rhythmic principle of the work in its very structurersquo Blanchot called it in LrsquoEntretien infini) which framing each fragment detaches it from those surrounding it or attaches it to those not surrounding it (and vice versa) in addition therefore also separating it from itself as other than what it was an infinitely finite broken vessel The effect wrote Blanchot was to give writing literature art if such exist the unredeemed abandoned and fragmentary status of the world according to Isaac Luria in which suggests Blanchot as in the Lurianic Kabbala the act of creation is no longer present to itself in the immanence of its potency or power but perpetually withdrawn shrunken and effaced a shattered origin retreating like a barely visible constellation into the passivity of an unleavened past lsquo Withdrawal [Retirement] and not expansionrsquo explains Blanchot (dimly if provocatively recalling Heidegger) lsquoSuch perhaps is art like the God of Isaac Luria who creates only by excluding himselfrsquo32 lsquoIn other wordsrsquo he first put it in 1957 writing in the margins of Gershom Scholemrsquos pioneering study of Jewish mysticism

the essential problem of creation is the problem of nothingness [le neacuteant] Not how something can be created from nothing but how nothing is created so that from nothing there are grounds [lieu both location and cause] for something It is necessary for there to be nothing [il faut qursquoil (nrsquo)y ait rien] that nothing should be [que le rien soit] this is the true secret and the initial mystery a mystery that begins painfully in God himself mdash through sacrifice


retraction and limitation a mysterious willingness to be exiled from the all that he is and efface and absent himself not to say disappear33

Of the four winds Blanchot names in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ndash outside neuter disaster and return ndash it is the third disaster as the title testifies which is privileged in relation to the three others The extent of that privilege is however uncertain For what is announced in the word disaster or dis-aster as Blanchotrsquos use of the term in Comiteacute seems to suggest is an impossible aporetic trait drsquounion or hyphen connecting without connecting the three other terms alongside which it is set forming a square where each term occupies a particular corner but could equally well be positioned at any one of the others and take the place of any one of the other terms There is no frame then which is not already exceeded by whatever provisionally holds it in place For in Blanchotrsquos writing outside neuter disaster and return while far from exact synonyms are nevertheless in a serial relationship with one another in such a way that each says the same while saying it differently This of course is precisely what each strives to name according to its own idiomatic resources repetition without identity that which is always already dispersed that which is irreducible to opposition and that which is neither same nor other but always otherwise Blanchotrsquos four winds in other words do not merely present themselves they present each of the others even as by that very token they turn aside from presentation with the result that each may be read as itself but also under erasure as a provisional substitute for any or each of the others from which it nevertheless necessarily differs And this scattering of meaning to the four winds has itself a name dis-aster or deacutesshyastre albeit that by the logic or a-logic of dis-aster that name might equally well be written outside neuter disaster return dehors neutre deacutesastre retour

This explains paradoxically enough why a significant amount of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is given over to questions of definition This is at any time a precarious and abyssal operation one that in seeking to provide reliable differentiation often ends up producing the very opposite To inscribe the finite in other words is an infinite undertaking incapable of reaching conclusion No thought of ending is ever an ending of thought Indeed it is arguably no accident as far as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is concerned that the word


disaster or deacutesastre in this text that bears the name of this gesture is both first and last to be written LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre in other words both starts and finishes by writing lsquodisasterrsquo The writing of disaster (the book) once more is the writing of disaster (the thing) lsquo Disaster ruins everything while leaving everything intactrsquo this is how Blanchotrsquos text opens in roman towards the top of a page and this is how it closes in italics at the very bottom lsquo Solitude radiating out emptiness of the heavens [vide du ciel] death deferred disasterrsquo34 Disaster then in this text to which it gives its name is both incipit and explicit beginning and ending alpha and omega and that of which it speaks passes from everything at the outset to emptiness at the end from a negation suspended to a suspension of a negation That these (rhetorical) effects were calculated by the author is apparent from the fact that in 1975 in the first published extract from the book to come when Blanchot chose to cite his subsequently terminal phrase which at the time occurred a page or so before the end he did so in this variant form lsquo uml Solitude radiating out emptiness in the heavens [vide dans le ciel] death deferred sun [soleil]rsquo35 The argument seems a compelling one Oddly however the same textual evidence might equally indicate the opposite that the word lsquodisasterrsquo was always already something other than disaster and that in so far as it retained the memory of an erasure (of the extinct star it once was) so disaster though it marked a provisional ending was anything but an end in much the same way that it had not been a proper beginning either given that that the opening word lsquodisasterrsquo in this writing of disaster had always already been preceded by a single or double fourfold typographical motif in the figure of a star Between star and disaster then there was no opposition rather a double explosion that as language and something more or less than language effaced what it inscribed and inscribed what it effaced without beginning or end

Disaster is deceptive in other ways too However much in its opening pages Blanchotrsquos text seeks to present it if only to keep faith with the promise announced in the title disaster resists presentation lsquoDisaster takes care [prend soin] of everythingrsquo36 it is written at one point in italics without it being clear whether this means that disaster shows concern for everything or disposes of everything or both at the same time A similar double or neutral logic may be found at play elsewhere too Disaster it seems has the power (were this word not already a misnomer) both to outstrip and yet


fall short of the transitivity of subject-object relations lsquoIt does not affect [nrsquoatteint pas reach or touch] this one or thatrsquo the reader is told lsquoldquoIrdquo am not under threat from it It is in so far as spared and left to one side I am threatened by disaster that it threatens in me [en moi] that which is beyond me [hors de moi] an other than me who passively am made other There is no affecting disaster or being affected by it [Il nrsquoy a pas atteinte du deacutesastre the genitive is both subjective and objective] Out of reach [hors drsquoatteinte] is whoever it threatens impossible to say whether at close quarters or from afar ndash the infinite character of the threat has in a certain way breached all limitsrsquo37 Disaster then is always too long and too short and derives its radicality from that very ambiguity Its fate is both to overwhelm and to underwhelm what it affects ndash or not It belongs to temporality then only in so far as it both exceeds and suspends it and remains irreducible to being lsquoWhen disaster happens [survient]rsquo we read lsquoit does not come [ne vient pas] Disaster is its own imminence but since the future [le futur the future as esse being] as we conceive of it in the order of lived time belongs to disaster disaster has always already withdrawn or dissuaded it there is no future [avenir that which is to come] for disaster just as there is no time or space in which it might fulfil itselfrsquo38 lsquoHe does not believe in disasterrsquo another fragment announces immediately after sceptically couching its own words in italics lsquoit is impossible to believe in it whether one is alive or dying No belief that is adequate to it and at the same time a sort of disinterest disinterested in disaster Night sleepless night [Nuit nuit blanche] ndash such is disaster darkness lacking no obscurity with no light to brighten itrsquo39

If the law is disaster says another passage it is a law that does not concern us and escapes calculation whether of failure or loss40 Limitless and excessive disaster is however no absolute41 it deserves no monumentalisation but nor is it an embodiment of negativity lsquoNothing is enough for disaster which means that in the same way that destruction in its ruinous purity is not appropriate to it so the idea of totality cannot demarcate its limits all things affected and destroyed gods and men returned to absence nothingness in the place of everything all this is too much and too little Disaster deserves no capital letter though it may make death pointless even as it supplements it it does not superimpose itself upon the spacing of dying [lrsquoespacement du mourir]rsquo42 lsquoDisaster the black colour of


which should be attenuated ndash by being reinforced ndashrsquo the fragment continues lsquoexposes us to a certain idea of passivity We are passive in relation to disaster but disaster is perhaps passivity itself and in that respect past and always pastrsquo43 rather than thought gone mad it is an inherent madness of thinking located not within presence but on the side of forgetting lsquoforgetting without memory the motionless withdrawal of what was not traced ndash the immemorial perhapsrsquo44

Paradox equivocation undecidability strength and weakness power and impotence abundance and penury these then are disasterrsquos signature effects And as it is repeated as it must disaster like any signature necessarily always differs from itself and it is time and again that difference which Blanchotrsquos writing underscores and which detaches diverts and deflects each thought from itself lsquoI do not know how I came to such a passrsquo reports an unidentified first-person singular in one passage lsquobut it may be that I have reached the thought that prompts one to stand at a distance from thought for this is what it gives distance But to travel to the end of thinking [aller au bout de la penseacutee] (in the form of a thinking of the end [du bout] or the edge [du bord]) ndash is this not possible only by exchanging one thought for another Whence the injunction do not change your thinking repeat it but only if you can [si tu le peux]rsquo45 If repetition strictly speaking is impossible argues Blanchot this is but silent proof turn and turn about that impossibility is what repeats itself And if thought belongs to repetition it is to repetition not as a guarantee of identity but as return the perpetual recurrence of what is without place or position

Disaster is always more or less than it seems Description of it is necessarily oblique hypothetical apophatic Which is to say insists Blanchot neither negative nor positive

uml Disaster is not dark [sombre] it would release us from all if it could enter into relation with someone it would be an object of gay knowledge [gai savoir] as a term in language and the term of language But disaster is unknown the unknown name for that which in thought itself dissuades us from its being thought putting us at a distance by its closeness Solitary in being exposed to the thought of disaster that dissolves solitude and overwhelms every kind of thought like the intense silent and disastrous affirmation of the outside46


Disaster in Blanchot is not simply an elusive singularity unapproach-able by dint of proximity indeterminable in its resistance to relation unthinkable by virtue of being synonymous with thought itself Like a dark companion traversing the void it also exerts a strong gravitational pull mysteriously and without exception on the words concepts and writing that surround it dragging them out of their predictable orbits diverting their meaning upsetting their course Equally however its own motion is aberrant centrifugal exorbitant For the prefix de- or deacute- marking and re-marking not only the word dis-aster but a whole stellar canopy of other related and unrelated terms is already at least double If on the one hand it derives from Latin de- meaning down aside apart and mainly having a privative sense (not unlike English or German un-) on the other it also translates Greek dis- meaning twoways or twain Doubling itself in this way in dis-aster and numerous cognate or merely similar words according to a logic defiant of all ontologisation de- dis- or deacute- is dispersed and disseminated throughout Blanchotrsquos text both withdrawing words from themselves and multiplying their fractured spacing What a strange coup de deacutes or dice-throw of language Blanchotrsquos French readers might be forgiven for remarking mindful of Mallarmeacutersquos famously jagged and interrupted line spread over four pages surrounded by numerous different typefaces testifying to the fact that lsquoa dice throw never will abolish chancersquo

But chance perversely enough if it remains faithful to itself is also necessity and it is just one consequence of this logic of ineluctable contingency (lsquodisaster concern for the infinitesimal [souci de lrsquoinfime] sovereignty of the accidentalrsquo47 suggests Blanchot) that dis-aster in Blanchot implies inspires inscribes so many words or expressions in deacute- or equally dissolves itself into so many forms sharing that prefix thus entering into Blanchotrsquos text in the course of the first twenty pages alone such terms ndash terms in language but also denoting the term of language ndash as these which comprise in passing more than one redeemed neologism or paleologism disaster (deacutesastre) disinterest (deacutesinteacuterecirct) decline (deacuteclin) destruction (destruction) outside (dehors) disarray (deacutesarroi) surpassing (deacutepassement) danger (danger) distance (distance) drift (deacuterive) desolation (deacutesolation) difference (diffeacuterence) dissimulation (dissimulation) derangement (deacutesarrangement) delay (deacutelai) discourse (discours) defect (deacutefaut) despair (deacutesespoir) failing (deacutefaillance) detachment (deacutetachement) to which may be added the adjectives indecipherable (indeacutechiffrable)


disastrous (deacutesastreux) destroyed (deacutetruit) or the verbs dissuade (dissuader) disinterest (deacutesinteacuteresser) demand (demander) deflect (deacuteporter) disorient (deacutesorienter) surpass (deacutepasser) undo (deacutefaire) outstrip (deacuteborder) desire (deacutesirer) destroy (deacutetruire) decline (deacutecliner) de-scribe (deacuteshycrire) dissolve (dissoudre) denude (deacutenuer) rend (deacutechirer) be delirious (deacutelirer) fail or swoon (deacutefaillir) foil (deacutejouer) detach (deacutetacher) unbind or release (deacutelier) and the adverb already (deacutejagrave) already a signature in itself as Derrida (Jacques) was often given to point out And the remaining two hundred pages of text continue in similar vein tracing an infinitely proliferating deacutedale or daeligdal of words (a maze or labyrinth explains OED) synonymous only with its endlessly cunning yet dis-astrous displacements worthy of the great artifex to whose name it pays homage

The text that remains however is no verbal playground luxuriating in the dubious spectacle of preciosity masquerading as thought as readers of some of Blanchotrsquos later texts translated into English might on occasion legitimately wonder It is more simply that disaster deacutesastre is itself not a privileged word but always already itself a site of dis-aster Though it may appear to dominate Blanchotrsquos text disaster provides no stable centre but is only to be found disappearing into the void running down ready to explode and ever liable to turn into a white dwarf True enough concedes Blanchotrsquos text the recourse to paronomasia characteristic of many fragments may exhibit a fetishistic attachment to mere words But words suggests disaster are immensely powerful only because they are immensely weak and vice versa In any case they are radically inescapable And for that reason there is nothing to be done save to remain alert to languagersquos complex hidden freight which makes of each and every word not a self-identical point but always already a labyrinthine trail of other words each already giving way to the next in an infinite movement a lsquocircle unwound along a straight line rigorously prolonged reform[ing] a circle eternally bereft of centrersquo48

There is no fetishism therefore no fixity but cosmic motion lsquo If one says disasterrsquo a later fragment insists

we can sense that this is not a word a name or a noun [un nom] and that there is no such thing in general as any separate nominal predominant name or noun but always a whole intricate or simple phrase in which the infinity of language in its unfinished history its open system seeks to let itself be enlisted by a sequence


[processus] of verbs yet at the same time in the unresolved tension between name and verb to fall outside language as if suspended [comme en arrecirct] without however ceasing to belong to it49

It is with some justice then that Levinas in an interview with Philippe Nemo was moved to remark that Blanchot as he put it had given lsquothe noun ldquodisasterrdquo a verb-like meaningrsquo50 not least because as another fragment written in the margins of Derridarsquos Glas also explained lsquodisaster is the impropriety of its own name [son nom both name and noun] and the disappearance of the proper name (Derrida) neither noun nor verb but a remainder [un reste] which may be said to score [rayerait] by dint of invisibility and illegibility all that manifests itself and all that is spoken a remainder without result nor residue ndash patience still the passive when Aufhebung having become the unworkable [lrsquoinopeacuterable] ceasesrsquo51

In disaster then language is not all Something else without ever appearing as such unknown unnamed and unforeseen traverses each word effacing it and reinscribing it It does so however not as the transcendent or transcendental but lsquoasrsquo (as without as) the neuter the infinitely repetitive (re-)marking of difference prior to ontology Disaster perhaps is one of the many possible or impossible names of that difference which explains why disaster is both that which is most intimate to thought and most exterior to it taking care of all persistently exceeding its borders or margin Which is not to say that it may be possible to refuse to think disaster It rather implies the opposite Not just to give a name to disaster and understand what it was called and what it called for in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre but to think both the possibility and impossibility of thinking it at all this then was Blanchotrsquos arguably most difficult and most pressing challenge

II

Another epoch

uml reading these words from long ago lsquoInspiration this rootless speaking [cette parole errante] that reaches no end is the long night of insomnia and it is to defend himself against it by turning aside from it that the writer comes truly to write an activity which


restores him to the world where he is able to sleeprsquo or these others lsquoWhere I am dreaming something lies awake [cela veille] a waking which is astonishment at the dream and where indeed what lies awake in a present without duration is an impersonal presence [une preacutesence sans personne] the non-presence to which no being [aucun ecirctre] ever accedes and the grammatical formula for which might be said to be the third-person ldquoItrdquo [le ldquoIlrdquo] rsquo Why this reminder of the past [ce rappel] Why in spite of all they say about the uninterrupted waking [la veille ininterrompue] that persists behind dreaming and about the night that inspires insomnia do these words seem to be in need of being restated repeated in order to escape the meaning that animates them and to be diverted [deacutetourneacutees] from themselves and the discourse that uses them But in being restated they reintroduce a confidence thought to have been left behind [agrave laquelle on croyait avoir cesseacute drsquoappartenir] and take on an air of truthfulness say something lay claim to coherence saying you thought all this long ago you are therefore entitled to think it once again thereby restoring that reasonable continuity [continuiteacute raisonnable] which produces systems making the past function as a guarantee letting it become active capable of citing and inciting [citateur incitateur] preventing the invisible ruin that perpetual waking beyond consciousness-unconsciousness gives back to the neuter [rend au neutre]


returning in 1980 to these two passages first published in 1953 and 1961 already countersigned once before in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire and LrsquoAmitieacute respectively and now repeated re-cited and recontext-ualised for a third time Blanchot was recalling a description still formulated with the help of an authoritative quasi-phenomenological present But the present tense deployed in these vestigial extracts from the writerrsquos past output and in his later framing commentary as Le Pas aushydelagrave had shown was deceptive lsquoThe presentrsquo LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre reminds the reader lsquothough it may glory in moments [srsquoil srsquoexalte en instants] (appearing disappearing) forgets it cannot be contemporaneous with itselfrsquo53 Any present tense in other words together with the presence it served to designate was inseparable from the possibility of its return This meant that something in the present without being simply absent necessarily resisted appropriation by the present This possibility of return or repetition


or what Derrida calls iterability was an indispensable prerequisite for the appearance of any present but only in so far as it necessarily divided that present from itself rupturing its apparent homogeneity and breaching its claims to self-coincidence54 Without repetition there could be no present but repetition could only compromise the presence of the present supplying it so to speak with a silent companion a spectral shadow or ghostly double standing in for an unavailable past and a forever impending future and irreducible to presence and absence alike The present then was unavoidably traversed by something (uninterrupted waking the long night of insomnia repetition without end Blanchot calls it) which essential for its appearance as such by that token also prevented it from appearing entirely as what it took or gave itself to be It belonged to time only in so far as it was also withdrawn from time Proof of this was not hard to find It lay in the present fragment which returning to itself without ever having departed also provided an abyssal instantiation of what it affirmed for Blanchotrsquos text written in the present was also haunted by two other repeated fragments from long ago likewise in the present as indispensable to it as they were inassimilable as much inside as they were outside and as distinctively proper as they were irreducibly improper The present tense of writing was no present Blanchotrsquos fragmentary text was a remainder a spectral trace of what had never been present only ever a passive past response to its own non-occurrence

As Blanchot was well aware the philosophical implications of writingrsquos withdrawal of presence and the present are considerable Husserl with whose work the writer had long been familiar thought it essential as we have seen to privilege as the principle and touchstone of phenomenological inquiry what he called the lsquoliving present [die lebendige Selbstgegenwart living self-presence]rsquo55 But as Blanchotrsquos account of what he called lsquothe experience of artrsquo had already suggested in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire it was far from apparent how such a privilege might be assured in original or primordial fashion and it was not long before Derrida in La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene lsquoagainst Husserlrsquos express intentionrsquo as he pointedly put it began to suggest that lsquothe presence-of-the-present [la preacutesenceshydushypreacutesent] derives from repetition and not the reversersquo56 The present in so far as it was necessarily reliant on the passage of time was already by definition an intimation of mortality the originary meaning of I am Derrida argued was none other than I am mortal


lsquoThe appearing of the I to itself in the I amrsquo he explained lsquois originarily a relation with its own possible disappearancersquo The present was no sooner grasped than already lost lsquoOne can go furtherrsquo Derrida continued lsquoas language ldquoI am who I am [Je suis celui qui suis]rdquo is the admission [aveu] of a mortal The movement which leads from the I am to the determination of my being as res cogitans (and as immortality) is the very movement by which the origin of presence and ideality is concealed [se deacuterobe] in the presence and ideality it makes possiblersquo57 The absolute privilege conferred on the present in other words was grounded in relativity in an obfuscation or sleight-of-hand the present in the very terms in which it presented itself was inseparable from radical deferral disappearance death

The present tense in which Blanchotrsquos fragment rehearses and recapitulates its own past findings was already marked then structurally and thematically by the mortality of its author Death in turn however by dint of its unpresentable singularity was not an event that coincided with itself It too was the site of a repetitive doubling always future always past and not susceptible to be experienced in any present But if death la mort was necessary possibility suggests Blanchot drawing again on the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit so dying what Blanchot in LrsquoEcriture du deacutesastre as in Le Pas aushydelagrave calls le mourir using the substantivised infinitive to name an event outside any subjective or temporal horizon this was something other beyond power or possibility neither present nor absent as such and radically without term As Blanchot had put it in Le Pas aushydelagrave setting the two expressions side by side separated only by a silent comma their deceptive rhetorical similarity accentuating a more radical asymmetry lsquouml The unpredictability of death [la mort] the invisibility of dying [mourir]rsquo58 In a subsequent formulation obeying a force of repetition which was again an instance of what it described Blanchot once more returned to that relation and yielding to the initiative of words and the untranslatability of idiom addressed matters as follows

uml It is as though there is in death [la mort] something stronger than death dying itself [le mourir mecircme] ndash the intensity of dying the drive of the impossible undesirable even into the desired [la pousseacutee de lrsquoimpossible indeacutesirable jusque dans le deacutesireacute] Death is power and even potency ndash and thereby limited ndash it sets a term adjourns [ajourne] in the sense of assigning a given day


[un jour dit] both arbitrary and necessary even as it refers to an unspecified date [un jour non deacutesigneacute] But dying [le mourir] is absence of power [nonshypouvoir] interrupting the present [il arrache au preacutesent] always a crossing of the threshold excluding all term or end providing neither release nor shelter In death [la mort] it is possible to find illusory refuge the grave [la tombe] marks the stopping of the fall [lrsquoarrecirct de la chute] the funereal [le mortuaire] is the exit into the impasse Dying [le mourir] is the fleeting movement that draws into flight indefinitely impossibly and intensively59

What speaks then in mortality is not just the concealed ground of all presence but also that which is necessarily withdrawn from presence This much was already readable in Blanchotrsquos description of uninterrupted waking as resistance to presence and it was already embodied in the fragmentrsquos own recapitulative movement For language being always susceptible to repetition Blanchotrsquos fragment implied could not as a result not repeat itself which meant that words even if uttered in the first person were always already inhabited by an anonymous phantomatic third person doubling and expropriating the first presenting without presenting in spectral manner one alongside the other the finite and the infinite ie both the possibility of death and the impossibility of dying As Blanchot put it in his original essay on Leiris rewriting Descartes and Husserl alike lsquoI dream therefore it is being written [ Je recircve donc cela srsquoeacutecrit]rsquo60

But this was not all If to appropriate words in the effort to speak or write them in the first person was always to be expropriated by them in the third this also meant that expropriation in turn was the only available or even possible form of appropriation If the one was the other the other forcibly turned into the one To articulate this strangely reversible structure by which what was most proper to a name or signature was simultaneously and without contradiction that which was most improper to it (and vice versa) Derrida in a series of important studies from the early 1970s which found as we have seen a ready echo in Le Pas aushydelagrave coined the portmanteau term ex-appropriation However much a signature might be taken to frame a text and used to control its reading argued Derrida this was only possible in so far as the signature was already inscribed within that frame and exposed to the risk of being framed in its


turn The signature in other words was as much the product of the text as the text was an instantiation of the signature But as the signature forfeited all external authority what remained by a further turn of the wheel could not do other than acquire the status of a signature a signature that no longer belonged to the writer as progenitor of the work but served instead as a residual trace of the writer as illegitimate offspring of the text

But even as the author might no longer be deemed responsible for writing in the manner of the self-identical self-present origin of a text this did not relieve the writer of involvement On the contrary the writer recast as an effect of the work could not be other than absolutely answerable to it Literature lsquobeing inorganicrsquo wrote Bataille lsquois irresponsiblersquo lsquoNothing rests on it It can say everythingrsquo he continued but if Evil or negativity had sovereign value he also concluded this did not entail an absence of morality it demanded instead as Blanchot would later argue in respect of Nietzsche what Bataille described as a kind of lsquohypermorality [hypermorale]rsquo61 To write in other words and thus fall subject to the law of ex-appropriation was not to abdicate responsibility but on the contrary as Blanchotrsquos gesture of self-quotation demonstrates to be required willing or not to assume responsibility for writing not least by acknowledging that any text was part of an infinite conversation with literature philosophy history and politics So if on the one hand Blanchotrsquos fragmentary reprise of his own past texts confirmed the power of repetition as another entry has it as lsquorepetition of the extreme general collapse destruction of the presentrsquo62 on the other no less importantly through 1953 1955 1961 1971 1980 and beyond it testified to the continuity of a signature and of the thinking advanced and endorsed by that signature including in a paradox more apparent than real its enduring commitment to the impersonality of authorship and its unyielding recognition of the responsibilities of writing

Between these two versions of repetition now as dispersion now as gathering now as radical anonymity now as the persistence of a signature there was no contradiction as we have already seen It was rather that repetition this figure of anonymity impersonality and the neuter not only accounted for the inscription and erasure of the present but also presided over the possibility or impossibility of systematic thinking itself It is telling in this respect that in the course of a series of fragments exploring the relationship


between fragmentary writing and the philosophical System in an otherwise seemingly throwaway remark Blanchot cites a famous passage from Schellingrsquos 1810 Stuttgart Seminars suggesting that lsquothe soul is the properly divine in man the impersonal [das Unpersoumlnliche]rsquo and that lsquosince the human spirit [Geist] is related to the soul as something without being [Nichtseiendes] and without understanding [Verstandloses] its most profound essence considered separately from the soul and from God is madness [Wahnsinn] The understanding is regulated madness [geregelter Wahnsinn]rsquo63 reason in other words was inseparable from its opposite and from the prospect of its suspension or refutation This was not however to make an easy concession to the irrational What spoke just as incisively in Blanchotrsquos text is illustrated by what rereading Schleiermacher and Schlegel he also describes as an experience of reversal lsquoby producing a work [une œuvre]rsquo he wrote lsquoI give up [renonce] producing and formulating myself find fulfilment in something external and take my place within the nameless continuity of humankind ndash whence the relation work of art and encounter with death for in both cases we draw ever closer to a perilous threshold a crucial point at which we are abruptly turned inside out [brusquement retourneacutes]rsquo64

To write in other words was not to take possession of a world but to be excluded from it The point owing more than a little to the Lurianic Kabbala as we have seen is emphasised in another fragment reversing (while covertly retaining) a comment made by Edmond Jabegraves which had initially asked as follows lsquoIs dying [mourir] in the book to become visible for each and for oneself decipherable [deacutechiffrable]rsquo which Blanchot now refashioned to read lsquoMight it be that writing [eacutecrire] in the book is to become legible for each and for oneself indecipherable [indeacutechiffrable]rsquo65 If writing followed the logic not of death but of dying (mourir) suggested Blanchot the result was not increased visibility but legibility without manifestation and the enigmatic realisation that what was decipherable in writing for a writer was only that which being radically other was irreducibly indecipherable too What was personal or proper to the self was that which was rigorously impersonal or improper to it and as Blanchotrsquos revision stated this so by way of its reprise of a phrase borrowed from another it also performed in abyssal manner exactly what it said In so doing it showed that exclusion was not disengagement on the contrary producing the legible and the illegible alike it was the


exact opposite Which is also to say that writing could not but enter into complex dialogue with the philosophical tradition to which it was however not reducible Throughout LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Blanchotrsquos recognition of writingrsquos claims on thought remained far-reaching and unambiguous lsquoTo write in ignorance and without regard for the philosophical horizonrsquo he noted lsquoas punctuated gathered or dispersed by the words that delimit that horizon is necessarily to write with self-satisfied ease (the literature of elegance and good taste) Houmllderlin Mallarmeacute so many others do not allow us thisrsquo66

Of the various ways in which LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre takes up the philosophical tradition clearest in evidence at least in the initial sections of the book is the debt it owes to phenomenology Already from the outset the use of the word deacutesastre to signify cosmic interruption and a breaching of the established order of lsquobeing-in-the-world [lrsquoecirctreshydansshyleshymonde]rsquo67 was not without recalling and explicitly so the bracketing excluding and putting-out-of-action of the world by Husserlian epocheacute and it comes as no surprise to find a similarly subtractive gesture of thought described in analogous terms some pages later

uml Disaster does not make thought disappear only rids it of ques-tions and problems assertion and negation silence and speech sign and insignia At which point amidst the night without darkness bereft of sky heavy with the absence of world [lrsquoabsence de monde] withdrawn from all present of itself [tout preacutesent drsquoelleshymecircme] thought wakes [la penseacutee veille]68

What comes to be articulated for Blanchot in deacutesastre these lines suggest as in the phenomenological epocheacute is the uncanny capacity of thought or language without negating the world as such nonetheless if only provisionally to put its existence into parentheses in order to reflect on its meaningful articulation But between deacutesastre and epocheacute there is an essential and radical difference It is that while miming the epochal gesture constitutive of phenomenology deacutesastre was not however committed to recovering and renewing or refounding the origin (of world thought or meaning) but undertook the daunting more exacting task of thinking beyond any origin beyond experience beyond being beyond truth

If LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre put itself in phenomenologyrsquos debt therefore it was less by way of a speculative return to phenomenology


than a spectral return of phenomenology itself a phenomenology that is which no longer took existencersquos presence in the world as given nor to be its principal or guiding theme but sought instead to respond to the ghostly otherness before waking and sleeping conscious and unconscious visible and invisible worldly and unworldly occurring (without occurring) as exposure to repetition the outside and the neuter which preceded all presence and exceeding thematic understanding eluded all possibility of being grasped in or as itself As Blanchotrsquos text continues

What I do know in a convoluted contrived and only dimly related fashion [drsquoun savoir contourneacute controuveacute et adjacent] mdash with no relation to truth mdash is that waking in this sense [une telle veille] makes waking up or falling asleep impossible [ne permet ni eacuteveil ni sommeil] leaves thought beyond secrecy [hors secret] deprived of all intimacy a body of absence [corps drsquoabsence] exposed to do without itself [exposeacute agrave se passer de soi] without the ceaseless ever ceasing the exchange between the lively without life [du vif sans vie] and the dying without death [du mourir sans mort] where the lowest level of intensity does not put a stop to waiting nor has done with infinite prevarication As if lying awake [la veille] gently passively left us descending the perpetual staircase69

In that Blanchot in this fragment may be said to be examining the subjective or ideational structure of a common experience such as lying awake at night able neither properly to sleep nor properly to be roused these remarks might legitimately be thought at least in part to belong to traditional phenomenological inquiry But in so far as the description given shows little interest in what might be thought to appear to consciousness as evidence of the proper constitution and positing of meaning through the agency of a suitably commanding transcendental self and quite explicitly does away with presence experience subjectivity possibility world and truth it would be hard not to conclude the exact opposite

In the course of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre as in parts of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli and Le Pas aushydelagrave Blanchot turns his attention to several further affective personal or interpersonal structures including such well-worn phenomenological topics as suffering giving remembering forgetting speaking writing desire and death


Time and again however the effect is not to found the possibility of what is analysed but rather to challenge any possibility of foundation Blanchotrsquos account of patience is a case in point lsquoBe patientrsquo writes Blanchot repeating or citing an instantly recognisable but entirely banal commonplace remark which he then goes on to subject to detailed deconstructive scrutiny

uml lsquoBe patientrsquo Simple words They demanded much Patience has already deprived me [mrsquoa deacutejagrave retireacute] not only of my share of willing [ma part volontaire] but of my power to be patient if I am able to be patient it is because patience has not worn out in me that part of me where I hold myself fast Patience exposes me [mrsquoouvre] through and through [de part en part] to the point of a passivity that is the lsquonot of the entirely passiversquo [le lsquopas du tout agrave fait passifrsquo] and has therefore fallen below the level where passive is allegedly just the opposite of active in the same way as we fall outside inertia (the inert thing which suffers without reacting with its corollary living spontaneity purely autonomous activity) lsquoBe patientrsquo Who says such a thing There is nobody who can say it and nobody who can respond to it [lrsquoentendre hear or understand] Patience can neither be recommended nor imposed it is the passivity of dying [du mourir] in which a self [un moi] that is no longer myself [moi] answers for the limitlessness of disaster that which no present can remember70

The simplicity of language then is deceptive Patience in so far as it implies deferral sufferance temporisation argues Blanchot is necessarily incompatible with the magisterial authority of any consciously self-possessed empirical or transcendental self To decide intend or wish to be patient in other words is already to be impatient to seek to determine that which is paradoxically by essence indeterminable But if patience (from the Latin patientia suffering) is therefore understood as a yielding to the demand or demands of the other whether in the form of a person a thing or an event it cannot be construed in punctual or autarkic fashion but presupposes a degree of exposure to the other which is what Blanchot means by passivity (from Latin passivus capable of feeling or suffering) In order properly to address the singularity and specificity of patience Blanchot goes on passivity in turn needs to be thought in originary fashion ie not as inactivity following


or preceding activity on the part of the conscious subject nor as a kind of archeo-teleological predisposition preparing the way for subjectivity or consciousness since in either case this would mean accounting for it only in subsidiary or derived fashion Passivity then for Blanchot needs to be thought before the familiar binary opposition of active and passive (in which activity always takes precedence) and before that receptivity in the subject that for Husserl and the phenomenological tradition was subordinated to presence lsquoPassivityrsquo Blanchot remarks lsquois not simple receptivity [reacuteception] any more than it may be described as the formless [lrsquoinforme] and the inert [lrsquoinerte] matter lying ready [precircte] for any formrsquo71

Passivity does not occur in the present nor does it belong to the experience of any present subject and in so far as patience is a function of passivity then it too likewise can only be thought prior to the positing or positioning of a self In which case it follows that the phrase lsquobe patientrsquo cannot but be a contradiction in terms Whoever is addressed by those words is either already too much of a self to be thought to be properly patient or not enough of a self to be admonished in this way and whoever delivers such an instruction and claims both to be patient already and to know what it is to be patient is merely guilty of impatience twice over The everyday recommendation that Blanchot cites far from being an expression of commonplace possibility turns out to rest on an aporetical impossibility No sooner is the phrase spoken or written than it suspends withdraws and erases itself Patience nevertheless corresponds to an injunction indeed on Blanchotrsquos submission it is arguably little else a requirement that consists solely in a requirement To be patient in other words means simply to be required in an absolute sense exposed to the otherness of the other prior to subjective positioning and without it being possible to translate that requirement into any normative moral ethical political or aesthetic law though no law of whatever kind would be conceivable without it The requirement to be patient not only cannot be formulated as such it also necessarily precedes all other injunctions including itself

This perpetually retrocessive structure also affects the very words that Blanchotrsquos fragment invokes but then revokes For as Blanchot observes elsewhere notably in reply to Wittgensteinrsquos famous saw from the Tractatus (lsquoWhat we cannot speak about we must pass


over in silencersquo) it is only possible to acknowledge the limitations of words by recourse to more words72 The words lsquobe patientrsquo are self-defeating but in that defeat speaks something which they cannot say With the insertion of the simple device of always possible visible or invisible quotation marks detaching the words from themselves exposing their meaning to patient scrutiny Blanchotrsquos words become doubly self-defeating for they not only draw attention to their limitations they also bear witness to the limitlessness that extends beyond those limits without which those limits would not be perceptible at all lsquoBe patientrsquo as Blanchotrsquos commentary shows is an impossible injunction but what speaks in the impossibility of that injunction is the infinite passivity of patience without which there would be no words no language no injunction at all Words imply the necessary possibility of the absence disappearance and death of speaker or listener alike and if so it follows that that of which language always speaks but which words can never say is not death but dying beyond presence without end limitless disaster As Blanchot once wrote in the margins of a poem by Houmllderlin lsquo[s]peaking this we must [Parler il le faut] this this alone is right [convient] And yet ndash speaking is impossiblersquo73

If Blanchotrsquos analysis owes something to phenomenology it is in the patient way in which it explores the conditions of possibility of patience as such but as those conditions of possibility turn into aporetic conditions of impossibility as it becomes accordingly impossible to delimit or delineate the thematic consistency of any phenomenon lsquoas suchrsquo it is increasingly apparent that LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre enters into phenomenologyrsquos territory only to leave it behind engaging with phenomenology only to break with many if not all of its received assumptions which Blanchot pushes instead into a groundless abyss that is perhaps in the end only another name for the unthinkable of disaster as one fragment in italics now puts it lsquothat which retreats [se deacuterobe] in motionless flight remote from what lives and dies beyond experience [hors expeacuterience] beyond phenomena [hors pheacutenomegravene]rsquo74 lsquoIf I say disaster wakes [le deacutesastre veille]rsquo he has it a few pages earlier now in roman lsquoit is not to provide waking with a subject it is to say waking does not occur under a sidereal sky [un ciel sideacuteral]rsquo75

This was admittedly not the first time that phenomenology found its relationship to itself strained and pushed to the limit nor was it the first time among others that the phenomenon of uninterrupted


waking or insomnia had been the starting point for a rather different approach to worldly experience or being in the world Already in 1947 in pages that brought to a provisional conclusion ideas that may have first emerged in exchanges with Blanchot as far back as twenty years earlier Levinas in De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant had drawn on fatigue (la fatigue) and on idleness or laziness (la paresse) these entirely banal yet extreme and strangely limitless states of existence hitherto largely neglected by philosophy as being of interest merely to psychologists in an explicit attempt as he famously put it to reach beyond the intellectualism of Husserlian transcendental consciousness and to quit the climate of Heideggerian fundamental ontology76 For while Husserl and Heidegger in radically differing ways had begun by addressing questions of possibility (the possible constitution of the world by transcendental consciousness here the possibility of impossibility on which Dasein was grounded there) Levinas for his part adopted a very different starting point lsquoWhenever the continual interplay of our relations with the world is interruptedrsquo he wrote in 1947 evoking the contrasting legacy of his two precursors only to turn aside from their example lsquowhat one finds contrary to what one might think is not death nor the ldquopure egordquo but the anonymous fact of being [le fait anonyme de lrsquoecirctre]rsquo lsquorelation with a worldrsquo he added lsquois not synonymous with existence which precedes the worldrsquo77 What spoke in fatigue or idleness for Levinas then was not a relation with worldly experience or the properness or improperness of existence but the exact opposite the irreducibility of subjectivity to world or to being or non-being and the realisation that if being was already synonymous with its own unanswerable questions and questioning so the only task left for philosophy was for it to step beyond being no longer to search for the truth as such but to think the demands of what with considerable daring Levinas called le bien the good78

More then was at stake than the task of producing an adequate phenomenological description of fatigue or idleness Later in the discussion Levinas added to this initial list of negative or marginal affective states the experience of waking or insomnia and the horror of the dark drawing to do so on a series of literary examples including the 1941 version of Blanchotrsquos Thomas lrsquoObscur79 lsquoThe there is [Lrsquoil y a] ndash the play of being ndash is not played out through acts of forgetting [des oublis]rsquo explained Levinas discreetly rebuffing


Heidegger lsquoand does not insert itself into sleep like a dream Its very event consists in an impossibility ndash in an opposition to possibilities ndash of sleeping relaxing drowsiness absencersquo lsquoWaking [La veille]rsquo he went on lsquois anonymous There is not my wakefulness [ma vigilance] to the night in insomnia it is night itself that wakes Something wakes [Ccedila veille literally that ndash indeterminate and impersonal ndash wakes] In this anonymous waking in which I am entirely exposed to being [lrsquoecirctre] all the thoughts that fill my insomnia are suspended from nothing [suspendues agrave rien] They are without support I am so to speak the object rather than the subject of anonymous thinking [drsquoune penseacutee anonyme]rsquo80

At issue here suggests Levinas is something which though it may up to a point still be susceptible to phenomenological description has already begun to leave the orbit of that philosophy lsquothe affirmation of an anonymous vigilancersquo he notes lsquogoes beyond any phenomenon which already presupposes an ego [un moi] and thus escapes descriptive phenomenologyrsquo81 lsquoThe world of forms opens like a bottomless abyssrsquo he writes some pages later referring to the here of sleeping prior to understanding horizon and time radically detaching it from the Da- of Heideggerian Dasein (in so far as Dasein Levinas explains lsquoalready implies the worldrsquo) At such moments Levinas goes on lsquothe cosmos bursts apart [eacuteclate] leaving chaos gaping wide [pour laisser beacuteer le chaos] ie the abyss the absence of place the there is [lrsquoil y a]rsquo82 As for the experience of impending death this ultimate possibility according to Heidegger the lesson for Levinas as for Blanchot was starkly different lsquoWhat is important in the approach to deathrsquo remarked Levinas in a lecture delivered to Jean Wahlrsquos Collegravege philosophique shortly after lsquois that at a certain point we are no longer able to be able [nous ne pouvons plus pouvoir]rsquo83

More than thirty years after De lrsquoexistence aux existants returning to the experience without experience of uninterrupted waking and pursuing in his own fashion the post-phenomenological project he shared with Levinas Blanchot in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was no doubt aware of revisiting a familiar topos albeit one where what was at issue was familiarity itself its persistence and its strangeness and which by dint of Blanchotrsquos rewriting was once again exposed to the dual effects of repetition now as gathering now as dispersion now as a possible theme now as what preceded the positing of any theme and in either case beyond the authority of


any transcendental self which is precisely what Blanchotrsquos writing went on not only to describe in what it said but also to dramatise in the movement of its saying Taking up once more in 1980 this question of insomnia of lying awake at night Blanchot writes as follows

Waking [La veille] is without beginning or end To wake [veiller] is in the neuter lsquoIrsquo do not wake the impersonal wakes [on veille] night wakes always and unceasingly hollowing out the night to the point of the other night where there can be no question of sleeping Waking occurs only at night Night is a stranger to that wakefulness which acts [srsquoexerce] and fulfils its purpose [srsquoaccomplit] bearing lucid reason to what it must retain in reflection in protecting identity Waking is strangeness it does not awake from any prior slumber while also being a rewakening [reacuteveil] a constant insistent return to the motionlesness of waking Something wakes [Cela veille] without lying in wait or being on the look-out Disaster wakes [Le deacutesastre veille] Where there is waking when slumbering consciousness opening as a state of unconsciousness [inconscience] gives free rein to the light of dreaming what wakes waking [veiller the impersonal infinitive] or the impossibility of sleeping at the heart of sleep is not lit up in terms of an increase in visibility or reflective brilliance Who wakes Precisely the question is set aside [eacutecarteacutee] by the neutrality of waking nobody wakes Waking is no first-person waking power since it is not power but a reaching to the infinite without power exposure to the other of the night where thought renounces the vigour of vigilance worldly clearsightedness perspicacious mastery given over to the limitless prevarication of insomnia the wake which does not wake nocturnal intensity84

In the first instance this fragment is easily legible as a recapitulation and extension of Levinasrsquos 1947 description of insomniac waking and it is even possible that in writing lsquoCela veillersquo in 1980 Blanchot was aware of reproducing almost exactly Levinasrsquos earlier equivalent phrase lsquoCcedila veillersquo repetition however does not guarantee identity and between the description put forward by Levinas and the abyssal reflections of Blanchotrsquos fragment there is striking dissymmetry having to do perhaps most clearly with the dissymmetrical logic of repetition itself This is apparent in the ends to which these two


convergent but nonetheless distinct ways of thinking insomnia are put For Levinas the purpose was resolutely philosophical The challenge given the always prior anonymity of being was to deduce or derive the possibility of individual consciousness In that process waking provided an essential moment of transition For Levinas in so far as it corresponded to a moment of realisation or self-awareness waking served to introduce into the anonymity of being an irreducible event a fold a discontinuity a pause which interrupting the timelessness of the il y a announced the possibility and positionality of an individual consciousness what Levinas in his work of the mid-1940s and after described as hypostasis As he explains

The there is [Lrsquoil y a] lacks rhythm in the same way that the teeming multiplicity of darkness [points grouillants de lrsquoobscuriteacute] lacks perspective The positing of a subject is needed [Il faudrait la position drsquoun sujet] for it to be possible for an instant to irrupt into being and for this insomnia which is like the very eternity of being [lrsquoeacuteterniteacute mecircme de lrsquoecirctre] to cease

We thus introduce into the impersonal event of the there is [lrsquoil y a] not the notion of consciousness but waking [la veille] in which consciousness participates even as it asserts itself as consciousness precisely because it does no more than participate in it Consciousness is a part of waking which means it has already torn it in two [deacutechireacutee] It comprises precisely a shelter [abri] from that being which depersonalising ourselves we reach in insomnia the being [cet ecirctre] which is neither lost nor duped nor forgotten ndash which if we may hazard the expression is completely sobered up [dessaoucircleacute]85

Waking for Levinas in other words has a dual function while embodying exposure to the anonymity of being it also provides the chance of its suspension and thereby prompts the emergence of a subject For Levinas this was admittedly not an end in itself but a step towards reorientating phenomenology not in the direction of a thinking (or forgetting) of Being but a more originary rearticulation of the relation without relation of Same and Other In subsequent years this project was to undergo significant further development the strategy deployed in 1947 nevertheless remained a crucial resource the effects of which are still plain to see in a later text such as Autrement qursquoecirctre There too as Levinasrsquos closing chapter


makes clear it was the role of what he called the subjectivity of the subject irreducible to presence consciousness or thematisation to transcend the oppressively exclusive alternative largely attributed to Heidegger between being and non-being Thus Levinas arguing the case as so often elsewhere through an idiosyncratic patchwork of rhetorical questions bold assertions and syntactically undecidable interjections

Is it the case that the subject escapes the Concept and Essence [Essence as explained in a preliminary note this is Levinasrsquos version of Heideggerian Being] mdash anxiety before death and horror at the there is [lrsquoil y a] mdash only in resignation and in illusion against which in the hour of truth or the inevitable awakening Essence is more powerful Is it not possible to understand the subjectivity of the subject from beyond Essence as though on the basis of an Exit [Sortie] from the concept mdash a forgetting of being and of non-being Not forgetting lsquouncheckedrsquo [sans lsquocontrocirclersquo] still held within the bipolarity of Essence between being [lrsquoecirctre] and nothingness [le neacuteant] But a forgetting that might be said to be ignorance [ignorance] in the sense that nobility is ignorant of what is not noble and certain monotheists refuse to acknowledge [ne reconnaissent pas] while knowing it for what it is [tout en le connaissant] that which is not the most high [le plus haut] Ignorance beyond consciousness open-eyed ignorance86

As Levinas insists this attempt to describe beyond being and non-being what some pages further on he calls lsquoa third condition or uncondition [incondition inconditionality] of an excluded third [drsquoun tiers exclu an excluded middle]rsquo87 retained a strong commitment to the spirit of phenomenological inquiry in particular to the Husserlian concept of intentionality with its recognition of the transcendence of otherness though Levinas would develop its implications far beyond what Husserlrsquos own work seemed to allow88 Indeed at the same time as he sought to keep faith with Husserlrsquos legacy Levinasrsquos more urgent project was to move decisively beyond its strictly phenomenological horizon which he sought to do on the basis of that strange logic of substitution of indifference and responsibility combined which Levinas called lrsquounshypourshylrsquoautre the one-for-the-other in order to address subjectivity


as a kind of pre-ontological condition of possibility paradoxically irreducible to all phenomenality and thematisation as such As Levinas continued

the appearing [apparoir becoming manifest] of being is not the ultimate legitimation of subjectivity mdash it is here that the present inquiry ventures beyond phenomenology In the subjective the notions mdash and the essence they only articulate mdash lose the consistency offered them by the theme in which they manifest themselves Not in finding themselves to be lsquopsychic contentsrsquo in a lsquosubject opposed to an objectrsquo On the contrary it is in hyperbole in the superlative in the excellence of signification to which they return [remontent] mdash in the transcendence that passes through them or surpasses itself in them which is not a mode of being showing itself in a theme mdash that notions and the essence they articulate break apart and come to be knotted together in human intrigue Exteriorityrsquos emphasis is excellence Height heaven The kingdom of heaven is ethical89

In words such as these Levinasrsquos own post-phenomenological project says something of its essential overriding purpose already apparent in germ in the 1947 description of insomnia and waking In recasting the subject in its subjectivity not as presence but as a kind of radical passivity always already in the past prior to consciousness and manifestation as such the denuded and impotent hostage of an absolute unmediated and unnegotiable relation without relation with the transcendence of the other and beyond any established order of being or non-being irredeemably breached and exceeded to affirmative effect the task Levinas set himself was an unambiguous one For all that its decisive refusal of ontology made it virtually unique in the whole of modern philosophy whose foundations it sought to contest Levinasrsquos project no less than that of Husserl albeit in radically different fashion was likewise a constitutive one Its purpose was not to found the possibility of worldly experience and scientific understanding nor indeed contrary to a common misconception to formulate a religious or post-religious moral philosophy More radically and far more importantly it was to lay the philosophical foundations for the possibility and the necessity of an ethics a prescription giving precedence and priority to the demands of the Other


Between Levinasrsquos philosophical enterprise and the thinking detailed in the fragmentary writing of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre the relationship is complex Areas of explicit or implicit agreement are many the effort to think passivity and pastness outside of the received binary pairings of past and present active and passive the rearticulation of responsibility and responsiveness as proceeding not on grounds of the authority of the self but from the distance and exteriority of the Other the refusal of the all-inclusive imperium of ontology all this and more though not necessarily in the same terms nor with the same inflection finds a ready echo in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre as too does the discreet but nonetheless insistent memory of the death camps90 But this is not to say there are not important differences of emphasis language and purpose between the late work of the two friends some of which reach back to earlier exchanges between the pair91 The most obvious divergences are those of vocabulary While Blanchot not unlike Levinas plots in some detail (as he already had in Le Pas aushydelagrave) the reciprocal implications of passivity passing the past and passion it is noticeable that such other important Levinasian terms as ethics or the ethical transcendence substitution feature only marginally now in negative terms now as implicit quotations or even not at all in Blanchotrsquos text92 And among these divergences the most symptomatic of all was the different interpretation offered by Levinas and by Blanchot of that most durable of shared concerns dating back to the mid-1940s if not before and crucially at stake in their respective analyses of insomniac waking the anonymity or impersonality of being and nothingness identified with the there is the il y a93

For Levinas the il y a this exemplary token of the inescapable burden of being and non-being alike was that which it was necessary to interrupt in order to affirm and preserve the transcendence of the Other without which for Levinas no possibility of ethics or the ethical could be thought at all True enough he conceded if ethical perspectives were to have any effect in the world meaning and justice needed to be thematised as such within being lsquoThe indefinite time of essence the neutrality of its historical flowrsquo he pointed out lsquois that to which the dia-chrony of the one-for-the-other itself refers it manifests itself in this timersquo But this was only part of the story As Levinas went on

the imperturbable essence equal and indifferent to all responsibility which it henceforth encompasses turns as in insomnia from this neutrality and equality into monotony anonymity insignificance


into an incessant buzzing that nothing can stop any longer and which absorbs all signification even that of which this bustling about is a modality Essence stretching out indefinitely without restraint or interruption mdash the equality of essence not justifying in all equity any instantrsquos halt mdash without respite without possible suspension mdash such is the horrifying there is behind all finality proper to the thematising ego which cannot not sink into the essence it thematises94

Thematisation however argues Levinas is not all and it is precisely for that reason the stifling rule of the il y a can be suspended Oddly then the horror inspired by the il y a allows it to reverse itself radical immanence turns into radical transcendence with always the risk Blanchot suggests that the turn may prove not so much definitive but reversible which might then suggest that what speaks in the il y a is less the omnipotence of being than what Blanchot calls lsquothe impossibility of not being [lrsquoimpossibiliteacute de ne pas ecirctre]rsquo an anoriginal repetitiveness without beginning or end bereft of consistency interiority or truth For this is Blanchotrsquos alternative interpretation of the il y a no longer the oppressive dominion of being but the exacting rigour of impersonality or neutrality as that which precedes and has therefore always already interrupted being and non-being alike and finds expression not in meaning including the meaningfulness of the Levinasian one-for-the-other but in the vacuity of words language writing95 As Blanchot explains in a fragment that hardly by coincidence falls almost exactly halfway through LrsquoEacutecriture du desastre separating the text into two joining the book to itself while also disjoining it from itself and making a twofold intervention into philosophical ontologico-ethical language as such

uml Between these two falsely interrogative propositions why is there something rather than nothing and why is there evil in the world rather than good I cannot see the difference that it is claimed can be detected since both are borne by a lsquothere isrsquo [un laquo il y a raquo] which is neither being nor nothingness neither good nor evil and without which the whole thing collapses or has therefore already collapsed Above all the there is [lrsquoil y a] as neuter [en tant que neutre] outplays [se joue] the questions brought to bear upon it if questioned it ironically absorbs the


question which cannot gain purchase upon it [le surplomber dominate it] Even if it allows itself to be overcome it is because defeat is what is incongruously congruous to it just as bad infinity in its perpetual repetitiveness determines it as true in so far as it (falsely) imitates transcendence and in that way exposes its essential ambiguity and the impossibility for this to be measured according to what is true or just96

Always already preceding itself prior to being or non-being irreducible to the opposition between immanence and transcendence which it folds together and exceeds the neuter or neutre raised one further question in respect of Blanchotrsquos reading of Levinas and the legacy of phenomenology Levinasrsquos work had already displaced the question of the relationship in Blanchotrsquos own work between fragmentary writing and philosophy Levinas for the success of his own project was only too aware of the importance of distinguishing between what in a simple but rhetorically effective move he called philosophyrsquos Said its Dit and its Saying its Dire ie on the one hand its finite conceptual fabric embodied in thematisation and systematicity and on the other the infinity of its address to the Other If the Said served to confirm ontology Saying was what interrupted it lsquoTo enter into being and truthrsquo Levinas argued deploying a version of the phenomenological reduction

is to enter into the Said [le Dit] being is inseparable from its meaning It is spoken It is in the logos Here though is the reduction of the Said to Saying beyond the Logos being and non-being mdash beyond essence mdash truth and non-truth mdash the reduction to meaning [signification] to the one-for-the-other of responsibility (or more exactly substitution) mdash place or non-place place and non-place the utopia of the human mdash the reduction to restlessness [inquieacutetude] in the literal sense of the word or its diachrony which despite all its assembled forces despite all the forces it brings together simultaneously in union being [lrsquoecirctre] is incapable of eternalising97

In its responsiveness to the task of unsaying ndash of deacuteshydire ndash what philosophically it could not do otherwise than say Levinasrsquos thinking did not sit unproblematically within the history of Western philosophy


as Blanchot among others was quick to acknowledge reinforcing the point in a kind of abyssal supplementary footnote one of only two in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre as a whole lsquowhat is pronounced [srsquoeacutenonce] or rather announced [srsquoannonce] with Levinasrsquo he argued lsquois an excess [un surplus a supplement] a beyond the universal [un aushydelagrave de lrsquouniversel] a singularity that may be called Jewish and which waits still to be thoughtrsquo98 But though Levinasrsquos thinking was not reducible to the so-called Greek universalising tradition Blanchot added the fact remained that lsquoin many respects [agrave bien des eacutegards]rsquo Levinasrsquos lsquoother philosophyrsquo was still lsquoldquoeternal philosophy [la philosophie eacuteternelle]rdquorsquo not least because for Blanchot as for Levinas there was (and could rightly be) no other This much was clear from Levinasrsquos unstinting fidelity to the phenomenological reduction at the very moment when he sought to draw on its resources to transcend the philosophical System as such But the reduction of the Said to Saying had its pitfalls that Blanchot was careful to indicate albeit discreetly in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre He did this in at least four ways first by placing in apposition to the word Dire itself put into parentheses the alternative term eacutecriture second by underlining the word Dire alongside a conditional verb (lsquothis responsible passivity that might be termed Saying [qui serait Dire]rsquo) thus putting the word at a distance from itself third by using it in his own text in a different negative sense in the context of the dangers of etymology to denote the language of teleology lsquowords having become the sacred depository of all lost latent meaningsrsquo he noted lsquothe recovery of which is henceforth the task of whoever writes in view of some final Saying [Dire final] or counter-Saying [contreshyDire]rsquo and lastly with the addition of an explicitly sceptical caveat taking issue with its implicit phenomenological assumptions lsquolet us repeat with Levinasrsquo he writes at one stage lsquothough he privileges Saying [le Dire] as the gift of meaningfulness [don de signifiance] ldquoLanguage is already scepticismrdquorsquo99

Despite his many sympathies with Levinasrsquos project then Blanchot at this point demurred suggesting sotto voce that the opposition between the Saying and the Said was perhaps too easily hostage to an originary privileging of speech and meaningfulness In this respect it is striking that when Blanchot goes on to use Levinasrsquos formulation elsewhere as when he refers three years later for instance in Apregraves coup lsquoprior to any distinction between form and content signifier and signified even before the divide [partage]


between uttering [eacutenonciation] and utterance [eacutenonceacute]rsquo to lsquothe unqualifiable Saying [le Dire inqualifiable] the glory of a ldquonarrating voicerdquorsquo100 it was to appeal to something more originary or perhaps better more originally anoriginal than the Levinasian opposition beween Saying and Said Dire in Blanchotrsquos sense ndash writing saying speaking ndash had therefore less to do with ethical transcendence with all the problems this entailed than with the unmasterable return of the neuter traversing immanence and transcendence alike finding temporary expression perhaps in literature but only in so far as literature under the effect without effect of the neuter was always already an erasure and a reinscription a remainder

But if Levinasian Saying had its drawbacks was there perhaps another way of eluding the philosophical System in order to address the relationship between philosophy and what it excluded These were questions that preoccupy several fragments in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre This was hardly surprising for the issue at stake was none other than that of the status of Blanchotrsquos text as a place of encounter between philosophy and the fragmentary

For that encounter to occur at all Blanchot argued it was clear that the relationship between the two could not be construed as one of continuity nor indeed as one of opposition The event of the fragmentary in other words demanded to be thought in a radically different way As he explained

uml The demand of the fragmentary [lrsquoexigence fragmentaire] motions [fait signe] to the System which it dismisses (just as it dismisses in principle any authorial self) without however ceasing to make it present just as in any binary alternative the other term cannot altogether suppress [faire oublier] the first term which it needs in order to be substituted for it To criticise the System accurately [La critique juste du Systegraveme] does not consist (as is so often idly assumed) in catching it out [le prendre en faute] or in interpreting it insufficiently (as even Heidegger does at times) but in treating it as invincible beyond criticism or as the current phrase is impossible to ignore [incontournable] In that case with nothing eluding it by dint of its omnipresent unity and gathering together of everything [rassemblement de tout] there is no place left for fragmentary writing except for it to emerge as the impossible necessary [le neacutecessaire impossible] which writes itself through time [de par le temps] outside time


[hors temps] in a suspension [suspens] which without reserve [sans retenue] breaks the seal of unity precisely by not breaking it but by leaving it to one side without possibility of discovery In this way fragmentary writing may be deemed not to belong to the One in that it may be said to distance itself [srsquoeacutecarterait] from manifestation And in this way too it may be taken to denounce thought as experience (in whatever way the word is understood) no less than it does thought as completion of everything [accomplissement de tout]101

Less as an identifiable genre than as a requirement irreducible to any given genre the fragmentary in its role as ghostly double both accompanies and yet does not accompany the philosophical System as Blanchot calls it drawing most likely on Heideggerrsquos recently published (and newly translated) 1936 seminar on Schellingrsquos Treatise on Human Freedom102 The fragmentary suspends the System in other words while also remembering its possibility it is not without relation with the System therefore perhaps even to the extent of retaining some back-handed dialectical responsibility for its actual emergence here as elsewhere the fragmentary for Blanchot is never without risk For all that the fragmentary is not simply opposed to the System which it neither criticises nor directly challenges in the knowledge that to do so would mean being incorporated into the System preferring instead to let the System run its totalising course it occupies no properly identifiable place or position either positively or negatively neither inside nor outside the System as such

So if the System in say Hegel or Schelling these erstwhile fellow students of Houmllderlin is to be understood as Heidegger puts it as lsquothe totality of Being in the totality of truth and of the history of truth [das Ganze des Seyns im Ganzen der Wahrheit und der Geschichte der Wahrheit]rsquo103 this can only imply that the fragmentary in its relation of non-relation with totality somehow falls outside the jurisdiction of being including the truth of being being as truth the truth of history and history as truth All it (is) in other words in Derridarsquos formulation (is) a remainder neither absent nor present but irreducible to all being found (without being found) adds Blanchot only at the unthinkable conjunction (without conjunction) between the impossible and the necessary this place without place that is irreducibly aporetic and though the


hierarchy of terms is reversed is reminiscent only of death of la mort impossible neacutecessaire that necessary impossible death which Blanchot returning to Hegel Heidegger and Levinas invokes some pages later as the abyssal impossibility on which language is founded ndash and founders104

But how to think further this abruptly unmediated encounter between the necessary and the impossible between incontrovertible law and inassimilable interruption How to address what resists or exceeds thinking And faced with impossible necessity or necessary impossibility how to avoid simply lapsing into incredulity

Levinas for whom lsquo[l]anguage is already scepticismrsquo as we have seen once more offered a clue Blanchot quotes the phrase twice over in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre and cites it a third time in his 1980 tribute105 In doing this Blanchot no less than Levinas was aware of laying claim however obliquely to a long discredited body of thought which had already been set aside or overcome by mainstream philosophy most famously perhaps by Hegel who in The Phenomenology of Spirit as Blanchot recalls lsquomade it into a privileged moment in the systemrsquo106 Likewise Husserl who in explaining the phenomenological reduction was quick to insist that placing the world in parentheses as he put it neither implied nor entailed any doubt as to its existence Scepticism on the other hand Husserl maintained by challenging the existence of the world on the basis of evidence that could only be derived from experience of the world was a fatally contradictory self-defeating doctrine107 There was of course a reason for Husserlrsquos sensitivity It was that the word epocheacute originally meaning suspension of judgement was itself a borrowing from the sceptics Pyrrho of Elis for instance in the third century BCE as Diogenes Laertius famously records in Book Nine of his Lives of Eminent Philosophers considered epocheacute to be the end or telos of philosophy as such alone conducive to tranquillity (ataraxia)108 True enough the epocheacute of the ancient sceptics was hardly the same as the phenomenological concept introduced and developed more than two millennia later by Husserl But the proximity between the two was more than simply accidental and was surely of more than passing interest to Blanchot who only months after his friend Levinas had successfully defended his doctorate on Husserlrsquos theory of intuition at the University of Strasbourg had completed in June 1930 a dissertation of his own for the Diplocircme drsquoeacutetudes Supeacuterieures at


the Sorbonne ndash on the subject of lsquoLa Conception du dogmatisme chez les sceptiquesrsquo109

In the absence of Blanchotrsquos actual dissertation yet to be rediscovered one can but speculate on its general orientation and findings It is nevertheless worth recalling the particular usage of the term dogma by the authors on whom Blanchot was most likely working which may cast some light on the dissertationrsquos concerns Writing in the second or third century Sextus Empiricus the sceptical thinker whose work has been most extensively preserved and whom Blanchot mentions in his 1980 tribute to Levinas as though still vividly remembering their fifty-year-old conversations on epocheacute in Husserl and the ancient sceptics sought to differentiate between three categories of thinkers those who like the disciples of Aristotle or Epicure or like the Stoics claimed to have discovered truth those who like the followers of Clitomachus Carneades and other academicians deemed truth to be ungraspable or inaccessible and finally those who had not given up their inquiries and were still searching for answers110 The first two groups according to Sextus deserved the title of dogmatists in that both groups were certain they were in possession of the truth irrespective whether it was construed in positive or negative terms The third group who had yet to reach any conclusions these were skeptikoi the sceptics The word is said to derive from Greek skeptesthai meaning to inquire or to consider though the OED also suggests it is related to the noun skopos an observer or watchman in which case it might follow that for Blanchot at least scepticism was but another instance of uninterrupted waking

According to Sextus the burden of classical scepticism pace Husserl was not to deny the existence of the external world it had rather to do with propositional truth or falsity ie what it was possible to say about worldly experience lsquoThe key principle of sceptical argumentrsquo he writes lsquois that opposed to every proposition is an equal proposition for we believe that it is on that basis that we cease to dogmatisersquo111 lsquoThose who say that the sceptics reject appearancesrsquo he continues lsquoseem to me to have paid little attention to what we say For we do not overthrow the affective sense impressions which induce our assent involuntarily and these impressions are what appearances are And when we question whether the underlying object is such as it appears we grant the fact that it appears and our doubt does not concern the appearance itself


but the account given of that appearance and that is different from questioning the appearance itselfrsquo112 readers may recognise in these words something of the questioning of the authority and power of truth attributed to the work of Blanchot and various contemporaries It would however be not only anachronistic but also inaccurate to equate the scepticism of Sextus with the cultural relativism associated with what is commonly known as postmodernism ndash not least because from Sextusrsquos perspective if parallels can be drawn at all contemporary relativism in its peremptory self-certainty would more nearly equate to a form of dogmatism than critical scepticism a thought that Blanchot underlines in his turn as we shall see by radically differentiating scepticism from the nihilism with which it is so often confused

What the countertemporal turn to the legacy of ancient scepticism nevertheless uncovered for Blanchot and Levinas alike was evidence of the limits set on philosophyrsquos systematic investment in ontology rationalism and truth According to traditional metaphysics scepticism was fatally flawed not least by the implicit contradiction between what it propounded ie that in matters of truth it was appropriate to suspend judgement and the discourse on which it relied in order to establish the truthfulness plausibility or coherence of its own position (in so far as it had one) But for Levinas this was to miss the point From the perspective of his post-ontological insistence on the asymmetry between Same and Other scepticism was decisive proof of the irreducible gap between Saying and the Said on which its philosophical possibility did indeed turn But on Levinasrsquos submission it was precisely the ineliminability of that discrepancy that explained scepticismrsquos perpetual always fantomatic return (lsquoScepticism is the refutablersquo he wrote lsquobut also the returning ghost [le revenant]rsquo) and accounted for the fact that even if refuted scepticism was nevertheless possessed of what he called lsquoinvincible forcersquo113 As Levinas explains

The periodic return of both scepticism and its refutation signifies a temporality in which instants resist the memory which reclaims [reacutecupegravere] and re-presents Scepticism as it traverses the rationality or logic of knowledge is a refusal to synchronise the implicit affirmation contained in saying and the negation which this affirmation articulates [eacutenonce] in the Said To the reflection which refutes it the contradiction is visible but scepticism remains


insensitive to it as though the affirmation and the negation did not sound [ne reacutesonnaient pas] together at the same time Scepticism therefore challenges the thesis according to which what is repeated between the saying and the said is the relation that binds in synchrony the condition to the conditioned As though what counted for scepticism was the difference between my exposure [mon exposition] mdash without reserve mdash to the other which is Saying and the exposition [exposition] or statement of the Said in its equilibrium and its justice114

In revisiting ancient scepticism then Levinas did not seek to refute its refutation and thus rehabilitate it as a discourse delivering superior truth More importantly it was to find in scepticism a repressed and always already re-emergent instantiation of what he calls the dia-chrony of Saying that decoupling of the infinite act of utterance from any finite utterance which in turn he maintained was proof of the excess or ethical ex-cellence of Saying with regard to the Said

In commenting on Levinasrsquos project in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Blanchot as we have seen was already expressing discreet reservations about the lingering phenomenological assumptions of Levinasian Saying rereading Levinasrsquos pages on scepticism earlier the same year for lsquoNotre compagne clandestinersquo Blanchot continued quietly to press the case The emphasis of his account again fell on some of the implications of Levinasian Saying

Enigma of a Saying as though belonging to a God [comme drsquoun Dieu] speaking in man [lrsquohomme humankind] man who relies on no God for whom there is no residing who is exiled from all world and without other-worldly transcendence [sans arriegravereshymonde] and who lastly does not even have language as an abode [demeure] any more than he may be thought to have language in order to speak by way of affirmation or negation This is why Levinas returning to the discussion of scepticismrsquos invincibility also says (if memory serves) that lsquolanguage is already scepticismrsquo where the emphasis can be placed on already and not only because language may be deemed inadequate or consist essentially of negativity or even because it may be thought to exceed the limits of thinking [du penser] or else perhaps because of its relation with the ex-cessive and in so far as it bears the


trace of what passed by [ce qui a passeacute] without presence of a trace that left no trace always already effaced bearing the trace however beyond being Language in this way may be deemed scepticism admittedly as language that denies the possibility of clinging [srsquoen tenir] to certain knowledge or does not allow transparent communication but because of that as language that exceeds all language while not exceeding it the language of epocheacute or as Jean-Luc Nancy has it of syncope The scepticism of language thus takes from us up to a certain point (a limit that remains undecided [indeacutecise]) all guarantee by reason of which it does not enclose us in what it might claim should be a caution or condition115

As elsewhere when Blanchot responds to the work of Levinas it is hard to find evidence of what might properly be termed opposition or contradiction between the thinking of the two friends And yet as Blanchot rehearses these key concerns of Levinas there is a noticeable shift in emphasis leading the argument in the course of four intricately interwoven propositions away from Saying God or transcendence and towards language as both limit and limitless-ness inscription and erasure interruption and interminability not as dia-chronic wisdom therefore but as a radical absence of all guarantee Admittedly Blanchotrsquos formulation concedes its own debt to the phenomenological epocheacute whose legacy it discreetly overwrites however by means of a reference to Jean-Luc Nancyrsquos reading of Kant and of the question of presentation in literature and philosophy after Kant in the process returning a favour for Le Discours de la syncope in 1976 had concluded with a quotation from an essay by Blanchot on one of Francersquos most celebrated phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty in which as Nancy recalls approvingly and as Blanchot might have written apropos of Levinas (and in agreement with Levinas) one reads that lsquo[p]hilosophical discourse always at a certain moment loses itself [se perd ie both loses its way and fades away] it may even be no more than a relentless process of losing and of losing oneself [de perdre et de se perdre]rsquo116

Scepticism too for Blanchot perhaps from his earliest years as a reader of philosophy was one of the places where philosophy lost track of itself not in order to find itself in nihilistic contradiction with itself nor indeed to find itself transformed into something


other than itself but rather to find itself suspended by something neither inside nor outside and on which it had as a result no possible purchase something that was for itself without name but which here or there might receive provisional acknowledgement under a proliferation of other possible-impossible guises as scepticism the neuter the fragmentary or even perhaps as disaster Thus scepticism in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre playing a similar role as elsewhere falls to the fragmentary or the neuter

uml Scepticism a name that has scored out its own etymology and all etymology is not indubitable doubt nor is it simply nihilist negation rather irony Scepticism is bound [est en rapport] to the refutation of scepticism It is refuted if only by the fact that life goes on but death does not confirm it Scepticism is the very return of the refuted that which irrupts anarchically in capricious and irregular fashion every time (and yet simultaneously not every time) that the authority and sovereignty of reason or even unreason impose their order upon us or organise themselves definitively into a system Scepticism does not destroy the system it destroys nothing it is a kind of gaiety without laughter in any case without mockery suddenly making us lose interest in assertiveness [lrsquoaffirmation] or negation [la neacutegation] like all language in the neuter Disaster might be said also to be this lot [cette part] of always unavailable sceptical gaiety which puts seriousness (the seriousness of death for instance) beyond all seriousness just as it lightens the load of the theoretical by not letting us entrust ourselves to it117

Scepticism then while it belonged to philosophy also marked its outside its telling weakness its abiding interruption In that regard it was however not alone

III

An inheritance

uml The writer the daylight insomniac



The ancient sceptics Plato Hegel Schelling Schlegel Nietzsche Wittgenstein Husserl Heidegger Levinas Derrida numerous are the names of philosophers that reverberate through Blanchotrsquos text This does not mean LrsquoEacutecriture du desastre is a book of philosophy nor does it imply it is an anti-philosophical one Under the aegis of the fragmentary it exists (in so far as it exists) in philosophyrsquos interstices and on its margins even as it opens a territory of its own with neither map nor geography119 To this the many remnants of sentences or phrases traversing its pages some written in italics others in roman bear ample witness challenging any reader who might attempt to decipher them by using this or that generic or symbolic grid What gets said in many of the bookrsquos shorter fragments is often tantalising and elusive Phrases are no sooner proposed than suspended traced than effaced left as a remainder lsquo The calm the burning of the holocaust the annihilation of noon ndash the calm of disasterrsquo writes one fragment the twenty-ninth in sequence in italics towards the opening of the book120 repetitive circular even regressive in structure with the double reference to calm (from Greek kauma burning heat heat of the sun) bracketing the fragment before finally giving way to the cosmic dispersion of dis-aster and its iterative four-stage movement passing through a sequence of differentiated bindings each synonymous with the next while also reversing it first the calm of untroubled heat then the all-consuming sacrificial conflagration then the devastating light of midday then again the deceptive tranquillity of the burning heat of day ndash Blanchotrsquos fifteen words also stand calmly detached from themselves by the intervention of an unpronounceable scriptural icon as though to repeat and immobilise render both visible and obscure that conceptual movement retraced by Derrida in Glas one of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastrersquos most insistent intertexts through which Hegel in the Phenomenology effects the strategically important transition on the way towards the realisation of Absolute Knowledge between natural religion (die natuumlrliche Religion) and religion in the form of art (Kunstreligion) the significance of which was far from being lost on Blanchot Indispensable to that transition as Derrida shows is an all-consuming sacrifice by dint of which Hegel puts it lsquo[p]ure light disperses its unitary nature into an infinity of forms and offers itself up as a sacrifice to being-for-itself [gibt sich dem Fuumlrsichsein zum Opfer dar se donne en holocauste offers itself up as in a holocaust] so that from its substance the


individual may take an enduring existence for itselfrsquo121 Opfer offering or sacrifice writes Hegel holocauste translates Derrida partly following Jean Hyppolite and explains

The difference and play of pure light this panic-stricken [panique] pyromaniac dissemination and all-burning [le brucircleshytout] offers itself up in a holocaust to the for-itself [au pourshysoi] [ ] It sacrifices itself but does so in order to remain maintain its guard bind itself to itself strictly and become itself for-itself in proximity to itself [aupregraves de soi bei sich in Hegelrsquos German] To sacrifice itself it burns itself The burning [la brucirclure] burns itself therefore and goes out the fire dampens down the sun begins to descend [deacutecliner] to follow the course that will take it into Western interiority [lrsquointeacuterioriteacute occidentale] (the West [lrsquooccidental] as we know bears the sun in its heart) This sacrifice belongs as its negative to the logic of the all-burning to what might be called the double register of its countable calculus [son calcul comptable] If you want to burn everything it is also necessary to consume the fire avoid keeping it alive as a precious presence It is therefore necessary to put it out to keep it so as to lose it (truly) or lose it so as to keep it (truly) The two processes [procegraves also trials] are inseparable and can be read in either direction from right to left or left to right the raising [relegraveve Derridarsquos translation of Hegelian Aufhebung] of the one must attach importance [faire cas literally to turn into a case] to the other Panic-stricken limitless inversion the word holocaust that turns out to translate Opfer is more appropriate to the text than Hegelrsquos own word In this sacrifice everything (holos) is burned (caustos) and the fire can go out only by being rekindled [le feu ne pourra srsquoeacuteteindre qursquoattiseacute]122

What then is at stake in this whole complex and reversible scenario where possibility hangs on impossibility identity on extinction and conceptual progress on the interruption of presence Derrida replies as follows

This perhaps the gift the sacrifice the putting into play or setting on fire of everything [la mise en jeu ou agrave feu de tout] the holocaust are under ontologyrsquos control [sont en puissance drsquoontologie] They bear it [la portent] and outstrip it [la deacutebordent]


but cannot do other than give birth to it Without the holocaust dialectical movement and the history of Being could not open or become engaged in the ring [lrsquoanneau] of their anniversary or be negated [srsquoannuler] to produce the movement of the sun from East to West Before if it were possible here to reckon with time before all else before any determinable entity [eacutetant] there is there was there will have been [il y a il y avait il y aura eu] the irruptive event of the gift An event that no longer has to do with what is ordinarily meant by the word Giving [la donation] can no longer be thought on the basis of being [agrave partir de lrsquoecirctre] but lsquothe oppositersquo one might say were this logical inversion to be at all pertinent here where what is at issue is not yet logic but the origin of logic In [Heideggerrsquos] Zeit und Sein the gift of the es gibt gives itself to thinking before the Sein in the es gibt Sein and displaces everything that is understood by the word Ereignis often translated as event123

The calm of disaster this conflagration this destruction likewise opens a world while itself remaining radically irreducible to it Its burning heat destroys what it salvages but salvages what it destroys at the same time however as far as itself is concerned like the il y a to which Derrida turns in passing disaster resists all appropriation and finds expression only in an impossible oxymoron lsquo Obscure disaster [le deacutesastre obscur] is what carries the light [qui porte la lumiegravere]rsquo as Blanchot puts it two pages later124 The moment is a crucial one For even as it marks the very articulation of the possible under the aegis of the all-encompassing System of Hegelian thought it necessarily interrupts that movement of possibility like a caesura characterised only by its own impossibility Like the hiatus of dis(-)aster embodied in an invisible hyphen it mediates thought while resisting all mediation what Blanchot quoting Levinas calls the impossibility of all possibility indispensable to the System while radically exterior to it hovering inside and outside it as a ghostly residue which suggests Blanchot it is one of the pressing tasks of thought to honour ndash or if not to join in destroying in the knowledge that what was thereby promised to destruction by assimilation exclusion or annihilation was the indestructible which endures not as power or possibility but as the interminable impossibility of dying that always defeats the will to destroy not by overcoming it but by always eluding its authority unreachable


intangible infinitely other Disaster too then rather than anything resembling a sacrifice was more a giving or withdrawing outside all possibility resistant to the teleology of speculative knowledge and unanswerable to the question of being or non-being both

In dramatising opening and closing beginning and ending the lightening and darkening of a world without world before or after all world Blanchotrsquos twenty-ninth fragment with its evocation of the calm of disaster was not alone For almost exactly two-thirds of the way through the book occupying 268th position in this book of 403 fragments and roughly marking its midpoint in terms of pages covered thus articulating and interrupting its structure twice over in the manner of another redoubled discursive or poetic caesura stands a more sustained excursus a cosmological fable perhaps or merely a waking dream which leaning on Serge Leclairersquos On tue un enfant (A Child is Being Killed) Blanchot introduces explicitly as a (Freudian) primal scene125 As he does so however while maintaining the psychoanalytic concept he also takes care to withdraw it twice over by placing it within parentheses and by adding a question mark thus challenging the coherence of the term the appropriateness of its use and the terminological authority on which it relies (Only those for whom it is lsquorisk extreme danger daily questioningrsquo Blanchot puts it should feel entitled to use analytical vocabulary otherwise he suggests it simply turns into the readymade language of conformist culture)126 At any event Blanchotrsquos primal scene written almost entirely in italics will be familiar to many it is the most frequently cited text in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre perhaps even the whole of Blanchotrsquos later work which is no doubt proof of the way in which the fragment offers itself to reading as a testamentary address or valedictory exordium even perhaps as Lacoue-Labarthe suggests an autobiographical prose poem127

uml (A primal scene) You who live later close [proches] to a heart that beats no more suppose suppose this [supposez-le] the child ndash aged seven eight perhaps ndash standing by the curtain drawing it aside and through the windowshypane [agrave travers la vitre] looking What he sees the garden the wintry trees the wall of a house yet as he looks on no doubt as children do at where he usually plays he grows weary and slowly looks up towards the ordinary sky with its clouds the grey light the dull day without depth


What happens next the sky the same sky [le mecircme ciel] suddenly open absolutely black and absolutely empty revealing (as though through the broken windowshypane) an absence such that everything [tout] has always and forever been lost in it so much so that affirmed and dissipated within it is the dizzying knowledge that nothing is what there is and to begin with nothing beyond [rien est ce qursquoil y a et drsquoabord rien au-delagrave] What is unexpected about the scene (its interminable trait) is the feeling of happiness [le sentiment de bonheur] that immediately engulfs the child the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only in tears an unending stream [un ruissellement sans fin] of tears It is assumed he is just having a childish upset and the attempt is made to console him He says nothing He will live henceforth in that secret [dans le secret in secrecy with the secret] He will weep no more128

The effects of Blanchotrsquos ill-fitting and deceptive subtitle are many In so far as it frames designates or names the text Blanchotrsquos heading is simultaneously attached to the text it introduces and detached from it repeated twice over in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre at the head of two further fragments which it annexes to the first as its continuation or commentary the subtitle serves to release the three fragments from their original singular context in order ndash provisionally ndash to bind them anew to a fresh context As each fragment is thereby extracted from one site and projected or rejected towards another in a movement that can continue unchecked in limitless fashion as reading advances retreats or advances again a series is opened including not only the three initial fragments but also several further fragments comprising a sequence derived (like one of the three already mentioned) from a 1978 text first published under the selfsame title (lsquoUne scegravene primitiversquo) and a series drawn from a text in which Blanchot had originally reviewed Leclairersquos On tue un enfant a book in which the notion of the primal scene looms large not forgetting at least one additional supplementary fragment (in principle many others) in which the dialogue begun as a commentary on the first () lsquoprimal scenersquo is continued129 The principle of seriality in other words seems capable of infinite expansion making it impossible to decide where the series begins or ends which is what is already implicit in the staging of the primal scene For if it is the hallmark of any such scene never to have properly occurred in the present but to


repeat itself without end as always other than what it was under the influence of the logic of delayed action (or Nachtraumlglichkeit) that the primal scene exemplifies in Freud without it ever being clear what does or not belong to the scene then LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre might be seen to be nothing other than the endless reiteration of such a scene with the corollary that what was thereby revealed was the knowledge that not only was no primal scene ever properly primal but also that by that very token it was always either more or less than a scene thus confirming in radically abyssal fashion the revelation ndash the absence of revelation or revealed absence ndash staged by Blanchotrsquos text as belonging to its own (non)primal (non)scene

Blanchotrsquos subtitle ndash lsquo(A primal scene)rsquo ndash is not the only interpretative or textual frame put into play in Blanchotrsquos fragment On the contrary the remainder of the text repeats the similar framing movement several times over First the explicit address to future readers on the part of one no longer living likewise sets the text aside from itself and surrounds it with a virtual frame signalled by the invitation lsquosuppose thisrsquo This gesture in turn frames a scene involving a small child who is likewise framed as an observer looking through a window-pane at a garden which itself provides the frame for a vision of the sky a sky which is immediately reframed as somehow different while remaining the same to which the youthful onlooker framing this sky for a second time responds with tears of joy to which the text itself responds with a shift in tense from the present to the future once more setting the text at a distance from itself This multiple layering of the text whereby each frame gives way to another frame is not however all For the scene(s) described in the fragment do(es) not stand alone They recall several passages elsewhere in Blanchotrsquos work in which the text describes a similar kind of distancing effect Witness for instance (the list makes no claim to be exhaustive) the episode in LrsquoArrecirct de mort where Simone in a kind of virtual extension of the phenomenological epocheacute is glimpsed through a shop window (lsquoagrave travers la vitre drsquoun magasinrsquo) or the suggestion mentioned earlier in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire apropos of Kafka also reminiscent of the phenomenological epocheacute that the lsquopoetrsquo is someone lsquofor whom there exists not even a solitary world [un seul monde] for there exists only the outside the streaming [le ruissellement] of the eternal outsidersquo or the analogous scene in Le Pas aushydelagrave also mentioned earlier involving children playing in the garden shouting lsquowhorsquos playing being me todayrsquo (to which the answer in the impersonal third person


is lsquolui lui luirsquo him him him) which reprised some pages later the children having now departed leaves behind like some vacant stage lsquoa space infinitely empty like a garden [espace infiniment vide comme un jardin]rsquo or earlier in Le Pas aushydelagrave the recurrent perception of the sky lsquoopening on to its emptiness [sur son vide]rsquo or on to the limitless void of the blue of the heavens (le bleu du ciel) as Blanchot phrases it in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre in an unmistakeable echo of Bataillersquos 1957 novel of the same name written some twenty-two years before it finally appeared in print lsquoldquoThe blue of the heavens [Le bleu du ciel]rdquorsquo Blanchot puts it evoking the possibility of yet another frame lsquois what best expresses the emptiness of the heavens disaster as withdrawal [retrait] outside sidereal shelter and the refusal of any sacred nature [drsquoune nature sacreacutee]rsquo130

As well as referring to other texts by Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastrersquos lsquoprimal scenersquo also contains evidence of a vast library of other texts too impossible to delimit among which might be mentioned for instance as Lacoue-Labarthe suggests Pascalrsquos posthumous Meacutemorial with its startling invocation of lsquoJoy joy joy tears of joy [Joie joie joie pleurs de joie]rsquo or Mallarmeacutersquos famous essay lsquoLe Mystegravere dans les Lettresrsquo in which as far as reading was concerned the blank page was said always to return lsquoinitially gratuitous but now certain to conclude that nothing beyond [pour conclure que rien aushydelagrave] and authenticate the silencersquo a phrase Blanchot discreetly extends in his second paragraph using it to query the aestheticism implied in some of Mallarmeacutersquos own thinking131 The reference to Freudian analysis already contained in the fragmentrsquos subtitle is similarly extended into Blanchotrsquos discussion of Leclaire in the third fragment subtitled lsquo(A primal scene)rsquo which in turn resonates through LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre as a whole particularly in so far as Blanchotrsquos reading of Hegel is concerned For Leclairersquos debt via Lacan was not only to Freud but Hegel too and to the figure of double death (ie first in symbol then in reality) that features importantly in Lacanrsquos thinking notably on the subject of Antigone albeit that for Blanchot the opposition between the two deaths had the effect of rooting subjectivity within a dialectic of the possible forgetting that dying was not accessible as such and that what Leclaire observed to be the tenacious confusion between the two in common usage was both inevitable and necessary and capable of being resolved Blanchot went on only by sleight of hand or by some philosophical ruse just as the conceptual holocaust documented in


Glas only yielded to possibility in so far as its own impossibility ndash its resistance to mediation interruptive suspension and recalcitrant exteriority ndash was forgotten excluded excised132

It is not only that Blanchotrsquos so-called primal scene is framed by numerous citational perspectives putting it in conversation with a variety of literary philosophical or theoretical texts the scene also practises its own frame-like opening as the figure of the window-pane testifies But this is no simple pictorial representation The opening of the frame transforms what is seen through it changing the garden trees house then the sky not into something other (the sky remains emphatically the same) but voiding everything of all substance presence or being The radical subtraction that results is doubtless epochal in at least two senses First the framing of the sky lsquoabsolutely black and absolutely emptyrsquo brackets out all that there is save the nothing that precedes and exceeds the appearance of any object or entity at all (in much the same way that prior to all creation in the Lurianic Kabbala as Blanchot put it in 1957 it was necessary first for there to be nothing and for nothing to be) Second this voiding of the scene radically alters the relationship between frame and scene in that if what appears in the frame is everything everything reduced to nothing it follows that the scene must now include the frame itself together with the numerous other textual frames surrounding it Blanchotrsquos primal scene in other words cannot be securely positioned Instead of being read by a proliferating multiplicity of other texts it now reads them in its turn and in so doing necessarily also reads or rereads itself The scene fractures the frame explaining why the window-pane in Blanchotrsquos description suddenly appears broken The emptiness in the scene proves contagious and it is no longer possible to distinguish inside and outside which is why Blanchotrsquos scene ceases to be a scene at all and turns into an interminable infinite undelimitable abyssal trace testifying to the realisation as Blanchotrsquos text famously puts it that lsquonothing is what there is and to begin with nothing beyondrsquo

But how are these words to be taken As philosophical proposition or spiralling self-reflection As fiction or as theory or as the dissolution of the one by the other Or simply as a fragment of autobiography It is tempting of course to take Blanchotrsquos words as a statement of radical nihilism or ontological atheism To do so however would be to risk ignoring their precarious status as mere supposition irreducible either to the true or to the false which is not only how the fragment


is framed from the outset but how the fragment enjoins the reader to interpret that frame that is as a supposition paradoxically bereft of positionality a lsquosaid [dit]rsquo the reader is subsequently told in an abyssal observation that itself has no guarantee of truth lsquowhich without referring to an unsaid [non-dit] (as the conventional claim now has it) or to an inexhaustible excess of words sets aside the Saying [reacuteserve le Dire] which seems to denounce it authorise it and provoke it to a retraction [un deacutedit]rsquo133 This later fragment returning to the scene to both prolong it and comment on it thus surrounding it with an additional ill-fitting frame adds the following inconclusive remarks again printed in italics passing ostensibly from one voice to another

lsquomdash I admit ldquonothing is what there is [rien est ce qursquoil y a]rdquo makes it impossible for it to be said like some calm simple negation (as though the eternal translator were to replace it with ldquoThere is nothing [il nrsquoy a rien]rdquo)rsquo lsquomdash No negation but the terms are ponderous like blocks of verse [stances] set side by side (without proximity) in closed selfshysufficiency (outside meaning) each motionless and unspeaking thereby usurping their sentence structure of which we would find it difficult to say what was conveyed by itrsquo mdash lsquoDifficult is an understatement passing through this sentence is what it can contain only by bursting apart [eacuteclatant]rsquo lsquomdash For my part I can hear the irrevocable quality of the there is [lrsquoil y a] which being and nothingness like the sea heaving in vain unfolding and refolding tracing and effacing roll over and over [roulent] to the rhythm of the anonymous rustling soundrsquo lsquomdash Hearing the absent echo [le sans-eacutecho] of the voice what a strange soundrsquo lsquomdash The sound of strangeness but let us go no furtherrsquo lsquomdash Having already been too far returningrsquo

But the speakers do go on as does Blanchotrsquos fragment suspending its movement dispersing its words concluding without concluding as follows

lsquoThe question forever suspended having died from this ldquobeingshyableshytoshydierdquo which gives him joy and devastation did he survive or rather what then does surviving mean if not living from an acquiescence in refusal in the exhaustion of emotion withdrawn from interest in oneself disshyinterested extenuated to the point of calm expecting nothingrsquo lsquomdash Consequently waiting and waking


because suddenly wakeful and henceforth knowing this never wakeful enoughrsquo134

Never sleeping never fully awake just like these words that already interrupted by the other can themselves no longer be interrupted the fragmentary too can but continue forwards backwards sideways always outside of itself in response to that without which it would not occur at all and which if it had a name might in the end be written dis-aster

Disaster then was anything but torpid disengagement and it was hardly by chance therefore that invited in 1994 to contribute to a special issue of the periodical Lignes commemorating the friend who was robert Antelme who had died four years before Blanchot once more had recourse to the figure of insomnia knowing it to be always more than a figure lsquoOnly slowlyrsquo he wrote to the absent Antelme lsquoin these nights when I lie sleeping without sleeping [ougrave je dors sans dormir] did I became conscious (the word is not a good one) of your closeness however distant you were When this happened I convinced myself you were there not you but these repeated words ldquoIrsquom growing distant Irsquom growing distant [Je mrsquoeacuteloigne je mrsquoeacuteloigne]rdquorsquo lsquoI realised then immediatelyrsquo he went on lsquothat robert who was so generous and had so little concern for himself did not speak to me about himself or for himself but about all the places of extermination [lieux drsquoextermination] some of which he would list (if he was the one speaking) ldquoListen to them listen to these names Treblinka Chelmo Belzec Majdanek Auschwitz Sobibor Birkenau ravensbruumlck Dachaurdquorsquo135

To wake without waking then was no melancholy indulgence it was unremitting exposure to what Goya in 1797 another witness to the disasters of war (lsquoLos desastres de la guerrarsquo) called the sleep of reason ndash which brings forth monsters

IV

What happened

uml The unknown name outside of namingThe holocaust [lrsquoholocauste] this absolute event in history historically dated the allshyburning [cette toute-brucirclure] in which


the whole of history caught fire and the movement of Meaning was engulfed in which the gift without forgiving without consent was ruined without giving rise to anything that might be affirmed or denied the gift of passivity itself the gift of what cannot be given How to preserve it [le garder] if only in thought [fucirct-ce dans la penseacutee] how to make thought into that which might preserve the holocaust in which everything was lost including the thought that preserves [la penseacutee gardienne]

In mortal intensity [lrsquointensiteacute mortelle] the fleeting silence of cries without number


For many readers perhaps even including Blanchot himself the writing of disaster remained radically inseparable from one very specific disastrous turning-point in history the systematic persecution and murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 On this reading alongside the yiddish Hurbn (meaning the Destruction) or the Hebrew Shoah (meaning the Catastrophe) deacutesastre might be thought to be another solemn yet inevitably inadequate name on the part of a writer who was not a Jew for the attempted annihilation without trace of all those who in Nazi Germany and throughout Nazi-occupied Europe were identified by the wearing of a star As a result there was arguably nothing surprising in the fact that in 1985 prefacing the published text of his film Shoah to which Blanchot would pay tribute a year later Claude Lanzmann should present the transcript ndash lsquodrained of blood [exsangue] and denuded [nu]rsquo ndash by referring to it as lsquothe writing of disaster [lrsquoeacutecriture du deacutesastre]rsquo137 And more generally too though it is impossible to say how much Blanchotrsquos use of the word may have contributed to this it is clear that the word deacutesastre has achieved some currency in contemporary French discourse not only as a synonym for the devastation of wartime defeat but also as a kind of generic secularised designation for the legacy of the death camps The effects are not limited to French reception Ann Smockrsquos English translation of LrsquoEcriture du deacutesastre with the superfluous second definite article in its rendering of that title (The Writing of the Disaster) similarly gives disaster the determinate status of a unique historical event while the 1995 first American trade paperback edition made the association doubly explicit by featuring on its


cover the image of lsquoa desecrated Torah scroll fragment recovered in 1945 from Pultusk Polandrsquo now held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection in the margins of which it offered the following explanatory blurb lsquoModern history is haunted by the disasters of the century ndash world wars concentration camps Hiroshima and the Holocaust rsquo138 Academic writing too has followed much the same trend and commentators have found it easy to conclude in the words of Michael Syrotinski that lsquothe horrors of Auschwitzrsquo constitute lsquothe dominant point of referencersquo of Blanchotrsquos 1980 book139

This literal identification of deacutesastre in Blanchot with the Shoah is nevertheless highly problematic Even a casual reading cannot fail to notice that disaster in Blanchotrsquos text does not name a delimited historical event nor does it correspond to any actual identifiable phenomenon nor does it have the status of a regular or regulative discursive concept even less is it a synonym for unprecedented political violence and oppression If it is to be believed as Blanchotrsquos opening sentence affirms that lsquo[d]isaster ruins everything while leaving everything intactrsquo then it is difficult not to say impossible to understand how disaster might in some sense be equivalent to genocide its experience legacy or traumatic memory Similarly when Blanchot writes in another fragment that lsquo[w]e are not contemporary with disaster that is its difference and this difference is its fraternal threat [sa menace fraternelle]rsquo or when the reader is told that lsquo[d]isaster is the time when it is no longer possible by desire ruse or violence to risk the life one seeks to maintain through this very risk a time when the negative falls silent and when in place of men comes the infinite calm (the effervescence) which does not embody itself nor make itself intelligiblersquo140 there seem to be few grounds if any for concluding that disaster which Blanchot insists cannot be experienced as such is in any sense an attempt to name the destruction of so many millions of Jews The willingness to assimilate deacutesastre to the memory of the Shoah would much rather appear to rest on the tenacious but unfounded assumption that the fragmentary in Blanchot should be equated with negativity and with loss and destruction and that it cannot as a result be anything other than synonymous with the event that for Blanchot and others of his own and later generations has the indisputable status of a disastrous historical caesura a change of epoch no less with devastating political and philosophical consequences still to be measured141


And yet while it is plainly inadequate to see in disaster a name or symptom of Holocaust this is not to say that the memory of the camps does not feature importantly and with particular urgency (elsewhere paying tribute to Levinas Blanchot describes it as an obsession) at the very heart of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre where it forms the explicit matter of five fragments occurring like another caesura no more than a dozen pages after the first lsquoprimal scenersquo mentioned earlier142 Moreover Blanchotrsquos parcimonious but nevertheless telling recourse to the word holocaust (which appears only three times in the whole of the book) both in its literal sense of an all-burning sacrifice this emblem of possibility lodged as an irreducible impossibility at the heart of the speculative metaphysical tradition (following Derridarsquos analysis of Hegel in Glas) and in its received sense as a possible though disputed name for the murder of six million Jews suggests that one of the exacting challenges against which Blanchot sought to measure his writing in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was that of responding philosophically and politically to the memory of the camps without there being any certainty that any word or words at all might prove adequate to the task At any event to dismiss Blanchotrsquos writing as culpable evasiveness on the part of a former extremist nationalist political journalist swapping postwar philosemitism for 1930s antisemitism is not only to fail to read Blanchotrsquos text more seriously it is grotesquely to trivialise the issues at stake in reflecting on the legacy of the camps143

Blanchotrsquos engagement with the political and philosophical implications of the camps did not of course stand alone but was part of a wider evolving story of avoidance controversy and partial recognition during the postwar years At first deportees were honoured for their contribution to the French resistance movement but as years went by they were increasingly relegated to the historical background It was only slowly particularly in the wake of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem through 1961 and 1962 that commentators began to differentiate more clearly between concentration camps and extermination camps between repression and genocide between the status of those who were imprisoned arbitrarily or otherwise for political or allegedly related activities and others who were the victims of systematic racist or ethnic persecution and between those who actually entered the camps and those far more numerous who selected for murder even


as they arrived never reached the camps without these categories necessarily being mutually exclusive144

Throughout the 1940s 1950s and 1960s Blanchotrsquos published writing largely reflected these vicissitudes The earliest extant mention of what he called lsquothe solitude of the man of the camps [la solitude de lrsquohomme des camps]rsquo was in an article from 1950 on the russian nihilists (who had also featured in Camusrsquos 1949 play Les Justes) in the course of which he touched briefly on Lazare parmi nous by the poet novelist and essayist Jean Cayrol a (non-Jewish) survivor of Mauthausen concentration camp It was not however until April 1962 as we have seen in an essay on Antelmersquos LrsquoEspegravece humaine following a brief footnote five years earlier that Blanchot articulated in print a more sustained response145 In August and September the same year there appeared a further essay under the title lsquoLrsquoEcirctre juif [Being Jewish]rsquo subsequently also included in LrsquoEntretien infini in which without explicitly mentioning the death camps Blanchot was quick to acknowledge the long history of antisemitic violence in the Christian West lsquoThroughout the centuriesrsquo he wrote lsquothe Jew is the figure of the oppressed [lrsquoopprimeacute] and accused [lrsquoaccuseacute] and both is and has been the victim of oppression in every societyrsquo Beyond religion and beyond cultural tradition however and not without some brutality as he willingly conceded Blanchotrsquos more pressing concern was to identify in Judaism lsquonot the revelation of the one Godrsquo as he put it but lsquothe revelation of language [la parole speech] as the place where human beings hold themselves in relation with that which excludes all relation the infinitely Distant the absolutely Foreignrsquo146

This philosophical assessment of the lessons of Judaism was of course almost exactly contemporary with Blanchotrsquos reading of Totaliteacute et infini and owed much not only to the work of Levinas but also to the contribution of Andreacute Neher whose 1962 collection of essays LrsquoExistence juive Blanchot also acknowledged in a footnote147 Judaism then for Blanchot in 1962 was anything but a religious particularism it was characterised before all else and far more radically by its singular universalism supplemented by a no less unyielding commitment to universal singularity to exile wandering and justice lsquoThere is a truth of exile and a vocation of exilersquo he wrote in terms as bold as they were cautious lsquoand if to be Jewish is to be promised [voueacute] to dispersion it is because dispersion in the same way that it calls for dwelling without place


and in the same way that it ruins every fixed relationship of power with one individual one group or one State also when faced with the demand of the Whole clears the way for another demand [une autre exigence a different requirement] and ultimately puts an end to the temptation of Unity-Identityrsquo148 This double perspective seeking to marry an understanding of the history of a people with what Blanchot in a long footnote calls lsquothe metaphysical demand [lrsquoexigence meacutetaphysique] made on all [poseacutee agrave tous] by Judaism by dint of Jewish existencersquo explains why in LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchot felt able to combine the essay lsquoBeing Jewishrsquo and the essay on the non-Jewish Antelme under the shared rubric of lsquoThe Indestructible [LrsquoIndestructible]rsquo thus allowing his interpretation of Judaism in a move some have found contentious to announce Antelmersquos concentration camp experience and to be glossed or explicated by it in turn149

It was only in 1972 in a brief series of five or six fragments first published in tribute to Jabegraves and later incorporated into Le Pas aushydelagrave that Blanchot may be said to offer a more explicit recognition of the Jewish specificity of the Final Solution which he did in the following terms anticipating much of the argument of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre

That the fact of the concentration camps [le fait concentrashytionnaire] the extermination of the Jews and the death camps where death continues its work should be for history an absolute which interrupted history this is something that must be said [on doit le dire] without it being possible however to say anything further Discourse cannot develop on that basis Those who might need proof will not receive any Even in the assent and the friendship of those who share the same thought there is almost no affirmation possible because all affirmation has already been shattered and because friendship in its proximity can be sustained only with difficulty [srsquoy soutient difficilement] Everything has foundered everything founders no present resists150

While acknowledging the distinction between concentration camps and death camps Blanchotrsquos concern in this fragment was nonetheless to think together their shared possibility as belonging to an absolute caesura affecting history but irreducible to it But in


doing so he remained mindful of both the necessity and yet the danger of philosophical discourse On the one hand to turn aside from philosophy assuming this to be possible at all would be tantamount to a refusal to think the legacy of the camps and would result in unacceptable silence but on the other to impose philosophical discourse on the camps would risk repeating the violence of naming which by determining the other as an object to be posited positioned and controlled was at the heart of the possibility of the camps themselves

The first explicit mention of the experience of the camps in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is in this respect revealing It comes as one of a list of situations as Blanchot puts it prolonging a movement begun in LrsquoEntretien infini apropos of Antelme where passivity (in Blanchotrsquos or Levinasrsquos sense of the word) is put to the test lsquoPassivityrsquo writes Blanchot lsquowe can evoke situations of passivity distress [le malheur] the crushing power of the concentration camp State [lrsquoeacutecrasement final de lrsquoeacutetat concentrationnaire] the servitude of the slave without master fallen beneath need dying [le mourir] as lack of attention to the outcome of death In all these cases albeit with falsifying approximate understanding [drsquoun savoir falsifiant approximatif] we can recognise common traits anonymity loss of self loss of all sovereignty but also of all subordination loss of residence homeless wandering the impossibility of presence dispersion (separation)rsquo151 Blanchotrsquos analysis did not however proceed without hesitation Even as he began sketching out a preliminary philosophical argument pursuing his post-phenomenological project by enumerating a series of exemplary limit-experiences of which the camps were one he was held back by the logic of passivity itself driven to question philosophyrsquos own limits and explore the possible complicity that might exist between the oppression of the camps and the power of discourse as such Some pages earlier Blanchot had already announced as much by pointing a finger at the objectifying (albeit sometimes saving) violence implicit in literary and perhaps other kinds of criticism as embodied in lsquothe horror ndash honour ndash of the name which always risks becoming an excessive label [surshynom a name imposed rather than assumed] clawed back in vain by the movement of anonymity [le mouvement de lrsquoanonyme] the fact of being identified unified fixed arrested in a presentrsquo lsquoThe charnel-house of namesrsquo he added lsquoheads never emptyrsquo152


If the memory of the camps weighed heavily on postwar Europe then it did so not only in the minds and lives of those who survived but also within the confines of philosophical discourse itself What was the connection between instrumental reason and the design construction and administration of the camps This was not a question Blanchot was alone in asking As early as 1944 under the heading lsquoElements of Antisemitismrsquo Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment had already begun to probe lsquothe limits of the Enlightenmentrsquo and in 1966 in Negative Dialectics translated into French only two years before publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Adorno returned to the theme lsquoGenocidersquo he famously wrote lsquois absolute integration which is everywhere in the offing wherever people are drilled into uniformity (as the military phrase goes) till the point is reached when as deviations from the concept [Begriff] of their complete nothingness [Nichtigkeit] they are literally exterminatedrsquo lsquoAuschwitzrsquo he added lsquoconfirms the philosopheme of pure identity as deathrsquo153 As Adorno pointed out as would Blanchot in his turn what occurred in the camps had implications reaching far beyond its immediate victims their family friends or community lsquoWith the administrative murder of millionsrsquo Adorno observed lsquodeath was turned into something that had never before to be feared in this way No possibility remained for death to enter into the lived experience of the individual as something consistent with its course The individual was expropriated of the last meagre resource remaining That in the camps it was no longer the individual [das Individuum] that died but a mass-produced item [das Exemplar] is bound to affect the dying of those who escaped such measuresrsquo154 As for the responsibilities of thinking in these circumstances Adornorsquos diagnosis was severe but exacting and although he may have demurred at its dialectical formulation it is unlikely that Blanchot could have dissented lsquothe obvious implicationrsquo Adorno concluded lsquois that thinking in order to be true today at any rate must also think against itself If it fails to measure up to the extremity which eludes the concept [Begriff] it would be little different from the musical accompaniment the SS liked to have playing to drown out the screams of their victimsrsquo155

But how then to think against thinking And how to do so moreover without the aid and security of the dialectic even one that calls itself negative In another of the fragments dedicated to Jabegraves in 1972 in which he considered the lsquomurderousrsquo or lsquolethalrsquo


effects of the interminable rollcalls to which inmates were routinely subjected Blanchot essayed an answer

The calling of names in the camps in a way that obviously leaves no room for polite camouflage reveals the meaning of every formality of registration [drsquoeacutetatshycivil of births marriages and deaths] (and of all verification of identity which in our advanced civilisations gives rise to all kinds of police violence and denial of freedom) Language does not communicate it strips naked and according to the nakedness mdash exposure to the outside mdash proper to it which it is possible only to mitigate [tempeacuterer] ie to pervert [pervertir] by the detour which is the play of this always oblique lsquooutsidersquo which is also primarily the play of language without right or direction indirect as though in play156

To think the existence of the camps requires a turning aside from the objectifying implications of names concepts discourse But far from imposing a respectful mutism this is why it remains imperative to speak To remember the camps in other words enjoins discretion obliqueness indirection necessitating a speaking that withdraws or dissipates its own violence in order to attend to the silence it bears within it a silence that is both a resistance to language and a demand for speech If words are inescapable so too is silence and to respond to the past is to listen equally both to the one and to the other In the years following LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Blanchot would insist increasingly on the specifically Jewish dimension of what occurred But the question of the always inadequate always necessary name endured lsquoShould we forget Should we rememberrsquo he asked in 1989 again paying tribute to Jabegraves and answered lsquoremember what remember something for which we have no name ndash the Shoah the Holocaust the Extermination the Genocidersquo157

The literature on the Nazi camps is extensive The source material on which Blanchot draws in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is by necessity highly selective as revealing for what it omits as much as for what it includes Naturally enough Antelme is again mentioned by name albeit only once158 More surprisingly perhaps there is no explicit reference to any other prominent historical or autobiographical work in French documenting the experience of the camps The ground-breaking work of Leacuteon Poliakov (Breacuteviaire de la haine


1951) or Olga Wormser-Migot (Le Systegraveme concentrationnaire nazi 1968) the significant and influential testimonies of David rousset (Les Jours de notre mort 1947) Elie Wiesel (La Nuit 1958) or Charlotte Delbo (Auschwitz et apregraves 1965ndash71) among many others possible are all conspicuous by their absence as too are the names of writers in languages other than French who might have been cited with the notable exception of Celan recalled here as in Blanchotrsquos 1972 memorial homage Le Dernier agrave parler not as a poet of testimony but of its impossibility For lsquoif death is in vainrsquo remarks Blanchot apropos of Celanrsquos Buumlchner Prize address lsquoDer Meridianrsquo lsquoso too is the speaking of death [la parole de la mort] including the words that believe themselves to say it and disappoint in saying itrsquo159

Blanchotrsquos major documentary source in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre does however come to him from German the 1975 French translation of Hermann Langbeinrsquos lengthy often harrowing compilation of memoirs witness statements conversations and interviews with inmates and survivors of Auschwitz together with some members of the SS assembled during the 1960s by the author an Austrian ex-Communist who having been active in the International Brigades in Spain was interned in France and subsequently handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy authorities in 1941 After over a year in Dachau Langbein was then moved in August 1942 to Auschwitz where he remained for two years as clerk (or Schreiber) to the SS camp doctor (the SSshyStandortarzt) before being transferred again in August 1944 to Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg First published in German in 1972 as Menschen in Auschwitz his book appeared in an abridged French version three years later as Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz160 As Langbein explains being partly of Jewish descent he would normally have been categorised under Nazi racial laws as a Mischling ie a mixed-blood or half-caste and as such given the same lowly status as a Jew He was however able to keep the facts of his birth hidden from the authorities which allowed him as an Austrian and therefore an assimilated German to occupy a relatively protected position in the camp even as he remained exposed throughout were his family background to be revealed to the implicit threat as he puts it of being lsquohurled down the long ladder from the position of a privileged German to that of a Jew placed at the very bottomrsquo161


Langbein then who is mentioned twice by name in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre provides Blanchot with much if not indeed all of the detail concerning conditions in Auschwitz It is from Langbein for instance as he freely acknowledges that Blanchot borrows the example (even including some of the same turns of phrase) of inmates being forced lsquoto carry rocks at the double [porter au pas de course des pierres] from one place to another [agrave tel endroit] pile them up [agrave les empiler] then carry them back still running [toujours courant] to where they were at the startrsquo162 At the end of the same fragment it is in Langbein too that Blanchot will have found evidence of inmates refusing to contemplate suicide out of sheer defiance As Benedikt Kautsky put it quoted by Langbein lsquoat a point where I thought I could not do otherwise than collapse physically or morally my instinct for self-preservation appeared in the guise of defiance ldquoSurely you arenrsquot going to do those pigs the favour of killing yourselfrdquo This was an argument that one applied not only to others but much more effectively to oneselfrsquo163 Other sinister vignettes also have their basis in Langbein such as the grotesque incident concerning Lagerfuumlhrer Schwarzhuberrsquos six-year-old son (Blanchot commits a transcription error mistaking six for dix and misreports the boyrsquos age as ten) who was forced to go around with a sign around his neck identifying who he was in order to avoid him being sent to the gas chamber by accident or the grisly memory of the famous visit to Auschwitz in July 1942 by Himmler who while attending a mass execution for the first time is said to have felt sick (lsquoihm ist uumlbel gewordenrsquo says Langbein Meunier followed by Blanchot translates lsquosrsquoest eacutevanouirsquo felt faint) and as a result ordered steps to be taken to lsquohumanisersquo extermination which led to the introduction of the gas chambers (lsquodeath humanised on the outsidersquo remarks Blanchot lsquoon the inside horror at its most extremersquo)164

From Blanchotrsquos point of view the merits of Langbeinrsquos work were several First its detailed account of the daily reality of Auschwitz as experienced by those who witnessed it provided a ready fund of sometimes anecdotal but always telling first-hand testimony Second in Langbeinrsquos exhaustive project there was an untimely timeliness and a pressing urgency For though the events it recorded were by now thirty or more years distant Menschen in Auschwitz was not a piece of antiquarian research It was very much of the moment not only in the sense that being published


in the early to mid-1970s it was strictly contemporary with the composition of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre but also in that it was itself part of a broader long-running historical and political campaign not only in Langbeinrsquos native Austria but more widely in Europe which already in the early to mid-1960s had culminated in the first major Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt Finally and perhaps most importantly as far as Blanchot was concerned there was in Langbeinrsquos work a methodical precision allied with remarkable sobriety and unmediated directness far from discursive or conceptual presumptions which derived from his unique position as a witness in his own right and as a witness to numerous others who as the victims of genocide or political persecution were no longer able to bear witness in person

The contemporaneity of Langbeinrsquos volume was a trait it shared with certain of the other historical sources cited in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre which like the fragmentary itself also reflected the vagaries of the publishing cycle even as any conceptual opposition between the contingent and the essential came to be challenged as a result The fact was books and documents that saw the light of day seemingly by chance or by accident also said something fundamental about the deeper preoccupations of the epoch itself It was not at all as it sometimes was for others in order to defend the virtues of French parliamentary democracy that Blanchot at the time also took a keen interest for instance if in a less sustained way in contemporary revelations regarding the Soviet concentration camp system165 But here too the emphasis fell on the information provided in first-hand autobiographical and historical work such as the memoirs of Joseph Berger (with their dismaying indictment of lsquothe terrible perversions of power and terrible misfortunes of the peoplersquo) or Alexander Solzhenitsynrsquos multi-volume non-fictional narrative The Gulag Archipelago both of which Blanchot cites and which like the work of Langbein similarly became available in the early to mid-1970s amidst ongoing philosophical and political disquiet about the totalising tendencies of all State power as such166

The comparison with the Soviet experience also gave Blanchot a notional if necessarily fragile vantage point to emphasise what the camps rather than being some monstrous aberration revealed about the societies which produced them lsquoConcentration camps extermination campsrsquo he wrote carefully distinguishing the two


and invoking not the one but the many lsquofigures [figures] where the invisible forever made itself visible All the characteristics of a civilisation revealed or laid bare (ldquoWork brings freedomrdquo ldquorehabilitation through workrdquo)rsquo167 But if horror lrsquohorreur seemed to dominate in Auschwitz and meaninglessness le nonshysens in the Gulag Blanchot went on so the reverse was equally the case without either perspective capable of proving exhaustive But this was precisely the question at issue that politics which aspired to be all was not all and whenever it sought to translate itself into unlimited possibility the only outcome was nihilistic oppression subjugation and death This much came as no surprise to Blanchot Indeed reading these passages in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre it is hard not to be reminded that the writerrsquos own concerns were still those of a former journalist possessed of a passion for the political as he put it in 1984 whose own very different intellectual itinerary from the early 1930s onwards had begun and unfolded during an epoch likewise dominated by Soviet communism and German fascism and who born in 1907 was himself a near contemporary of Langbein (b 1912) Berger (b 1904) Antelme (b 1917) and Solzhenitsyn (b 1918)

In his engagement with Langbein Blanchot pays particular attention to the testimony relating to two groups who by common consent feature among the most desperate of Auschwitzrsquos many victims the so-called Muselmaumlnner those inmates who relinquishing all will or ability to carry on living were thought to have passed beyond the line separating life from death and the members of the euphemistically-titled Sonderkommando on whom was imposed the task of attending to the gas chambers for which sinister duty in most cases they eventually paid with their own lives Shared by both groups ndash the daily confrontation with the unspeakable here the total collapse of subjectivity there ndash alongside the unremitting prospect of personal destruction was the extremity of the threat posed to the victimsrsquo capacity to testify at all for themselves or for each other Experience in other words could no longer be signified or constituted as such even less located within recognisable parameters Notwithstanding the considerable efforts of Langbein and numerous others sometimes without name to record what happened and absolutely inseparable from the events to which Langbein and others sought to bear witness there remained something that resisted all verisimilitude narrative continuity or


depiction in general This explains why throughout LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre published barely eighteen months after Marvin J Chomskyrsquos NBC mini-series Holocaust a model of consumerist banalisation was broadcast on French television Blanchot makes no explicit mention at all of any of the fictional treatments of the experience of the camps either in French or any other language168 Instead Blanchot preferred to make his own a remark that comes from Langbein commenting on the sporting and musical activities that took place in Auschwitz which Langbein for his part is willing to defend up to a point explaining as he put it that lsquothe instinct of survival makes a person seek diversion wherever this is possiblersquo But as Langbein then concedes these privileges (football and boxing matches film shows musical performances) were not available to all lsquoTo be surersquo he writes lsquofor the grey mass of pariahs there was neither cinema nor sport nor concertsrsquo a verdict that Blanchot transcribes modifying its phrasing slightly only to add with noticeably greater severity the following admonishment obviously addressed more to contemporary audiences of the late 1970s and 1980s than to the survivors of Auschwitz lsquoThere is a limit at which practising an art [lrsquoexercice drsquoun art] becomes an affront to distress [une insulte au malheur] Let us not forget thisrsquo169

What here is presented by Blanchot as an ethico-moral argument ie that the misery of others should not be exploited for the purpose of aesthetic enjoyment was not the writerrsquos final word on the matter Elsewhere the case is made on more explicitly transcendental grounds it is that art suggests Blanchot in a reverse corollary of the proposition that writing is traversed by the impossibility of dying cannot properly represent destruction extreme dereliction or death In so far as it appeals to what Blanchot using the word rather differently to Levinas calls lsquothe unqualifiable Saying [Dire] the glory of a ldquonarrating voice [voix narrative]rdquo which expresses itself [donne agrave entendre] clearly without it ever being possible for it to be obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what is being communicatedrsquo literature cannot do other than speak of survival lsquoLet me sayrsquo he wrote explicitly recalling Adornorsquos famous dictum lsquothere can be no such thing as a fictional narrative [reacutecitshyfiction] about Auschwitzrsquo lsquoNo matter when it may be writtenrsquo he went on in a much-quoted sentence lsquoevery narrative will henceforth be from before Auschwitz [drsquoavant Auschwitz]rsquo170 There remained however an essential ambiguity or irony which


often goes unnoticed but of which Blanchot himself was doubtless aware It was that to illustrate the point he found himself obliged to cite a story Kafkarsquos Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) which had truly been written before Auschwitz ie in the latter part of 1912 but which as Blanchotrsquos presentation confirmed was as a result not without saying something impossible improper even intolerable about Auschwitz ie that happily unhappily lsquolife goes on perhapsrsquo What came before in other words necessarily also came after Coming as it did then before the death of many of Kafkarsquos friends and family in Auschwitz and elsewhere Die Verwandlung could not do other than bear witness as proof of the unthinkable impossibility of the camps and proof too of the desperate impropriety yet necessity of hope

Blanchotrsquos point was not that a veil of silence could or should be drawn over the camps If this were the case he would have had no use for Langbein and little interest in the detail of his research Blanchotrsquos argument was both simpler yet more complex it was that in the experience of the camps there was something literally unimaginable to use Antelmersquos word which could not therefore be made present or reconciled with narrative logic or integrated within the archeo-teleological structure of history as the history of sense The camps Nazi and Soviet were historical through and through But history was not all For if it were everything it would in fact be impossible to write it since it would be without beginning ending or middle History in other words if it exists is necessarily traversed interrupted exceeded by an unspoken unspeakable silence irreducible to history that cannot be made present or represented as such Such silence however was not nothing It left a trace not as deferred presence not as temporary absence but as something that fragile transitory and always on the brink of effacement nevertheless had a chance of surviving This was why for Blanchot as for others the diverse testimony assembled by Langbein was of such crucial importance And to underline the point Blanchot again had recourse to Langbeinrsquos account in order to cite the historical (but also much more than historical) testimony left by Salmen (or Zelman) Lewental (or Loewenthal) a Polish Jew from Ciechanoacutew who was a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando from December 1942 onwards and as such closely involved in the failed uprising of October 1944 At some stage Lewental buried two caches of documents near one of the


Birkenau crematorium buildings the one containing the diary of an unidentified member of the Łodz ghetto found outside the gas chamber by Lewental to which he added a brief commentary of his own and the other a diary detailing the circumstances of his imprisonment and the events surrounding October 1944 These two sets of documents significantly damaged by the passage of time and the conditions in which they had been preserved were discovered in July 1961 and October 1962 respectively171

Found in this way over a decade and a half after their burial Lewentalrsquos words written in Yiddish which might easily not have survived at all spoke across time and history In fragmentary form from beyond the grave they delivered an address to the future Partially destroyed by mould and by damp rendered in part illegible they spoke of that of which it was impossible to speak Speak however they did warning or reminding their uncertain readers to come in a fragment itself already half-destroyed that lsquothe whole truth is even more tragic even more terrible [La veacuteriteacute est bien plus tragique encore plus atroce translates Meunier]rsquo172 Between the version cited by Langbein and the translation given in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre there is admittedly a difference For Blanchot rewords and completes Lewentalrsquos message writing now lsquo[T]he truth was [fut] always more terrible [toujours plus atroce] more tragic [plus tragique] than what will be said about it [que ce que lrsquoon en dira]rsquo173 The gesture is arguably problematic By what right may one alter an absolutely singular text of this kind The question raised however affects all inheritance all memory all repetition How to maintain fidelity how to avoid infidelity Any answer is less decidable than it might seem For all repetition for good or ill is a betrayal and better an active remembering one might say than a pious but inert monument174 reading Lewentalrsquos message in Langbein most likely citing it imperfectly from memory (as he often does elsewhere) what Blanchotrsquos discreet and possibly inadvertent revision to Lewentalrsquos exact words nevertheless suggests is that the only response to such a message is to make it onersquos own in the certain knowledge of the absolute impossibility of doing so aware however that if such a legacy is to survive it is not enough for it simply to be echoed with the respect due to it it had to be reaffirmed even rewritten by whoever is not a witness but is nevertheless forcibly entrusted like any heir with the impossible yet necessary task of bearing witness to the witness


Words Lewental seemed to be saying could not but remain suspended on their radical inadequacy There were other difficulties too Knowledge itself Blanchot argues is not indifferent it always risks complicity with that which it seeks to grasp and explain if only by transforming it into the graspable and explicable To understand is also to forgive The knowledge of horror in other words is never far from the horror of knowledge Blanchot puts it thus lsquoKnowledge which goes so far as to accept that which is horrible [lrsquohorrible] in order to know it [le savoir] reveals the horror of knowledge [savoir knowledge that is established impervious absolute] the lower depths of cognition [connaissance] the discrete complicity which maintains its relation with that which is most intolerable in power [le pouvoir both political power and the being-able-to]rsquo175 Blanchot illustrates the point in a fragment which again draws on Langbein from whom is taken the story of the twenty-five-year-old Kalmin Furman another member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando as recounted to Langbein by Jehuda Bacon

On one occasion Furman told me he was meant to take his own parents to the crematorium At the time he attempted to hang himself but was cut down just in time Afterwards he was excused from working on corpses but in return received a special assignment whenever the SS were shooting prisoners in a special room in the crematorium Furmanrsquos job was to hold the victims by their arms If anyone failed to keep quiet he was held by the ear then the shot in the back of the neck could be aimed in the right place When I asked Bacon whether Furman had ever indicated how he could endure this he replied that Furman wanted to observe how people behaved in the face of death [wollte beobachten wie man sich vor dem Tod verhaumllt observait le comportement des hommes devant la mort translates Meunier in words Blanchot transcribes exactly]176

Citing these words from Langbein but leaving out the names of all concerned Blanchot interjects a rejoinder as final as it is brief lsquoI shall not believe this [je ne le croirai pas]rsquo In Furmanrsquos reply there was a silence unvoiced by the victim manifesting itself in the stereotypical recourse to the indifference of knowledge as a kind of self-lacerating protection against the unspeakable It is a silence


implicit in all knowledge of what happened that it is essential to hear says Blanchot And he goes on

This response (lsquoI observed how people behaved [jrsquoobservais le comportement des hommes ]rsquo) was not a response [the young man] could not respond What remains is that constrained by an impossible question he could find no alibi except in the search for knowledge [la recherche du savoir] the supposed dignity of knowledge [la preacutetendue digniteacute du savoir] this final propriety which we believe will be bestowed upon us by knowledge [par la connaissance]177

reactions to this passage have in some cases been oddly defensive providing eerie confirmation of Blanchotrsquos point that belief in the unlimited prerogative of knowledge produces a strange blindness of its own Gerald Bruns for instance describes Blanchotrsquos lsquoanecdotersquo as lsquoa moral allegory of Stoic impassivityrsquo bordering alongside Lewentalrsquos words on lsquoimplausibility or bad faithrsquo forgetting that Furman as Blanchot makes clear was acting only under extreme duress and was allowed by the SS nothing of the detachment autonomy or equanimity of a mature philosophical subject178 Gillian rose too remains stubbornly insensitive to the silence implicit in Furmanrsquos words and accuses Blanchot in showing lsquothe dignity of knowledgersquo to be lsquoobscenersquo (as she puts it) of lsquoblam[ing] the victimrsquo179 Nothing could be further from the truth Again it is as though the possibility of knowledge can have no bounds the inconceivable impossibility of Furmanrsquos position surviving death (says Blanchot) only to be deprived of that death and forced to exchange it for the death of others is therefore set at nought and the appeal to the indifference of knowledge which says more about the instrumentalisation of reason than it does about the responsibilities of the victim is shorn of all context all singularity and in the end all politics As Blanchot insists knowledge is not an impartial tool it transforms what it seeks to know into an object of knowledge which is to say an object of possible existence In so doing it renders its object acceptable to reason which as a result always risks being tainted with what it objectifies But this is not at all to say that it is desirable or even possible to renounce all knowledge It is an appeal to those who come after even as they are enjoined to know what happened that they recognise too the limits


of the power of knowledge and respond purposefully to the silent fissure of impossibility that traverses all testimony of the camps This is Blanchotrsquos own watchword repeated by him several times over in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre and elsewhere addressed as much to himself as to others both parts of which most importantly are of equal significance lsquoKnow what happened do not forget and at the same time never will you know [Sachez ce qui srsquoest passeacute nrsquooubliez pas et en mecircme temps jamais vous ne saurez]rsquo180

remembering thinking writing as Blanchot is only too keenly aware imply responsibility responsibility however is not only due to what is spoken it is owed to what remains unspoken too The realisation is one that is inseparable from the fragmentary but it traverses too the whole question of how to remember the camps As far as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is concerned it receives perhaps one of its most telling enactments in a brief fragment which opens the series of texts dealing explicitly with that legacy Written mainly in italics and made up of two unsourced truncated quotations brief to the point of unrecognisability and standing in so to speak for the numerous other memoirs testimonies or scribbled notes which have inevitably been omitted and passed over in silence since such are the limits of any book any memory any archive the fragment reads as follows lsquouml The suffering [souffrance] of our time ldquoAn emaciated man with head dropped and shoulders curved unthinking [sans penseacutee] unseeing [sans regard]rdquo ldquoOur eyes were turned to the groundrdquorsquo181 For an attentive reader of Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz these discreet and elliptical sentences are however without mystery For both feature almost verbatim within Langbeinrsquos book The first is taken from Primo Levirsquos Auschwitz memoir Se questo egrave un uomo (If This Is A Man) first published in Italian in 1947 and republished (not unlike LrsquoEspegravece humaine) to significantly greater acclaim a decade later while the second occurs towards the beginning of Levirsquos sequel La Tregua (The Truce) first published in Italian in 1963 and retracing his tortuous return journey from Auschwitz to Turin In both cases the text used by Blanchot is that given in Meunierrsquos 1974 translation though it should be noted that in transcribing the first quotation Blanchot also intervenes silently as he does elsewhere to compress the original wording182

The contexts in which these two quotations originally featured in both Levi and Langbein are not indifferent to their meaning or to Blanchotrsquos treatment of them The first brief extract from Levi


cited as such by Langbein details the stance or perhaps better the literal impossibility of stance associated by the writer with the extreme dejection dereliction and powerlessness of the figure of the Muselmann As Levi himself explains in a passage that immediately precedes that quoted by Langbein (and by Blanchot)

To sink is the easiest of matters it is enough to carry out the orders one receives to eat only the ration to observe the discipline of the work and the camp Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this way All the musselmanns who finished in the gas chambers have the same story or more exactly have no story they followed the slope down to the bottom like streams that run down to the sea On their entry into the camp through basic incapacity or by misfortune or through some banal incident they are overcome before they can adapt themselves they are beaten by time they do not begin to learn German to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion Their life is short but their number is endless they the Muselmaumlnner the drowned form the backbone of the camp an anonymous mass continually renewed and always identical of non-men who march and labour in silence the divine spark dead within them already too empty to really suffer One hesitates to call them living one hesitates to call their death death in the face of which they have no fear as they are too tired to understand183

As this context indicates there was nothing haphazard or negligent in Blanchotrsquos failure to specify the source of his quotation It is rather that to whoever had not only reached the limit but touched the limitlessness of the limit unthinking unseeing and bereft of all story denied a life and a death that might be called their own the only possible adequate-inadequate proper-improper memorial was a fading impersonal trace deprived of identity authorship or context In its haunting fragility its poverty and persistence then Blanchotrsquos quotation is radically abyssal Left anonymous it testifies to those who were deprived of name emptied of authority it speaks of those who were robbed of all authority surviving as a fleeting inscription it discreetly remembers those who did not survive at all


In recent years this notion or concept of the Muselmann has of course become a significant focus of philosophical debate lsquoAt times a medical figure or an ethical category at times a political limit or an anthropological conceptrsquo contends Agamben lsquothe Muselmann is an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity but also vegetative existence and relation physiology and ethics medicine and politics and life and death continuously pass through each otherrsquo lsquoThisrsquo he adds lsquois why the Muselmannrsquos ldquothird realmrdquo [ie in Wolfgang Sofskyrsquos words cited by Agamben the Muselmannrsquos place lsquoin limbo between life and deathrsquo] is the perfect cipher of the camp the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed and all embankments floodedrsquo184 If the figure of the sovereign Agamben argues elsewhere is synonymous with lsquothe point of indistinction between violence and law the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violencersquo coming into its own in that state of exception that precedes traverses and outlasts all acts of political constitution much the same applies in inverse fashion to the Muselmann who beyond life and death beyond all possibility of testimony is given to testify in silence and impotence to a world in which lsquothe state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of daily lifersquo185 In Auschwitz lsquothe bare life to which human beings were reducedrsquo Agamben goes on lsquoneither demands nor conforms to anything It itself is the only norm it is absolutely immanentrsquo186 For the Muselmann then all transcendence is violently expunged Death in other words is no longer a possibility to be appropriated but something of which the individual has always already been expropriated The camp for Agamben is both the ultimate confirmation and radical inversion of the Heideggerian doctrine of SeinshyzumshyTode ie as Agamben reformulates it here that the sole task of existence is to appropriate its own inappropriable ndash improper ndash finitude

In the camp every distinction between proper and improper between possible and impossible radically disappears For here the principle according to which the sole content of the proper is the improper is exactly verified by its inversion which has it that the sole content of the improper is the proper And just as in Being-towards-death the human being authentically appropriates the inauthentic so in the camp the prisoners exist everyday


anonymously towards death The appropriation of the improper is no longer possible because the improper has completely assumed the function of the proper human beings live factually at every instant towards their death This means that in Auschwitz it is no longer possible to distinguish between death and mere decease between dying and lsquobeing liquidatedrsquo187

lsquoIf in Being-towards-death it was a matter of creating the possible through the experience of the impossible (the experience of death)rsquo Agamben puts it lsquohere the impossible (mass death) is produced through the full experience of the possible through the exhaustion of its infinityrsquo In this he writes lsquothe camp is the absolute verification of Nazi politics which in the words of Goebbels was precisely ldquothe art of making possible what seemed impossiblerdquorsquo188 For Agamben lsquo[t]he Muselmann is the non-human who obstinately appears as human he is the human that cannot be told apart from the inhumanrsquo189 As such he is the final moment in a sinister conceptual hierarchy an absolute limit beyond subjectivisation or individuation enduring as a kind of undifferentiated remainder coinciding as whole or as part with neither itself nor any other embodying what Agamben calls lsquoabsolute bio-political substancersquo190

lsquoThe lesson of Auschwitzrsquo concludes Agamben speaking with untroubled philosophical authority is this that lsquothe human being is the one who can survive the human beingrsquo a proposition he suggests can be read in two ways lsquoIn the first sense it refers to the Muselmann (or the grey zone) it therefore signifies the inhuman capacity to survive the human In the second sense it refers to the survivor it designates the human beingrsquos capacity to survive the Muselmann the non-humanrsquo To these two interpretations Agamben then adds a third which again has to do with the possibility of the Muselmann and claims that lsquothe human being is the inhuman the one whose humanity is completely destroyed is the one who is truly humanrsquo He goes on lsquoThe paradox here is that if the only one bearing witness to the human is the one whose humanity has been wholly destroyed this means that the identity between human and inhuman is never perfect and that it is not truly possible to destroy the human that something always remains The witness is this remainderrsquo191 It is at this point in his argument that Agamben turns to Blanchot to quote or more accurately to misquote the phrase with which Blanchot in 1962 had sought to respond to Antelmersquos


LrsquoEspegravece humaine lsquoman [lrsquohomme humankind] is the indestructible that can be infinitely [sic adverb added by Agamben] destroyedrsquo192 Criticising Blanchot for supposedly lsquomisunderstand[ing] his own wordsrsquo Agamben deflects and normalises Blanchotrsquos formula by grafting onto it an ontologico-dialectical humanistic inflection it was designed to resist lsquoThe human being can survive the human beingrsquo Agamben now wrote lsquothe human being is what remains after the destruction of the human being not because there is somewhere a human essence to be destroyed or saved but because the place of the human is divided because the human being exists in the fracture between the living being and the speaking being the inhuman and the human [ ] The human being is the being that is lacking to itself and that consists solely in this lack and the errancy it opensrsquo193

Agambenrsquos rewriting of Blanchotrsquos formula is nothing if not double-edged While it testifies to a striking convergence in some of their thinking what it more readily emphasises is the extent of their differences These are several in number First it is noticeable that while having through the work of both Levi and Langbein much the same access as Agamben to the name notion or concept of the Muselmann Blanchot for his part declines to use the term in transcribing the quotation from If This Is A Man When the word does appear in Blanchot which it does once only two pages later it is as part of a sequence of names each exemplifying horror (lsquobecause extermination in every form is the immediate horizonrsquo) but which together form a virtual or implicit quotation lsquothe living dead pariahs Muselmaumlnner [mortsshyvivants parias musulmans]rsquo194 If the Muselmann traverses Blanchotrsquos text then it is as a figure cited rather than used advanced only to be withdrawn not given any fixed conceptual positioning or paradigmatic identity The unmediated juxtaposition of Blanchotrsquos brief quotation from The Truce with the passage from If This Is A Man achieves a similar effect For though the two quotations are bound together in Blanchotrsquos text by the repetition of a single recurrent motif that of eyes and body downcast there is much that otherwise separates the two While the first quotation in the third person refers to conditions inside the camp and to the dereliction and abjection experienced by the Muselmann the second passage now in the first-person plural relates to the early days following the liberation of the camp at a time when the lives of the narrator and his companions


continue to be overshadowed by their recent experiences and by the even more pressing threat of disease But between despair and hope between all loss of self and its tenuous recovery Blanchot offers no teleological hierarchy Between the Muselmann and the narrator between third and first person there is no opposition therefore but a shared condition of expropriation captured in the same powerless downward turn of the body a weakness of stance that for Blanchot unlike Agamben does not offer itself to conceptual arraignment discursive determination or philosophical positioning

This emphasises a second major divergence between Blanchot and Agamben The latter as his account of the challenge embodied in the Muselmann shows remains faithful even in the breach to Heideggerrsquos thinking of death as Daseinrsquos ownmost possibility This in turn is what allows him to think the world of the camp in terms of a dialectic of infinite possibility which by definition suffers no resistance True enough the countless deaths that occurred in Auschwitz and elsewhere at the hands of the SS provide ample and incontrovertible proof of the seemingly limitless reach of deathrsquos possibility Those victims however did not belong to their executioners their deaths were not reducible to what the powers that decreed them wished to make of them and their very destruction testified to something over which those authorities had no control As they fell subject to their murderers there was something in the death meted out to them that refused and resisted that subjection Even in the camps then the pas aushydelagrave remained a threshold of political resistance For all dying Blanchot insisted even under the most extreme violent and unspeakable circumstances is born by disastrous impossibility What the indestructible names anonymously and in the neuter is not humanityrsquos inhuman capacity to survive itself then but the impersonal always other trace of impossibility that interrupts all possibility including that of absolute destruction However much the genocidal project of the Nazis was sustained by the paranoid fantasy of destroying the Jewish people absolutely and in total secrecy as Himmler announced in his notorious Poznań speech of October 1943 a trace necessarily remained not as a presence or an absence to be retrieved or restored but a mark of fragile indestructibility an otherness that bears witness to the impossible that inheres in all possibility even the most comprehensive as an indelible memory of destruction


Prolonging the thought of disaster in 1986 in response to Lanzmannrsquos Shoah it was this according to Blanchot that might be thought to constitute the singularity of the camps and of the Shoah their simultaneous status as both monstrous possibility and residual impossibility lsquoThis is what the genocide of the Jews wasrsquo suggested Blanchot again remembering Levinas lsquonot only the annihilation of all Jews but the annihilation of that annihilation itself Nobody was meant to know neither those carrying out the orders nor those giving them nor the supreme instigator nor finally the victims who should have disappeared in the ignorance and in the absence of their own disappearance The ldquosecrecyrdquo demanded and maintained everywhere was the secrecy of what exceeds and destroys all revelation by a human language ndash a destruction of the trace that is language ndash this ldquowithout tracerdquo or erasure of the human facersquo195 lsquoShoahrsquo he also observed this word signifying lsquoannihilationrsquo was thus a word for that which could not be annihilated Erasure itself in other words was also a trace it is what resists destruction not by denying its only too apparent well-documented possibility but by insisting on the impossible necessarily inherent within that possibility If anything survived the camp then it was not an undifferentiated remainder as Agamben seems to suggests but an impersonal trace which making memory possible yet impossible as Lanzmannrsquos film was able to testify offers both the chance and the burden of interminable mourning196

Blanchotrsquos silent quotation from Levirsquos If This Is A Man is however not the only place in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre where the writer may be found reflecting discreetly on the fate of the Muselmann Four fragments later he draws on a passage in the lsquoMuselmannrsquo chapter in Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz in which Langbein had quoted the words of an unidentified member of the Sonderkommando describing lsquoa group of emaciated starving Jews brought in from some camprsquo of whom the witness reports that lsquo[t]hey were terribly hungry and begged for a piece of bread to sustain them for the short time they still had to live Inmates brought a large amount of bread The eyes of the new arrivals which had been dimmed by horrendous hunger blazed in a wild outburst of joy [Leurs yeux ternis eacuteteints par une faim atroce srsquoilluminegraverent drsquoune ivresse sauvage translates Meunier] With both hands they seized a crust of bread and devoured it greedily while they were climbing the stairs to be shotrsquo197 reading this account alongside similar


stories detailing the often degrading extremes to which inmates (categorised in Langbein as Muselmaumlnner) were reduced as a result of the very basic needs especially hunger which they had no means of satisfying resisting or even controlling Blanchot commented as follows remembering as he did so his own earlier remarks on the question of need in LrsquoEspegravece humaine from 1962

uml It is necessary to meditate further (but is it possible) upon this in the camp if need as was said by robert Antelme experiencing it for himself bears everything maintaining an infinite relation to life even in the most abject manner (but here it is no longer a question of high or low) consecrating it through an egoism without ego there is also that limit at which need no longer helps one to live but is an aggression against the whole person a torment which denudes an obsession of the whole of being at the point where being has collapsed Dull extinguished eyes [Les yeux ternes eacuteteints] flash [brillent] suddenly with a wild glimmer [drsquoune lueur sauvage] for a crust of bread lsquoeven if the sense that one is going to die moments later still subsistsrsquo and there is no longer any question of nourishment This glimmer [lueur] or spark [eacuteclat] illuminates nothing living [nrsquoillumine rien de vivant] And yet with this look that is a last look bread is given to us as bread a gift that beyond all reason all values exterminated in nihilistic desolation and all objective order renounced maintains the fragile chance of life through the sanctification of lsquoeatingrsquo (nothing lsquosacredrsquo though let us be clear) something that is given unreservedly [sans partage] by whoever dies as a consequence (lsquoOf great importance is the mouthful of food [Grand est le manger]rsquo says Levinas after a Jewish saying)198

At this extreme point then where the possibility of properly dying or even surviving has been violently confiscated from those who have fallen victim to bare and debilitating need there supervenes and there remains a giving or gift beyond exchange or return in the end beyond need itself which devouring the human no longer serves as a foundation for shared human possibility but mutates into devastating abyssal emptiness As Blanchot goes on

But at the same time the fascination of the dying look into which the spark of life becomes frozen does not leave the requirements of need intact even in basic form making it henceforth impossible


to place eating [le manger] (bread) within the category of what can be eaten [du mangeable] At this extreme moment where dying [mourir] is exchanged for the life of bread no longer in order to satisfy a need and even less to make it desirable need [le besoin] mdash grinding need [besogneux] mdash dies [meurt] too as simple need and turning it into something inhuman (withdrawn from all satisfaction) exalts glorifies the need for bread having become an empty absolute into which henceforth we can but plummet [nous perdre be lost or ruined] in our entirety199

But even as he sought to measure the implications of such extreme dereliction Blanchot paused recalling another passage in Langbeinrsquos book citing the words of H G Adler the historian (and former inmate) of Theresienstadt concentration camp lsquoAnyone who has not experienced this destruction [aneacuteantissement annihilation translates Meunier] for himselfrsquo warned Adler lsquodoes not know and will never know Let him keep silent [Qursquoil se taise]rsquo200 There is then that which it is possible to know inseparable from it however is that which resists knowledge or understanding Neither horn of this dilemma can take precedence over the other Both are essential each imposes an obligation and requires a response The aporia remains however interminable and as far as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was concerned Blanchot could only conclude without possibility of conclusion by reiterating the dilemma as follows

the danger (here) of words in their insignificance as theory is perhaps that they claim to evoke the annihilation [lrsquoaneacuteantissement] in which everything always founders [ougrave tout sombre toujours] without attending to the lsquobe silentrsquo [le lsquotaisezshyvousrsquo] addressed to those who knew the interruption of history only from a distance or in part And yet to wake [veiller] over immeasurable absence this we must [il le faut] this we must without cease [il le faut sans cesse] because what began again [a recommenceacute] on the basis of that end (Israel all of us) is marked by this end with which we cannot be finished [nous nrsquoen finissons pas] in awakening ourselves [nous reacuteveiller]201

What wakes Blanchot put it some fifty pages earlier is of course disaster calling to attention not only the possibility of what happened but also that which was without possibility propriety


or presence in so far as history was what had meaning not only that which belonged to history therefore but also what interrupted it breached its continuity obliged it to pivot on itself lsquo Watch over absent sense [Veiller sur le sens absent]rsquo such in all senses of the term was Blanchotrsquos watchword forming a single detached injunction printed entirely in italics and part of no continuity no discourse no demonstration202 What it implied was a responsiveness and responsibility both to the historical event and to that which exceeded historical determination From the outset this was the double burden of disaster or deacutesshyastre in Blanchot and why it features throughout less as an event to be experienced or witnessed than as a caesura or hiatus separating history from itself not because disaster was somehow ahistorical but because it belonged to history only in so far as it exceeded its closure unhistorically historical historically unhistorical precisely dated says Blanchot but irreducible to historyrsquos flow In a word epochal Disaster then said more than that something in the experience of the camps however essential the historical record resisted apprehension by discursive conceptual knowledge what disaster also said was that something in philosophy itself inseparable from its normative assumptions its exclusionary logic and its institutional authority bore responsibility for what happened In other words it was as though at the very core of Western thought synonymous with its commitment to a logic of identity stood a suppression a violence an all-consuming sacrifice without which philosophy would and could not be what it was As far as that most imperious and monumental of modern philosophical edifices Hegelrsquos Phenomenology was concerned as read by Derrida in Glas closely followed by Blanchot in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre that moment had a name whose connotations were anything but academic That word encountered earlier written in lower case by Derrida and Blanchot alike was lsquoholocaustrsquo

It was therefore not for nothing argued Blanchot extending the implications of Derridarsquos analysis that Hegel in the Phenomenology and elsewhere showed such deep-rooted philosophical distrust of Judaism for it was in Judaism as far as the Christian West was concerned Blanchot went on that lay the singularity otherness and exteriority that had to be reduced assimilated or destroyed if totalising teleological reason was to reach its appointed destination its preordained rendez-vous with itself As Blanchot put it in a


fragment much indebted to Glas (and to Levinas) lsquoHegel may well be Christianityrsquos deadly enemy but in so far as he is Christian if far from being satisfied with one solitary Mediation (Christ) he mediates everything [fait meacutediation de tout turns everything into a mediation] Only Judaism is the thinking that does not mediate [ne meacutediatise pas does not think through mediation] And this is why Hegel Marx are anti-Judaic not to say antisemiticrsquo203 The suggestion was unforgiving Admittedly as we have seen Blanchot adds a minor potentially back-handed corrective some eighty pages later nuancing the initial claim at least as far as Marx was concerned when he quotes Lenin (after Henri Guillemin) to the effect that lsquothe slightest hint of antisemitism professed by any group or individual proves the reactionary nature of that group or individualrsquo204 But it was not in spite of the fact Hegel was a philosopher that his thinking displayed contempt for Judaism Blanchot contended but precisely because of it because dialectical reason required mediation and could not do other than apply its redoubtable powers of appropriation to what resisted much as the Christianity of Paul of Tarsus would attempt to do with regard to its own Judaic origins

Hegel Marx were not alone For Blanchot applied the same argument with more telling force to Heidegger Here too Blanchot told Catherine David in November 1987 following the testimony of Karl Loumlwith there was no contradiction between politics and what still notwithstanding Heideggerrsquos declared project of stepping back from Western metaphysics had the obstinate status of a philosophy The one followed from the other and if Heideggerrsquos primary failing as Blanchot put it in LrsquoEntretien infini referring to Heideggerrsquos endorsement of Hitlerrsquos campaign to leave the League of Nations in November 1933 consisted in the decision to lsquoplace in Hitlerrsquos service the very language the very writing by which at a great moment in the history of thinking we were invited into what was described as the loftiest questioning coming to us from Being and from Timersquo205 so in subsequent years his lsquoirreparable faultrsquo lay in his enduring silence about the Extermination as Blanchot now called it even in answer to the interlocutor who was Paul Celan This was why attributing Lacoue-Labarthersquos formulation to Celan to whose writing it was intimately connected and now using the word in print in its own right for the first time Blanchot had little hesitation in agreeing lsquothat the Shoah in respect of the West was the revelation of its essencersquo206


That the genocide of the Jews had deep philosophical as well political and historical causes was not to claim it was the result of some inexplicable or unavoidable necessity Nor was it to suggest that the solution was to renounce philosophy and to embrace in its stead literature religion or the irrational For if it was the case that the Shoah was one of the disastrous ends of Western philosophy this served only to remind Blanchot as it did Levinas Lacoue-Labarthe Derrida and others that it was essential to pursue philosophy beyond that end to persist beyond disaster so to speak by maintaining the thought of disaster Scepticism sobriety interminable vigilance these were the tasks For if disaster spoke of the radical possibility of nothingness of nothing as radical possibility as the experience of the camps seemed to testify it also said that in nothing in the impossibility of nothing there survived a trace to which in remembering in forgetting in responding both to the future and to the past it was necessary to bear witness

In Was heiszligt Denken a text much frequented in earlier decades by Blanchot Heidegger argued that the ontological difference was not only what made thinking possible and necessary it was that which thought today was also required to think In 1980 Blanchot returned to the question and gave it an entirely new inflection What made thought possible and necessary he argued and was today its task and its challenge that by which thought is required and which endures as a requirement for thought this was none other than disaster

V

the youngest day

uml The last judgement in German the youngest day [le jour le plus jeune] the day beyond days not that judgement is reserved for the end of time on the contrary justice cannot wait it is there to be carried out dispensed considered at length (learned) too at every instant every just act (do they exist) turns this day into the last day or ndash as Kafka once put it ndash into the very last no longer just one in the ordinary sequence of days but such as to make the most ordinary of ordinary days into something extraordinary


Whoever was a contemporary of the death camps is forever a survivor death will not make him die


But it would be wrong to see the interruption of history affirmed in the thought of disaster only as a response to irredeemable catastrophe For if it marked an unthinkable caesura in the history of the West it also had its counterpart in something else also irreducible to history which likewise divided the epoch from itself which was not to say the two interruptions were the same On the contrary in a May 1964 article on Jabegraves Blanchot contrasting the one with the other wrote of a lsquorupture suffered [subie] within history and there speaks catastrophe still and forever at hand [Blanchot first glossed the phrase by adding in apposition the extermination which he then excised in 1971] the infinite violence of distress [malheur] the rupture due to the violent authority [pouvoir] that wants to mark a new era [faire eacutepoque] and leave its stamp upon it [marquer une eacutepoque] And then the other the original rupture prior to history so to speak no longer suffered but demanded [exigeacutee] and which expressing its distance from all power [puissance] delimits an interval into which Judaism introduces the affirmation which is its own the rupture shown by ldquothe wound invisible at the outsetrdquo ldquothis wound rediscovered belonging to a race [race] having its origins in the bookrdquo ldquonothing but the grief whose past and continuing existence are indistinguishable [se confondent] from those of writingrdquorsquo208

But how to think further the challenge to historical and political violence mounted by the second of these breaks And how therefore to articulate its radical difference from the first Towards the end of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre commenting on a sentence from a 1976 book by Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet in which the two authors writing in apocalyptic vein in the disenchanted aftermath of May 1968 had put forward what they called an ontology of revolution and an ethics of revolt Blanchot ventured an answer209 lsquorevolt yesrsquo he murmured lsquoas the demand of the turning [lrsquoexigence du tournant] in which time changes with the extreme of patience being in relation with the extreme of responsibilityrsquo But in that case he went on responding to another of Lardreau and Jambetrsquos remarks revolt ought not to be identified with rebellion which


was just another word for war and the struggle for mastery and domination In revolt something else was at stake which without being anhistorical was irreducible to history as narrative or event lsquoWhat might be the status of this other history [lrsquoautre histoire] thenrsquo he asked

if its characteristic feature is that it is not a history neither in the sense of Historie [history as inquiry into the past] nor in the sense of Geschichte [history as temporal sequence] (which implies the idea of gathering together [rassemblement]) and also in that nothing in it ever occurs in the present no event or advent measures it [la mesure] or counts it out [la scande] and beyond all temporal succession (which is always linear even when it is as tangled [enchevecirctreacutee] and erratic [zigzagante] as it is dialectical) it unfolds a plurality which is not that of the world nor of arithmetic an excessive history [histoire en trop] then lsquosecretrsquo and separate which assumes the end of visible history though it is without all idea of beginning and ending always in relation with an unknown that requires the utopia of knowing all because it always overflows its limits mdash an unknown which is not bound to the irrational beyond all reason nor even to something irrational within reason perhaps a return to an other meaning in the laborious work of lsquodesignificationrsquo This other history might be called a pretend history [une histoire feinte] which does not mean a mere nothing but appealing always to the emptiness of a non-place a falling short [un manque] in which what falls short is history itself beyond belief [incroyable] because wanting of all belief [en deacutefaut par rapport agrave toute croyance]210

In the twenty fragments and ten or so pages that followed bringing LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre itself to an end Blanchot probed further this suggestion of an history always already other than history To do so moving in a very different direction to his erstwhile interlocutors of 1976 he lingered on a sequence of familiar-unfamiliar names Wittgenstein Houmllderlin Kafka Melville and Levinas each of which served as a kind of threshold for a series of meditations on the exteriority of thought to philosophy the dangerously fascinating withdrawal from thought of what Blanchot calls the One the end or ends of what undecidably goes under the name of literature the relationship between writing the Law laws and regulations


the figure of the messianic in Jewish thinking waking as a waking beyond waking and disaster deacutesastre as deferred dying

But although they reprise several important motifs that had appeared earlier in Blanchotrsquos text these closing fragments do not produce closure For one thing they send a reader back to earlier passages already touching on Wittgenstein Houmllderlin Kafka Melville Levinas the identity of the Messiah or the exigencies of waking thereby redoubling the burden of reading rather than alleviating it For another the ending they invoke as this brief cursus suggests has not only always already happened without happening it is also in the form of a proleptic interruption or suspension of time history meaning lsquo Let us share out [partageons] eternity in order to make it transitoryrsquo urges for instance the last fragment printed in roman the third before the end of the book offering a knowingly paradoxical prescription that has the strange effect of dividing time from itself both as that which inheres within itself (the transitory) and as that which endures beyond itself (the eternal) and speaks of a possibility or perhaps better an impossibility which irreducible to the timeless and the time-bound as such entrusts to the community of readers to whom it is addressed a task that belongs to the infinite only in so far as it is already the demand of finitude and which stepping beyond the two disabling theism and atheism alike provides a trace of what Nancy has called Blanchotrsquos absentheacuteisme or absentheism211

In these final pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre there is much else that is similarly informed by Blanchotrsquos increasingly explicit engagement with what Nancy goes on to describe as the theological or better theomorphological dimension in the formerrsquos thinking212 From the 1970s onwards and during the 1980s in particular this found expression in Blanchotrsquos growing receptivity to Jewish thought and tradition even as he remained cautiously mindful of his own position as a non-Jew It is nevertheless apparent that in these later years Blanchot turned more and more to the Old Testament the Talmud and the work of such writers thinkers or commentators as Jabegraves Scholem David Banon Marc-Alain Ouaknin and of course Levinas213 But when Blanchot once more evoked the thought of Levinas in the closing pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre it was to unexpected effect Leaving aside the intense engagement with Autrement qursquoecirctre that figures so prominently in earlier sections


of the book Blanchot now moved ten further years back in time to copy out in the form of a single fragment given in italics Levinasrsquos claim made at the end of a 1963 article on the question of Jewish identity (nuancing the distrust of lsquopoems and poetic activityrsquo Blanchot observes that Levinas displays elsewhere) that lsquoto accept [admettre] the action of literature [la litteacuterature] on humanity [les hommes] ndash this perhaps is the ultimate wisdom [lrsquoultime sagesse] of the West in which the people of the Bible will recognise itselfrsquo214 lsquoAre true books just booksrsquo Levinas had inquired immediately before in that nearly twenty-year-old essay lsquoOr are they not also the embers still glowing beneath the ashesrsquo he went on lsquoas rabbi Eliezer called the words of the Prophets [les paroles des Sages] In this way the flame traverses history without burning in it But the truth illuminates whoever breathes life back into the dormant flame More or less Itrsquos a question of breathrsquo

Though it stood alone in Blanchotrsquos text surrounded by a blank unspeaking margin like so many other fragments in the book this surprising encomium to literaturersquos ardently transhistorical quasi-religious importance on Levinasrsquos part did nevertheless gesture in the direction of the three other literary names featuring in its vicinity Houmllderlin Kafka and Melville only one of whom was admittedly a Jew but each of whom by dint of Blanchotrsquos citation beyond confessional affiliation was discreetly accorded vicarious prophetic status (Prophetic it may be remembered is the epithet used in Le Pas aushydelagrave to describe that which in the past already repeated the future215) But before going on to cite or gloss their contribution to what Levinas called ultimate wisdom Blanchot in another slightly earlier fragment had entered a minor caveat having precisely to do with the status of prophecy lsquoHe who waitsrsquo he observed in familiar yet densely elliptical vein lsquoprecisely does not wait for you [ne trsquoattend pas] In this way you are however awaited [attendu] but not in the vocative case not called [non appeleacute]rsquo216 Like others in the book alongside a veiled allusion the fragment also contained a partial quotation the significance of which would only become apparent if at all in abyssal fashion some pages later In the meantime one of the lessons of the fragment was nevertheless clear As Blanchot had insisted in LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli waiting in so far as it could be both a transitive and intransitive verb was importantly already neither the one nor the other The future could not not


come in other words and was thus bound to be awaited but it was necessarily imponderable irreducibly uncertain and defiant of all purposeful attention Whatever prophecy entailed was inseparable from a necessary hesitation suspension or deferral lsquoWhen language [la parole] becomes propheticrsquo Blanchot put it in January 1957 annotating a book by Andreacute Neher lsquoit is not the future [lrsquoavenir] that is given but the present [le preacutesent] that is withdrawn and all possibility of firm stable lasting presence Even the Eternal City and the Indestructible Temple are suddenly ndash and unbelievably ndash destroyed It is like the wilderness [deacutesert] again and language [la parole] too is like the wilderness [deacutesertique] a voice needing the wilderness in order to cry and endlessly reviving within us the dread [lrsquoeffroi] the acceptance [lrsquoentente] and the memory of the wildernessrsquo217

In the oblique turn to prophecy what interested Blanchot in 1980 as already in 1957 as Nancy suggests was not religious doctrine as such but something more original and more radical the resources of language and thought when exposed to the chance both the promise and the threat of epochal turn And this was the question Blanchot went on to pursue in the long fragment that immediately followed resuming a train of thinking begun earlier in the book when he had addressed the demand of a lsquoplurality subtracted from unity and from which unity always subtracts itself a relation with the other by the other that is not unified or alternatively a difference irreducible [eacutetrangegravere] to the different the fragmentary without fragments this remainder [ce reste] to be written which in the same way as disaster has already preceded and ruined any beginning of writing and speechrsquo218 Despite this originary dispersion the power and privilege of the One were nevertheless considerable Prior to any distinction between monotheism and polytheism and not to be confused with the first in preference to the other argued Blanchot it exerted a seemingly incontrovertible hold over thought as that towards which thinking was turned even as it remained radically inaccessible to it If it had force of law then it was only because it was more prestigious than any law lsquoThe severity of the One that prescribes nothingrsquo Blanchot explained lsquoevokes that which is imprescriptible [imprescriptible unchanging inalienable] in the Law superior to all prescriptions and so high there is no height at which it reveals itself The Law by the authority beyond all justification usually attributed to it (in such a way that


whether it is legitimate or illegitimate is not important) is already a lowering of the One which being neither high nor low neither single nor secondary allows any number of equivalences which all leave it intact the Same the Simple Presencersquo219

lsquoBut what would happenrsquo Blanchot then asked returning to that other (than) history described a page earlier lsquoif it were possible to thwart the One [faire eacutechec agrave lrsquoUn] And how to thwart the Onersquo lsquoPerhapsrsquo he suggested lsquoby speaking [en parlant] by a kind of speech [une sorte de parole]rsquo and he added lsquoThat no doubt is disasterrsquos struggle [le combat du deacutesastre] And it was in a sense Kafkarsquos struggle too struggling for the One against the Onersquo220 Kafka though did not stand alone and in the fragment that followed Blanchot emphasised the point by quoting the second part of a famous two-line epigram by Houmllderlin entitled lsquoWurzel alles Uumlbels [root of All Evil]rsquo written in the early part of January 1800 almost exactly a year after the poetrsquos famous New Yearrsquos letter to his brother cited some pages earlier in which he declared himself in Blanchotrsquos words lsquoready to throw his pen under the table in order to give himself over completely [afin drsquoecirctre tout] to the revolutionrsquo221 and only months after the coup drsquoeacutetat of the Eighteenth Brumaire which saw Napoleacuteon imposed as the autocratic dictatorial First Consul lsquoTo be at one [Einig zu sein] is godly and goodrsquo wrote the poet in opening words Blanchot silently elided only then to adopt as his own the question that followed lsquobut whence comes the craving [Sucht Blanchot translates deacutesir maladif unhealthy desire] among men that there should be only the one person [nur Einer qursquoil nrsquoy ait que lrsquoun] and the one thing only [Eines nur qursquoil nrsquoy ait que de lrsquoun]rsquo222

The political implications of Blanchotrsquos campaign to eject all pretenders to the One as so many oppressive tyrants were plain enough But what then did it mean to struggle for the One against the One To oppose the One Blanchot explained by mere dialectical reversal would simply be to pay homage to its transcendent power rather than confronting and thus confirming it it was essential to seek instead to separate or subtract or withdraw it from itself making it ever poorer and ever more vacant thereby affirming the singular One against the totalising One and it was this interminable process of suspension and reinscription suggests Blanchot that most potently set Kafkarsquos writing apart The struggle for the One against the One in this sense as Blanchot puts it was not an overcoming


of literature lsquoKafkarsquos gift to usrsquo he argued lsquoa gift which we do not receive is a kind of struggle for literature by literature a struggle whose finality at the same time proves elusive [eacutechappe] and which is so different from what we know by that or any other name that even to call it unknown is inadequate to describe it since it is as familiar to us as it is alienrsquo223 Taking this analysis into a reading of Kafkarsquos Castle Blanchot reaffirmed an interpretation he had first put forward in LrsquoEntretien infini which had to do with the radically suspensive effects of that most banal of experiences unending fatigue lsquoAt nightrsquo he wrote lsquoinsomnia is dis-cussion not the labour of arguments clashing [se heurtant] with other arguments but extreme commotion [lrsquoextrecircme secousse] empty of thoughts [sans penseacutees] disturbance shattered to the point of calm [lrsquoeacutebranlement casseacute jusqursquoau calme]rsquo at which point Blanchot added an abyssal illustrative parenthesis lsquothe exegeses that come and go in The Castle this story of insomniarsquo without it being clear as far as this last phrase was concerned whether the genitive was to be taken as subjective or objective ie whether the story was one written about sleeplessness or one written by or during sleeplessness (Kafka like Blanchot was often in the habit of writing at night)224 In a sense it was both and neither and if Kafkarsquos novel could be described now as a story about wakefulness now as a story about fatigue there was no contradiction it was just that if to write was always to have reached a limit it was also to discover that the limit had already given way to the limitlessness that inhabited it In other words what constituted the singularity of the One when pressed was also what deprived it of any self-coincidence as totality To be exposed to the demand of the One was not to touch ground therefore but to be confronted instead with an absolute absence of ground As Blanchot goes on

uml It is strange that K at the end of The Castle should by some commentators be consigned to madness From the outset he is beyond the debate between reason and unreason in so far as everything he does is without relation [sans rapport] with the reasonable and yet absolutely necessary that is just or justified Similarly it does not seem possible that he should die (whether damned or saved is almost unimportant) not only because his struggle [son combat] is not in terms of living and dying but also because he is too weary [fatigueacute] (his weariness the only feature


to be accentuated as the story proceeds) to be able to die [pour pouvoir mourir] for the advent of his death [lrsquoavegravenement de sa mort] not to change into an interminable non-event [inavegravenement interminable]225

Notwithstanding Blanchotrsquos unambiguous atheism comments Nancy it is difficult not to sense in this impossibility of dying this simultaneous exacerbation and suspension of human finitude the veiled yet nevertheless insistent presence of the theme of resurrection226 That there are other biblical motifs at work in these final pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is likewise hard to deny Explicitly mentioned alongside the work of Kafka and partaking in the same literary struggle is another remarkably eschatological text Melvillersquos story lsquoBartleby the Scrivenerrsquo which Blanchot had first reviewed in 1945 in a translation by Pierre Leyris and which had recently been republished in a new version by Michegravele Causse in the Autumn 1976 issue of Le Nouveau Commerce (in which just over a year earlier Blanchot had published the fragmentary discussion of Levinasrsquos Autrement qursquoecirctre that now occupies the first fifty or so pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre)227 This was not the first time Blanchot had taken an interest in the American novelist reviewing in September 1941 Jean Gionorsquos French version of Moby Dick the critic had explained to his readers how lsquoAhab and his crew embark on a hopeless struggle [combat] and perish in a disaster [deacutesastre] crowned by lightning [couronneacute par la foudre]rsquo228 Nearly forty years later the struggle and the disaster remained But what they now offered Blanchot as he returned again to lsquoBartlebyrsquo was a kind of radical instantiation of a double gesture of affirmation and withdrawal in which neither the one nor the other was allowed to pose itself as such but was always already contaminated overwritten dissolved by the other reiterating Bartlebyrsquos talismanic refrain lsquoI would prefer not torsquo which he rendered in 1980 in deliberately syncopated or interrupted fashion as lsquoje preacutefeacutererais ne pas (le faire)rsquo abandoning the translation adopted in 1975 in the remarks on Levinas in Le Nouveau Commerce (which had lsquojrsquoaimerais mieux ne pas le fairersquo) and reverting punctuation aside to Leyrisrsquos 1945 text (lsquoje preacutefeacutererais ne pas le fairersquo) Blanchot now glossed its enigmatically hesitant yet insistent demand as follows lsquothe phrasersquo he wrote lsquospeaks in the intimacy of our nights the negative preference the negation that effaces the preference and in so doing effaces itself the neuter of


that which would rather not be done the restraint the gentleness that cannot be called obstinate and which confounds [deacutejoue] obstinacy with these few words language falls silent [se tait] while perpetuating itself [en se perpeacutetuant while in or by perpetuating itself]rsquo229

Despite appearances then to refuse to comply in Bartlebyrsquos case was no negative gesture based on superior strength To affirm withdrawal was already to withdraw affirmation and to undo both so to speak beyond this or that preference resulting in prolonged exposure to the neuter and the impossible On the part of Bartleby scrivener copyist writer no longer prepared to subject his hand or script to the control of others it was to offer lsquoa passive resistancersquo as Melville calls it230 to the law of Wall Street not however by opposing it directly rather by taking up residence within it accepting its rules while gently revoking them exasperating its occupants driving them from their offices finally taking their place now become a ghostly contagious presence a recalcitrant vagrant whose final gesture wasting away and falling asleep in the Tombs (as the old New York prison was called) refusing to make death into either an outcome or an event as Blanchot puts it was to reveal infinite passivity at the heart of finite power and to interrupt the authority of a legal machine no longer able to control what went on within its carefully patrolled precincts

If Melvillersquos story gave voice to a kind of epochal resistance to the law by subordinating it to an interruption as original as it was enigmatic embodying it in a character who was little more than a name and whose main activity was to refrain from all activity then so too Kafkarsquos writing according to Blanchot was likewise synonymous with an encounter with different manifestations of the law whose authority was both traversed and suspended by it For if writing was exposure not only to the Law (what Derrida in an essay on Kafka would later describe as the lsquobeing-law of the lawrsquo) but also to the laws of a given culture or society and to the everyday rules by which the life and death of its citizens were organised or given meaning then it necessarily followed in so far as all literature was a writing and in so far as Law laws or rules were inseparable from their textual inscription that literature had the strange capacity of intervening before the Law not in order to transgress it but by silently citing quoting framing transcribing or copying it gently to set it aside and detach it from itself as a provisional and contingent


moment belonging to an infinity of language that asserting nothing had always already called time on the power and authority to which the law lay claim231 Here for Blanchot was the secret without secret of literature not only in Melville but in Kafka too in whom it was again not without far-reaching political implications lsquoKafkarsquos trial [Le procegraves de Kafka]rsquo Blanchot wrote referring both to the novel by that name and the movement it unfolded but which never reached completion lsquomay be interpreted as an interlacing [enchevecirctrement] between these three domains (the Law laws and rules) an inadequate interpretation however in so far as to give it credence one would have to posit a fourth domain not attributable to the other three [ne relevant pas des trois autres] ndash that of the overhang [surplomb the way in which a geographical or architectural feature protrudes over another] of literature itself even though literature refuses this privileged standpoint not allowing itself to become dependent on some other order or any order whatsoever (pure intelligibility) in the name of which it might be symbolisedrsquo232

Literature writing for Blanchot in so far as it had always already interrupted the law was inseparable from the law of that interruption To suspend the law in other words was not to break the law but rather as we have seen to obey a more originary law of suspension To measure the radical consequences of this literary and political argument Blanchot in the closing pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre made a bold move This first of all took him back to Levinasrsquos Difficile Liberteacute on which he had drawn earlier not only to vouchsafe the status of literature as ultimate wisdom but also in enigmatically abyssal manner to announce the imminent return of the question of prophecy reverting then to Levinas Blanchot picked up where he had left off In the course of a lengthy fragment devoted to the messianic in Jewish thought in terms that are both faithful yet at times surprisingly unfaithful he transcribed a sequence of passages quotations and motifs from one of Levinasrsquos earliest published Talmudic commentaries from 1960 and 1961 in which Levinas had explored a number of texts from the Tractate Sanhedrin (97bndash99a) dealing precisely with the question of prophecy and the relationship between the future and the Messianic epoch233 It was in that commentary for instance that Blanchot will have encountered the story of the Messiah waiting lsquoat the gates of rome among the beggars and the lepersrsquo234 As readers of Levinas will recall it was rabbi Joshua b Levi prompted by the prophet Elijah who


put the question to the Messiah lsquoWhen will you comersquo (lsquoQuand viendrasshytursquo lsquoPour quand ta venuersquo writes Blanchot transcribing the question in two separate contexts lsquoagrave quand ta venuersquo Levinas had originally had it) only to receive by way of answer the word lsquoTodayrsquo (lsquoPour aujourdrsquohuirsquo says Blanchot lsquopour aujourdrsquohui mecircmersquo insists Levinas) lsquoThe reply is admittedly impressiversquo comments Blanchot lsquotoday means today [crsquoest donc aujourdrsquohui]rsquo And he goes on lsquoit means now [maintenant] and always now There is no reason to wait though there is it seems a duty [obligation] to do so And when is now A now that does not belong to ordinary time which necessarily disrupts it [le bouleverse] fails to maintain it [ne le maintient pas the word maintenant meaning lsquonowrsquo originally derives from the present participle of the verb maintenir] destabilises it especially if one remembers that this ldquonowrdquo outside any text [hors texte] on the part of a story of severe fictionality [drsquoun reacutecit de seacutevegravere fiction] refers back to texts that make it once more dependent on realisable-unrealisable conditionsrsquo At this stage in his commentary perhaps borrowing the reference from Scholem Levinas had wondered whether the reference to lsquotodayrsquo ought not be taken as a silent quotation from Psalm 95 7 where Levinas reads lsquoToday if you wish to hear my voice [Aujourdrsquohui si vous voulez entendre ma voix]rsquo a gloss that Blanchot quotes in turn albeit in an idiosyncratically redundant translation of his own lsquoNow so long as you pay attention to me or if you are willing to listen to my voice [Maintenant pour peu que tu me precirctes attention ou si tu veux bien eacutecouter ma voix]rsquo235

In these closing pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre there are several further borrowings from Levinasrsquos Talmudic commentary both implicit and explicit including for instance the proposition that the Messiah may already have come which Levinas takes from rabbi Hillel or the idea that the coming of the Messiah may be conditional on human endeavour moral improvement or repentance a view associated by Levinas with rabbi Johanan or even the possibility advanced by rabbi Nachman on the basis of a reference in Jeremiah 30 21 that the Messiah may perhaps be none other than lsquoMersquo ndash lsquoMoirsquo as Levinas translates it236 (Blanchotrsquos responsibility alone however was the ndash absentheistic ndash inference directed against lsquothe Christian hypostasisrsquo that there was therefore nothing divine about the Messiah lsquoas comforter and the just of the justrsquo he remarks lsquoit is not even certain that he is a person or an individual [quelqursquoun de


singulier]rsquo237) Arguably the most important exchange in this tacit dialogue between Levinas and Blanchot is the observation which the latter makes his own that the advent of the Messiah in Judaism diverged radically from the (Christian Hegelian) idea of an end to history lsquoA totally different concept of redemption determines the attitude to Messianism in Judaism and in Christianityrsquo Scholem followed here by Blanchot had likewise argued lsquoJudaismrsquo Scholem went on lsquoin all of its forms and manifestations has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly on the stage of history and within the community It is an occurrence which takes place in the visible world and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearancersquo Christianity on the other hand he maintained lsquoconceives of redemption as an event in the spiritual and unseen realm an event which is reflected in the soul in the private world of each individual and which effects an inner transformation to which nothing external in the world necessarily correspondsrsquo lsquoWhat for the one [ie Christianity]rsquo Scholem concluded lsquostood unconditionally at the end of history as its most distant aim was for the other [ie Judaism] the true centre of the historical process even if it was henceforth peculiarly decked out as a ldquohistory of salvation [Heilsgeschichte]rdquorsquo238 And though he demurred at Scholemrsquos preference for apocalyptic messianism over rabbinical rationalism Levinasrsquos position was little different lsquoJudaismrsquo he concurred lsquodoes not bring with it a doctrine of an end to history dominating individual destiny Salvation is not an end to history ndash or its conclusion It remains at every moment possiblersquo239

It was here that Blanchotrsquos own Bartleby-like intervention as reader and as copyist was at its most incisive For he ended this lengthy fragment on Jewish messianism by citing a final lsquomysterious textrsquo (as he calls it) which first spoken by rabbi Hiyaa b Abba in rabbi Johananrsquos name was again extracted from Levinasrsquos commentary on Sanhedrin 99a The text given in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ran as follows lsquoAll the prophets ndash there is no exception ndash have prophesied only for messianic time [epocheacute] As for future time what eye has seen it except for You Lord who will act for him who is faithful to you and remains waitingrsquo For once Blanchotrsquos original wording is worth reproducing in full It reads lsquoTous les prophegravetes ndash il nrsquoy a pas drsquoexception ndash nrsquoont propheacutetiseacute que pour le temps messianique [lrsquoeacutepokhegrave] Quant au temps futur quel œil lrsquoa vu en dehors de Toi Seigneur qui agiras pour celui qui trsquoest fidegravele et


reste en attentersquo240 The writer concluded with a parenthesis citing the names of Levinas and Scholem one alongside the other showing a prudent reluctance perhaps to choose between these divergent yet equally authoritative thinkers As for the original Talmudic text that is the object of Levinasrsquos remarks readers do not need to look far Levinas cites it as follows lsquoAll the prophets without exception prophesied only in respect of the messianic era As for the world to come no eye has seen it except for You O Lord who will act for him who awaits yoursquo Again for purposes of comparison it is worth giving the French text in full lsquoTous les prophegravetes sans exception nrsquoont propheacutetiseacute que pour lrsquoeacutepoque messianique Pour ce qui est du monde futur aucun œil ne lrsquoa vu en dehors de Toi O Seigneur qui agiras pour celui qui trsquoattendrsquo241

Already according to Levinas the original passage from Tractate Sanhedrin incorporated within it a loose version of Isaiah 64 4 (lsquono eye has seen a God besides thee who waits for those who wait for himrsquo)242 Blanchotrsquos own response it seems was to reply with a free traduction of his own which despite being only two sentences long diverged in no fewer than eight distinct ways from the source text cited by Levinas Inaccuracies of this kind are not unknown in Blanchot who frequently quotes from memory and as we have seen often silently improves texts and translations for his own purposes Here as elsewhere there is evidence of a coherent strategic purpose in Blanchotrsquos rather surprising infidelity Admittedly some of the changes made to the Talmudic text quoted by Levinas are more matters of style than of substance like for instance the decision to replace the adverbial expression lsquowithout exception [sans exception]rsquo with the interpolated phrase lsquothere is no exception [il nrsquoy a pas drsquoexception]rsquo which is more assertive in tone and allows Blanchot to insert in the negative a reference to the thought of the il y a but is otherwise acceptably close to the original text Other modifications are more significant such as the omission of the vocative lsquoOrsquo in lsquoO Lord [O Seigneur]rsquo which suggests a less effusive relationship with the godhead and is reminiscent of Blanchotrsquos earlier attempt to imagine a kind of futural waiting irreducible to all transitivity Even more striking is Blanchotrsquos substitution of the phrase lsquotime to come [temps futur]rsquo for lsquoworld to come [monde futur]rsquo and the transformation of the confident statement lsquono eye [aucun œil] has seen itrsquo into the more quizzical rhetorical question lsquowhat eye [quel œil] has seen itrsquo the result of which on both counts is to sever the connection


between the future and the certain possibility of a world Likewise the replacement of the words lsquofor him who waits [pour celui qui trsquoattend]rsquo with the cognate but otherwise barely justifiable phrase lsquofor him who is faithful to you [pour celui qui trsquoest fidegravele]rsquo extended in another instance of calculated redundancy by the intransitive expression lsquoand remains waiting [et reste en attente]rsquo has the effect of postponing by now for the second time all transitive recourse to the verb attendre But perhaps most surprising of all among Blanchotrsquos silent revisions is the expression lsquomessianic time [temps messianique]rsquo used in preference to Levinasrsquos lsquomessianic era [eacutepoque messianique]rsquo a decision for which he compensates by supplying in parentheses in italics and together with a question mark the Greek word eacutepokhegrave as employed by Sceptics and Husserlians alike as though to emphasise in this abrupt confrontation between these two traditions the Hellenic and the Judaic the philosophical yet more than philosophical implications of the messianic suspension of the end (of world time and epoch) in Jewish thought

In a context that may be thought by some to be demanding of the most scrupulous fidelity what is to be made of so many unfaithful ndash some will say violent ndash displacements

There are four aspects of Blanchotrsquos partial rewriting of Levinasrsquos Talmudic quotation that merit attention First it should be remembered that occupying as it does a significant place in Judaic tradition and ritual the main purpose of the Talmud according to Levinas was not to serve as a discourse of pious edification On the contrary he put it in 1968

in itself the text of the Talmud is a form of intellectual struggle [combat intellectuel] and bold opening [ouverture hardie] onto those questions mdash even the most irksome mdash towards which the commentator has to find a path without allowing himself to be misled by the appearance of tortuous discussions which mask in fact an extreme attention to the real Mischievous [espiegravegles] and laconic in their ironic or abrupt formulation while still profoundly enamoured of the possible [eacuteprises du possible] the pages of the Talmud consign an oral tradition and teaching that were written down [devenus eacutecrit] only by accident and which it is essential to restore to their dialogic and polemical vitality notably the way in which multiple mdash but not haphazard mdash meanings emerge [se legravevent] and hum [bourdonnent] in each response [chaque dire]243


Explaining elsewhere his own reading of the Talmud and without seeking he says to exclude its religious significance Levinas nevertheless emphasised the extent to which as he put it lsquoits [religious] meaning is not only transposable into philosophical language but refers to philosophical problems toorsquo lsquoThe thought [penseacutee] of the Doctors of the Talmudrsquo he went on lsquoproceeds from a meditation [reacuteflexion] that is radical enough also to satisfy the demands of philosophyrsquo244 Admittedly Levinas concedes that lsquothe exposition of a Talmudic text by someone who has not spent his life studying rabbinic literature in the traditional way is a very daring enterprise [une entreprise tregraves oseacutee] even if whoever attempts it has been familiar since childhood with the square letters and even if he has derived much from these texts for his own intellectual lifersquo245 In other words while the discourse of the Talmud was singular in so far as it was an integral part of Judaism it was also entirely universal in its address in so far as it sought to establish ethical principles that were valid for all

But what then of a reader who like Blanchot belonged to the outside Not being able to lay claim to the intimate knowledge and understanding acquired even by a self-confessed modest commen-tator such as Levinas schooled in the art of Talmudic interpretation by lsquothe prestigious ndash and merciless [impitoyable] ndash teacher of exegesis and of Talmudrsquo Mordechai Chouchani246 Blanchot (like the current writer) could not feature as anything other than an illegitimate interloper And yet at the same time in so far as the thinking found in the Talmud belonged according to Levinas to philosophy just as much as it did to religion it followed that any reader had equal right even equal responsibility to participate in the dialogue or polemic enshrined within it A reader alien to Talmudic tradition was in other words faced with a double burden while being deprived of authorised knowledge regarding the appropriate method for interpreting a text he or she in his or her capacity as reader was nevertheless required to respond to an event of reading that had always already taken place The predicament is held within an aporia As such however it is arguably less strange than might first appear For it is a condition shared in essence by any reader encountering any text for the first or even the second time required to respond that is in so far as reading is already a response but having no definitive method for doing so which according to Levinas was exactly the task facing even the seasoned Talmudic


exegete That Blanchot was able structurally to revise Levinasrsquos Talmudic quotation and felt entitled to do so merely confirmed this double burden with all its opportunities and risks which is also to say its hyperbolic responsibility

In rewriting Levinasrsquos text Blanchot in the form of an unfaithful divergent or even contestatory wording affixed to that text a signature of his own As he did so he not only appropriated the text for his own purposes by an act of calculated hubris he also modestly inscribed himself within it and testified twice over to the infinity implied within this necessarily finite text For Levinas who found it embodied in privileged fashion in the Talmud but inseparable from all writing in general this was what he called lsquothe prophetic dignity of language capable of always signifying more than it says [capable de signifier toujours plus qursquoil ne dit] the marvel of inspiration whereby man [lrsquohomme] listens with astonishment to what he is uttering already reads the utterance and interprets it and why human speech is already writing [eacutecriture lower-case scripture]rsquo247 In transcribing Levinas with a difference or differences then Blanchot was illustrating this abiding and incontrovertible principle of interpretative excess Copying the text incorrectly he admitted and exacerbated his own incompetence but by refusing to sacralise the text he allowed it to differ from itself and bear witness to its inalienable prophetic futurity His position as a copyist then was both infinitely cautious and infinitely risky and it was hardly by chance he found himself repeating the affirmative yet always less than affirmative gesture of Bartleby giving himself over to the endless task of copying but only in so far as what he did (or better preferred not to) owed allegiance to its own Law simultaneously in the observance and in the breach and patiently responsibly turned aside from all other institutional authority

Blanchotrsquos silent revisions to Levinasrsquos quotation were not however gratuitous There was a second important aspect to the intervention LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre sought to make in these closing pages which had to do with the nature of the messianic promise itself Blanchot of course agreed that Jewish messianism was crucially different from its Christian counterpart But if he endorsed the notion that the messianic promise in Judaism was inseparable from some kind of ethical social or political activity he also went a step further For Scholem Jewish messianism was either restorative or utopian depending on whether it saw its goal as lsquoa return to a primeval


time [Urzeit] to a state of things which in the course of history or perhaps even from the very beginning became decadent and corrupt and which needs restoration restitution or reintegrationrsquo or alternatively as a lsquophenomenon in which something emerges which has never before existed in which something totally new is unmistakeably expressedrsquo248 But either way however it was represented it seems that for both currents of thinking the messianic future was premised on the possibility of a world a world grounded in redemptive wholeness no longer subject to fragmentation or to decline and embodying for all time that which was just and good

But not so for Blanchot whose silent replacement of lsquoworld [monde]rsquo by lsquotime [temps]rsquo in Levinasrsquos Talmudic quotation suggested a very different emphasis For as Blanchot went on to imply it was one of the irredeemable ironies of the structure of the messianic promise that whoever was welcomed as a Messiah always risked being unmasked as an impostor This much was abundantly clear from Scholemrsquos own lengthy account of the rise consecration yet ultimate apostasy of the pseudo-Messiah Sabbatai Zevi (or Sevi) in the mid-seventeenth century followed as it was by protracted attempts on the part of his followers to reconcile their enduring religious expectations with this unforeseen turn of history249 What this meant as Steacutephane Mosegraves observes was that lsquothe Jewish idea of messianism is in its very essence an aporia messianism can only affirm itself by realising itself but no sooner does it realise itself than it negates itself Whence its tragic quality the messianic tension of the Jewish people has always had it live in the expectation of a radical upheaval of life on earth which each time it seemed as though it was in the offing very quickly appeared illusory Whence too in Jewish mysticism the constant cautioning against the temptation of impatience of premature intervention into history Whence also in Jewish religious consciousness its strange and distinctive experience of time which is lived in its very nature as expectation neither as a kind of pagan enjoyment of the present moment nor as a kind of spiritual escape transcending time but an ever renewed aspiration from the very heart of time itself to the coming of the absolutely new conceived as capable of emerging at any moment redemption is always imminent but if it were to come it would be immediately put into question in the very name of the absolute demand it claims to meetrsquo250

For Blanchot the political lesson was clear For if every prophet always already risked being in some sense a false prophet the appeal


to the messianic was by that token a temptation it was necessary to resist not in order to deny the messianic promise in the name of secular historical progress but paradoxically in order to affirm it as something always already withdrawn from linear or teleological history If the messianic promise was to endure intact it was therefore indispensable that it remain perpetually unrealised not to say radically unrealisable It was therefore essential in Blanchotrsquos eyes to subtract the messianic promise from the future realisation of a world (lsquoMessianic impatiencersquo he wrote elsewhere lsquois perhaps the danger of dangersrsquo251) and why rather than culminating in any world State regime or leader it could only speak here and now not of history but of the time without time that was the time of the fragmentary Otherwise the consequences were serious What followed would not be historyrsquos suspension but its sacralisation not the political as radical contestation inalienable freedom and infinite refusal but politics as irrational belief providential power and abusive tyranny The messianic in other words rather than an impatient hastening of the end was its own exact opposite a patient deferral of all possibility of ending As Blanchot went on to argue in the fragment immediately following

uml Why did Christianity need a Messiah who might be God It is not enough to say through impatience But if we do view historical figures as gods it is surely by an impatient subterfuge And why the idea of the Messiah Why the necessity of completion in justice Why can we not bear why can we not desire that which is without end Messianic hope ndash hope which is also dread ndash becomes unavoidable when history appears politically only as arbitrary chaos [un tohushybohu] a process deprived of sense But if political reason becomes messianic in its turn this confusion which denies all seriousness to the search for reasonable (comprehensible) history just as it does to the demand [lrsquoexigence] of messianism (the accomplishment of morality) is merely a sign of a time [temps] so agonising so dangerous that all recourse appears justified can one keep onersquos distance [prendre du recul] when Auschwitz is happening How to say Auschwitz has happened252

True enough conceded Blanchot messianic belief as Scholem had long maintained was an understandable response to urgent


historical crisis But it was nevertheless a temptation which as such was dangerous not only to politics the future and writing but also to itself For if the messianic was a promise of realisation that in realising its promise could paradoxically not do otherwise than abolish itself as a promise it followed that properly to affirm it was also to suspend it and to suspend it to affirm it again and again In this respect the messianic marked a step beyond belief and disbelief theology and atheology theism and atheism as Nancy might put it which advanced nothing it did not immediately withdraw and vice versa It was at any event this hyperbolic self-resistance self-withdrawal or self-deconstruction of the messianic that is the third motif that Blanchot chose to stress in his recasting of Levinasrsquos quotation For the messianic promise to be maintained then it was necessary for it to remain void of any actual past or future Messiah Its only spokesperson might be the prophet Elijah not named at any stage by Blanchot to whom it nevertheless fell to keep open the always vacant unnamable futural place at table As Blanchot put it in response to a questionnaire about commitment in literature written only months after the publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre

[i]f in the Passover ceremony [la ceacutereacutemonie de la pacircque juive] it is traditional to reserve a cup of wine for whoever will precede and announce the messianic advent [lrsquoavegravenement messianique] of the world of the just [du monde juste] one can understand why the vocation of the (committed) writer is not to see himself in the role of prophet or messiah but to keep the place of whoever will come to preserve that empty place against usurpers and to maintain the immemorial memory that reminds us that we too were all slaves once and that though we may be free we remain and will remain slaves so long as others remain so that there is therefore (to put it too simply) freedom only for the other and by the other a task which is admittedly an infinite one and risks condemning the writer to a didactic pedagogic role and by that token excluding him from the demand he bears within himself and constrains him to have no place no name no role and no identity that is to be never yet a writer253

This paradoxical self-suspension of the messianic was what was no doubt at stake in Blanchotrsquos overwriting of the expression


lsquomessianic era [eacutepoque messianique]rsquo with a reference to lsquomessianic time [temps messianique]rsquo a time that on Blanchotrsquos submission then was anything but a span of time an era or epoch This for two reasons First as Blanchot explained earlier it followed from the story picturing the Messiah at the gates of rome that the presence of the Messiah on the scene was anything but lsquopresencersquo It was a coming that elided itself strictly in so far as it was not present to itself but a response to an appeal from the other As Blanchot explains lsquoIf the Messiah is at the gates of rome among the beggars and the lepers it might be thought that his incognito would protect him or prevent his coming but precisely he is recognised someone driven by the relentless need for questioning [presseacute par la hantise de lrsquointerrogation] asks ldquoWhen will you comerdquo The fact of being there [Le fait drsquoecirctre lagrave] is therefore not the same as coming [la venue] Even when the Messiah is there the call ldquoCome come [Viens viens]rdquo must always ring out His presence is no guarantee Whether future and past (it is said once at least that the Messiah has already come) his coming does not correspond to any presencersquo254

The notion that the Messiah may have already come as already indicated is one that Blanchot will have found in Levinasrsquos Talmudic commentary But he will have found it too in the work of another of the key interlocutors addressed in these closing pages of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre Kafka For it was Kafka in the passage from the Octavo Notebooks to which Blanchot refers in the fragment that came next who had suggested most likely following rabbi Israel ben Eliezer the founder of Hasidism that lsquoThe Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary [nicht mehr noumltig] he will come only after his coming [erst nach seiner Ankunft kommen] he will not come on the last day [am letzten Tag] but on the very last [am allerletzten]rsquo But if this seemed to suggest the coming of the Messiah was a distraction and that what really counted were humanityrsquos own patient efforts at achieving justice with the implication that the expectations raised by the messianic promise needed to be deferred postponed perhaps even abandoned this was far from the whole truth Indeed some days or pages earlier Kafka had explained a contrario that lsquo[i]t is only our concept of time that lets us call it the Day of Judgement [das Juumlngste Gericht] in reality it is a state of emergency [ein Standrecht a special or military tribunal constantly in session that delivers summary


judgements]rsquo255 The Messiah on Blanchotrsquos submission having always already preceded his own coming and carried by the future only in so far as he was already borne by the past was irreducible to all presence all plenitude embodiment or finality But if the time of the messianic was time beyond time even one might say the time of eternal return this was not to say the Messiah belonged to timeless eternity rather that the messianic promise necessarily traversed divided and interrupted time rather than belonging to a deferred future then it corresponded here and now to a demand it was impossible to elude in the present but only in so far as it implied a radical interruption of that present As both an injunction and a promise the messianic in other words was always double it not only enjoined patience obliqueness and withdrawal it also required urgency directness and intervention

It was only fitting then that Blanchotrsquos most far-reaching intervention into Levinasrsquos quotation was also its most oblique It consisted as we have seen of a silently quizzical almost incidental aside interrupting the movement of the Talmudic text For after boldly substituting his own messianic time for Levinasrsquos messianic epoch Blanchot immediately reinserted the word eacutepoque not however as itself naturalised within French primarily meaning a full unitary period of historical time but as its own Greek other eacutepokhegrave implying suspension withdrawal division Only five pages before the end of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre what to make of this sudden provocative even violent juxtaposition of Athens and Jerusalem It was evidently not the first time such an encounter had been announced proposed or enacted Like Derrida Blanchot was no doubt mindful of the Hegelian implications of the famous Joycean proposition voiced admittedly lsquowith saturnine spleenrsquo (lsquoWomanrsquos reason Jewgreek is greekjew Extremes meet Death is the highest form of life Bahrsquo) with which Derrida in 1964 had concluded his influential early essay on Levinas lsquoViolence and Metaphysicsrsquo observing nevertheless as he did so the latterrsquos unequivocal preference for Abraham over Ulysses and his strongly stated wish lsquoto oppose to the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca the story of Abraham leaving his homeland for ever for an as yet unknown land forbidding his servant even to take his son back to this starting pointrsquo256 This commitment to nomadic exile in lieu of patriotic rootedness was one that Blanchot shared and this explains perhaps the tentative elliptical manner in which he aligns


the Greek thought of epocheacute with that of the Judaic messianic epoch Implicit in Blanchotrsquos interpolation was the belief that the meeting between the two did not necessarily imply fusion or incorporation It was rather that their unmediated textual collision served to question the primacy or autonomy of each and open the chance or possibility of difference without opposition relation without relation dissymmetry without hierarchy

It was at any event in those terms in an essay written for the catalogue of the exhibition lsquoDe la Bible agrave nos jours [From the Bible to the Present-Day]rsquo held at the Grand Palais in Paris some five years after LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre that Blanchot went on to consider the double legacy of the Greeks and the Jews lsquoIn our traditionrsquo he argued

as it becomes exhausted while yet maintaining itself it seems to me that there have always been two chosen peoples two lsquomiraclesrsquo or two enigmas two small populations [peuples peoples] almost imperceptible on the map and yet rich with a message that has educated the centuries One however has never suffered as a result of being this model nation the exemplary representative of something that sustains our nostalgia It has never been a subject of complaint against the Greeks that they passed down to us the logos philosophy beauty and a certain idea of democracy The Greeks a chosen people par excellence But for the Jews the same election or a higher and more ancient election is held to be an arrogant claim a particularity that isolates even if what was passed down or taught to the Jews is valid for all and is the affirmation or promise of the Unique that is valid for all257

In addressing in tandem the legacy of the Greeks and of the Jews then Blanchot was far from attempting to assimilate the one to the other It was rather that the challenge was never to think the one without the other never that is to subscribe to the abstract universality of the logos without simultaneously affirming the singularity it negated For if lsquoit never occurred to the Greeks these bearers of the logosrsquo he noted with feigned surprise lsquothat there should be equality of speech and of law with the Barbariansrsquo it should be remembered he argued that lsquothe Hebrews were singled out from amongst all the nations (which is what Egypt represents) in order to acknowledge in this withdrawal


[retrait] or this setting aside [mise agrave lrsquoeacutecart] the opening to all and to all the nations and before the Eternal the equality of all (but not the abstract repetitive equality which excludes responsibility and fraternity) as though what was revealed to the Jews was that they were other in order to be released from the Same and in order to become responsive to alterity in the extraordinary concern for the otherrsquo258

If the interruption of being time and thought announced in Greek epocheacute and in the messianic promise of Judaism was offered to writing as its chance and its necessity it was in so far as nothing was given in itself or as such but only in turn as a trace that was both an affirmation and a withdrawal the one as the other the other as the one It is not by chance in this respect that the thought of disaster throughout LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre remains inseparable from a thought of the gift a gift never available in itself as such but only as an incontrovertible demanding yet always unfulfilled and incalculable promise lsquoDisaster is the gift [Le deacutesastre est le don]rsquo Blanchot wrote in a fragment that foretelling its own future had already appeared some 200 pages earlier lsquoit gives disaster [il donne le deacutesastre] it is as if it disregarded [passait outre] being and non-being alike It does not have the status of an advent [avegravenement] (that which is proper in what occurs [ce qui arrive]) ndash it does not occur [nrsquoarrive pas] such that I do not even arrive [je nrsquoen arrive mecircme pas] at this thought except without knowing without the appropriation [appropriation] of any knowledge Or else is it the advent [avegravenement] of what does not occur of what may be said to come without occurring [qui viendrait sans arriver] outside being and as it were without anchorage [par deacuterive] Posthumous disasterrsquo259

Or as he put it just before the end of the book in the form of a penultimate fragment traversed by the thought of the penultimate (lsquoLa Peacutenultiegraveme Est mortersquo Mallarmeacute famously wrote) that is by that which announcing the end defers all ending thus marking its possibility and its impossibility in so far as like death it had already happened and had yet still to happen given without being given in the form of a provisional and incomplete statement or an implicit question enigmatically printed in italics lsquo What remains to be said [Ce qursquoil reste agrave dire]rsquo260

What is it that remains to be said a reader may ask Everything ndash and yet nothing In a word always more or less than a word dis(-)aster


notes


2 One of the earliest recorded usages of the word in Blanchot belongs to one of his first published essays lsquoLes Penseacutees politiques de M Paul Valeacuteryrsquo La Revue franccedilaise XXVI 9 August 1931 749ndash50 in which writing in nationalist vein he complimented the poet for his sensitivity lsquoto the first signs of the disaster [du deacutesastre] into which our [ie French national] heritage risks being drawn and which would ruin him as one of its privileged beneficiaries [heacuteritier privileacutegieacute] more than any otherrsquo Six years later as the urgency of the political agenda became more acute so did the destructive (and saving) violence implied in the word and in a 3 March 1937 article in LrsquoInsurgeacute lsquoCe qursquoils appellent patriotismersquo Blanchot the political commentator can be found denouncing the complacency of lsquomoderatersquo opinion (extending his ire to the whole political establishment from left to right) by declaring his hope that lsquothe proximity of disaster [la proximiteacute du deacutesastre] will transform their cowardice into anguish and rot their confidence into despair [deacutesespoir]rsquo

3 Anon lsquoLrsquoAvenir de la Francersquo Journal des deacutebats 7 July 1940 1 On Blanchotrsquos authorship of at least some of the material that appeared in this short-lived column (the first of which was partially censored) see Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 153

4 See roger Laporte Eacutetudes (Paris POL 1990) 11

5 Blanchot La Part du feu 9 18 The Work of Fire 1 10 translation modified In April 1941 in the second of his articles to be published in the Journal des deacutebats under Vichy (Chroniques litteacuteraires 18ndash19) the writer had likewise already begun to bind lsquothese times given over to disaster [ce temps voueacute au deacutesastre]rsquo to the unlikely prospect of hope Two and a half years further on in a September 1943 article on rimbaud in Faux Pas 166 Faux Pas 143 he asked on a more affirmative note lsquowhy is it not possible for the poet to cease being a poet without provoking a disaster [un deacutesastre] by which poetry far from being weakened is enrichedrsquo translation modified In April 1947 in an essay on Pascal addressing the relationship between success and failure Blanchot similarly observed in La Part du feu 256 The Work of Fire 263 that lsquo[p]oetry in this sense is the realm of disaster [le royaume du deacutesastre]rsquo True deacutesastre in these early reviews does not always carry these cosmological overtones


In the Journal des deacutebats for 13ndash14 November 1943 (Chroniques litteacuteraires 493) Blanchot greeted a recent volume of lesser-known works by La Fontaine by referring ironically to lsquothis disaster of a La Fontaine without the Fables [ce deacutesastre drsquoun La Fontaine sans fables]rsquo

6 Blanchot La Condition critique 45 lsquoDays of Hope by Andreacute Malrauxrsquo translated by Michael Holland Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 5ndash12 (p 5) translation slightly modified Malrauxrsquos novel was first published in 1937 while the memory of the political events with which it was concerned was still very much alive Blanchotrsquos powerful endorsement of the book in 1946 is arguably the first overt sign of the writerrsquos rejection of the prewar nationalism with which he had earlier been identified

7 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 94 Existence and existents 58 translation modified The same image also informs Levinasrsquos account of insomnia which he describes as being lsquocharacterised by the consciousness that it will never end ie that there is no way of escaping the wakefulness [vigilance] by which one is gripped Wakefulness without purpose [sans aucun but] From the moment one is fettered [riveacute] to it all notion of a starting or finishing point is gonersquo See Levinas Le Temps et lrsquoautre 27 Time and the Other 48 translation modified In the 1935 essay lsquoDe lrsquoeacutevasionrsquo Levinas had recourse to the same phrase too for his analysis of shame lsquoWhat appears in shame [la honte]rsquo he argued lsquois therefore precisely the fact of being inescapably fettered [riveacute] to oneself the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself in order to hide from oneself the irremediable presence of the I to itselfrsquo lsquoEternityrsquo Levinas adds lsquois only the accentuation or radicalisation of the fatality of being inescapably fettered to itself [lrsquoecirctre riveacute agrave luishymecircme]rsquo See Levinas De lrsquoeacutevasion (Montpellier Fata morgana 1982) 87 95 On Escape translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford Stanford University Press 2003) 64 71 translation modified readers may recall the final sentence of Thomas lrsquoObscur (itself recalling the end of Kafkarsquos Trial) which reads (in both versions) lsquoThomas looked in turn at this flood of vulgar images then plunged forth sadly desperately as if shame [la honte] had begun for himrsquo On the il y a in the early work of Levinas and Blanchot see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 62ndash3 110ndash4

8 Blanchot LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 256 The Space of Literature 244 translation modified

9 Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 284 The Book To Come 233ndash4 translation modified A similar usage of deacutesastre is also found in


Blanchotrsquos 1969 essay lsquoLrsquoAbsence de livrersquo where one reads that lsquothe Work [lrsquoŒuvre] is not bound like the book to success (to completion) but to disaster [deacutesastre] disaster is however still an affirmation of the absolutersquo lsquoIn shortrsquo Blanchot adds lsquowe can say that if the book can always be signed it remains indifferent to whoever signs it the work ndash Festivity as disaster [la Fecircte comme deacutesastre] ndash demands resignation demands that whoever claims to have written it should renounce all selfhood [renonce agrave soi] and refrain from all self-designationrsquo see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 629 The Infinite Conversation 429 translation modified

10 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 192 The Infinite Conversation 130 translation slightly modified In similar vein evoking in 1988 in a letter to Salomon Malka his prewar friendship with Levinas Blanchot recalls the part played by lsquothe misfortunes of a disastrous war [le malheur drsquoune guerre deacutesastreuse]rsquo in renewing the bond of solidarity between the pair see Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 166 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 124

11 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 115 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 93 translation modified As Blanchot was aware any desire to break absolutely with the past will always founder on the paradox that in order to put an end to history history itself is not only necessary but inescapable Though it may be premised on a certain kind of atemporality then the thought of disaster as we shall see is anything but indifferent to the (present) epoch

12 Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes I 38 1193 Mallarmeacutersquos own self-avowedly lsquobarbarous word-for-wordrsquo English version of the poem was sent to an America poet friend Sarah Helen Whitman the same year An alternative translation would be lsquoCalm block here below fallen from an obscure disasterrsquo It is worth noting too that in a 1976 essay on Ernst Bloch borrowing the term deacutesastre from Blanchot Levinas also writes it deacutesshyastre see Levinas De Dieu qui vient agrave lrsquoideacutee (Paris Vrin 1992) 66 Of God Who Comes to Mind translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford Stanford University Press 1998) 35

13 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 16 The Writing of the Disaster 7 translation modified Compare LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 190 The Writing of the Disaster 124 For lsquoce jeu insenseacute drsquoeacutecrirersquo lsquothis madsenseless gamewagerperformancersquo see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini vii The Infinite Conversation xii

14 For Mallarmeacutersquos original text and an account of the circumstances surrounding its publication see Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes II 660 and 1722ndash3 For the other versions cited see Henri Mondor Vie de Mallarmeacute (Paris Gallimard 1941) 670 Jean-Paul Sartre


Mallarmeacute la luciditeacute et la face drsquoombre edited by Arlette Elkaiumlm-Sartre (Paris Gallimard 1986) 157 For Blanchotrsquos sceptical assessment of Mondorrsquos enterprise see Blanchot Faux Pas 117ndash25 Faux Pas 99ndash106

15 For this original longer essay see Blanchot La Condition critique 347ndash9 What remains of the piece is reproduced in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 190ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 124

16 Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes I 384ndash7 In October 1943 Blanchot was already comparing the dispersed epigrams of the German mystic Angelus Silesius to lsquoa twinkling of stars [une scintillation drsquoastres]rsquo see Blanchot Chroniques litteacuteraires 472

17 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 25 106 The Writing of the Disaster 12 64 lsquoWhen writing not writing is unimportantrsquo writes Blanchot lsquothen writing changes ndash whether it takes place or not it is the writing of disasterrsquo lsquo Supposing it is possible to say in plodding fashion that the God of Leibniz is because he is possiblersquo he adds nearly two hundred fragments later lsquoso it will be apparent that it may also be said on the contrary the real is real in so far as it excludes possibility ie by being impossible in the same way as death and in the same way to a loftier extent [agrave un plus haut titre even more so as though Blanchot were directing his readersrsquo attention to the title legitimating or authorising the book itself] as the writing of disaster [lrsquoeacutecriture du deacutesastre]rsquo translations modified

18 For these earlier publications see Blanchot lsquoDiscours sur la patiencersquo Le Nouveau Commerce 30ndash31 1975 19ndash44 corresponding to LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 7ndash10 28ndash49 52ndash5 220 15 16 17 The Writing of the Disaster 1ndash3 13ndash28 29ndash31 146 6ndash7 see also using the phrase for a fourth time Blanchot lsquoLrsquoeacutecriture du deacutesastrersquo La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 330ndash1 July-August 1980 1ndash33 corresponding to LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 60ndash107 120ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 35ndash65 and 74ndash5

19 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 49 The Step Not Beyond 33 emphasis in the original

20 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 8 The Writing of the Disaster 2 lsquo ldquoFalserdquo unity or the simulacrum of unityrsquo notes Blanchot lsquocompromises unity better than any direct challenge to it which is in any case not possiblersquo translation modified

21 Paul Valeacutery Œuvres edited by Jean Hytier 2 vols (Paris Gallimard 1960) II 597 emphasis in the original



23 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 101 149ndash50 165 174 The Writing of the Disaster 62 96 107 113 For the original texts see Valeacutery Œuvres II 579 803 871 and Cahiers edited by Judith robinson 2 vols (Paris Gallimard 1973) I 517 II 1086 I am indebted to Brian Stimpson for help in identifying the source of the third of these passages Valeacuteryrsquos collection of prose fragments Mauvaises penseacutees et autres from which two of the extracts are taken was reviewed by Blanchot on first publication in 1942 in the Journal des deacutebats see Blanchot Chroniques litteacuteraires 271ndash7

24 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 165 The Writing of the Disaster 106ndash7 translation modified See also LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 149ndash50 174 The Writing of the Disaster 96 113 Blanchot expresses himself more forcefully on this question of (retrospective) unity in a review of robinsonrsquos posthumous edition of Valeacuteryrsquos Cahiers in La Condition critique 339ndash42 In the article Blanchot voiced strong reservations at the editorrsquos decision admittedly following Valeacuteryrsquos own recommendation to arrange the poetrsquos disparate notes and thoughts under various thematic headings and he concluded by comparing the ambition behind robinsonrsquos efforts with that carried out for quite different purposes but according to Blanchot to comparable effect by Elisabeth Foumlrster-Nietzsche responsible for falsifying key aspects of her brotherrsquos Nachlaszlig and correspondence

25 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 100 114 148ndash9 152ndash4 158ndash60 162 168ndash71 180ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 61 70 94ndash5 97ndash9 101ndash3 104 108ndash11 117ndash8

26 Heidegger Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens Gesamtausgabe 13 (Frankfurt Klostermann 1983) 76


28 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 114ndash5 The Writing of the Disaster 70 translation slightly modified For the phrase lsquoimpossibility of all possibilityrsquo see Levinas Totaliteacute et infini 262 Totality and Infinity 235 translation slightly modified


30 Blanchot La Condition critique 348 The passage cited here immediately follows the first paragraph of the fragment that now appears in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 190ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 124 It is worth noting here as the reference to lsquodisseminationrsquo (already a quotation from Mallarmeacute) suggests how much of Blanchotrsquos exploration of the space of the book including


the interest in the number four and its implications is informed by his reading of Derridarsquos La Disseacutemination

31 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 196 The Writing of the Disaster 128 translation modified In Le Rhizome (Paris Minuit 1976) 17 Deleuze and Guattari wrote (slightly differently) lsquoThe multiple has to be made not by adding an always extra dimension but on the contrary in the simplest of ways by dint of sobriety at the level of the dimensions that are already available always n-1 (this is the only way the one is part of the multiple by being always subtracted) Subtract the singular from the multiplicity to be constituted write at n-1rsquo The passage reappears unchanged in Gilles Deleuze and Feacutelix Guattari Mille Plateaux (Paris Minuit 1980) 13 A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia translated by Brian Massumi (London Athlone 1988) 6 translation modified Numerology as Blanchot would know is of course an important element in the Talmud I return to Blanchotrsquos engagement with Jewish thought in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre later in this chapter


33 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 169ndash70 The Infinite Conversation 117 emphasis in the original translation modified The context of Blanchotrsquos remarks is important for they occur in an essay from August 1957 on Simone Weil philosopher mystic political activist resistance worker and a convert from Judaism to Christianity whom some like Levinas five years earlier in his essay lsquoSimone Weil contre la Bible [Simone Weil Against the Bible]rsquo in Difficile Liberteacute 160ndash76 Difficult Freedom 133ndash41 reproached for her militant rejection of the Jewish Old Testament not to say her almost explicit antisemitism Blanchotrsquos response says the same but does so very differently reading Weil paradoxically as a kind of involuntary or inadvertent Marrano whose writing remained profoundly indebted to the very Judaic tradition she rejected proof no doubt that for Blanchot at least the supposed victory of Christianity over Judaism much canvassed by Hegel and his successors was never complete but always in doubt from the outset Blanchotrsquos main source of understanding of the Kabbala in general and of Luria in particular as he duly acknowledges was Scholemrsquos Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York Schocken [1941] 1961) a volume first translated into French in 1950 and with which Blanchot was familiar as early as 1952 (compare LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 67 The Space of Literature 70) Blanchot also refers to the Lurianic lsquobreaking of the Vesselsrsquo in a 1964 essay on


Edmond Jabegraves in LrsquoAmitieacute 255 Friendship 225 On the broader theological question of lsquocreation from nothing and divine self-limitationrsquo (to which LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is also in its way a response) see Scholem Uumlber einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1970) 53ndash89


35 See Blanchot lsquoDiscours sur la patiencersquo Le Nouveau Commerce 30ndash31 1975 43







42 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 9 The Writing of the Disaster 2 translation modified It was Derrida in LrsquoEacutecriture et la diffeacuterence (Paris Seuil 1967) 7 Writing and Difference translated by Alan Bass (London routledge 1978) v who reintroduced the term espacement (spacing) in this sense which he did by quoting from Mallarmeacutersquos preface to lsquoUn coup de deacutes rsquo as Blanchot was only too aware In deploying the word in his turn Blanchot was implicitly citing not only Mallarmeacute but Derrida too and vice versa









50 Emmanuel Levinas Eacutethique et infini (Paris Le Livre de poche 1982) 41 Ethics and Infinity translated by richard A Cohen (Pittsburgh Duquesne University Press 1985) 50 translation modified

51 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 68ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 40 translation modified On the remainder (or reste) in Glas see Jacques Derrida Glas (Paris Galileacutee 1974) 7ndash11b Glas translated by John P Leavey Jnr and richand rand (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1986) 1ndash5b In referring to Glas quotations from the left-hand and right-hand columns are normally indicated by the use of a and b respectively page numbers given first refer to the 1974 Galileacutee edition those given second relate to the Leavey-rand translation

52 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 97 The Writing of the Disaster 59 emphasis in the original translation modified Of the two self-quotations contained in this fragment the first published in March 1953 glossing a comment reported by Gustav Janouch is from an essay on Kafka reprised in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 185ndash96 (p 193) The Space of Literature 177ndash87 (p 184) The second written eight years later is taken from a June 1961 review of Michel Leirisrsquos Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour and collected in LrsquoAmitieacute 162ndash70 (p 169) Friendship 140ndash7 (p 146)


54 On iterability see Derrida Marges de la philosophie 367ndash93 Margins of Philosophy 309ndash30 and Limited Inc edited by Gerald Graff (Evanston Northwestern University Press 1988) Limited Inc edited by Gerald Graff introduced and translated by Elisabeth Weber (Paris Galileacutee 1990)

55 Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen 24 Meacuteditations carteacutesiennes 19 Cartesian Meditations 22ndash3 translation modified

56 Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 58 Speech and Phenomena 52 Compare Blanchot in the essay lsquoLa Litteacuterature et lrsquoexpeacuterience originelle [Literature and the Original Experience]rsquo from June 1952 in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 255ndash6 The Space of Literature 243 lsquoIt is in this sensersquo he writes lsquothat in artrsquos vicinity lies a pact with death with repetition and with failure rebeginning repetition the fatality of return everything that is alluded to in those experiences where the sense of strangeness is coupled with a sense of deacutejagrave vu


where the irremediable takes the form of endless repetition where the same is given in the infinite regress of duplication where there is no cognition but only recognition ndash all of this alludes to that initial error which may be expressed as follows what is first is not the beginning but rebeginning and being is precisely the impossibility of being for the first timersquo emphasis in the original translation modified

57 Derrida La Voix et le pheacutenomegravene 60ndash1 Speech and Phenomena 54ndash5 translation modified




61 Bataille Œuvres complegravetes IX 182 171 Literature and Evil translated by Alastair Hamilton (London Calder amp Boyars 1973) 25 ix


63 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 181 The Writing of the Disaster 118 emphasis in the original translation modified For the source text see F W J Schelling Ausgewaumlhlte Schriften edited by Manfred Frank 6 vols (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1985) IV 81ndash2 Idealism and the Endgame of Theory Three Essays by F W J Schelling edited and translated by Thomas Pfau (Albany State University of New York Press 1994) 232ndash3 translation modified Blanchot is referring to the recent French translation in Schelling Œuvres meacutetaphysiques 1805ndash1821 edited and translated by Jean-Franccedilois Courtine and Emmanuel Martineau (Paris Gallimard 1980)


65 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 8 The Writing of the Disaster 2 translation modified For the original phrase see Jabegraves Aely (1972) in Le Livre des questions 2 vols (Paris Gallimard 1988ndash89) II 332 The Book of Questions Yaeumll Elya Aely translated by rosmarie Waldrop (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1983) 237 translation modified Jabegraves reproduces the two fragments (his own and Blanchotrsquos revision) side by side without comment in Ccedila suit son cours (1975) in Le Livre des marges (Paris Le Livre de poche 1987) 10 The text of Aely not insignificantly continues lsquoHas the time come for me to face the questions of my books As if


I should at least as far as they are concerned accept responsibility for writing them when it seems to me that I am not responsible at all when on the contrary in my innermost thoughts I would accuse them for having swapped my life for another that I have difficulty in living but perhaps they are calling me to account precisely for the existence I owe to them In which case through me it is my own books that question my booksrsquo (II 332ndash3)


67 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 85 The Writing of the Disaster 50



70 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 28ndash9 The Writing of the Disaster 13ndash14 emphasis in the original translation modified Patience is a topic Blanchot also examines in relation to the figure of Orpheus in LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 179ndash84 The Space of Literature 171ndash6 Blanchotrsquos interest in the self-deconstructive logic of commonplace expressions owes much to the influence of Jean Paulhanrsquos famous essay Les Fleurs de Tarbes which Blanchot reviewed in 1941 in a sequence of three essays two of which appear in Faux Pas 92ndash101 Faux Pas 76ndash84


72 Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus logicoshyphilosophicus translated by D F Pears and B F McGuinness (London routledge amp Kegan Paul 1961) 151 Blanchot comments on the phrase using Klossowskirsquos 1961 French translation in La Communauteacute inavouable 92 The Unavowable Community 56

73 Blanchot La Part du feu 129 The Work of Fire 127 translation modified






78 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 28 Existence and existents 23

79 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 103 Existence and existents 63 This is not to say as some critics have claimed that there is therefore a privileged relationship between the il y a and the literary (as opposed to the philosophical or the ethico-moral) To argue as much would inevitably mean reverting to an essentialist conception of literature entirely at odds with the infinite retrocession exteriority and neutrality of the il y a itself

80 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 110ndash11 Existence and existents 66 emphasis in the original translation modified



83 Levinas Le Temps et lrsquoautre 62 Time and the Other 74 translation modified


85 Levinas De lrsquoexistence agrave lrsquoexistant 111 Existence and existents 66 translation modified Compare Levinas Eacutethique et infini 39 Ethics and Infinity 49 In insomnia he says lsquoI am not awake ldquoit is awakerdquo [Je ne veille pas laquo ccedila veille raquo]rsquo Levinas goes on to refer this lsquoexperiencersquo back to the work of Blanchot

86 Emmanuel Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre ou aushydelagrave de lrsquoessence (Paris Le Livre de poche 1974) 272 emphasis and capitalisation in the original Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence translated by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague Nijhoff 1981) 177 translation modified

87 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 281 Otherwise Than Being 183ndash4 translation modified

88 For Levinas it was similarly in a radicalisation of Husserlian intentionality as an encounter with the other that lay the originality of Blanchotrsquos thinking of literature lsquo[T]he critical work of Maurice Blanchotrsquo he observed in 1959 lsquoin which literature is neither an approach to ideal Beauty nor one of the ornaments of our life nor the testimony of the times nor the translation of its economic conflicts but the ultimate relation with being [lrsquoecirctre] in a quasi-impossible anticipation of what is no longer being [ce qui nrsquoest plus lrsquoecirctre] ndash that work is inconceivable without the radical idea of intentionalityrsquo See Levinas En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 199 Discovering Existence with Husserl 190


89 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 281 Otherwise Than Being 183 emphasis in the original translation modified

90 Blanchot draws attention to the importance of the dedication (to all the victims of the death camps including members of Levinasrsquos own family) that opens Autrement qursquoecirctre in his tribute to Levinas published the same year as LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre and prolonging its concerns see Blanchot La Condition critique 357ndash67 (p 367) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 144ndash52 (p 152)

91 See in particular Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 70ndash105 The Infinite Conversation 49ndash74 and Levinas Sur Maurice Blanchot Proper Names 127ndash70 On some of the main differences between Levinas and Blanchot see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 158ndash84

92 For the use of ethics or the ethical (eacutethique) see Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 26 47 48 The Writing of the Disaster 12 26 27 for lsquosubstitutionrsquo and lsquothe one for the otherrsquo both explicitly presented as quotations see LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 169 The Writing of the Disaster 109

93 On the lengthy prehistory of the exchanges between Levinas and Blanchot on the question of the il y a see my Blanchot Extreme Contemporary 62ndash3 110ndash3

94 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 253ndash4 Otherwise Than Being 163 emphasis in the original translation modified

95 For this alternative interpretation of the il y a which is also an alternative reading of Levinas see Blanchot La Condition critique 366 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 151 As elsewhere the fluctuating movement of Blanchotrsquos syntax bears the weight of much of the argument lsquoThe il y arsquo he writes lsquois one of Levinasrsquos most fascinating propositions his temptation too as it were the reverse side of transcendence thus indistinguishable from it which may be described in terms of being but as the impossibility of not being the incessant insistence of the neuter the nocturnal murmur of the anonymous that which never begins (and is therefore an-archic because perpetually escaping the decisiveness of a beginning) the absolute but as absolute indeterminacy all this is bewitching that is attracts towards the uncertain outside speaking infinitely outside truth in the manner of an Other [drsquoun Autrui] we could not get rid of simply by calling it deceitful (the evil demon [le malin geacutenie]) nor because it might be described as a mockery for this speaking which is only a laugh perfidiously suppressed giving meaning while yet eluding all interpretation neither gratuitous nor cheerful grave just as much and something like the illusion of seriousness being therefore what disturbs us most is also the movement most apt


to deny us the resources of being [lrsquoecirctre] as place [lieu] and light [lumiegravere] the gift perhaps of literature without knowing whether it enchants by disenchanting or whether its words that please and disgust do not ultimately attract us because it is a promise (a promise it keeps yet does not keep) to illuminate what is obscure in all speech what in speech escapes revelation and manifestation the trace again of non-presence the opaqueness of transparencyrsquo emphasis in the original translation modified

96 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 107ndash8 The Writing of the Disaster 65 translation modified The French edition of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre is 220 pages long

97 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 77 Otherwise Than Being 45 translation modified

98 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 45n1 The Writing of the Disaster 149n8 emphasis in the original translation modified As Levinas puts it for his part in an essay first published in 1960 lsquo[w]hat Judaism brought into the world is not pride in national excellence (which is what the Greeks had when they distinguished themselves from the barbarians) but the idea of a universality flowing from excellence a universality of radiance [lrsquoideacutee drsquoune universaliteacute deacutecoulant de lrsquoexcellence drsquoune universaliteacute de rayonnement] Judaism conceives its function proper its religious election in its responsibilities as an elite its task as worker of the first and not the eleventh hour This is a terrible privilege [privilegravege redoutable] ldquoYou alone I distinguished among all the families on earth that is why I ask you to answer for your sinsrdquo Universality in Jewish thought rests on the responsibilities of an elite that subsists in its particularity Universality is the omega of morality not the alpharsquo Levinas Les Impreacutevus de lrsquohistoire (Paris Le Livre de poche 1994) 162 Unforeseen History translated by Nidra Poller (Urbana University of Illinois Press 2004) 117ndash8 emphasis in the original translation modified For Blanchotrsquos own later response to Jewish universality see Blanchot La Condition critique 419ndash24 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 162ndash6

99 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 23 37 151 170 The Writing of the Disaster 11 20 97 110 translation modified Unfortunately Ann Smockrsquos translation renders Blanchotrsquos Dire inconsistently now as lsquotellingrsquo now as lsquoSpeakingrsquo now as lsquowordrsquo then again as lsquoSpeakingrsquo The quotation from Levinas to which I return shortly is from Autrement qursquoecirctre 263 Otherwise Than Being 170

100 Blanchot Apregraves coup 97ndash8 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 494 translation modified


101 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 100ndash1 The Writing of the Disaster 61 emphasis in the original translation modified

102 Blanchot quotes from the seminar series in a later fragment see LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 155 The Writing of the Disaster 99 compare Heidegger Schellings Abhandlung uumlber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Tuumlbingen Max Niemeyer 1971) 7 Schelling le traiteacute de 1809 sur lrsquoessence de la liberteacute humaine translated by Jean-Franccedilois Courtine (Paris Gallimard 1977) 22 Schellingrsquos Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom translated by Joan Stambaugh (London Ohio University Press 1985) 6ndash7 It is likely Blanchot was reminded of Heideggerrsquos lecture course by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy who refer to it in their discussion of the romantic fragment in LrsquoAbsolu litteacuteraire 57ndash80 The Literary Absolute 39ndash56 The passing reference to Heidegger in this fragment also asks to be read alongside the earlier passage from Schellingrsquos Stuttgart Seminars to which Heidegger perhaps understandably makes no reference in his discussion of the 1809 treatise which from Blanchotrsquos perspective was a tell-tale symptom of Heideggerrsquos forgetting of impersonality ndash and the neuter

103 Heidegger Schellings Abhandlung uumlber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit 58 Schelling le traiteacute de 1809 sur lrsquoessence de la liberteacute humaine 91 Schellingrsquos Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom 48 translation slightly modified

104 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 110 The Writing of the Disaster 67 translation modified On la mort impossible neacutecessaire in Blanchot see Derrida Demeure 56ndash7 The Instant of My DeathDemeure 47ndash8

105 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 123 170 The Writing of the Disaster 76ndash7 110 Compare Blanchot La Condition critique 364 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 149

106 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 122 The Writing of the Disaster 76 translation modified On scepticism in Hegel compare Blanchot La Part du feu 308 The Work of Fire 317ndash8 The reference is to Chapter 4B in the Phenomenology which traces the passage between the dialectic of Master and Slave and the emergence of unhappy consciousness See Hegel Werke III 159ndash63 Phenomenology of Spirit 123ndash6 lsquoScepticismrsquo writes Hegel lsquois the realisation of that of which stoicism was only the notion and is the actual experience of what the freedom of thought is This is in itself the negative and must exhibit itself as such With the reflection of self-consciousness into the simple thought of itself the independent existence or permanent determinateness that stood over


against that reflection has as a matter of fact fallen outside of the infinitude of thought In scepticism now the wholly unesssential and non-independent character of this ldquootherrdquo becomes explicit for consciousness the [abstract] thought becomes the concrete thinking which annihilates the being of the world in all its manifold determinateness and the negativity of free self-consciousness comes to know itself in the many and varied forms of life as a real negativityrsquo (159 123)

107 See Husserl Ideen 56 Ideas 61 and Logische Untersuchungen I (Tuumlbingen Niemeyer 1993) 110ndash12 Logical Investigations Vol 1 translated by J N Findlay (London routledge 2001) 75ndash6 lsquoThe worst objection that can be made to a theoryrsquo comments Husserl making the same philosophical point as Hegel lsquoand particularly to a theory of logic is that it goes against the self-evident conditions for the possibility of a theory in general [gegen die evidenten Bedingungen der Moumlglichkeit einer Theorie uumlberhaupt] To set up a theory whose content is explicitly or implicitly at variance with the propositions on which the sense and the claim to validity of all theory rests is not merely wrong but basically mistakenrsquo Perhaps only Nietzsche among other major thinkers had a good word for the sceptics calling them in Ecce homo lsquothe only respectable type in the whole two- or five-faced philosophical tribe [der einzige ehrenwerthe Typus under dem so zwei bis fuumlnfdeutigen Volk der Philosophen]rsquo see Nietzsche KSA 6 284 The AntishyChrist Ecce Homo Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings 90 translation modified On scepticism as epochal suspension in Nietzsche see Derrida Eacuteperons 43ndash52 Spurs 55ndash67

108 See Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers translated by r D Hicks 2 vols (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 1972) II 517ndash9

109 See Marie-Anne Lescourret Emmanuel Levinas (Paris Flammarion 1994) 83ndash5 and Bident Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 49

110 See Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes The Modes of Scepticism Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) 1 Sextus Empiricus Esquisses pyrrhoniennes translated by Pierre Pellegrin (Paris Seuil 1997) Book I sect1 3ndash4 (p 53) Outlines of Pyrrhonism translated by r G Bury (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 1967) 3

111 Sextus Empiricus Esquisses pyrrhoniennes Book I sect6 12 (pp 59ndash61) Outlines of Pyrrhonism 9 translation slightly modified

112 Sextus Empiricus Esquisses pyrrhoniennes Book I sect10 19 (p 65) Outlines of Pyrrhonism 15 translation slightly modified


113 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 261 262 Otherwise Than Being 168 169 emphasis in the original translation slightly modified

114 Levinas Autrement qursquoecirctre 260 Otherwise Than Being 167ndash8 emphasis in the original translation modified

115 Blanchot La Condition critique 364 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 149 emphasis in the original translation modified The reference to Nancy is to Le Discours de la syncope 1 Logodaedalus (Paris Aubier-Flammarion 1976) The Discourse of the Syncope Logodaedalus translated by Saul Anton (Stanford Stanford University Press 2007)

116 See Nancy Le Discours de la syncope 1 Logodaedalus 148 The Discourse of the Syncope Logodaedalus 138ndash9 For the quotation by Nancy see Blanchot La Condition critique 337



119 Compare Levinas Difficile Liberteacute revised edition (Paris Le Livre de poche [1976] 1990) 259 Difficult Freedom 185 where one reads lsquoThe end of philosophy is not the return to the age in which it has not begun in which one was able not to philosophise the end of philosophy is the beginning of an age in which everything is philosophy because philosophy is not revealed through philosophersrsquo


121 Derrida Glas 268a Glas 241a For the quotation from the Phenomenology see Hegel Werke III 507 Phenomenology of Spirit 688 Hyppolite in his classic French translation of La Pheacutenomeacutenologie de lrsquoesprit II 216 has lsquoLa lumiegravere pure eacuteparpille sa simpliciteacute comme une infiniteacute de formes seacutepareacutees et se donne en holocauste agrave lrsquoecirctreshypourshysoi en sorte que lrsquoentiteacute singuliegravere emprunte la subsistance agrave sa substancersquo The effects of Blanchotrsquos reading of Glas are readily discernible throughout LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre They are most particularly in evidence in the entries dealing with Hegel (including the question of Hegelrsquos antisemitism) and with the phenomenology of the gift in Heidegger Levinas and Bataille the difference between es gibt and il y a and the related question of the event (Ereignis) and what is proper or authentic (eigentlich) in Heidegger In a 1990 tribute to Derrida Blanchot acknowledged his debt to Derrida in the following terms lsquoAfter such a long silence


(perhaps hundreds and hundreds of years) I shall begin to write again not on Derrida (what presumption) but with his help and convinced I shall betray him immediatelyrsquo Blanchot followed up this beginning by raising a question about singularity and repetition lsquoIs there one Torah or tworsquo he asked replying that lsquothere are two because necessarily there is only onersquo See Blanchot lsquoGracircce (soit rendue) agrave Jacques Derridarsquo Revue philosophique 2 1990 167ndash73 (167) lsquoThanks (Be Given) to Jacques Derridarsquo translated by Leslie Hill The Blanchot Reader 317ndash23 (p 317)

122 Derrida Glas 268ndash9a Glas 241a emphasis in the original translation modified

123 Derrida Glas 269a Glas 242a translation modified This passage from Glas is also among those revisited ndash rekindled or reheated ndash by Derrida in Feu la cendre (Paris Des Femmes 1987) 26ndash32 Embers translated by Ned Lukacher (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1991) 42ndash8 It also informs Derridarsquos reading of La Folie du jour in Parages in which Derrida shows Blanchot already to be exploring the many vagaries of the light of the day whose absence if total imposes blindness but whose presence if limitless perversely tends to the same with the result that the only clarity available in the world promises (in)sight only in so far as it threatens it and is necessarily traversed and always already compromised by irredeemable darkness


125 On the Freudian primal scene or Urszene (known in French as scegravene primitive or scegravene originaire) which usually refers to the real or fantasised witnessing of parental coitus by the child see Jean Laplanche and J-B Pontalis Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1997) 432ndash3 The Language of Psychoanalysis translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London The Hogarth Press 1973) 335ndash6 For the original essay on Serge Leclairersquos On tue un enfant (Paris Seuil 1975) A Child is Being Killed translated by Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford Stanford University Press 1998) see Blanchot lsquoOn tue un enfant (fragmentaire)rsquo Le Nouveau Commerce 33ndash34 Spring 1976 19ndash29


127 See Lacoue-Labarthe Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable 66

128 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 117 The Writing of the Disaster 72 emphasis in the original translation modified The fragment was


first published (entirely in roman with italics added for the word mecircme) as lsquoUne scegravene primitiversquo Premiegravere livraison 4 1976 1 In addition to the change in wording and in position of the title (which originally appeared in conventional manner at its head) the 1980 text shows three further minor changes first it substitutes a colon for a semi-colon at the end of the first clause in the second sentence second it introduces a paragraph break (the 1976 version was one continuous paragraph) finally it deletes the adjective lsquoprimitiversquo from the expression lsquoscegravene primitiversquo as it originally appeared in sentence four On the history of this first publication and for an analysis of these changes see Lacoue-Labarthe Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable 133ndash51 For further comment see Christopher Fynsk Infant Figures (Stanford Stanford University Press 2000) 49ndash84 and Kevin Hart The Dark Gaze Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago University of Chicago Press 2004) 51ndash75

129 For the three fragments each explicitly invoking a lsquo(A primal scene)rsquo [sic] see Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 117 176ndash9 191ndash6 The Writing of the Disaster 72 114ndash16 125ndash8 Blanchot also incorporates further material first published as lsquoUne scegravene primitiversquo in Le Nouveau Commerce 39ndash40 Spring 1978 43ndash51 including not only the third fragment listed above but eight others bearing the same virtual subtitle in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 191ndash6 202ndash6 The Writing of the Disaster 125ndash8 133ndash6

130 See Blanchot LrsquoArrecirct de mort 72ndash3 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 160ndash1 LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire 81 The Space of Literature 83 Le Pas aushydelagrave 16 31 9 The Step Not Beyond 7 19 2 LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 202 The Writing of the Disaster 133 translations modified

131 For the reference to Pascal see Lacoue-Labarthe Agonie termineacutee agonie interminable 136ndash7 and Blaise Pascal Œuvres complegravetes edited by Jean Mesnard 4 vols (Paris Descleacutee de Brouwer 1964ndash92) III 50ndash1 For the echo of Mallarmeacute see Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes II 234

132 On the confusion between the two deaths and need to maintain the opposition between them see Leclaire On tue un enfant 13ndash14 A Child is Being Killed 4 For Blanchotrsquos sceptical response see Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 110ndash15 The Writing of the Disaster 67ndash71 lsquoYesrsquo he writes lsquolet us remember the very early Hegel He too even before what is known as his early philosophy thought the two deaths could not be dissociated and that only the fact of confronting death not only facing it or being exposed to its danger (characteristic of heroic courage) but of entering into its


space undergoing it as infinite death and just as much as death pure and simple or by ldquonatural causesrdquo could found sovereignty and mastery spirit with all its prerogatives It followed from this perhaps absurdly that what set the dialectic in motion ie the experience of death that could not be experienced immediately blocked it a blockage which the entire subsequent process kept in memory like an aporia which had always to be taken into account I will not go into the detail how from Hegelrsquos early philosophy onwards by a prodigious enrichment of thought the difficulty was overcome All this is well known The fact remains that if death murder suicide are put to work and if death itself is deadened by becoming powerless power and later negativity there is with every step forward with the help of possible death the necessity of not overstepping ordinary death death without name death outside concepts impossibility itselfrsquo emphasis in the original translation modified Death murder suicide put to work a few pages later Blanchot would attempt to address one of the twentieth centuryrsquos most monstrous perversions of what lay hidden in these words



135 Blanchot lsquoldquoDans la nuit surveilleacuteerdquorsquo Lignes 21 January 1994 127ndash31 (p 127) The issue as a whole together with significant additional material was republished as robert Antelme Textes ineacutedits Sur LrsquoEspegravece humaine Essais et teacutemoignages (Paris Gallimard 1996) Blanchotrsquos contribution appears pp 71ndash6 and is also included in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 179ndash80 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 133

136 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 80 The Writing of the Disaster 47 emphasis in the original translation modified The fragment was first published as part of lsquoFragmentairersquo in Pierre Alechinsky and others Celui qui ne peut se servir des mots (Montpellier Fata morgana 1975) 19ndash31 (p 31) where it appeared last Blanchot quotes it again in its entirety in 1988 in lsquoldquoNrsquooubliez pasrdquorsquo Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 172ndash3 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 128 translation modified

137 See Claude Lanzmann Shoah (Paris Gallimard [1985] 2001) 17 Blanchot quotes from the film in lsquoNrsquooubliez pasrsquo La Condition critique 430ndash3 (432ndash3) lsquoDo not forgetrsquo translated by Leslie Hill Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 34ndash7 The word Shoah became


current in French as a preferred alternative to the term holocauste (first used in this sense in 1958 by Franccedilois Mauriac in his preface to Elie Wieselrsquos Auschwitz memoir La Nuit) only after the release of Lanzmannrsquos film ie five years after the publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre For the filmmakerrsquos own reasons for choosing the title for the film see Lanzmann Le Liegravevre de Patagonie (Paris Gallimard 2009) 525ndash6

138 Blanchot The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press New Bison Book edition 1995) back cover This publisherrsquos description is all the more contentious in that nowhere in the book does Blanchot mention Hiroshima nor indeed address in any explicit way either World War I or World War II A more cautious translation of the bookrsquos title would have been Writing Disaster or even Disaster Writing

139 Michael Syrotinski Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (Liverpool Liverpool University Press 2007) 117 Gary D Mole makes a similar point in his Levinas Blanchot Jabegraves Figures of Estrangement (Gainesville University Press of Florida 1997) 15 Mole even goes so far as to claim that the Shoah is lsquothe unnarrated experiencersquo at the centre of LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (p 143)


141 Perhaps surprisingly there are places in Blanchotrsquos work particularly in the years after LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre when the writer nevertheless does seem to use the word in its more conventional sense as in his 1986 text on apartheid which begins lsquoSo it is that what was lived through when Nazism excluded from life and from the right to life a section of humanity persists after the disaster [apregraves le deacutesastre] which seemed to render such a calamitous doctrine [une doctrine aussi malheureuse] impossible or impossible to formulate [informulable]rsquo see Blanchot lsquoNotre responsabiliteacutersquo in Pour Nelson Mandela (Paris Gallimard 1986) 215ndash17 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 168ndash9 translation modified

142 See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 129ndash34 The Writing of the Disaster 81ndash4 This is not to imply that Blanchotrsquos meditation on the camps can necessarily be confined to these pages

143 For the polemical charge levelled at Blanchot see Tzvetan Todorov Face agrave lrsquoextrecircme (Paris Seuil 1994) 124ndash5 Todorovrsquos complaint not only rests on an expeditious and misleading account of Blanchotrsquos political activities in the mid-1930s it also shows little appreciation of the complexity of Blanchotrsquos subsequent thinking Todorovrsquos own approach to the legacy of the Nazi and Soviet


camps is explicitly normative and moral it consists he writes in identifying in the world of the camps lsquovirtues everyday or heroic onesrsquo and lsquovices everyday or monstrous onesrsquo (p 50)

144 On the various phases of French reaction to the camps and the importance of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in prompting greater awareness of the Jewish specificity of the extermination camps see Sylvie Lindeperg Clio de 5 agrave 7 (Paris CNrS eacuteditions 2000) and lsquoNuit et brouillardrsquo un film dans lrsquohistoire (Paris Odile Jacob 2007) Annette Wieviorka Deacuteportation et geacutenocide (Paris Hachette 2003) LrsquoEgravere du teacutemoin (Paris Hachette 2002) and Auschwitz meacutemoire drsquoun lieu (Paris Hachette 2006) and Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Wieviorka Univers concentrationnaire et geacutenocide (Paris Mille et une nuits 2008) On the broader French political context see Henry rousso Le Syndrome de Vichy 1944ndash198 (Paris Seuil 1987) As rousso points out it was not until the 1970s in France that there was significant public recognition of the Jewish dimension of the camps and of the direct involvement of the (collaborationist) French authorities in the events of the Shoah

145 For this glancing treatment of Cayrol see Blanchot La Condition critique 178ndash81 (pp 180ndash1) Elements from the piece were incorporated into Blanchotrsquos June 1954 article lsquoTu peux tuer cet homme (You Can Kill This Man)rsquo in LrsquoEntretien infini 271ndash80 The Infinite Conversation 182ndash7 In 1951 in the story Au moment voulu (When The Time Comes) an important narrative crux is marked by the bombing of the synagogue in the rue de la Victoire in Paris in October 1941 As Martin Crowley points out in his Robert Antelme 32ndash3 Blanchotrsquos first mention of LrsquoEspegravece humaine comes in a note signalling its reissue in 1957 ten years after first publication appended to the essay lsquoLrsquoExpeacuterience de Simone Weilrsquo in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 56 August 1957 297ndash310 (p 306) collected in LrsquoEntretien infini 175 The Infinite Conversation 446ndash7 It is worth noting however that as early as 1960 around the time when Eichmann was seized by Mossad agents in Argentina Blanchot on the evidence of an unpublished text preserved in the papers of Dionys Mascolo cited by Christophe Bident in Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible 395 was already citing the counter-example of the Nazi camps as grounds for the necessity of political disobedience lsquoThe principle which recommended that one should serve onersquos country right or wrongrsquo he wrote lsquowas buried in the extermination camps [les camps drsquoextermination] together with the victims of those who were unable [ne surent pas] to prefer disobedience founded on reason to obedience founded on madnessrsquo


146 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 181 187 The Infinite Conversation 123 127 translation slightly modified

147 See Andreacute Neher LrsquoExistence juive solitude et affrontements (Paris Seuil 1962) Blanchotrsquos remarks on Franz rosenzweig (in LrsquoEntretien infini 181 The Infinite Conversation 123) are directly inspired by a similar passage in LrsquoExistence juive 231

148 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 184 The Infinite Conversation 125ndash6 emphasis in the original translation modified In his lsquoBlanchot Violence and the Disasterrsquo collected in Auschwitz and After edited by Lawrence D Kritzman (New York routledge 1995) 133ndash48 Allan Stoekl takes Blanchot to task for allegedly reversing the traditionally negative (antisemitic) valorisation of exile exteriority and rootlessness and for lsquoultimately negat[ing] the specificity of Judaismrsquo (p 137) This is to miss the point For Blanchot as for Levinas it is absolutely crucial that traits customarily associated with Judaism are shown to be universal ie shared by humanity as a whole in which case they are no longer negative features but essential and necessary ones At any event in declaring for instance that lsquo[t]he Jew is a source of disquiet and a figure of unhappiness [malaise et malheur]rsquo (LrsquoEntretien infini 180 The Infinite Conversation 122 translation modified) an assertion the writer acknowledges already to be itself an unhappy one Blanchot is not recycling antisemitic propaganda but as he points out drawing on the contemporary and influential work of Albert Memmi the francophone Tunisian writer (and a Jew) who began his autobiographical essay Portrait drsquoun juif (Paris Gallimard 1962) Portrait of a Jew translated by Elisabeth Abbott (London Eyre amp Spottiswoode 1963) by arguing that lsquowhat is called the history of the Jews [lrsquohistoire juive] is never more than a protracted rumination on the topic of Jewish misfortune [le malheur juif]rsquo (p 29) In this respect as Memmi went on lsquo[t]he condition of the Jews [ ] is shorthand in more condensed and sombre terms for the human condition itselfrsquo (p 244) More fundamentally of course it is not necessary to go very far to find the association between Judaism exodus and exile it has its origins in the Old Testament

149 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 190n1 The Infinite Conversation 447n4 translation modified For one troubled reaction see Michael Holland lsquoLetrsquos Leave God out of thisrsquo Blanchotrsquos reading of Totality and infinityrsquo in Facing the Other the Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas edited by Seaacuten Hand (richmond Curzon 1996) 91ndash106 Blanchotrsquos lengthy footnote sandwiched between the two essays lsquoLrsquoEcirctre juifrsquo and lsquoLrsquoEspegravece humainersquo originally appeared as the


conclusion to the second part of lsquoLrsquoEcirctre juifrsquo published in La Nouvelle Revue franccedilaise 117 September 1962 471ndash6 (pp 474ndash6)

150 Blanchot lsquoSur Edmond Jabegravesrsquo Les Nouveaux Cahiers 31 Winter 1972ndash3 51ndash2 Le Pas aushydelagrave 156 The Step Not Beyond 114 emphasis in the original translation modified In the interim in a text published anonymously in Comiteacute in October 1968 collected in Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 123ndash5 (p 125) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 98ndash9 (p 99) Blanchot paid tribute to those who had protested against antisemitic attacks on Daniel Cohn-Bendit by writing that lsquothe most intense violence was no doubt in that moment of non-violence when protesting against his deportation (Cohn-Bendit banned this was the governmentrsquos meagre ldquoexemplary measurerdquo) thousands of workers and students revolutionaries then in an absolute sense marched chanting ldquoWe are all German Jewsrdquo Never had that been said anywhere never at any moment language beginning anew [parole premiegravere] opening and overturning frontiers opening overwhelming the futurersquo Soon after as Levinas records in Du sacreacute au saint (Paris Minuit 1977) 48ndash9 Nine Talmudic Readings translated by Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington Indiana University Press 1990) 115ndash6 Blanchot broke ranks with those left-wing activists who campaigning on behalf of the Palestinians had become compromised in the writerrsquos view by what he described as a kind of unwitting antisemitism Already in 1971 as the fragment cited indicates he was warning against the dangers of what in subsequent years would turn into fully-fledged Holocaust denial A further fragment dated October 1974 written on the first anniversary of the Yom Kippur war published in Change 22 February 1975 223 shows the evolution of Blanchotrsquos thinking on the question of Israelrsquos singularity lsquoWhyrsquo he asks lsquodid every calamity [tous les malheurs] finite and infinite personal and impersonal now and forever have implicit within it while ceaselessly recalling it that historically dated calamity which was however without date of a land already so reduced that it seemed almost erased from the map and whose history nevertheless overflowed the history of the world Whyrsquo See Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 64 The Writing of the Disaster 37 translation modified I return to Blanchotrsquos use of the word Israel later in this chapter




153 See Max Horkheimer and T W Adorno Dialektik der Aufklaumlrung (Frankfurt Fischer [1944] 1969) 177ndash217 Dialectic of Enlightenment translated by John Cumming (London Verso 1997) 168ndash208 Adorno Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt Suhrkamp [1966] 1975) 355 Negative Dialectics translated by E B Ashton (London routledge and Kegan Paul 1973) 362 translation modified That Blanchot was familiar with Adornorsquos 1966 book by the time LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre was written is likely from the remarks made in response to it in 1983 in Apregraves coup 98 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 494 Blanchot also returns to Adornorsquos text in another essay published in 1984 where he writes lsquoThe categorical imperative losing the ideal generality given to it by Kant became that which Adorno formulated more or less in these terms Think and act in such a manner that Auschwitz never repeats itself which implies that Auschwitz must not become a concept and that an absolute was reached there in relation to which other rights and duties are to be judgedrsquo see Blanchot Les Intellectuels en question (Paris Fourbis 1996) 55ndash6 lsquoIntellectuals under Scrutinyrsquo translated by Michael Holland The Blanchot Reader 223 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos proximity to Adorno see Michel Lisse lsquoeacutecrire ldquoapregraves Auschwitzrdquo Maurice Blanchot et les camps de la mortrsquo Les Lettres romanes numeacutero hors-seacuterie 1995 121ndash38

154 Adorno Negative Dialektik 355 Negative Dialectics 362 In LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 216 The Writing of the Disaster 143 Blanchot formulates a thought very close to Adornorsquos as follows lsquoWhoever was a contemporary of the death camps is forever a survivor death will not make him diersquo translation modified For Jean-Luc Nancyrsquos similar analysis of the camps as exerting a totalising logic of surshyrepreacutesentation (super- or over-representation) see Nancy Au fond des images (Paris Galileacutee 2003) 57ndash99 The Ground of the Image translated by Jeff Fort (New York Fordham University Press 2005) 27ndash50

155 Adorno Negative Dialektik 358 Negative Dialectics 365 translation modified

156 Blanchot Le Pas aushydelagrave 56ndash7 The Step Not Beyond 38ndash9 emphasis in the original translation modified




159 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 143 The Writing of the Disaster 90 translation modified On the pioneering work of Poliakov and Wormser-Migot see Lindeperg and Wieviorka Univers concentrationnaire et geacutenocide 11ndash39 On Blanchotrsquos engagement with the poems of Celan see my Radical Indecision Barthes Blanchot Derrida and the Future of Criticism 194ndash213

160 See Hermann Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz (Vienna Europaverlag [1972] 1987) Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz translated by Denise Meunier edited by Jacques Branchu (Paris Fayard 1975) A complete English version is available as People in Auschwitz translated by Harry Zohn (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 2004) The 1975 French translation for greater ease of reading (and according to his preface with the authorrsquos agreement) reduced the length of Langbeinrsquos original text by roughly a quarter and reordered some of the remaining material

161 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 19 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 5 People in Auschwitz 5 translation modified

162 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 129 The Writing of the Disaster 81 translation modified Compare Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 40 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 24 People in Auschwitz 24 Meunierrsquos version reads lsquoDes pierres eacutetaient porteacutees au pas de course drsquoun endroit agrave un autre soigneusement empileacutees puis reporteacutees toujours en courant agrave lrsquoancien emplacement etcrsquo Zohn translates lsquorocks had to be carried from one place to another quickly carefully stacked there and then rushed back to the old placersquo Blanchot makes a similar point in Apregraves coup 95ndash6 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 493

163 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 145 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 119 People in Auschwitz 121 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 130 The Writing of the Disaster 82

164 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 368 320 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 311 278ndash9 People in Auschwitz 326 282 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 132 The Writing of the Disaster 83

165 Throughout this whole period Blanchot maintained a close interest in national and international political events as is clearly apparent from his Lettres agrave Vadim Kozovoiuml between 1976 and 1998

166 See Joseph Berger Shipwreck of a Generation (London Harvill Press 1971) 177 Le Naufrage drsquoune geacuteneacuteration translated by Jacqueline Bernard and Philippe Monod (Paris Denoeumll 1974)


Alexander Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago 1918ndash56 IshyII translated by Thomas P Whitney (London Collins amp Harvill Press 1974) LrsquoArchipel du Goulag 1 et 2 parties translated by Jacqueline Lafond Joseacute Johannet reneacute Marichal and Serge Oswald (Paris eacuteditions du Seuil 1974) The Gulag Archipelago 1918ndash56 IIIshyIV translated by Thomas P Whitney (London Collins amp Harvill Press 1975) LrsquoArchipel du Goulag 3 et 4 parties translated by Geneviegraveve Johannet Joseacute Johannet and Nikita Struve (Paris eacuteditions du Seuil 1974) Compare Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 129ndash30 131ndash2 The Writing of the Disaster 81 83 It is hard to overestimate the impact of Solzhenitsynrsquos lengthy historical testimony in the mid-1970s particularly in France where the Communist Party enjoyed considerable support among both workers and intellectuals (in the first round of the 1973 legislative elections for instance it polled 213 of the popular vote more than any other party on the left) Though less prominent Joseph Berger was in many respects just as significant He was born in Poland of Jewish parents in 1904 and growing up with strong Zionist leanings emigrated in 1919 to Palestine where he became a communist and in 1922 helped found the Communist Party of Palestine In 1931 after several years spent working for the Communist cause throughout the Arab world he was recalled to Moscow and became a Soviet citizen but was arrested in January 1935 as a Trotskyist agitator For the next twenty years he was transferred from one concentration camp to another before being eventually rehabilitated and released in 1956 He emigrated to Israel the following year and died in 1978

167 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 129 The Writing of the Disaster 81 translation modified reading these words Allan Stoekl in lsquoBlanchot Violence and the Disasterrsquo cited earlier takes issue with Blanchotrsquos use of the word lsquofiguresrsquo (which Ann Smock in her translation unfortunately chooses to render as lsquoemblemsrsquo) and makes the bizarre allegation that Blanchot treats lsquothe Holocaustrsquo (a word or name that as we have seen Blanchot barely uses at all) as lsquoan examplersquo and thereby lsquoenters into complicity with the very people who set up the system [of the Holocaust] in the first place because he uses itrsquo (p 142) This is a wild misrepresentation of Blanchotrsquos thinking For at least two reasons First figures in Blanchotrsquos French are precisely not emblems (what OED calls a picture of an object serving as a symbolic representation of an abstract quality a symbol or typical representation a figured object used with symbolic meaning) but forms which explicitly impose visibility on the invisible by making dying itself an object of specularising control violently substituting for the singular


impossibility of dying the industrialised appropriation of death through technology In other words what is given brutal visibility in the camps is the remorseless figuring ndash the shaping manipulating even emblematising ndash of human existences by the camp and the oppressive socio-political system of which it was a component (An earlier version of Blanchotrsquos argument may be found in Le Pas aushydelagrave 133ndash4 The Step Not Beyond 96ndash7) Second it escapes Stoeklrsquos notice that by making plural reference to lsquoconcentration camps extermination campsrsquo Blanchot pointedly refuses to conflate the regimes under which different camps operated and reduce them to the status of examples of anything a scruple Stoekl fails to respect by silently deleting Blanchotrsquos reference to lsquoannihilation camps [camps drsquoaneacuteantissement]rsquo in the first line of his quotation (p 142) regrettably this is not the only place where Blanchot is credited with views that are the exact opposite of those expressed in his writing Similarly tendentious interpretative violence masquerading as ethical attention (but testifying only to an alarming failure to read) can be found in Max Silverman Facing Postmodernity (London routledge 1999) 28 where Blanchotrsquos question cited earlier lsquoHow to preserve [garder] it [ie lrsquoholocauste] if only in thought how to make thought into that which might preserve [garderait] the holocaust [lrsquoholocauste] in which everything was lost including the thought that preserves [la penseacutee gardienne]rsquo is wilfully and shockingly mistranslated in order to serve as evidence of Blanchotrsquos alleged lsquoappropriation of the Holocaustrsquo as follows lsquoHow should we [sic] maintain [a memory of the Holocaust [sic]] if not through thought [sic] yet how should we [sic] construct [sic] a thought [sic] which could capture [sic] that event in which everything was lost including ldquoappropriatingrdquo [sic] thoughtrsquo interpolations mine

168 On French reaction to Holocaust transmitted amidst some controversy by Antenne 2 between 13 February and 6 March 1979 nearly a year after first appearing on American television see Henry rousso Le Syndrome de Vichy 160ndash3

169 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 326 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 131 People in Auschwitz 132 translation modified Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 132 The Writing of the Disaster 83 Paraphrasing Langbein Blanchot writes lsquoBut adds Langbein for the pariahs neither sport nor cinema nor musicrsquo translation modified

170 Blanchot Apregraves coup 98ndash9 The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 494ndash5 translation modified As Blanchot makes clear the reference


here is to William Styronrsquos Sophiersquos Choice published in 1979 and at the time Blanchot was writing the object of much media debate following Alan J Pakularsquos 1982 film of the same name based on the novel starring Meryl Streep which was released in France early in 1983 It is hard to say whether Blanchot had actually seen the film or even read the book

171 For Lewentalrsquos testimony see Ber Mark The Scrolls of Auschwitz translated by Sharon Neemani (Tel Aviv Am Oved 1985) 216ndash40 For a more recent transcription and translation into German (via Polish) from Lewentalrsquos original Yiddish see Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos (Oświęcim Państwowe Muzeum Oświęcim-Brzezinka 1996) 189ndash251 Many of the texts contained in both volumes are also available in French under the title Des voix sous la cendre manuscrits des Sonderkommandos drsquoAuschwitzshyBirkenau (Paris Meacutemorial de la Shoah-Calmann Leacutevy 2005) Throughout these publications there seems little agreement on the correct spelling of Lewentalrsquos name The form used by Blanchot is that given by Langbein

172 Quoted by Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 234 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 202 People in Auschwitz 202 translation modified For the original text see Mark The Scrolls of Auschwitz 240 where the translation reads lsquoThe truth as it really exists is immeasurably more tragic and terriblersquo The version given in Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens 197 is as follows lsquoDie ganze Wahrheit ist um vieles tragischer noch viel grauenerregender rsquo Langbeinrsquos translation is slightly different lsquoDie ganze Wahrheit ist um vieles tragischer noch viel entsetzlicher rsquo


174 On this aporia of impossible fidelity and necessary betrayal particularly in respect of mourning for a friend (in this case Bataille) see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 301ndash2 The Infinite Conversation 203


176 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 227 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 194 People in Auschwitz 196ndash7 translation modified


178 Bruns Maurice Blanchot The Refusal of Philosophy 225


179 Gillian rose lsquoPotterrsquos Fieldrsquo in Maurice Blanchot the Demand of Writing edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill (London routledge 1996) 190ndash208 (p 204) Similarly there seems to be no warrant at all for Stoeklrsquos perverse claim in the essay cited earlier that Blanchotrsquos remark about the horror of knowledge lsquowould at first seem to apply primarily to those who as prisoners in the camp go along with the system even try to survive in order to understand it or in order to enable others to understand itrsquo (p 143) Blanchotrsquos point is not that it was somehow wrong for inmates to attempt to act decisively against the camps as Lewental and others had done but more simply that as far as those who come after are concerned there are limits to what it is possible to comprehend

180 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 131 The Writing of the Disaster 82 translation slightly modified Contrary to appearances these words do not figure as such either in Menschen in Auschwitz or in the material collected in The Scrolls of Auschwitz or Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens They seem to condense two separate phrases the first from Lewental cited by Langbein that lsquoNo one can imagine exactly what happened [Ce qui se passait exactement aucun ecirctre humain ne peut se le repreacutesenter] All this can be conveyed only by one of us someone from our small group [ie the Sonderkommando] our inner circle provided that someone accidentally survivesrsquo the second again from Langbein recording the words called out by members of the Sonderkommando to inmates who had perhaps a better chance of surviving lsquoWhen you leave the camp talk write and scream so the world may learn what is happening herersquo [Parlez eacutecrivez criez quand vous aurez quitteacute le camp pour que le monde sache ce qui srsquoest passeacute ici]rsquo see Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 17 225 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 3 195 People in Auschwitz 3 194 For the quotation from Lewental see Mark The Scrolls of Auschwitz 239 Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens 196


182 See Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 128 198 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 102 155 People in Auschwitz 105 170 Compare Primo Levi If This Is A Man and The Truce translated by Stuart Woolf (London Sphere Books 1987) 96 190 Among the rare critics to have noticed at least the first of Blanchotrsquos silent quotations I should mention Gerald Bruns in Maurice Blanchot The Refusal of Philosophy 225ndash6 In If This Is a Man Levi writes lsquoThey crowd my memory with their faceless presences and if I


could enclose all the evil of our time in one image I would choose this image which is familiar to me an emaciated man with head dropped and shoulders curved on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seenrsquo emphasis mine (Meunierrsquos French version based on Langbein followed except for the last clause by Blanchot reads lsquoun homme deacutecharneacute la tecircte pencheacutee les eacutepaules courbeacutees dont ni le visage ni les yeux ne permettent de lire une lueur de penseacuteersquo) In his second narrative as he prepares to begin the long journey home Levi writes lsquoduring the whole interminable year spent in the Lager I had never had either the curiosity or the occasion to investigate the complex structure of the hierarchy of the camp The gloomy edifice of vicious powers lay wholly above us and our looks were turned to the groundrsquo emphasis mine (Meunier followed by Blanchot translates lsquoNos regards eacutetaient tourneacutes vers le solrsquo) It is hard to say whether Blanchot was familiar with Levirsquos two volumes as a whole both were available in French translation during the 1970s the first in a hastily produced version given the misleading title Jrsquoeacutetais un homme translated by Michegravele Causse (Paris Buchet-Chastel 1961) and subsequently disowned by Levi only to be replaced by a more accurate text in 1987 the second as La Trecircve translated by Emmanuelle Joly (Paris Grasset 1966)

183 Levi If This Is A Man and The Truce 96

184 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 48 Some pages earlier Agamben cites the same passage from If This Is a Man as Blanchot no mention is made of Blanchotrsquos use of the passage even when Agamben takes issue with Blanchotrsquos interpretation of Antelme later in the book

185 Agamben Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life translated by Daniel Heller-roazen (Stanford Stanford University Press 1998) 32 Remnants of Auschwitz 49 Agamben explores this claim in further detail in his State of Exception translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago University of Chicago Press 2005) I discuss the figure of the state of exception in Blanchot and Agamben in lsquoldquoNot In Our Namerdquo Blanchot Politics the Neuterrsquo Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 141ndash59 At stake in the differend between Agamben and Blanchot it might be said are two radically different accounts of sovereignty (or its dissolution)


187 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 75ndash6 emphasis in the original On this opposition between death and mere decease sterben (to die) and verenden (to perish) underpinned in its turn by the opposition


between humans who are capable of world and animals that are not see Heidegger Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 171 Poetry Language Thought 176


189 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 81ndash2


191 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 133ndash4 emphasis in the original translation slightly modified

192 Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 133 Compare Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 192 The Infinite Conversation 130


194 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 131 The Writing of the Disaster 82 translation modified Ann Smock translates lsquozombies pariahs infidelsrsquo As Langbein indicates those who in Auschwitz and other camps were known as Muselmaumlnner were also known elsewhere by other names Agamben makes a similar point in Remnants of Auschwitz 44 before going on however to privilege the term Muselmann throughout forgetting it would seem that it was only one name among others For a critical assessment of the implications of this decision see Fethi Benslama lsquoLa repreacutesentation et lrsquoimpossiblersquo Le Genre humain LrsquoArt et la meacutemoire des camps edited by Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris Seuil 2001) 59ndash80 and for a more sustained critique of Agambenrsquos strategy see Philippe Mesnard and Claudine Kahan Giorgio Agamben agrave lrsquoeacutepreuve drsquoAuschwitz (Paris Kimeacute 2001)

195 Blanchot La Condition critique 432 lsquoDo not forgetrsquo Paragraph 30 3 November 2007 35

196 As Blanchot writes in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 86 The Writing of the Disaster 51 lsquoIn the work of mourning grief does not work it wakes [veille]rsquo translation modified

197 See Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 120ndash1 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 96 People in Auschwitz 98 For the original text translated from the Yiddish see Mark The Scrolls of Auschwitz 206ndash7 Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens 178 There is some doubt about the identity of the author of this fragment thought however to have been Leib Langfuss by Esther Mark (who collaborated closely in researching The Scrolls of Auschwitz and was responsible for publishing the book after her husbandrsquos death)

198 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 133 The Writing of the Disaster 83ndash4 translation modified Compare LrsquoEntretien infini 195ndash6


The Infinite Conversation 132ndash3 For the quotation from Levinas himself quoting rabbi Johanan in the name of rabbi Jose b Kisma (Sanhedrin 103b) see Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 10 Difficult Freedom xiv lsquoThe Otherrsquos hunger [La faim drsquoautrui]rsquo comments Levinas lsquobe it of the flesh or of bread is sacred [sacreacutee] only the hunger of the third party limits its rights the only bad materialism is our own This first inequality perhaps defines Judaism A difficult condition An inversion of the apparent order to be performed again and again Whence the ritualism that dedicates the Jew to service with no thought of reward to accept a burden carried out at his own expense discharged at risk only to himself This is the original incontestable meaning of the Greek word liturgyrsquo emphasis in the original translation modified


200 Langbein Menschen in Auschwitz 526 Hommes et femmes agrave Auschwitz 446 People in Auschwitz 472

201 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 134 The Writing of the Disaster 84 translation modified To what in this passage does the word Israel refer In a recently published letter to Levinas from May 1948 cited by Olivier Corpet in La Regravegle du jeu 19 41 October 2009 246 written shortly after the declaration of the State of Israel Blanchot expressed his reaction to events in the following terms lsquoYou wonrsquot hold it against mersquo he suggested to his correspondent lsquoif I feel the need to say how much I feel bound in sympathy and admiration [estime] to those involved in the struggle in Palestine You sometimes spoke of Zionism in the past saying that it did not seem to you to measure up to Jewish destiny [agrave la mesure du destin juif] But now that after so many centuries and in such remarkable circumstances the State of Israel is once more one ought surely to see in this something beyond measure [quelque chose de deacutemesureacute] which is the hallmark of that destinyrsquo Levinas for his part would always insist as for instance in a Talmudic commentary on which Blanchot had occasion to draw later on the importance of lsquonever giving the word Israel only an ethnic sensersquo lsquoIt is not by virtue of being Israel that excellence is definedrsquo Levinas argued lsquobut by this excellence the dignity of being delivered by God himself that Israel is definedrsquo (Difficile Liberteacute 114 Difficult Freedom 83) On the difficulties arising for Levinas from this double invocation of Israel as both a futural promise and a presently existing State see Howard Caygill Levinas and the Political (London routledge 2002) 159ndash98 Pursuing his exchange with Levinas on the identity of


Israel in the long footnote placed between lsquoLrsquoEcirctre juifrsquo and lsquoLrsquoEspegravece humainersquo in LrsquoEntretien infini 191ndash2 The Infinite Conversation 447ndash8 Blanchot agreed that lsquothe question expressed by the words ldquobeing-Jewish [ecirctreshyjuif]rdquo and the question of the State of Israel should not be confused even if the one is modified by the otherrsquo The word Israel in LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre cannot therefore simply be taken to refer to the State of Israel in its past present or future form True enough at least in general terms the support Blanchot expressed for the State of Israel in 1948 would remain a constant feature of his politics In 1998 for instance in one of his last public statements on the matter the writer responded to a questionnaire marking the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel (though Blanchot true to his own convictions refrained from naming it as such) with the following words lsquoWhatever happensrsquo he wrote lsquoI am with Israel I am with Israel when Israel suffers I am with Israel when Israel suffers for causing suffering I can do no more Certainly I have my political preferences I am on the side of [Shimon] Peres [leader of the Israeli Labour Party at the time Israelrsquos Foreign Minister] I believe [Menachem] Begin [former leader of the Likud Party who left power in 1983 and was closely identified with the policy of expanding Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied Palestine] was wrong very wrong to encourage settlements But I do not feel that I have the right to appear to tell people what to do when what is at stake is that which is closest to mersquo See Blanchot lsquoCe qui mrsquoest le plus proche rsquo Globe 30 July-August 1988 56 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 170 translation modified

202 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 72 The Writing of the Disaster 42 translation modified On Blanchotrsquos use of the expression lsquosens absentrsquo see Nancy La Deacuteclosion (Deacuteconstruction du christianisme 1) (Paris Galileacutee 2005) 130ndash32 DisshyEnclosure The Deconstruction of Christianity translated by Bettina Bergo Gabriel Malenfant and Michael B Smith (New York Fordham University Press 2008) 86ndash7

203 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 104 The Writing of the Disaster 63 translation modified Compare Levinas Difficile Liberteacute revised edition 328ndash33


205 Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 210 The Infinite Conversation 451 emphasis in the original translation modified

206 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash93 155ndash63 (p 162) Political Writings 1953ndash1993 119ndash23 (p 123) Compare Lacoue-Labarthe


La Fiction du politique (Paris Christian Bourgois 1987) 63 Heidegger Art and Politics translated by Chris Turner (Oxford Blackwell 1990) 37

207 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 216ndash7 The Writing of the Disaster 143 translation modified For the reference to Kafka see Kafka Gesammelte Werke VI 182 Dearest Father Stories and Other Writings 78 Blanchot following Klossowskirsquos translation of Kafkarsquos Journal intime (Paris Grasset 1945) 298 cites the passage in full in La Part du feu 30 The Work of Fire 24

208 Blanchot LrsquoAmitieacute 252ndash3 Friendship 223 translation modified The quotations in Blanchotrsquos text are drawn from Jabegraves lsquoLe Livre des questionsrsquo (1963) in Le Livre des questions I 15 30 The Book of Questions The Book of Questions The Book of Yukel Return to the Book translated by rosmarie Waldrop (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1976) 13 25ndash6

209 See Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet Ontologie de la reacutevolution I LrsquoAnge (Paris Grasset 1976) 47 The book is one of the best-known instances of what came to be promoted in France in the 1970s as new philosophy or lsquola nouvelle philosophiersquo which referred in this case to an esoteric confection of Maoist politics Lacanian psychoanalysis and Christian theology

210 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 209ndash10 The Writing of the Disaster 138ndash9 emphasis in the original translation modified Blanchotrsquos reference to Historie and Geschichte is a nod in the direction of Heidegger notably sect76 of Sein und Zeit

211 See Nancy La Deacuteclosion 133 DisshyEnclosure 88 lsquoNo return to religion attempts to insinuate itself here [in Blanchot]rsquo Nancy explains lsquomuch rather what attempts to extract itself from the legacy of monotheism is its essential and essentially non-religious trait the trait of an atheism or what could be called an absentheism beyond all positing of any object of belief or nonbeliefrsquo translation modified

212 See Nancy La Deacuteclosion 137 DisshyEnclosure 90

213 See for instance Blanchot lsquorefuser lrsquoordre eacutetablirsquo Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 151ndash3 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 157ndash8 La Condition critique 419ndash24 443ndash5 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 162ndash6 171ndash2 Many of these texts postdate the publication of LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre the concerns they voice however are already clearly at work in the 1980 volume especially in these closing pages

214 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 213 The Writing of the Disaster 141 translation modified For the original quotation see Levinas


Difficile Liberteacute 77 Difficult Freedom 53 On Levinasrsquos reticence towards poetry elsewhere see Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 76 The Infinite Conversation 53



217 Blanchot Le Livre agrave venir 98ndash9 The Book To Come 79 translation modified Neherrsquos 1955 book on which Blanchotrsquos essay is based has since been republished as Prophegravetes et propheacuteties lrsquoessence du propheacutetisme (Paris Payot 2004)





222 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 212 The Writing of the Disaster 140 translation modified For the original verses see Houmllderlin Saumlmtliche Gedichte 222 This was not the first time that Blanchot had recourse to the figure of the First Consul as an emblematic representation of personal dictatorship In his 1965 essay on Sade he similarly conflated Bonaparte in 1799 with de Gaulle in 1965 see LrsquoEntretien infini 342 The Infinite Conversation 229 Blanchot may also have encountered Houmllderlinrsquos epigram in Heideggerrsquos Vortraumlge und Aufsaumltze 187 where it is used to illustrate the differences between the same the equal the identical and the indifferent

223 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 213 The Writing of the Disaster 141 translation modified Blanchotrsquos use of the word combat or struggle in these lines does not mark a covert reintroduction of the dialectic it is a partial quotation drawing on the title of one of Kafkarsquos earliest posthumous texts Beschreibung eines Kampfes most commonly translated into French as Description drsquoun combat

224 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 83 The Writing of the Disaster 49 translation modified Compare Blanchot LrsquoEntretien infini 556 The Infinite Conversation 379 On Blanchotrsquos use of Kafkarsquos Castle in that essay see my Bataille Klossowski Blanchot Writing at the Limit 219ndash25 On the topos of weariness in LrsquoEntretien infini see


my lsquoWeary Wordsrsquo in Clandestine Encounters Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot edited by Kevin Hart (Notre Dame Indiana Notre Dame University Press 2010) 282ndash303

225 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 214 The Writing of the Disaster 141 translation modified One of the chief meanings of the word avegravenement used here by Blanchot relates of course to the lsquocomingrsquo of the Messiah

226 See Nancy La Deacuteclosion 140n3 DisshyEnclosure 182n14

227 For Blanchotrsquos early review see La Condition critique 41ndash4 The translation it discusses is Herman Melville Les Icircles enchanteacutees suivies de Bartleby lrsquoeacutecrivain translated by Pierre Leyris (Paris Gallimard 1945) For Caussersquos later version of Melvillersquos story see lsquoBartlebyrsquo Le Nouveau Commerce 35 Autumn 1976 76ndash122 In her brief introduction Causse not only mentions the parallel with Kafka (which Blanchot in 1945 had likewise noted while also suggesting a more persuasive affinity with Lautreacuteamont) but also describes Melvillersquos story as lsquopropheticrsquo Blanchotrsquos remarks seem to have prompted several further commentaries on the story see Ann Smock lsquoQuietrsquo Qui parle 2 Fall 1988 68ndash100 Deleuze Critique et clinique (Paris Minuit 1993) 89ndash114 Essays Critical and Clinical translated by Daniel W Smith Michael A Greco and Anthony Uhlmann (London Verso 1998) 68ndash90 J Hillis Miller Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge Harvard University Press 1990) 141ndash78 and Agamben Potentialities Collected Essays in Philosophy edited and translated by Daniel Heller-roazen (Stanford Stanford University Press 1999) 243ndash71 Deleuze in conclusion describes the figure of Bartleby among others as that of lsquothe new Christrsquo (p 114) while Agamben in similar vein credits him with being a possible lsquonew Messiahrsquo (p 270)

228 Blanchot Faux Pas 275 Faux Pas 240 translation modified

229 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 219 The Writing of the Disaster 145 translation modified For Blanchotrsquos earlier version of Bartlebyrsquos phrase see lsquoDiscours sur la patiencersquo Le Nouveau Commerce 30ndash31 1975 19ndash44 (p 28) Blanchot in 1980 was also careful to avoid Caussersquos 1976 version which had preferred the rather vaguer and less convincing lsquoje preacutefeacutererais nrsquoen rien fairersquo In 1986 as testimony to the obstinate untranslatability of Bartlebyrsquos strange watchword Pierre Leyris was responsible for a further revised version which this time opted for the more colloquial and peremptory lsquoje preacutefeacutererais pasrsquo See lsquoBartleby le scribersquo in Melville Les Contes de la Veacuteranda translated by Pierre Leyris (Paris Gallimard 1986)


230 Herman Melville Billy Budd Sailor and Other Stories edited by Harold Beaver (Harmondsworth Penguin 1967) 72

231 See Derrida lsquoPreacutejugeacutesrsquo in La Faculteacute de juger (Paris Minuit 1985) 87ndash139 Acts of Literature 183ndash220


233 See Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 83ndash131 Difficult Freedom 59ndash96

234 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 214 The Writing of the Disaster 141 There is a strong likelihood that Blanchot also followed up Levinasrsquos footnote reference to Scholemrsquos 1959 lecture lsquoTowards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism [Zum Verstaumlndnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum]rsquo republished in French translation in 1974 where he would have learnt more about lsquothis truly staggering ldquorabbinic fablerdquorsquo as Scholem calls it which dates back to the second century ie before rome became identified with the Catholic Church See Scholem Judaica I (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1963) 28 The Messianic Idea in Judaism translated by Michael A Meyer (London Allen amp Unwin 1971) 12 Le Messianisme juif essai sur la spiritualiteacute du judaiumlsme translated from the English by Bernard Dupuy (Paris Calmann-Leacutevy 1974) 37 Blanchotrsquos phrasing repeats (and inverts) Dupuyrsquos translation which refers to lsquole Messie aux portes de Rome parmi les leacutepreux et les mendiants [ie the lepers and beggars] de la Ville eacuteternellersquo

235 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 215 The Writing of the Disaster 142 translation modified Compare Difficile Liberteacute 100 Difficult Freedom 71 and Scholem Judaica I 26 The Messianic Idea in Judaism 11 Le Messianisme juif 36 (where Dupuy has lsquoAujourdrsquohui si vous eacutecoutez sa voix rsquo) On Scholemrsquos use of the quotation see Steacutephane Mosegraves LrsquoAnge de lrsquohistoire Rosenzweig Benjamin Scholem (Paris Gallimard [1992] 2006) 35ndash7 Oddly the passage is omitted from Mosegraves The Angel of History Rosenzweig Benjamin Scholem translated by Barbara Harshav (Stanford Stanford University Press 2009) readers of Blanchotrsquos Le TregravesshyHaut will recall the writerrsquos own singular use of the word lsquonow [maintenant]rsquo in the very last line of the novel when seemingly on the threshold of dying in a present tense that refers to no graspable present the narrator declares to any or all who are listening lsquoNow now is the time I shall speak [Maintenant crsquoest maintenant que je parle]rsquo See Blanchot Le TregravesshyHaut 243 The Most High 254 translation modified Levinas in his commentary remarks on the lsquoalways singular and often bizarre translationsrsquo sometimes found in the Talmud (Difficile Liberteacute 85 Difficult


Freedom 60 translation modified) It would not be hard as here to apply the exact same epithets to certain of Blanchotrsquos own versions as I show in lsquoldquoA Fine Madnessrdquo Translation Quotation the Fragmentaryrsquo Blanchot romantique A Collection of Essays 211ndash31

236 See Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 113 91 121ndash2 emphasis in the original Difficult Freedom 82 64 88


238 Scholem Judaica I 7ndash8 The Messianic Idea in Judaism 1 translation slightly modified Compare Scholem Le Messianisme juif 23ndash4

239 Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 115 emphasis in the original Difficult Freedom 84 translation slightly modified On the sometimes frosty relationship between Levinas and Scholem see Lescourret Emmanuel Levinas 39ndash40 332ndash4 reading Levinasrsquos words it is hard not to be reminded here of the proposition that features at the end of Benjaminrsquos lsquoOn the Concept of History [Uumlber den Begriff der Geschichte]rsquo according to which notes the author lsquowe know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future which holds sway over all those who turn to soothsayers [Wahrsager] for enlightenment This does not imply however that for the Jews the future became homogeneous empty time For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enterrsquo See Walter Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften edited by rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaumluser 7 vols (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1974ndash89) I 2 704 Selected Writings edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W Jennings 4 vols (London Harvard University Press 1996ndash2003) IV 397 This raises the further question of the extent of Blanchotrsquos knowledge of Benjamin whose name occurs only sparsely in the writerrsquos published texts albeit in a number of significant places The first as indicated earlier is in a review article (first published in September 1960 and later included in LrsquoAmitieacute 69ndash73 Friendship 57ndash6) of Benjaminrsquos Œuvres choisies translated by Maurice de Gandillac (Paris Julliard 1959) principally concerned with Benjaminrsquos famous essay lsquoThe Task of the Translatorrsquo (other texts included in Gandillacrsquos selection were lsquoCritique of Violencersquo lsquoFate and Characterrsquo lsquoGoethersquos Elective Affinitiesrsquo lsquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproductionrsquo lsquoOn Some Motifs in Baudelairersquo and lsquoThe Storytellerrsquo) True Blanchot demurred at Benjaminrsquos apparent belief in the existence of a pre-Babelian Ursprache but his


interest was sufficiently sparked by Benjaminrsquos presentation of the messianic promise implicit in translation (lsquoWhence a messianism proper to every translatorrsquo Blanchot remarked lsquoif he works to make languages grow in the direction of this ultimate language already attested in every present language by dint of the future held within it which translation makes its ownrsquo [LrsquoAmitieacute 70 Friendship 58 translation modified]) to repeat unchanged in a paper setting out the role of translation in the nascent project for the Revue internationale a passage that first appeared in the September 1960 article (compare LrsquoAmitieacute 71 Friendship 59 and Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 62 Political Writings 1953ndash93 62) In May 1963 in an essay entitled lsquoArs novarsquo in LrsquoEntretien infini Blanchot signalled his continuing interest by referring to various remarks by Benjamin on the aura and the fragmentary which were admittedly derived second-hand from Adornorsquos Philosophie der neuen Musik (Philosophy of Modern Music) which Blanchot was reviewing at the time It was not until 1968 that Blanchot properly revived his engagement with Benjamin which he did by quoting in an unsigned text published in Comiteacute (lsquorupture du temps reacutevolutionrsquo in Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash1993 127 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 100) the famous description of the July revolution in Paris when Benjamin reported lsquoon the first evening of fighting it so happened that shots were fired at the dials on Paris clocktowers simultaneously and independently and from several locations at oncersquo (Gesammelte Schriften I 2 702 Selected Writings IV 395 translation slightly modified) This passage too was drawn from Benjaminrsquos lsquoOn the Concept of Historyrsquo a text that Blanchot may well have read when it first appeared in French translated by Pierre Missac in the October 1947 issue of Les Temps modernes 25 623ndash34 only a few pages after his own article lsquoA la rencontre de Sadersquo (577ndash612) Between 1947 and 1968 it is clear that Blanchot had also had access to Adorno and Gretel Adornorsquos 1955 two-volume edition of Benjaminrsquos Schriften which allowed him to replace Missacrsquos version with a more accurate translation of his own And though Benjaminrsquos name does not occur elsewhere in Blanchot it is hard to believe he could have read Scholem without being aware of the latterrsquos connection with Benjamin not least because Scholemrsquos Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism with which Blanchot had long been familiar was dedicated to Benjaminrsquos memory


241 Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 84ndash5 Difficult Freedom 60 translation modified Other translations are evidently possible David Banon


for instance in Le Messianisme (Paris Presses universitaires de France 1998) 14 gives the following version lsquoTous les prophegravetes sans exception nrsquoont propheacutetiseacute que pour les temps messianiques Pour ce qui est du mondeshyquishyvient aucun œil ne lrsquoa vu en dehors de Toi Elohim qui agiras pour celui qui trsquoattendrsquo


243 Levinas Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris Minuit 1968) 13 Nine Talmudic Readings 4ndash5 translation modified


245 Levinas Difficile Liberteacute 84 Difficult Freedom 59 Levinas is of course referring to himself

246 Levinas Difficile Liberteacute revised (1976) version 405 Difficult Freedom 291

247 Levinas Aushydelagrave du verset lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris Minuit 1982) 7 Beyond the Verse Talmudic Readings and Lectures translated by Gary D Mole (London Athlone 1994) xndashxi emphasis in the original translation slightly modified

248 See Scholem Judaica 3 (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1973) 155 The Messianic Idea in Judaism 51 Le Messianisme juif 105ndash6 Scholemrsquos essay first published in 1968 in response to some of the events of that year is likely to have been of particular interest to Blanchot

249 On Sabbatai Zevi see Scholem Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 287ndash324 Judaica 5 Erloumlsung durch Suumlnde (Frankfurt Suhrkamp 1992) The Messianic Idea in Judaism 78ndash141 Le Messianisme juif 139ndash217 Blanchot offers a brief overview of Sabbatai Zevirsquos role as pseudo-Messiah based on Scholemrsquos account in LrsquoAmitieacute 269ndash70 Friendship 237ndash8

250 Mosegraves LrsquoAnge de lrsquohistoire 273ndash4 The Angel of History 132 emphasis in the original translation modified

251 Blanchot La Condition critique 424 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 165 emphasis in the original

252 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 216 The Writing of the Disaster 142ndash3 translation modified Tohushybohu is the word used in Genesis 1 2 for lsquothe earth was without form and voidrsquo

253 Blanchot Eacutecrits politiques 1958ndash93 153 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 118 translation modified This implicit reference to Elijah precedes by several years Derridarsquos analogous invocation of the prophet in Ulysse gramophone 103ndash6 Acts of Literature 284ndash6 Later too Derrida likewise goes on to stress lsquothe structural


contradictionrsquo at the heart of the messianic promise in a context that as the title of Derridarsquos chapter (lsquoHe Who Accompanies Me [Celui qui mrsquoaccompagne]rsquo) plainly suggests owes much to Blanchot see Derrida Politiques de lrsquoamitieacute (Paris Galileacutee 1994) 198 The Politics of Friendship translated by George Collins (London Verso 1997) 173ndash4


255 Kafka Gesammelte Werke VI 182 179 Dearest Father Stories and Other Writings 78 38 translations modified On Kafkarsquos familiarity with Hasidism and the messianic tradition and for a reading of The Castle as a critique of messianism ndash which in Blanchotrsquos terms would also amount to its interruptive or suspensive reaffirmation ndash see robertson Kafka Judaism Politics and Literature 228ndash35 For Blanchotrsquos own familiarity with Hasidism based on a reading of Buber and Scholem see LrsquoAmitieacute 259ndash71 Friendship 228ndash39

256 See Derrida LrsquoEacutecriture et la diffeacuterence 228 Writing and Difference 192 412 For the quotation from Joyce see Ulysses (London Harmondsworth 1992) 622 and for the quotation from Levinas see En deacutecouvrant lrsquoexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger 267 Deconstruction in Context 348 translation modified

257 Blanchot La Condition critique 419ndash20 Political Writings 1953ndash1993 162 translation modified



260 Blanchot LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre 220 The Writing of the Disaster 146 translation modified For the quotation from Mallarmeacute see Mallarmeacute Œuvres complegravetes I 416ndash17

5

A change of epoch

No finality where finitude reigns

[Pas de fin lagrave ougrave regravegne la finitude]

BLANCHOT La Communauteacute inavouable1

The fragmentary in Blanchot comes in many guises interrupted narrative abyssal reflection philosophical meditation deconstructive intervention literary critical note autothanatographical gloss metatheoretical excursion and much else besides still awaiting adequate characterisation At the same time however and more importantly the fragmentary is never merely coincident with these (or any other) manifestations which it forcibly suspends exceeds erases and reinscribes not in order to negate them but repeatedly to affirm their radical difference from themselves And if any given fragment is finite it follows that the fragmentary is itself necessarily infinite To the tracing of every limit in other words responds or corresponds that which unspoken or unsaid extends beyond the limit ndash a limit which while remaining impossible to cross is nevertheless interrupted effaced and overwritten so to speak with the otherness fragile precarious and ghostly upon which every limit depends This is not to say the fragmentary is a synonym for broken or deferred totality Sharing a condition of possibility with the parenthesising movement of the phenomenological epocheacute borrowed from philosophy but radicalised by Blanchotrsquos thinking to a point of unrecognisability it intervenes as a perpetual opening


to alterity to that which speaks without speaking beyond the horizon of the familiar to that which is unpredictable undecidable and irreducibly multiple in its consequences and effects

This explains why rather than a mere epiphenomenon of so-called modern or postmodern culture the fragmentary as both fait accompli and promise is rigorously inescapable It is also the reason why in turn any account of the fragmentary however lengthy cannot do other than face the fact of its own incompletion The lessons of this predicament are however double If it reminds us that to write is to confront the interminable it also demonstrates that words themselves are without end What may seem to some a curse is always already a blessing What Blanchot calls disaster as we have seen is radically inseparable from the prospect of hope Despite rumours to the contrary then the fragmentary is never a terminus never a point of conclusion or closure but an exigency inseparable from all writing an appeal or injunction in breach of all previous or existing norms delivered to that which yesterday today or tomorrow is still yet to come

The change of epoch in Blanchot if such exists is in this sense anything but an end of history It announces no new age no new era no new philosophical or theoretical system no new god This is not to say that throughout Blanchot did not remain deeply sceptical regarding the always imperialist claims of history the deep-rooted belief that like politics like narrative like meaning like sense history was all ndash without excess or remainder But this was not because Blanchotrsquos writing sought to remove itself from history On the contrary its engagement with history with politics with meaning was acute and unrelenting It insisted however that history like politics like meaning was only possible if something in history exceeded history interrupted it and stood aside from it just as it did politics narrative meaning and the rest not least because without that caesura without that detour without that interruption no event of writing no singularity no encounter indeed no history no politics and no meaning would occur at all

The change of epoch in Blanchot belongs neither to philosophy nor to history both of which it contests And for the exact same reason it does not belong to literature either Its impending immi-nence is all the more incisive for being withdrawn from the present

A ChAnGE oF EPoCh 435

and from presence which is also to say that its place without place is here wherever speech and writing occur and its time without time always already now

note


436

InDEx

Adler H G 365Adorno T W 2ndash8 15ndash16 346

352 429n 239Agamben Giorgio 45 86n 98

90n 103 271n 137 359ndash63 421n 184 422n 194 427n 227

Allen William S 168n 110Antelme Monique 154n 5Antelme robert 24 44ndash50

86n 98 89n 100 90n 103 237 268n 121 281 339 343ndash5 347 351 353 360ndash1 364 412n 145 421n 184

Arendt Hannah 271n 137Aristotle 35 117 158n 36

201 325Atack Margaret 269n 124

Balibar eacutetienne 238ndash9 271n 137Banon David 371 430n 241Barthes roland 180 286Bataille Georges 2 32 64ndash6

81n 73 100n 142 104 110 131 140 154n 5 223 243 248ndash9 252 254n 9 260n 44 274n 158 305 336 407n 121

Beaufret Jean 74n 38 103ndash4 153n 2

Beckett Samuel 2 4 6 17ndash19 69n 7 111 113 131ndash2 156n 17 165n 84 178 183

Benjamin Walter 80n 67 271n 137 429n 239

Benveniste Emile 130 160n 53 163n 64

Berger Joseph 350ndash1 416n 166Bertram Ernst 65 100n 143Blanchot Maurice

Aminadab (Aminadab) 127 161n 57

LrsquoAmitieacute (Friendship) 49ndash50 80n 67 236ndash8 253n 1 259n 41 301 397n 33 429n 239 431n 249 432n 255

Apregraves Coup (Vicious Circles) 78n 55 94n 108 321ndash2 415n 153 416n 162

LrsquoArrecirct de mort (Death Sentence) 10ndash11 71n 19 99n 135 115 137ndash8 165n 86 335

lsquoLrsquoAttentersquo 14 103ndash23 289LrsquoAttente LrsquoOubli (Awaiting

Oblivion) 10 14 26 48 72n 26 92n 104 103ndash53 154n 8 155n 10 160nn 50ndash1 162n 58 163n 66 165nn 84ndash5 172 174 179 222 249 285 308 372 411n 139

Au moment voulu (When the Time Comes) 10 13 23 71n 15 79n 63 129 162n 63 412n 145

references in bold refer to detailed treatment of works indicated

InDEx438

Celui qui ne mrsquoaccompagnait pas (The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me) 10 13 71n 15

La Communauteacute inavouable (The Unavowable Community) 247ndash53 274nn 154 158 275n 159 276n 165 401n 72 433

Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man) 10ndash11 13ndash14 143 162n 58 165n 86 168nn 114ndash15 267n 90

LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre (The Writing of the Disaster) 7ndash8 26 31 37 50 78nn 57 60 79n 62 106ndash7 115 155n 14 163n 64 167n 109 179 193ndash5 197 243 259nn 41ndash2 260n 44 279ndash391 395nn 17 20 396n 30 399n 52 400n 63 404n 99 405n 102 407n 121 408n 128 409n 132 410n 137 414n 150 415nn 153ndash4 416n 162 417n 167 418n 169 420n 180 422n 194 423n 201 425nn 210 213 426nn 222ndash3 427nn 225 229 428nn 234ndash5 431n 252

LrsquoEntretien infini (The Infinite Conversation) 9 17ndash23 26ndash9 31ndash7 40ndash9 61ndash8 69n 8 71n 13 73n 33 75nn 39 45 77n 53 79n 64 80nn 65 67 81n 73 84nn 86 88 85n 95 86n 96 89n 101 90n 103 92n 104

99nn 140ndash1 100n 143 101nn 146 151 120ndash2 131 151ndash2 157n 29 158n 34 163nn 64 71 164n 80 167nn 102 106 169n 120 192ndash3 196ndash7 202 206 225 259n 39 260n 44 261n 46 262nn 58 63 264n 75 269nn 122ndash3 281ndash2 285 293 343ndash5 367 375 393n 9 394n 13 397n 33 412n 145 413nn 147ndash9 419n 174 423n 201 426nn 222 224 429n 239

LrsquoEspace litteacuteraire (The Space of Literature) 9 70n 11 75n 40 82n 81 83n 82 110 187 280ndash1 301ndash2 335 397n 33 399nn 52 56 401n 70

Faux Pas (Faux Pas) 58 79n 64 97n 124 392n 5 394n 14 401n 70

La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day) 11ndash12 212 219 266n 78 269n 123 408n 123

LrsquoInstant de ma mort (The Instant of My Death) 11 183 199 257n 21

Le Livre agrave venir (The Book to Come) 14ndash16 73n 27 74n 37 84n 86 94n 109 156nn 17 19 164n 80 256n 17 273n 144 281 373

La Part du feu (The Work of Fire) 74n 37 79n 64 80n 67 97n 124 154n 4 164n 80 176ndash8 254n 9 279ndash80 392n 5 405n 106 425n 207

InDEx 439

Le Pas aushydelagrave (The Step Not Beyond) 26 30ndash1 43 56 58 63 94n 109 106ndash7 166n 87 171ndash253 254nn 3 6 256n 11 257n 21 260n 44 261n 47 265n 77 266nn 84 87 267n 90 268n 121 274n 152 275nn 159 161ndash2 277n 167 285ndash6 293 301 303ndash4 308 318 335ndash6 372 417n 167

politics 6ndash7 20 22ndash8 37 40 44ndash7 64 75n 39 76nn 46 49 80n 65 82n 81 85n 94 86n 98 90n 103 97nn 121 124 153n 3 165n 85 193ndash4 196 212 231ndash53 259n 41 260n 44 268n 121 269nn 122ndash3 126 270n 135 271n 137 272nn 141 143 273nn 144ndash5 274n 158 276n 165 279ndash82 305 310 339ndash47 352ndash3 355 362ndash3 367ndash70 374 385ndash7 392n 2 393n 6 411nn 141 143 412n 145 413n 148 414n 150 415nn 153ndash4 417n 167 420nn 179ndash80 421n 185 423n 201 426n 222 429n 239

Thomas lrsquoObscur (Thomas the Obscure) 55 65 72n 21 98n 125 180ndash1 183 216 243 256n 17 312 393n 7

Le TregravesshyHaut (The Most High) 244 253 260n 44 273n 147 277n 169 428n 235

Breton Andreacute 97n 124Bruns Gerald 78n 54 356

420n 182Buber Martin 194 259n 41

432n 255Buber-Neumann

Margarete 94n 108

Cayrol Jean 343 412n 145Celan Paul 94n 108 187

253n 1 258n 28 276n 165 289 348 367 416n 159

Char reneacute 2 4 19ndash24 26ndash7 37 46 48 60ndash1 74nn 37ndash8 75nn 39 45 92n 104 93n 105 103 153n 2 158n 34 251

Chomsky Marvin J 352Clark Timothy 154n 8Cohn-Bendit Daniel 50

414n 150Crowley Martin 86n 98

89n 100 90n 103 412n 145

Davis Colin 90n 103Delbo Charlotte 348Deleuze Gilles 32 34 262n 63

264n 75 292 397n 31 427n 227

Derrida Jacques 3 7 12 32 34 58ndash60 68n 1 70n 9 81n 70 94n 109 99n 135 101n 146 108 126 138ndash9 157n 27 161n 54 165nn 84 86 166n 87 182ndash3 204 206 208 212 215 219 225ndash6 245 249 264n 75 284 289 300 302ndash4 323 330ndash2 342 366 368 377 389 396n 30

InDEx440

398n 42 406n 107 407n 121 408n 123 431n 253

Diogenes Laertius 324Duras Marguerite 164n 80

249ndash50 268n 121

Eaglestone robert 86n 98epocheacute 51ndash62 96n 120

98n 127 179ndash80 231 234 307 324ndash5 328 335 380 389ndash91 433

Fichte Johann Gottlieb 31 113Fink Eugen 32 34ndash5 81n 73Foumlrster-Nietzsche

Elisabeth 396n 24Foucault Michel 14 32 34

70n 11 143

Gaulle Charles de 22ndash4 75n 39 235ndash6 238 269n 122 270n 135 426n 222

Goya Francisco 339

Hegel G W F 4 6 15ndash16 27ndash8 64 167n 109 176 191ndash2 253 254n 9 261n 47 277n 169 289 323ndash4 330ndash2 336 342 366ndash7 380 389 397n 33 405n 106 406n 107 407n 121 409n 132

Heidegger Martin 6 14ndash16 32ndash3 35 37ndash44 53 55 58 66 74n 38 75n 45 80n 65 81n 68 82n 81 83n 85 84n 88 85n 94 92n 104 97nn 121ndash2 98n 129 103ndash10 112 114ndash16 118ndash22 124 130ndash1 145ndash8 150 152 153nn 2ndash3 154nn 5 8

155nn 9 14 156n 19 157nn 27 29 159n 39 160n 50 161n 55 166n 99 167n 109 168nn 110 113 169n 116 191 196 199ndash204 206 226 249 262nn 58 63 264n 75 271n 137 285 289ndash90 293 303 312ndash13 316 322ndash4 330 332 359 362 367ndash8 405n 102 407n 121 421n 187 425n 210 426n 222

Heraclitus 19 22 27 43 48 92n 104 117ndash22 130 134 142 147 152ndash3 157n 27 158nn 33ndash4 36 159nn 37 39 160n 48 163n 64 166n 99 167nn 106 109 201

Houmllderlin Friedrich 1 6 38ndash40 55 82n 81 83n 85 104 106ndash7 114 117 150ndash2 154n 5 169n 116 253 261n 47 277nn 168ndash9 289 307 311 323 370ndash2 374 426n 222

Hollier Denis 271n 137Horkheimer Max 346House Jim 276n 165Husserl Edmund 51ndash60

62 95n 111 96n 120 97nn 121 124 98nn 127 129 179 302 304 307 310 312 316ndash17 324ndash5 330 382 402n 88 406n 107

Jabegraves Edmond 306 344 346ndash7 369 371 397n 33 400n 65 414n 150 425n 208

Jambet Christian 369 425n 209

InDEx 441

Janicaud Dominique 80n 65 97n 122 153n 2 154n 8 157n 27

Jaspers Karl 32ndash3 36 80n 67Joyce James 139 389Juumlnger Ernst 33 64 115

153n 2

Kafka Franz 1 6 9 11ndash12 85n 95 94n 108 177ndash8 280 284 335 353 368 370ndash2 374ndash8 388 393n 7 399n 52 425n 207 426nn 223ndash4 427n 227 432n 255

Klingemann August 31 79n 62Klossowski Pierre 32 66

99n 141 101n 147 174 193 196 198 200 204ndash7 210 262n 63 271n 137 401n 72 425n 207

Kojegraveve Alexandre 64 254n 9

Lacan Jacques 336 425n 209Lacoue-Labarthe Philippe 3

29ndash31 77n 53 82n 81 97n 122 183 260n 44 277n 169 333 336 367ndash8 405n 102 408n 128

Langbein Hermann 348ndash55 357ndash8 361 363ndash5 416nn 160 162 418n 169 419nn 171ndash2 420nn 180 182 422nn 194 197

Lanzmann Claude 340 363 410n 137

Laporte roger 243 260n 44 273n 145 280

Lardreau Guy 369 425n 209Leclaire Serge 333ndash4 336ndash7

409n 132Leiris Michel 182 304

399n 52

Levi Primo 357ndash8 361 363 420n 182

Levinas Emmanuel 34 43 45 51ndash5 57ndash8 73n 33 81n 73 84n 88 86nn 96ndash7 90n 103 93n 105 95nn 110ndash11 96n 120 97n 121 98n 129 103 108 117ndash18 126 132 136 158n 36 164n 80 176 194 249 275n 162 276n 164 280 285 289ndash90 300 312ndash22 324ndash8 330 332 342ndash3 345 352 363ndash4 367ndash8 370ndash2 376 378ndash85 387 388ndash9 393n 7 394nn 10 12 397n 33 402nn 79 85 88 403nn 90 95 404n 98 407nn 119 121 413n 148 414n 150 423n 201 425n 214 428nn 234ndash5 429n 239

Lewental Salmen 353ndash6 419n 171 420nn 179ndash80

Loumlwith Karl 32 65ndash6 196 262n 63 367

Luria Isaac 293 306 337 397n 33

Luther Martin 225 267n 103 272n 138

MacMaster Neil 276n 165Mallarmeacute Steacutephane 1 51 60

62ndash3 68n 1 94n 109 107 126 156n 19 181 208 231 243 281ndash4 287 289 291 298 307 336 391 394nn 12 14 398n 42 409n 131

Malraux Andreacute 280 393n 6Marx Karl 64 248 367

InDEx442

Mascolo Dionys 23ndash4 76n 48 242 273n 144 412n 145

Maxence Jean-Pierre 272n 141Melville Herman 370ndash2 376ndash8

427nn 227 229Memmi Albert 413n 148Merleau-Ponty Maurice 328Mole Gary 411n 139Mondor Henri 283 394n 14Morali Claude 275n 162Mosegraves Steacutephane 385 428n 235

Nancy Jean-Luc 3 29ndash31 70n 9 76n 46 77n 53 247ndash8 149 266n 83 274n 158 328 371 373 376 387 405n 102 407n 115 415n 154 424n 202 425n 211

Neher Andreacute 343 373 413n 147 426n 217

neuter 19ndash22 30 34 36ndash7 43ndash6 48ndash9 58 60ndash3 67ndash8 80n 67 85nn 91 95 86n 97 90n 103 93n 105 99n 138 112 116 131 141 143 148ndash9 157n 29 167n 102 181 183ndash5 188 190ndash1 196 213ndash15 217 222 229 243 251 264n 75 266n 83 269n 122 285 290 294ndash5 300ndash1 305 308 314 319ndash20 322 329 362 376ndash7 402n 79 403n 95 405n 102

Nietzsche Friedrich 1 25ndash6 31ndash44 57 63ndash8 79nn 63ndash4 80nn 65 67 81nn 70 73 82n 78 86n 96 99n 141 100nn 142ndash3 101nn 148 151 104 117 159n 37

191ndash212 219 247 249 251 258n 36 259n 39 260n 44 261n 47 262nn 58 63 264n 75 265n 77 289 305 330 406n 107

nihilism 7 33 37 40ndash5 66 86n 96 90n 103 196 199ndash203 205 210 243 261n 46 326 337

Parmenides 39 43 201 219 261n 47

Pascal Blaise 336 392n 5 409n 131

Paulhan Jean 98n 125 234 269n 126 401n 70

Plato 42 158n 36 167n 109 201 258n 35 261n 47 264n 75 330

Poliakov Leacuteon 347 416n 159

Queneau raymond 154n 5 254n 9

ramnoux Cleacutemence 117 120 158n 34 163n 64 166n 99

richter Johann Paul Friedrich (Jean Paul) 78n 55

rimbaud Arthur 4 69n 5 392n 5

rose Gillian 356rosenzweig Franz 413n 147rousset David 348rousso Henry 412n 144

418n 168

Sade D A F Marquis de 18 259n 43 426n 222 429n 239

Sartre Jean-Paul 55 283Schelling F W J 31 289

306 323 330 400n 63 405n 102

InDEx 443

Schlechta Karl 32Schlegel Friedrich 1 26ndash9 31

37 288 306 330Schmitt Carl 271n 137Scholem Gershom 293ndash4 371

379ndash81 384ndash6 397n 33 428nn 234ndash5 429n 239 431n 248

Sextus Empiricus 325ndash6Shoah 94n 107 339ndash68 410n 137

411n 139 412n 144Silesius Angelus 395n 16Silverman Max 417n 167Solzhenitsyn Alexander 350ndash1

416n 166Stoekl Allan 413n 148

417n 167 420n 179Styron William 418n 170Syrotinski Michael 341

Talmud 371 378ndash85 388ndash9 397n 31 423n 201 428n 235

Todorov Tzvetan 260n 44 411n 143

Valeacutery Paul 1 6 287ndash9 392n 2 396n 24

Vittorini Elio 24

Weil Simone 84n 88 397n 33 412n 145

Weller Shane 261n 46Wiesel Elie 348 410n 137Wittgenstein Ludwig 310ndash11

330 370ndash1 401n 72Wormser-Migot Olga 348

416n 159

444

445

446

447

448

449

450

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 A turning

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II

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Notes

Chapter 2 The demand of the fragmentary

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Notes

Chapter 3 An interruption

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VI

Notes

Chapter 4 Writing ndash disaster

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Notes

Chapter 5 A change of epoch

Note

Index

maurice blanchot and fragmentary writing - the eye...2 maurice blanchot and fragmentary writing...

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