Blanchot Blogging

There could be little less discreet than writing "on Maurice Blanchot."  Hopelessly redundant, in a sense, either one must accept the theory he provides, or reject it.   There is little room for compromise. 

The real work of writing alongside, that which would work him silently (though not parasitically, or simply victim to mimetic contagion) into one's thinking.  Well, I'm not sure that I'm there yet...though the danger his writing poses in such regard, is certainly far greater than most.

It is especially hard to engage Blanchot's thought without extensive citation.  The rhythms of his thought ––a unique intensity and persistent sobriety and patience (not to mention ambiguity of genre, use of paradox, double injunction and oxymoron)–place a high demand on the reader who would comment.  At the same time, there is a wonderful alinearity at work, like all writing in fragments, one might suppose, that resists the sterile confinement of citation. 

Blanchot, maybe needless to say, is not so much concerned with preemptively parrying his every possible imaginary critic (and in the process reducing them to mere cookie-cutter versions of their former selves) as he is with pursuing a faithful description of that peculiar trembling or disquiet, namely the one which seems to have left its mark on a generation of thinkers left writing after Heidegger, and under the permanently fallen sky (dis-aster, the star-less night) of the Holocaust. 

But also like Kafka, Blanchot permits himself this strange indulgence, the pursuit of this some-thing that will forever float inverted commas around the word, 'literature'.  In a sense, he is even more dismissive of his critics than Derrida (or for that matter Nabokov) both of whom at least respond, even if it's only to point again to their books.   

In any case, what follows is sort of long, and probably pushing the limits of bloggility.  Also, it isn't very good.   Be as gentle or as brutal as you wish with it.   In short, this will have been a largely mediocre post, but hopefully somewhat productive nonetheless.

And if it happens that to the question "When will you come?" the Messiah answers, "Today," the answer is certainly impressive:  so, it is today!  It is now and always now.  There is no need to wait, although to wait is an obligation.  And when is it now?  When is the now which does not belong to ordinary time, which necessarily overturns it, does not maintain but destabilizes it?  When? -- especially if one remembers that this "now" which belongs to no text, but is the now of a severe, fictitious narrative, refers to texts that make it once more dependent upon realizable-unrealizable conditions:  "Now, if only you heed me, or if you are willing to listen to my voice."  Finally, the Messiah -- quite the opposite in this respect, from the Christian hypostasis -- is by no means divine.  He is a comforter, the most just of the just, but it is not even sure that he is a person -- that he is someone in particular.  When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I, he is not exalting himself.  Anyone might be the Messiah -- must be he, is not he.  For it would be wrong to speak of the Messiah in Hegelian language -- "the absolute intimacy of absolute exteriority" -- all the more so because the coming of the Messiah does not yet signify the end of history, the suppression of time.  It announces a time more future, as the following mysterious text conveys, than any prophesy could ever foretell:  "All prophets -- there is no exception -- have prophesied only for the messianic time [l'epokhe?] [Blanchot's brackets].  As for future time, what eye has seen it except Yours, Lord, who will act for him who is faithful to you and keeps waiting."  (Levinas and Scholem.)  (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 142).

As the German expression has it, the last judgement is the youngest day, and it is a day surpassing all days.  Not that judgment is reserved for the end of time.  On the contrary, justice won't wait; it is to be done at every instant, to be realized all the time, and studied also (it is to be learned.)  Every just act (are there any?) makes of its day the last day or -- as Kafka said -- the very last:   a day no longer situated in the ordinary succession of days but one that makes of the most commonplace ordinary, the extraordinary.  (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 143)

     Does Blanchot, as some have suggested, present a "negative eschatology?"  In a time––this moment, now––so saturated with capitalist noise about the "victory of (neo)liberal democracy" and its accompanying, mantric, superficially (neo)Hegelian echoes of an "end of History"––we might do well to heed the warnings contained in Derrida's later writings, particularly Specters of Marx.  It is surely a time of unprecedented change and inter-hypertextual exchange that is neither without its increasing fragility, and inequalities, nor its own accompanying jubilatory rhetoric, marked equally by false conjuring and denial.  What might be called the "messianicity" in both Blanchot's and Derrida's thinking may stand in radical opposition to the messianism, or even--as Derrida once put it--"apocalyptic tone"--conditioning much of the discourse now predominating, pop-politically as well as philosophically. 
     What might it mean for the "coming community," as Giorgio Agamben would have it, to wrest some chance of survival from the (post)modern irony of an 'advertising without object' (soap commercials with everything but the soap--or maybe only soap)? 

(Agamben is no (neo)Marxist; this much seems clear, although maybe this is not so easily said about certain others writing in Blanchot's shadow).   In his original reading of Spinoza, and unmistakably in the spirit of Blanchot (though perhaps not without significant adaptation), Agamben theorizes a politics of community oriented by a singularity without essence, an "inessential  commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence"  (Agamben, The Coming Community, 18-19). 

     But what about a community oriented by a refusal of homogeneity and sameness? 

At a certain moment, in the face of public events, we know that we must refuse.  The refusal is absolute, categorical.  It does not argue, nor does it voice its reasons.  This is why it is silent and solitary, even when it asserts itself, as it must, in broad daylight.  Men who refuse and who are tied by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together.  The time of joint affirmation is precisely that of which they have been deprived.  What they are left with is the irreducible refusal, the friendship of this certain, unshakable, rigorous No that keeps them unified and bound by solidarity.  (Blanchot, Friendship, 111)

How is it possible to affirm an absolute singularity without in any way referring to an essence of singularity (perhaps "irreducible" is not the same as "absolute")?  What about refusing, in a more general and liberal or pragmatic sense, the politics of perpetual war and the threat of nuclear holocaust?  What might a politics––a "democracy" perhaps––seeking to become truly open to the other qua other in fact look like?  Is it enough to swim in the waters of a relative "being in potential" without also risking the madness of decision, acknowledging a radical aporia of responsibility?  These questions are hopelessly general, and Agamben is not so easily pinned down.  Still, he does not seem to credit the recent mobilizations against the structuring of so-called "free trade" with much more than a sort of "simple affirmation."  On the other hand, "whatever singularities" that "do not possess any identity" or "bond," and so require no "recognition," are themselves--when they gather together ("being in common" without however belonging)––the true site of resistance against the State:

          The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.  This has nothing to do with the simple affirmation of the social in opposition to the State that has often found expression in the protest movements of recent years.  Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition...What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)...

          Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State.  Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.  (Agamben, The Coming Community, 84-86)

     At the same time as they are lauded, these "whatever singularities" then seem to foreshadow the inevitability of a final showdown of sorts.  Could such a thing still be called a "revolution" or a "war"?  Might Agamben be articulating something both ancient and modern at once?  What are the alternatives?  Hasn't this being-in-common without belonging already taken place at so many moments?  The  question that orients most, as always, concerns death.   

The fact is that the senselessness of their existence runs up against a final absurdity, against which all advertising runs aground:  death itself.  In death the petty bourgeois confront the ultimate expropriation, the ultimate frustration of individuality:  life in all its nakedness, the pure incommunicable, where their shame can finally rest in peace...This means that the planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction.  But this also means that the petty  bourgeoisie represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it must at all costs not let slip away.  Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity--if humans could...be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable.

     Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself--this is the political task of our generation.  (Agamben, The Coming Community, 65)

    

    An "absolutely exposed singularity"––one without secrets, even?  A "communication without the incommunicable?" How might such an exposure be possible without being reduced merely to a hollow, or willingly appropriated gesture?  Does such an ontology remain bascially metaphysical, however subtly disguised?  How might such a "selecting," already within the beast of advertising, occur––and occur in time?  To be sufficient might such a "selecting" require nothing less than the reorientation of advertising itself?  (Advertising is shaped by complex motives, after all, although the power of the image extends beyond its concept.)

     {There is an old surrealist film (whose title and author escapes me) in which two human heads composed of an enormously elaborate collage of random everyday objects are made to open their mouths and consume each other in a reciprocal, vomitous movement.  It is a battle of epic proportions, but each time they re-pool and resist being formed into one.  The exchanges marked as much by loud silences between Agamben and Derrida might resemble something like this.  It is a movement of near-total appropriation, where one renders the other's argument even stronger in order to reorient it in one's own direction--the clutter of words from the other consumed and regurgitated back.  Very well, nothing new about that!}

     In any case, striding gargantuanly along, the above passages belonging to Agamben beg to be presented alongside those of Derrida, where the themes of secrecy and responsibility are defended in a condition without belonging:

How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself and without my being able to see him in me?  And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is "my" secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some "one," or to some other who remains someone?  It is perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy, namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no-one.  A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place [chez soi]...The question of the self:  "who am I?" not in the sense of "who am I" but "who is this 'I'" that can say "who"?  What is the "I," and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the "I" trembles in secret?  (Derrida, The Gift of Death, 92)

     Writing, finally no less homesick than speaking, remains a potential site for a certain kind of politics--one not without fragility or risk.   Maybe impropriety is not without its secrets.  Maybe Agamben does not deny or  surpress 'the secret', but he does seem not to give it the same  tension and certainly not the same attention as Derrida, who seems to want to hold on to the strong sense of what binds me to the other, even if it must by definition remain unpronouncable, or unspoken.  Agamben, on the other hand, often seems closer to Blanchot, in that it is not so much the One who is affirmed through the act of (always multiple) sacrifice, as it is sacrifice itself that is affirmed through the One.  Here, closer to Levinas than Derrida, perhaps, is Blanchot again:

Dying means:  you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last––possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.  (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 65)

     Is Blanchot's politics of writing diagnosably apocalyptic?   Having always already arrived, the disaster can hardly be demanded "to come," although neither has it once arrived (once and for all).   

And why the idea of the Messiah?  Why the necessity of a just finish?  Why can we not bear, why do we not desire that which is without end?  The messianic hope--hope which is dread as well--is inevitable when history appears politically only as an arbitrary hubbub, a process deprived of meaning or direction.  But if political thinking becomes messianic in its turn, this confusion, which removes the seriousness from the search for reason (intelligibility) in history--and also from the requirement of messianic thought (the realization of morality)--simply attests to a time so frightful, so dangerous, that any recourse appears justified:  can one maintain any distance at all when Auschwitz happens?  How is it possible to say:  Auschwitz has happened?  (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster)

     The holocaust may figure in Blanchot's thinking as a sort of enforced apocalypse--one that has undeniably already taken place, but that will remain, in an important sense, still unbelievable.  (The apocalypse has already disappointed.)  Blanchot seems to be distinguishing here between a "political thinking" in a weak sense, and a "messianic thought" whose demand for a certain "realization of morality" might be not altogether unimportant.  But in the same breath Blanchot is clearly opposing the idea of an "end of history" inasmuch as such a thought is the reactive messianism, reacting in a time when the "meaning or direction" of history is rendered inaccessible--alienated, perhaps--by superficial political "hubbub."  Such a reactive messianism, if it were to contaminate politics--hasn't it already?--would lead only to the worst.         

(From a strictly political point of view fascism and Nazism have not been overcome, and we still live under their sign.)  (Agamben, The Coming Community, 63)

     In his wonderful, if a bit strangely titled(?) book, Blanchot:  Extreme Contemporary, Leslie Hill provides a lucid reading of the affinities shared between Derrida and Blanchot in their conceptions of both community and the future. 

The invocation of the end is a tribute necessarily paid to infinity, as Blanchot makes clear by pointing at the end to the self-defeating paradox of Wittgenstein's famous conclusion to the Tractatus.  To speak of the end is always to defer the end; no sooner is it pronounced than the finality of the apocalyptic 'come!' in fact suspends the end as a moment of perpetual (re)beginning.  Apocalypse in Blanchot is therefore not an apocalypse, for it is an apocalypse without end, truth or finality.  It is, as Derrida had predicted, apocalypse without apocalypse.  (Hill, 208)

      Derrida likes to distinguish between two types of "future"––one that is predictable, subject to prescriptions, programs, forcasts and formulas; and one that resists such labeling efforts, remaining, in the most open sense, still a future yet "to-come."  Thinking the future then requires a sensitivity toward two registers of language––one that is immediate or practicle, and one that seeks to remain almost indifferent to the present, or faithful to some desire for a language not yet formed. 
     The need to distinguish between two kinds of language finds not unrelated expression in the theory of Georges Bataille.  According to Bataille, a language belonging to a "restricted economy" would be that which is merely routine, practical, normative, or self-evident (perhaps everyday, ontic, byt) while that of a "general economy"––(words in their stronger, perhaps more philosophical sense––although what "philosophical" might mean of course in terms of Hegel and Nietzsche is far from certain, especially in Bataille)––would begin to interrogate or reflect upon its possibility beyond a condition of mere practicality or self-evidence.  In short, "general economy" might suggest a language––while still remaining philosphical, perhaps––belonging more to poetry.  At least in Blanchot's reading, the language of "general economy" might still take place in conversation––particularly between friends––whereby through repetition and re-affirmation meanings are not so much deepened as distended, opened onto an abyss, or even made in some sense, "tragic."  (Blanchot perhaps tending to speak of anguish where Bataille would rather talk of laughter.)  (Blanchot, "Affirmation and the Passion of Negative Thought," 54).  There is of course a potential playful element to this tragedy as well.  The language of a "general economy" is that––in Blanchot's terms––of the "limit-experience," or of "patience."
     The need for more than one language is linked to the aporia of responsibility––in every demand, there is always more than one demand:

There are, Blanchot maintains, always at least two languages, two voices, two demands.  Such multiplicity of tone, according to Derrida, is a trait common to all eschatology; but Blanchot raises it to the status of a philosophical, literary, and political strategy.  Writing, he argues, falls subject to an injunction which by definition cannot be satisfied and is capable of supplying neither sanction nor recompense.  But for every demand addressed to the act of writing by virtue of its own absence of worldly foundation or justification, there is always another demand requiring that justice be done without delay in the world.  These two demands, the one requiring the obliqueness of infinite patience, the other demanding urgent and decisive action, function according to different rhythms, different temporalities, and different logics of possibility and impossibility.  While not necessarily opposed to one another, and not homogeneous even within themselves, they are nonetheless radically disjoined, and it is essential, in the nameless name of the neuter, Blanchot argues, that the dissymmetry arising from this disjunction be affirmed, respected and obeyed.  (Hill, 210) 

     The separation between these "two rhythms" or "logics" as Hill puts it, is not rigorously possible, if one believes them to be always already conditioning each other.  There may in fact be something radically anti-elitist in this––an undoing of the hierarchizing of langauge––at the same time that the stakes and demands for a seriousness and complexity of thought have never been greater.  Blanchot's affirmation, at least as read by Derrida, seeks also to go beyond this "dissymetry," in a sense, perhaps even to transform the space of both demands if not the meaning of affirmation itself.  (It might be not unlike guiding a drop of water with a pin, he thought to himself. But the image always fails.)   There may be nothing "essential" about the space of the 'neuter', and nothing like a command merely to "obey," but without this affirmation of disjunction––without heeding the full weight of its injunction––there can only ever be no future––just "the end."       
     Hegel's thought must itself be "gone through" with patience in order to be effectively transformed and perhaps finally left behind.  More generally still, writing must also, and from the moment it begins, withdraw from its appearing as such.  Writing must "revoke" the pretension of any "end," even while it cannot help but imply such a thing the moment it begins.

Last witness, end of history, close of a period, turning point, crisis--or, end of (metaphysical) philosophy...But if (since there is no other way of putting this) a decisive historical change is announced in the phrase "the coming comes," making us come into our "most proper," or "own-most" (being), then one would have to be very naive not to think that the requirement to withdraw ceases from then on.  And yet it is from then on that "withdraw" rules--more obscurely, more insistently...Why does writing--when we understand this movement as the change from one era to a different one, and when we think of it as the experience (the inexperience) of the disaster--always imply the words inscribed at the beginning of this "fragment," which, however, it revokes?  It revokes them even if what they announce is announced as something new which has always already taken place, a radical change from which the present tense is excluded.  (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 102)

Writing then refuses the present, but never in the same way as the phrase, "end of history," forecloses on the present (or never in the same way twice).  If writing has the power to transform eras, or if writing itself is the change between eras, there is a sense in which writing both hears and refuses its own present––or at least its own presence as a representation of power (over the future, for instance).  Blanchot's politics of writing is, at least in Leslie Hill's reading, nothing if not a responsibility (very much in the sense Derrida gives to this word) to alterity and to the Other (as irriducibly other).  Perhaps only a radical indifference to the first of Derrida's two futures––to the one that is prescribed or merely (in the "weak" sense) "possible"––can clear a space for the gift of another kind of time.  Such a time might be open, or ceaselessly opening––a prelude without hasty or absolute distinctions between "enemies" and "friends."   

The Politics to which Blanchot's writing gives voice...is an eschatology--eschatology beyond eschatology--which addresses the future not as power but as judgement, not as imminent presence but as infinite promise.  The hope is not for more, or better representation, but rather for the destruction of the present as such and thus for a revolution that would open time itself to the otherness that presence always excludes (Hill, 209).

As is fitting, Hill cites Blanchot's article, 'N'oubliez pas!' that appeared in May 1968:

a revolution...destroying all without anything destructive, destroying, rather than the past, the very present in which it took place and not attempting to provide a future, extremely indifferent to any possible future (judged as success or failure), as though the time it sought to open up was already beyond these standard determinations.  (Hill, 209)

(Révolution...détruisant tout sans rien de destructeur, détruisant, plutôt que le passé, le présent même où elle s'accomplissait et ne cherchant pas à donner un avenir, extrêmement indifférent à l'avenir possible (la réussite ou l'échec), comme si  le temps qu'elle cherchait à ourvrir fut déja au-delà de ces déterminations usuelles.)  (Blanchot, "N'oubliez pas!" 11-12)

See also:  Beatitude:  Blanchot and Death.

Comments

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[Matt]

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Sorry, Leslie.

[Matt]

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