the secret and the neuter: on heidegger and blanchot

Research in Phenomenology

Research in Phenomenology 37 (2007) 3255

www.brill.nl/rp

The Secret and the Neuter: On Heidegger and BlanchotPascal MassieMiami University of Ohio

Abstract Blanchots thought has often been understood as a critique and a reversal of Heideggers. Indeed, many formulas of the former are construed as mere inversions of the latter. Yet, the philosophical problem raised by the encounter between Blanchot and Heidegger cannot be sufficiently accounted for in terms of inversion or reversal. Focusing on the question of the secret (Blanchots term) in its relation to Geheimnis (Heidegger), this essay starts with a discussion of the notion of secrecy in relation to mysticism and argues that (a) this difference should not be construed in terms of a disjunction. Blanchots relation to Heidegger is not on a par with Levinas critical account of the latter; (b) that to acknowledge the centrality of the secret does not commit one to mysticism; and (c) that Blanchots ultimate claims about the neuter commit him to a position that is much closer to Heideggers than his apparent disavowal of the latter would seem to entail. Keywords Heidegger, Blanchot, secret, neuter, mysticism

The intent of this essay is to elucidate the difference between what Heidegger names being and what Blanchot names the neuter and to do so by focusing on the notion of the secret. It is my contention that this notion is pivotal in the sense that a pivot designates a hinge, a point on which everything else revolves. One could say that Heidegger arrives at a thought of the secret (das Geheimnis) while Blanchot departs from it. This, at least, seems to be the case. Just as the proximity of Blanchot to Heidegger has often been noticed (in particular with respect to the question of death), Blanchots apparent reversals of Heideggers formulas has often been interpreted as a rejection of these formulas.1 And indeed Blanchot often presents his reader with what1)

For instance, Ullrich Haase and William Large note that the idea of authentic death, as the origin of my knowledge [Heidegger] is transformed [in Blanchot] into the infinite passivityDOI: 10.1163/156916407X169807

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007

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appears to be a mere inversion of Heidegger. For instance, while Heidegger understands death as the utmost possibility of impossibility, Blanchot answers in terms of the impossibility of possibility. While Heidegger rejects the inauthentic understanding of death exemplified by the commonsensical saying: one dies [man stirbt], Blanchot answers I never dies but one dies (LEspace littraire, 124). As a consequence, on Blanchots account, death can never be my own. Similarly, Blanchot stresses passivity in a way that seems explicitly opposed to Daseins resolution, and his insistence on the night seems to contrast with Heideggers clearing of being. And yet, Blanchots relation to Heidegger is not sufficiently understood if we simply classify the former along with the critics of the latter. In what follows, I shall argue that their relation (and therefore their difference) is best captured in one of Blanchots sayings (albeit about two other figures, namely: Joubert and Mallarm); it is a matter of a mere nothing [that] separates here two infinitely different experiences. . . . It is essential but difficult to always hold firmly this nothing that separates thinking.2 More specifically, the question concerns the difference between two types of silences: a silence that would be pregnant with a revelation in waiting (which, on a certain reading at least, could characterize Heideggers Geheimnis) and a silence that has nothing to say (Blanchots neuter). The critical nature of Blanchots remarks on Heidegger is not a matter of critique in the academic sense of the term; rather (to use one of Blanchots phrases), it is a matter of experience, or more precisely, of limit experience, keeping in this expression the ambiguity of the objective or subjective genitive: it is an experience of the limit and the limit of experience. In this dual sense, a limit experience is at stake in the difference between Heideggers Abgrund (the abyss) or das Nichts (the nothing), and Blanchots la nuit (night) or le neutre (the neuter). For das Nichts (which Blanchot links toof dying (Maurice Blanchot [London and New York: Routledge, 2001], 53). Simon Critchley argues in a similar vein that Dying is the impossibility of possibility and thus undermines the residual heroism, virility and potency of Being-toward-death (Simon Critchley, Il y a Holding Levinass Hand to Blanchots Fire, in Maurice Blanchot. The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill [London: Routledge, 1996], 110). Again, Timothy Clark argues that Blanchot moves away from Heideggers dichotomy of revealing and concealing that suggests a privileging of the metaphoric of light and the corresponding postulate of unity (Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derridas Notion of Practice of Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 95). 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 65 (translation modified).

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the secret) names dis-appearing (as withdrawing), whereas le neutre names non-appearing. Ultimately, the question I want to raise concerns the possibility of upholding this difference, that is, of deciding on the distinction between secret and neuter. This essay aims at showing that the elusiveness of the secret undermines the objection Blanchot addresses to Heidegger and is necessarily reinscribed within Blanchots thought on the neuter. If it is so, Blanchot cannot be properly read as a critic of Heidegger (alongside, for instance, Levinas) and the decision between both thoughts cannot be ruled by the either/or of non-contradiction but must remain open. I. Secret without Mysticism The secret designates a truth deprived of public revelation. Wherever a secret is at stake, the instant of disclosure remains infinitely deferred. Wherever there is a secret, the secret is not thereit is, by definition, what is not given. The proclamation that a secret surrounds us holds an announcement (there is truth/meaning) that can never be fulfilled (it cannot be disclosed). A secret is the always-frustrated announcement of a revelation that cannot and must not come to pass. Both anticipated and recoiled further back than anything simply hidden, the secret remains in suspense. In this sense, the secret partakes of transcendence and transgression. It occurs in the very act through which a transgression posits a transcendence that it cannot affirm. This positing (there is a secret) denies what it affirms (the secret is here) and affirms what it denies (if it were here, it wouldnt be a secret). The secret designates being without presence, an interiority without exteriority, being without manifestation. It is not the impossible presence of nonbeing that is at stake; rather, it is what is in excess of presence, what never enters into presence, and yet is not nothing. As Blanchot, bringing together secret and impossible, puts it: the secret is the inevitable accomplishment of what is impossible to accomplishand this would be dying itself.3 Those who insist on the presence of the secret are commonly deemed mystics. With this denomination a criticism is already implied. For what is mysticism but a matter of affirming that what can never show itself nevertheless encircles us, of positing that which can never testify for its presence?Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982), 107; hereafter cited as SB.3)

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Inasmuch as it asserts what one does not and cannot know, any talk of secrecy is prima facie suspect of irrationalism or obscurantism. All these terms have been applied to Heidegger and Blanchot.4 The truth a mystic proclaims can never be made manifest, it cannot be known (not even by the very mystic who proclaims it). At best, its truth is, in Nicholas of Cusas phrase, a matter of known ignorance. There are secrets only for those who do not know. The mystic knows that there is something to be known behind his ignorance, and posits it as something of which he knows nothingI do not know, but I will have known. To claim that there is a secret is to claim what is beyond knowledge. With respect to the secret, ignorance is both necessary and insufficient. Such ignorance is not a simple negation of knowledge; it affirms that knowledge is missing and confesses its unfulfilled desire to know. Of course, as Socrates taught us, the recognition of ones own ignorance must coincide with the beginning of inquiry (that is to say with philosophy); but for mysticism, the inquiry postulates a knowledge that cannot be obtained. When it comes to the secret, the known and the knowable never coincide. If I know that there is a secret, I know that it is; yet, I ignore what it is. Thus, I cannot even know that there is a secret. Rather, I know it by ignoring it. But is not to know that there is something without knowing what it is sheer nonsense, as Meno already objected to Socrates (Meno 80d)? And is this not precisely the situation in which those who postulate a secret ultimately find themselves? Or is there a way of upholding this notion without being guilty of mysticism? Platos solution consists in pondering the difference between knowing and not knowing in terms of the souls virtuality. Our present situation of not knowing is pregnant with a non-revealed knowledge that awaits being brought to light. As soon as it is acknowledged, our condition of not knowing turns into the recognition of our virtual knowledge not yet brought to self-recognition. Ignorance, when aware of itself, turns into anticipation and expectation, and even though Socrates answer is placed under the invocation of priests and priestesses (Meno 81ab), its aim is not to lead to a mystical invocation of what is beyond knowledge but rather to point to the ethical demand that the virtual knowledge of the soul calls for: we will4)

With respect to the latter, Michael Purcell construes Blanchots impossible relation as a prolegomenon to grace and argues that an experience of the impossible is an impossible experience. On this reading the neuter must either be appropriated in favor of a religious experience or rejected as a logical absurdity (Michael Purcell, Grace and the Experience of the Impossible: Blanchots Impossible Relation as a Prolegomenon to a Theology of Grace, Philosophy and Theology, 10, no. 2 (1997): 42147.

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be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it (Meno 86b). To know is to remember, to overcome forgetfulness; and to ignore knowingly is to anticipate this remembrance. In this sense, the secret would indicate what lies in wait in this dynamic tension between lost knowledge and ignorance. It would seem that the accusation of mysticism that is commonly attached to the proponents of the secret can be answered not, indeed, by taking refuge in some other world but, on a contrary, by a strict adherence to the phenomenal, by an insistence on what shows itself. Merleau-Ponty already suggested that if the phenomenal constitutes our point of departure, it cannot be the termination of phenomenology, for the secret is rather its presupposition:The formulas of the secret (Geheimnis), mystical formulas, are not other than phenomenological formulas . . . for from the start phenomenology was understood as ontology and manifestation as something being does, and does from further than our representations.5

If phenomenological formulas are not other than formulas of the secret, it is because phenomenology is from the start concerned with the thing itself that which, as such, cannot be a representation, for the manifest cannot be a representation if nothing in it is represented. Thus, there is secret when one is brought to recognize that being exceeds knowing, that the metaphysics of representation presuposes the non-representable as its source. In this sense, any attempt to construct ontology on the basis of epistemology is bound to fail. Being within the limits of representation is precisely never being. This, however, is not simply a matter of reversal between two terms (knowing and being), for a reversal remains a matter of relation. It is not sufficient to ask which one of these terms constitutes the measure of the other. Should we invert the terms, we could only state that being is the measure of knowing. Yet, it is not by measuring its other that being constitutes the secret of knowing; rather, it is by being measureless. The excess of the secret is marked by a disproportion for which no progress of knowledge could ever compensate. The secret cannot be measured; for a measure encompasses what it measures, while it is proper to the secret that it exceeds any knowing.5)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours, 19591961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 11718.

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II. The Obscure: Beyond the Secret What Blanchot dubs the obscure allows us to explore further this question. Let us start by considering one of Blanchots literary works.I brought her the only true mystery, which consisted in the absence of mystery, which she could therefore only eternally seek. Everything was clear, everything was simple in me: in pure enigma there is no beneath. I showed her a face deprived of secret, indecipherable . . . and the more she reduced in me the share of the unknown, the more her discomfort and her fright increased.6

Mystery, enigma, secret: these words, taken from a work of fiction, delineate the horizon of Blanchots questioning. What the narrator says of himself in front of her, of himself as she gazes at him, whoever they are the reader of Thomas the Obscure will learn almost nothing of their identitycould as well be said of the text itself. Everyone seems to agree that Blanchots fictions are highly intricate, even obscure. They do not lend themselves to straightforward interpretation. Yet, they are not filled with esoteric allusions, nor do they require acquaintance with a key that only a few chosen ones (those who are in on the secret) could identify. Rather, Thomas the Obscure says all it has to sayno more and no less. The secret of this narrative (if it is one) concerns rather its possibility.7 But this applies as well to the narrator; or rather, to what the narration says of the narrator.8 What happens is quite simple: the narrator faces a woman; he shows her a face that, like the white face of a mime, remains as blank as an unwritten page. The woman is a reader: she scrutinizes the narrator as if he were a text to be deciphered; yet, her gaze remains frustrated by his face without expression. There is nothing to read on a white page, not a trace, not a sign. There is only a face-to-face and, in this intimate proximity, an extreme remoteness. Thomass obscurity is equivalent to the clarity of his lunar face. This, precisely, constitutes the enigma: a face without secret shows the pure enigma of a presence that does not signify, that is proximate by virtue of6)

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas lobscur (nouvelle version, 1950; reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 11819. Translated by Robert Lamberton as Thomas the Obscure, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (New York: Station Hill/Barryton, 1999), 118 (translation modified). 7) As Leslie Hill rightly suggests in Blanchot Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 53. 8) In many respects with Thomas the Obscure, what we can say of the narrator echoes what we can say of the narration.

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its distance and remote by virtue of its presence. Such a face is the opposite of a mask, which shows in order to hide. Thomass face is a mere surface, a visage without depth. The mystery of this unmeaning face resides paradoxically in the absence of a beneath (Thomas has no secret, nothing to hide). We could say that his face is neutral: it does not express this, any more than that; being, any more than nonbeing. The neuter does not signify. It never turns into a sign through which some meaning could be inferred. Before the neuter, the play of signification comes to a stop. What Blanchot calls the neuter is to be understood first of all from the question of meaning; that is, from the phenomenon whereby something that is present (a sound, a mark on a piece of paper) shows itself as other than it is, refers to something elsesomething that is not present or not present in the same manner. Signification is a matter of making a sign (signum facere) by pointing in another direction to something that is further. Meaning calls for a play between presence and absence whereby these terms, rather than being opposite, are connected by a relation of referring and indexing. The meaning of x is necessarily other than and beyond x. In order for something to mean some thing, there ought to be a difference between the sign itself and what it stands for. But then if to mean is never to be, any attempt to disclose the meaning of being is in principle condemned to fail. Being can only mean something else than what is and therefore it is never what it signifies. Being continually recedes before any inscription of its sense. The neuter for Blanchot points to a presencefor instance, a face one stares atbut a presence that does not signify. The singularity of the other constitutes an enigma that escapes metaphysical categories.9 Should we conclude that the neuter is Blanchots name for mere being? Mere: that is, being inasmuch as it withdraws before any inscription of meaning. Could it be that the face of the narrator, in its simplicity and clarity without beneath or beyond, exemplifies neutrality? The whole difficulty here consists in deciding whether a limit-experience (an experience of the limit) is equivalent to the revelation of an ultimate meaning. In other words, the question is to know why an encounter with the neuter, which is not a matter of secret, still remains, as Blanchot puts it, an enigma.9)

As Ullrich Haase and William Large put it: This is why Blanchot calls such immediate singularity the secret of being, insofar as it cannot be expressed in everyday language. But they are quite right to immediately add that this is not just a matter of proclaiming the ineffability of the other by suggesting that: everyday language still depends on this existence of its other and a complete separation from this secret would make our communication completely meaningless (Ullrich Haase and William Large, op. cit. 5758).

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Asking in terms of meaning, we found that the so-called meaning of being cannot be a meaning at all. Rather, being names the end of all meaning. But with this result are we not trapped in an endless circle? Blanchot talks about the enigma (at times, he calls it mystery) of that which is deprived of secret; the ultimate enigma would then be the absence of secret. Thus, after the secret, something remains. But does not this appeal to an enigma simply reiterate the secret? And is it not necessarily so from the very instant one envisions the limit or the end of meaning? The female character in Thomas the Obscure is condemned to seek eternally the enigma of unmeaning, to scrutinize a face without why. How could it be otherwise? For if the mystery does not mean anything, what does it hide? And if it does not hide anything, what does it mean? To approach this question we should start by considering the distinction Blanchot suggests between secret and enigma. Let us note, however, that this is not a matter of philosophical conceptuality or definition. Blanchot conjures up but does not define; and this is not simply because we are dealing with a novel (i.e., a fictional work that, as is commonly assumed, can do without conceptual rigor) but rather because the difference between enigma and secret escapes conceptuality. As Blanchot construes it in Thomas the Obscure, a secret is something that has a key (even if it is a missing or lost one) so that de jure a secret can be deciphered; it is but a matter of careful observation and cunning. An enigma, however, names a paradox without answer; such a paradox seems obscure, but in fact it is the most clear and simplest. An enigma has nothing to hide; it is without secret, open without reserve; but it opens to nothing further, like a blank face that does not signify anything. If the narrator brought her the only true mystery, which consists in the absence of mystery (emphasis added), this disclosure is not identical to a mere evidence that lies in the open. The absence of mystery is no evidence or transparent fact. Rather, the absence of meaning is the true enigma. And it is so not only because the mystery withdraws further (this would be the logic of the secret we mentioned earlier) but rather because its stark presence is unbearable inasmuch as it remains without a reason and yet continuously calls for one. What is unsaid and unsayable is not simply outside the said; it is the abysmal ground (the Ab-grund) of all saying. There is secret (at least in Blanchots sense) when silence is understood as the withdrawing movement of truth, that is, when silence is understood as a further truth that hides behind or beyond what is manifest. There is enigma, on the contrary, when, in spite of everything, one keeps asking that which does not answer and yet

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has nothing to hide with its silence: the blank face/page where there is nothing to decipher. In order to grasp what is at stakes here, it would be insufficient to talk about illusions. It is not simply an illusion that lurks at the heart of the secretthe illusion of a restraint that could be removed in favor of a revelation (if only Thomas would open up! If only light could shine in! Then we would know who lurks behind the mask). To talk of illusion is to confuse the enigma with a secret awaiting to be revealed; it is to confuse the absence of any beyond with a further reserve of meaning. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot observes about the question of the secret in general that it has to do with:[T]he fact (it is not a fact) of wondering whether the secret is not linked to there being still something left to say when all is said; it does suggest Saying (with its glorious capital), always in excess of everything said.The not-apparent in the whole when it is totally manifest; that which withdraws, hides in the demand that all be disclosed: the dark of the clearing or the error of truth itselfThe un-knowledge after absolute knowledge which does not, precisely, allow us to conceive of any after.10

With its appeal to the general, the phrase: the question of the secret in general takes on an air of traditional conceptuality. To talk of the secret in general and of its question (note the singular: is there only one?) seems to be a matter of positing an essence, of stating that by which in general any secret is a secret. Such a starting point opens up a series of long-established questions: Are there not exceptions that would contradict the rule? On what grounds can this generality be constituted? Does this secret in general result from an abstraction, an induction, an eidetic variation, or a noetic intuition? Inasmuch as it attempts to reveal that which was always presupposed and yet was never manifest, the philosophical concern for essences already entertains a fundamental relation to the secret. To philosophize is to reveal that which, although not immediately manifest, was already essentially there. In this sense, to philosophize is to attempt to reveal secrets. Yet, to reveal the essence of the secret in general would destroy not only the secret, but also the question that animates this investigation. Any effort to constitute the secret as a conceptual object can only lead to its annihilation, which, by virtue of the very logic we mentioned earlier, operates both as

10)

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 137; hereafter cited as WD.

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a denigration and a restoration of a further secret. For this reason, the fact that gives rise to the question of the secret is rather a wondering, a matter of raising an aporia that can only remain open. III. The Visibility of the Obscure As Blanchot construes it, to talk of a secret is to suggest: Saying and its glorious capital. These expressions, together with the dark of clearing, the error of truth, etc., point (without naming him) to Heidegger and, more specifically, to the fundamental saying of poets and thinkers, a saying according to which every that is to say indicates a there is to say that remains in advance of all that is said. One can recognize here the main theme of The Book to Come. This Saying is never identical to what is said. Rather, it obstinately points to what remains to be said. The secret is then a remainder, a missing surplus that would complete that which has already been said if it were not to constantly withdraw further into the obscure. But is this what Heidegger was talking about? To start with, we must clarify a crucial problem of translation. Heideggers word is das Geheimnis. Whereas English translators tend to render it by the mystery, French translators opt more commonly for le secret.11 From a linguistic standard, both translations are perfectly correct. Kant (as the Grimm Brothers recall in their Deutsches Wrterbuch) used das Geheimnis for what in Latin would have been called arcana, secretus, or mysteria.12 In some instances, the French le mystre would be a more natural translation than le secret; and conversely, in other instances, the English secret would be more fitting than mystery. For instance: Geheimkult designates what is normally referred to in French as les mystres (as in: les mystres dEleusis [the Mysteries of Eleusis]), but Geheimabsprache should rather be rendered in English as secret agreement (a kind of agreement that has nothing mysterious, even though it should be kept behind closed doors). Yet, if Heidegger has taught us to listen to what language itself has to say, we cannot be satisfied with what is merely correct according to the authority of11)

See (among others) for the English versions: William Lovitt note 14, below and John Sallis note 16, below. For the French ones: Andr Praus translation: Heidegger, Le Principe de raison (Paris: Gallimard, 1962); Alphonse de Waelhens and Walter Biemels translation: De lessence de la vrit, in Questions I (Paris: Gallimard 1968). 12) Deutsches Wrterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1897), volume 5, entry: Geheimnis.

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dictionaries. To listen to language is to ask beyond what is linguistically correct. But then, we find ourselves in a reverse situation. For in that case, neither mystery nor secret (whether in English or in French) conveys what, according to Heidegger, das Geheimnis brings to language. One could translate das Geheimnis as mystery, but mystery recalls , which refers to a secret doctrine reserved for the (the initiated one). A mystery is then a secret in the sense of an esoteric doctrine reserved to those who have been initiated in the arcane of the divine science. But this is clearly not what Heidegger intends by Geheimnis. On the other hand, the word secret refers to what is separate, put on reserve, set apart (Latin: secerno). In this sense, a compromising letter must be concealed in a secretary (a desk with a secret drawer). Yet, this is not either what Heidegger means by Geheimnis. Geheimnis is neither a matter of religious doctrine nor of some compromising document that must be placed away from indiscreet eyes. Drawing from what the German language gives us to hear, Heidegger pays attention first of all to the fact that das Geheimnis speaks about das Heim, that is, about the recess of a home, the hearth, the . Das Heim is our native place (Heimat)the place where we find ourselves at home. This is not at all a matter of Heideggers supposed provincialism, as some critiques have too easily concluded, but of rigorous ontological hearing that brings Heim and Geheimnis in the orbit of das Wesen.13 In Heideggers later works the term Wesen does not have anymore the metaphysical sense of essentia. Rather, Wesen takes its significance from the old verb wesan, and the durative import of whren: to endure, to sojourn, and to dwell. As such, its sense is both topological and ontological. Geheimnis speaks of belonging and dwelling; it speaks of the place (Heim) from which something (or someone) comes; a place to which one belongs (Heimat). Yet, the point is that Geheimnis names this originary place as what remains concealed. If the movement of Heideggers thoughtas is commonly summarized consists in leaping from the consideration of appearances to the question concerning appearing itself, from presence to presencing, from what stand in the open to the opening that grants presence, this move should not be misunderstood as an ascending from the cavernous shadows up to the13) To listen to language beyond what is linguistically correct is not to fall into arbitrariness. Under the entry for Heim, the Kluge Etymologisches Wrterbuch, 22nd ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989) mentions: Dieses Formenverhltnis ist ungeklrt, hat aber eine auffllige Parallele in ai. Bhma Erde, Welt, Wesen neben ai. Bhmi Erde, Boden.

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contemplation of the sun outside the cave. Rather, it must be understood as a movement from what is manifest back to what is not revealed, back to what does not shine. Unconcealment (clearing) comprises concealment. What is constantly covered up is not the light of truth that shines behind the veil of deceptive appearances; what is covered up is Geheimnis itself, the secret/mystery that holds sway throughout Daseins engagement in the open. In this sense, untruth is most proper to the essence of truth.All revealing belongs to a harboring and a concealing. But that which freesthe secret [das Geheimnis]is concealed and always concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open and brings into the open. . . . Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing there shimmers that veil that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils.14

Freedom is a matter of making ourselves free for the stellar course of the secret.15 While the task of thinkingwhich The Question Concerning Technology distinguishes from philosophy properis indeed deeply concerned with das Geheimnis, it is precisely not a matter of revealing secrets, of bringing to light what was hitherto hidden in order to accomplish some ultimate step in the steady progress of human knowledge. Rather, the task is a matter of a resolute openness toward the secret [die Ent-Schlossenheit zum Geheimnis]. Thinking is a questioning that glimpses into the secret out of errancy.16 Thus understood, thinking is not a matter of revealing secrets, but of keeping in with the secret. What does Geheimnis have to do with truth? Inasmuch as it remains hidden, the secret is untruth, but this untruth is not simply something false or inadequate; rather, untruth belongs to the nonessence of truth in the sense of a pre-essential essence. Yet, this nonessence is not unessential; it is not something indifferent or inessential.17 On the contrary, as nonessence, the secret concerns truth to the core, for essence (Wesen) is such that it includes

14) Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 25 (translation modified). 15) Ibid., 33. 16) Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, trans. John Sallis, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 151 (translation modified). 17) In the context of a paper that focuses on Blanchots critique of Heidegger, I shall translate das Geheimnis as the secret since this is how Blanchot reads it. However, the previous remarks concerning the difficulty of translating Heideggers word should be kept in mind.

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nonessence within itself.18 All disclosing at the same time conceals. The concealment of beings as a whole, untruth proper, is older than every openness of this or that being. It is also older than letting-be itself (ibid. 148). Why does Heidegger say older? This qualification certainly remains unfathomable as long as we assume the traditional correspondence theory of truth. Yet, it is no less fathomable if we assume that concealment is something that occurs prior to truth (whether in a chronological or a logical sense). It is so because truth is the event whose radical occurring also comprises its own archeology. Letting ourselves be destined toward things and openness for the secret [Gelassenheit zu den Dingen und Offenheit fr das Geheimnis] belong together.19 This is not a matter of rejecting the order of sensible things, the realm of present entities, in order to embrace a vaporous mystery of being that would stand beyond presence; rather, it is a matter of thinking the being together of manifestedness and secret. Being is not detached from beings (it is not the secerno of the secret); for on the contrary, being names the coming to pass (Ereignis) of the world. It is only when disclosing occurs that concealing arises as concealed. Geheimnis is not the hidden side of truth (the dark side of the moon is but the other side of the same). Rather, Geheimnis names the play of being, a world-play (Weltspiel) that cannot be accounted for in terms of cause or purpose and remains without a whya groundless ground. As such, the secret is an abyss.20 The negation (-) included in the word - indicates for Heidegger two distinct forms of disavowal: Geheimnis and errancy. Geheimnis (the proper nonessence of truth) holds sway throughout the disclosure of beings. Errancy, on the other hand, indicates a flight from the secret (the counteressence of the originary essence of truth). As concealing of concealment, errancy is a way of bypassing the secret, of covering it up. Erring, humans would rather cling to what is readily available, to what is controllable,18) This should be understood in terms of a deformative move imposed on such notions as essence, as such, within, or itself, as John Sallis demonstrates in Deformatives: Essentially Other Than Truth, in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 2946 (and particularly 3942). 19) Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Verlag Gnther Neske 2. Auflage, 1960) 2728, Discourse on Thinking, translated by J. Anderson and E. Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 55. 20) Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 112; German edition published as Der Satz vom Grund, ed. Petra Jaeger, vol.10 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1997), 186 (hereafter cited as GA 10, followed by page).

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measurable, and useful. Yet, from that standpoint, what is habitually considered their dignity is rather a mark of their destitution (i.e., the mark of their errancy). As keeper of truth, mans destiny, his dignity, is in fact to be the keeper of the secret. Both relations (to truth and to the secret) belong together. They are two aspects of the same relation: in order to preserve our relation to truth in the face of enframing, we have to be(come) the safe keepers of concealment. The saving power lets man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence. This dignity lies in keeping watch over the unconcealmentand with it from the first, the concealmentof all coming to presence on this earth.21 Thus, it is not some final revelation that will save men, but a turn (or re-turn) to what remains concealed in all that is revealed. If the secret indicates concealment, it must be self-concealment, that is to say: the secret belongs to being as to its essence. It belongs to what Being and Time already namedalbeit in a cursory waythe ontological enigma [Rtsel] of the movement of occurrence in general (GA 2: 389). Inasmuch as clearing is never simply clearing (letting shine in the open) but indicates the clearing of concealment, what in it is inaccessible must, paradoxically, at the same time show itself as such; i.e., it must show itself as inaccessible. Heideggers expressions: letting be, releasingunderstood both as the condition of truth and as its essential formdo not simply indicate the placing of beings in the open, in the way one turns on the light in a dark room in order to make its content visible. In letting be, truth also allows the secret to be. The secret shows itself alongside the manifest, but it shows itself as inaccessible; as the un-conditional, that is, as the absolute (ab-solutum: what is detached, cut off from any bond). In this sense, the secret belongs to the essence of truth.This essence belongs to being: to withhold itself from explanation on the basis of beings. Withholding itself, it removes itself from determinacy, from manifestness. Withdrawing

21) One might find it strange to find the term dignity under Heideggers pen. This expression is usually associated with the very humanism from which Heidegger attempts to dissociate himself. Yet, for Heidegger, mans true dignity points to something deeper within man, something that is precisely not merely human. The being of man (Daseins relation to being) is nothing anthropological. See John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heideggers Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 15557. Daseins dignity (its worth) is rather a matter of poverty, that is, a matter of acknowledging that Dasein has no power of disposal over being, that it depends upon the gifts and favor of being (ibid., 176).

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P. Massie / Research in Phenomenology 37 (2007) 3255 from manifestness, it conceals itself. Self-concealment belongs to being. If we wish to acknowledge this then we must say: Being itself is concealment.22

It is precisely because das Geheimnis tends to be covered up (when it is not simply dismissed as mysticism) that it nevertheless belongs to the essence of truth as its essential counteressence (Gegenwesen). How do we, humans, stand before the secret? Let us first hear this question properly. To stand (stehen) before (gegen) means to stand in the open (to ex-ist). But what stands in the open (what truly exists) cannot simply leave concealment behind, as one takes off a coat and puts it on a hook. Rather, to exist is to be without a whywhich, at the same time, is the most concealed depth. Man, in the most concealed depths of his being, first truly is when he is in his own way like the rosewithout why.23 This manner of standing before is not similar to the way an object [Gegenstand] stands before a subject. To ex-ist is not to be the object of a representation. Existence is what can never be captured in representation. The realm that opens up before us cannot be addressed in terms of representational thinking.24 Existing, Dasein stands neither inside (being in on the secret) nor outside. This neither/ nor (in Latin: ne . . . uter: the neuter) constitutes Daseins ambivalent openness to being. We can neither apprehend being as a being, nor dismiss it in order to simply stick to beings. Rather, we are both inside and outside: We belong to being, and yet not. We reside in the realm of being and yet are not directly allowed in (BC, 75; GA 51: 90). The secret is then both what is most intimate and what is most foreign; what is closest and what is most enigmatic. Heidegger uses the word Geheimnis to remind us that we are homeless [Heimloss] in our ownmost homeland [Heimat] (ibid.). Not to be allowed into where we belong is to dwell in errancy; it is to be at home in having no home, to find oneself a stranger in our ownmost being.2522) Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 51 (hereafter cited as BC); German edition published as Grundbegriffe, ed. Petra Jaeger, vol. 51 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1981), 60 (hereafter: cited as GA 51, followed by page). 23) Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 38; GA 10: 7273. 24) The poet [Angelus Silesius], for Heidegger, is inviting us to enter this other region outside representational thinking where the Principle of Rendering a Sufficient Ground does not hold. John Caputo, op. cit., 65. 25) This thought has interesting political consequences that go against the usual condemnation of Heidegger as a Nazi ideologist. Indeed, they go even against Heideggers own explicit determination of the historical destiny of the German people. Ones acknowledged homeland

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IV. The Insistence of the Secret Let us now return to Blanchots remark. The Saying (with a capital S) places all utterances under the injunction of being as what there is to say even though the latter can only maintain itself in the elusive distance of its excess. Just like silence, Heideggers concealment entertains a marked relation with saying. As silence, being would also be the origin of language (BC, 54). But why is this? This cannot mean that we are silent before being in the sense of a mystical awe before the unspeakable fullness of God, but rather, that being keeps silent about itself. As such, being is the ground and origin of silence. What remains to be said can only be in excess; a movement of withdrawing animates this surplus of meaning. All our explanations become chatting on the surface of what withdraws. Heideggers formula: dark of the clearing or the error of truth would then indicate an impossible totalization that is neither the sign of an insufficiency in the inquirer, nor a lack of meaning, nor again a defect of language; rather, it would reveal (in a paradoxical way) truth as the withdrawal of being. Being is only inasmuch as it withdraws. It is worth noticing Blanchots characterization of the secret (there is still something left to say after all is said) as unknowledge after absolute knowledge which does not, precisely, allow us to conceive of any after (WD, 137). Blanchots challenge is then the following: Must not one still hold on to an ideal of absolute knowledge in order to ask about this unknown and its after? After absolute knowledge there is, of course, no room left for knowledge; but more importantly, there is no room left for any after. Unknowledge, in this sense, cannot refer to a reserve of meaning awaiting to be discovered, for any awaiting (whether for another god or for another beginning) would still envision the secret as a truth that is still to come. Yet, the secret is never circumscribed; it remains boundless. What is hidden in it is the necessity of its being hidden.There is nothing secret anywhere; this is what the secret always saysAll the while not saying it. For with the words there is and nothing the enigma continues to rule, preventing settling and repose.The stratagem of the secret is either to show itself, to make itself so visible that it isnt seen (to disappear, that is, as a secret) or to hint that the secret

is actually the place where one is most homeless. Strangeness is not something that stands outside of us (whatever happens beyond the borders, where these people are not like us); rather it is what lurks at the heart of the familiar. We are the strangers.

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P. Massie / Research in Phenomenology 37 (2007) 3255 is only secret where there is no secret, or no appearance of any secret. (WD, 137; translation modified).

The unknowing of the secret neither posits nor awaits anything. This leads to an alternative (Blanchot talks of a stratagem) that is irreducible to the either/or of a contradictory pair. This, however, is a strange alternative; for, on Blanchots account, whether visible or invisible the secret can only disappear. If visible, the secret is no secret; and if invisible, the secret cannot appear. If so, the secret cannot be understood as the movement of nonbeing receding behind or beyond the clearing. Blanchots conclusion is then that the secret is nothing at all, not-even-that. Its refusal is not a matter of beings reticence. If the secret is but the semblance of itself (in a reflexivity that does not posit any identity), there is no more leap, no more awaiting or crossing the line. Instead of being confronted with the secret of being, we would stand before the neuter. Blanchots suspicion is that at the core of what Heidegger understands as the clearing/withdrawing movement of truth lurks a demand for enclosing that places in advance all saying under the yoke of being:The cosmic reassures us, for we can identify with the measureless vibration of a sovereign order, even if in this identification we venture beyond ourselves, entrusting ourselves to a holy and real unity. So it is with being and probably with all ontology. The thought of being never fails to enclose; it includes even what it cannot take inits boundlessness is always confirmed by its limits. The language of Being is a language which subjects and reverts to being, saying obedience, and submission, expressing the sovereign audience of Being in its hidden-disclosed presence. The refusal of being is still assent; it is beings consent to refusal. Being grants, to the refusal of possibility, its possibility. In this refusal, defiance of the law can only be declared in the name of the law which thereby is affirmed. (WD, 88).

The neuter names the difference between Heidegger and Blanchot (this nothing that separates two infinitely different experiences). But what does it mean? To envision the neuter as the absence of secret is to take in view that which withdraws while withdrawing and withdrawing even the act of withdrawing, without anything appearing of what thereby disappears, an effect reduced to an absence of effect (SB, 77). I would suggest that the difference that is at stake here concerns the sacred. As is well known, Bataille understood the sacred as an irruption within the sphere of the I, a fracture wherein the self is lost, an excess through which one joins the indefinite reality of the impossible. And certainly, as Kevin Hart notes, the neuter has this in common with the sacred: that it slips

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between distinctions.26 Yet, to talk of the neuter rather than the sacred is, for Blanchot, a matter of taking his distance from a religious/mystical understanding of the secret. The term neuter hints to the renunciation of mystery, the ultimate insignificance of lightness.27 Before the neuter no transfiguration is to be expected, no meaning is to be revealed. The neuter so defined (if it can be defined) indicates the namelessness of the name that exceeds the name; for the neuter is never just a name. It precedes the oppositions of sensible and intelligible, visible and invisible, presence and absence. The neuter names an erasure that is neither simply present nor simply absent, but is postponement of presence. I suggested earlier that the secret could be understood as an interiority without exteriority. In a parallel fashion (which is not merely a formal reversal) we could say of the neuter, the passion of the outside, that it is an exteriority without interiority, since the neuter neither gives nor harbors anything. Neither one, nor the other (ne . . . uter). The thought of the neuter does not deny the play of possibilities (which, for Heidegger, stand higher than actuality). To deny these possibilities would only amount to the affirmation of necessity. Rather, the neuter is the site of their indefinite articulation. Yet, it does not articulate the difference between these contraries as a joint that would somehow stand between them, for absence and presence can never coincide in a state of equilibrium. The neuter, as secret of the secret (which is no secret) is beyond meaning, pointing both to the limitlessness of language and to the limit that gives rise to meaning. The dualities of disclosing/withdrawing, clearing/receding, sheltering/ de-sheltering through which being grants the present of presence while refusing itself and that, for Heidegger, constitute the movement of being as truth, construe what is not given as that which is refused and thereby remains secret. By contrast, Blanchots neuter indicates an immeasurable alterity that exceeds the possibility of naming. For Blanchot the neuter cannot be subordinated to beings unity and totality. Any act of naming, inasmuch as it attempts to arrest into presence and repeatability the meaning of being, presupposes a condition of original namelessness28 that, at the same time, it strives to cover up. Blanchots discussion of the neuter is not a matter of disclosing a

Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 204. Blanchot, The One Who Would Not Accompany Me, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1993), 43. 28) Leslie Hill, op. cit., 13031.27)

26)

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ground that would be even more originary and ultimate than whatever has hitherto been suggested by the history of metaphysics. The original condition of namelessness does not designate a primordial silence (it is nothing prior to names), nor is it itself nameless (since we are talking about it). Rather, the neuters namelessness denotes the namelessness of the name; it points to what in any name always exceeds the name. Now, the point on which Blanchot seems to most differ from Heidegger is also the point of their greatest proximity. For Heidegger the encounter with das Nichts in anxiety is not reducible to the logical paradoxes that would follow from positing nothingness that have been explored by philosophers since Parmenides Poem. Rather, Heidegger thinks of das Nichts on the basis of a sheltering on whose horizon things can unfold. For us even nothing belongs to being.29 In that case, das Nichts might be the last word of being, but this last word opens the promise of a new beginning, another epoch of being. Blanchot, on the contrary, leaves the night of das Nichts to its absolute destitution. Rather than the infinite possibility of the other, the neuter indicates a limitless alterity, an impossibility that is beyond all possibilities. Such a beyond does not posit a transcendence; in particular, it does not animate saying (lowercase this time) with a desire for achieving Saying (or, to use Blanchots terms, it is not a matter of aiming at the Book to come). The unknown does not surrender to the known. In other words, exceeding the realm of meaning, the neuter is an unsayable that does not harbor any secret; it is not a reserve of further dispensation of meaning; it is absence itself, holding sway over meaning, silently doubling all that is. In this sense, the neuter, for Blanchot, is irreducible to any project of fundamental ontology. Before the neuter, we can say that there is no future, if we are careful to understand this expression, not as a negation of the futural, but as a denunciation of a fullness that is still to come. There is no future: not simply because (by definition) the future is not yet, but because in the phrase not yet, the yet covers up the not and turns it into an expectation of what is to come, thereby construing the future as a deferred presence. Being ahead of ourselves, we are indeed oriented toward the future, always forewarning and anticipating . . . but it is so because we are drawn into an entirely other experience that is not a matter of possibility any longer. Before the neuter we stand at the threshold of the impossible.29)

Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000), 89.

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The impossible does not designate a formal negation of possibility (the not-possible of what harbors a contradiction); nor does it lead to the end of thinking: the impossible is not there in order to make thought capitulate, but in order to allow it to announce itself according to a measure other than that of power (ibid., 43; emphasis added). In an essay entitled The Great Refusal30 Blanchot remarks that possibility must be understood from the word power [pouvoir], first in the sense of capacity, then in the sense of a power that is commended or a force [puissance] (GR, 42). In this context, possibility does not designate a purely formal condition of noncontradiction but a possibility of being, a power that can be actualized. What remains hidden in Heideggers understanding of beings withdrawal would then designate a power for further dispensations. Insofar as a power or force is always latent in possibility, even death, indicates the possibility of the ceasing of my power-to-be and constitutes the outmost limit of Daseins resolution. Thus, in construing death as the possibility of impossibility, impossibility itself would already be brought back under the rule of power; it is what resides within Daseins capacity.31 If it were not the case, there could not be any resolution toward death. By contrast, Blanchots impossible names the outside in the sense of that which stands away from the sphere in which we exercise power and can never be brought back within this sphere. Now, one could object that if we have a relation to the impossible, this relation must, by definition, escape possibility. There is no doubt that what Blanchot names the experience of the obscure or the passion of the outside is highly paradoxical. Blanchot himself stresses how uncanny is this thought: in impossibility the immediate is a presence to which one cannot be present, but from which one cannot separate . . . what escapes by the very fact that there is no escaping it: the ungraspable that one cannot let go of 30) The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3348. 31) It is worth noticing that Derrida, who, in earlier writings, seemed to be inclined to a similar critique of Heidegger, eventually recognized that this claim does not do justice to Heidegger. This possibility of the possible brings together on the one hand the sense of the virtuality or of the imminence of the future, of the that can always happen at any instant, . . . and on the other hand, the sense of ability, of the possible as that of which I am capable, that for which I have the power, the ability, or potentiality. These two meanings of possibility co-exit in die Mglichkeit ( Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 62). One could argue that there is still a third (and maybe more crucial) meaning of possibility, namely, that a possibility always retains the power not to be. This is neither a matter of anticipation nor a matter of domination.

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(ibid., 45). Yet, the paradox of this paradox is that the impossible is nevertheless encountered. In Blanchots terms, there is an experience in which the strangeness of the impossible is nothing far off but rather constitutes the proximate and comprises an experience of the neuter without secret. In other words, Blanchot needs to demonstrate that the experience of the impossible is precisely not an impossible experience. Although it is not an experience of something, it is in fact the closest, the most common experience of the there is (il y a).32This is an experience we do not have to go very far to find, it is offered in the most common suffering, and first of all in physical suffering. . . . Suffering is suffering when one can no longer suffer it and when, because of this non-power, one cannot cease suffering it. . . . There the present is without end, separated from every other present by an inexhaustible and empty infinite, the very infinite of suffering, and this, dispossessed of any future. (ibid., 44; emphasis added)

Blanchots analysis of suffering is, at least in part, to be read as a response to Heideggers being-toward-death. Inasmuch as in suffering we encounter what escapes our power to undergo it, suffering can only be endured as what we cannot endure. And yet, suffering is not beyond the trial of experience. Rather, it constitutes a trial from which we do not escape. As such, it is an experience of death for the living. In this respect, the legendary figure of Orpheus is exemplary, since it forces us to think of the alternative being-alive/beingdead otherwise than as a contradiction ruled by the principle of excluded middle. Coming back from the underworld to the land of the living, Orpheus is no less dead than Eurydice herself: not of the death of the world, which is rest, but of this other death that is death without end, that is the trial [preuve] of the absence of end.33 What Orpheus undergoes is not death (la mort), which for Heidegger discloses being-toward-an-end, but the suffering of dying (mourir), which is the experience of an absent end. By mentioning suffering, Blanchot is neither playing on pathos nor appealing to an exceptional state. Suffering is not a paroxysmal state in which the self cries out. Rather, it indicates the dimension of passivity that lurks behindThis appeal to experience is obviously paradoxical, as Kevin Hart notices, for it cannot be understood as an encounter with some direct presence, but at the same time it does not code absence as negative. Since this experience is not a lived event it is already nonexperience, Blanchot concedes, before adding that it is just an excess of experience (Kevin Hart, op. cit., 61). 33) LEspace littraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 228.32)

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each and every experience. There is nothing pathetic about this. Suffering is indifferent (indeed, it is neutral) insofar as she who is exposed to suffering is deprived of an I. Passivity does not constitute; rather, it destitutes. If, in The Great Refusal, Blanchot emphatically repeats the word experience, it is in order to stress that the impossible, far from withdrawing from experience, is encountered as what no longer withdraws, as what has always in advance reduced all movements of concealing to a mode of manifestation. In suffering we are delivered over to another time, or rather, we find ourselves delivered to time as the other (as absence and neutrality) that can no longer redeem (let alone save); for the time of suffering is a time of no escape, a time without possibilities. In suffering, time is arrested in the form of a present without end, separated from any other present by an infinite emptiness. Dispossessed of any future, suffering is an indefinitely hollowed-out present: it is the abyss of the present. How can we understand what Blanchot suggests here? Instead of claiming with Heidegger: higher than actuality stands possibility, should we rather claim with Blanchot: higher than possibility stands impossibility? Nothing is less certain however, for the decision concerning the difference between secret and neuter is itself impossible. In the previous sections we saw that das Geheimnis is not to be construed as a mystical experience or as an awaiting for some revelation, but rather, following Heideggers own indication on how to think this term on the basis of Heim, as the nonessence of truth that places strangeness at the core of Dasein. It remains to show that Blanchots neuter does not and cannot dismiss what Heidegger names the secret, but in fact intimately responds to it. It is worth noticing that in the seminar following the conference On Time and Being (1962), Heidegger refers to appropriation in terms of neutrality: Appropriation is to be thought in such a way that it can neither be retained as being nor as time. It is, so to speak, a neutrale tantum, the neutral and in the title Time and Being.34 Similarly, it is Heidegger (and not Blanchot) who writes: Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of suffering is covered over.35 How can we then focus on the words: enigma and suffering and, attributing them to Blanchots idiosyncrasy, present them as a

34) Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 43. 35) Heidegger, Why Poets? in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 204.

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refutation of Heidegger? It would seem wiser to refrain from concluding that the point Blanchot arrives at is merely one of refutation. Furthermore, Blanchot needs a reference to the experience of suffering in order to validate the thought of the impossible as an experience of another time; yet, as soon as he does so, a possibility comes into view. To suffer is still to be, for suffering takes time, while she who dies, has no time to suffer. Death is not a transformation or a mutation; it is neither a minor nor a major change. Death is neither an alteration nor a becoming. Dying, one does not become something else, one becomes nothing; that is to say, one does not become anymore. In this respect, one could accept Simon Critchleys remark: Dying thus opens a relation with the future which is always ungraspable, impossible and enigmatic; that is to say, it opens the possibility of a future without me, an infinite future, a future which is not my future,36 but on the condition that this non-personal future (a future for others, for the survivors) not be understood against Heideggers finite time (otherwise, Blanchot would simply revert to the vulgar concept of time as a continuous line of which Dasein happens to occupy a certain limited quantity). This other time constitutes an undecipherable otherness always ahead of me. Far from denying the finitude of time, the thought of this future that is not my own presuposes it. Likewise, the experience of suffering is striking inasmuch as it confronts us with the dissolution of our everyday world, leaving us confronted with the il y a. But this analysis, far from constituting a critique of Heidegger, is rather a repetition and a displacement of the famous analysis of anxiety in Being and Time.37 If the impossible is experienced in suffering, then it is possible even if this possibility occurs as the unbearable trial of suffering. This possibility is not a matter of power (it is nothing that can be actualized). Conversely, one could say that the possibility mentioned by Heidegger in his analysis of being-toward-death cannot make sense if one understands possibility on the basis of power. Here Blanchots limited attention to the concept of possibility is rather a hindrance. The impossible, which for Blanchot is an experience of the other, describes an encounter with the absolute, with that to which no one can relate. But then the experience of the impossible can never be what it claims to be, and it is at this juncture that theSimon Critchley, op. cit., 111. To be more precise, this occurs in Blanchot via Levinas analogous discussion of insomnia in Existence to Existents, trans. Alfonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 6567.37) 36)

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secret (or at least its possibility) is finally necessarily reinscribed within Blanchots thought of the outside. Even though the nonappearing of Blanchots neuter is not identical to the withdrawing of being in Heideggers Geheimnis, the neuter cannot be other than the secret. In a sense, it is rather the accomplishment of the secret that leaves us with a presence that hides nothing and yet does not disclose anything. This spectral reinscription of the secret is the haunting of thought by what it cannot seize. Far from hiding from us, we are exposed to its undecidable possibility. To welcome the night, to let it come, remains a matter of welcoming the secret.

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the secret and the neuter: on heidegger and blanchot

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