Spurious

Immediate Speech

1. Appeals to the immediate should awaken our suspicion: isn't consciousness itself, as Hegel would say, the very organ of mediation? But perhaps the appeal to the immediate, far from answering to what is most obvious of all in contemporary capitalism, allows us to reflect upon what escapes consciousness in the very act of mediation - to rescue a worklessness (désoeuvrement) that precedes its mediating labour.

That, at least, is how I understand Blanchot's use of the notion of immediacy when he characterises the kind of speech evidenced during May 1968. Speech, he claims, was immediate during the Events; in the action committees and on the streets, the participants achieved a remarkable freedom to speak that was both collective and anonymous. Here was a freedom other than that of bourgeois individualism, a speech in response to the Other, free from particularity, that each participant became for their fellow protesters. As Blanchot remembers, differences in age, fame and social status seemed to matter little in the Events (as Sartre, he notes somewhat cattily, had to learn quickly). There were incessant debates in the committees and demonstrations, but there was also an extraordinary capacity to speak, a 'saying' that, until then, was unable to reveal itself.

The immediacy of speech, then, circumvents prior forms of mediation that, until the Events, held sway over language. I can only sketch them here, but May 1968 saw the prestige of the old nationalisms, the old religions fall away - though in truth, this was something already in process - and with them a certain relation to language and to existing political, legal and economic institutions. I have explored the significance of the Events for Blanchot, and his own part in them elsewhere. Here, I want simply to explore the notion of the immediate with the aim of understanding what Blanchot calls speech.

2. We might recall Hegel's chapter on 'sense certainty' from the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he argues that what is present here and now, the immediate, is in fact already mediated. Any attempt to grasp the truth of the immediate requires one to render it in language, translating the singular into more general terms. Write at 10PM 'Now is night' on a slip of paper and look at next morning; the statement, obviously enough, is no longer true. The word 'now' that is supposed to grasp a singular moment, also means any now. The word is a universal; as soon as I express the real in language, I have lost its singularity.

For Hegel, however, one can only articulate the truth of the real in language. Language, in that sense is 'truer' than immediacy; it allows the immediate to become determinate for self-consciousness. For a thinker like Kierkegaard, however, as a recent book has shown us, language is not truer than immediacy, and the loss of the latter in the act of expressing it leads to the mistaking of 'reality as represented' for 'reality as reality', even as consciousness, for the most part, is unaware of this duplicity.

With Hegel, Kierkegaard agrees that determinate sense experience is always mediated; against him, however, Kierkegaard maintains that mediated reality is also duplicitous. Unlike Hegel, who maintains that reality is what is exists for consciousness, for Kierkegaard, reality is what is presupposed by consciousness. We can thus make a distinction between an 'originary time' and time as represented.

3. Blanchot, who had an abiding interest in Kierkegaard, giving him as an example of one of those thinkers who, outside the academy, was able to develop a form of fragmentary speech, also distinguishes between originary time - which he calls the origin - and the time of beginning (The Space of Literature). In so doing, he does not want to celebrate an ineffable or non-linguistic immediacy, but rather to show how literature retains a moment of the origin (of the real) within language, even as it retreats from the conscious awareness of author and reader.

But how is this possible? The special virtue of the language of poetry as opposed, say, to that of the philosopher is that it is often supposed to attend to things in their immediacy, celebrating this tree, for example, or this heroic deed. The poet's virtuosity lies in awakening the sense of the singular 'this', even as it is lost to other kinds of discourse (to that of biology, say, or history). Philosophy, by contrast, would rely on generalities, passing over the singular in favour of the universal.

Blanchot's argument is different. Although we might take the immediate to designate this tree or this patch of colour - what is given to us here and now as immediate for consciousness - he directs us to an immediacy that precedes the constituting work of consciousness. For Hegel, consciousness is mediation, confirming its work each time we speak in the first person. For Blanchot, by contrast, the immediate lays claim to each of us such that it precedes the positing of consciousness as it occurs through mediation.

Beneath or beyond any simple minded appeal to the immediate (whether as the indefiniteness of this tree or this battle, or as the supposed naturalness of poverty, exploitation and rivalrous relationships in contemporary capitalism), Blanchot points us to the irruption of the origin - to a non-personal experience wherein the locus of consciousness gives way to an anonymous 'it', the 'il', analogous to the 'dummy subject' of such phrases as 'it is raining'. The 'il', crucially, is impersonal, maintaining a relation to the 'I', to consciousness, while not being identical with it. (But I will not explore this notion at length here)

This dummy subject reveals itself, for Blanchot, in various ways. First of all, it can be found in a particular kind of affective states - he lists suffering, affliction, etc, exploring them both in his fictions and his more philosophical writings (The Infinite Conversation). Secondly, it is there in the encounter with a object that escapes its familiarity or conventional use - here, Blanchot remembers the 'perverse, unusable' knick-knacks Breton finds at a flea-market, but there is also his famous example of the corpse (see discussion of the image in The Space of Literature).

Thirdly, Blanchot discovers the 'il' in the encounter with language, on the part of literary authors and readers of literature (see virtually any of his collections of criticism from The Work of Fire onwards). Blanchot finds in literature an encounter that suspends the intentionality of author and reader as they seek to animate a fictional world on the basis of what is presented in language. It reveals itself in what he calls the 'narrative voice' of a story, in a 'saying' that interrupts the reader's attempt to form what is read into a fully realised fictional world (of course, Blanchot also writes literature that lets this narrative voice resound).

Fourthly, and this is what interests me here, from the late 1950s onwards (after his return, that is, from the south of France, where he had spent ten years in solitary writing to a period of political intervention and, in his theoretical writings, a marked broadening of interests), Blanchot points to speech as another way in which the experience in question happens.

4. For Hegel, the real, being as such, reveals itself only in language, as the sayable. Blanchot argues that immediacy, although it does not escape language, reveals itself in the very specific linguistic act he calls speech. Like Kierkegaard, Blanchot argues that consciousness is always in untruth with respect to the immediate, since it loses its relation to the immediate as soon as it attempts to express it, but as he will also argue, speech attests to this relation, answering it and letting it resound in language.

This argument receives its most detailed elaboration in the first third of The Infinite Conversation where, in a series of long conversations between unnamed discussants, he engages with Levinas's Totality and Infinity. As is well known, Levinas focuses in Totality and Infinity on a particular kind of relation, the relation to the human Other, Autrui, which he claims obtains in a particular act of language, as speech. He characterises this relation as asymmetrical, insofar as one of its terms, the Other, is said to be higher than the other, the ego, and unilateral, insofar as the Other is said to face the ego and to call it to its responsibility.

For Levinas, this moment of facing, of expression grants the ego a stable and enduring ipseity, a selfhood. Prior to this moment, we have what can be called a proto-self, separate and selfish, concerned only to secure its nourishment in an uncertain environment. At the moment of expression, the self comes together in its response to the Other, which Levinas thinks as the linguistic act in question. Speech opens in the response of the ego to the Other's silent expression. It is in discourse, language, that I can come to myself as an ego.

What does this mean? I become a self only at the moment when I can say 'I' (or imply the first person position in my response to another) in response to the face of the Other. As such, I owe my egoity, my ipseity to the alterity of the Other which, with respect to the meditation which occurs, for Levinas, at a practical and conceptual level by the ego (he calls it the same), is immediate.

Whereas the philosophical tradition, according to Levinas, has privileged the mediating activity of consciousness, this activity is predicated upon a linguistic act of acknowledgement and hospitality that is upstream of anything the ego might want or not want to do. Consciousness cannot help but be affected by the Other such that its constitutive activity fails. That is to say, consciousness does not measure the form of the relation to the Other in advance, which is why Levinas says the Other reaches me as the immediate. (All this presumes a lengthy and complicated discussion with Heidegger which I will not revisit here. Suffice to say that the work of the same, meditation, is thought by Levinas as a particular kind of form that governs our relation to things, but which comes apart with respect to the relation to the Other.).

Here, speech is very different from the ideality that consciousness introduces in the form of language. As we have seen, language, to the extent that it depends upon universals, passes over the singularity of the immediately given. But for Levinas, speech, understood as the address to the Other, acknowledges this immediacy (that is, it responds to the singularity of the relation to the Other) by suspending the constitutive work of consciousness.

Speech, accordingly, is not voluntary, since it does not stem from the will (which is governed by the same autonomous demand that governs consciousness), though nor can it be called involuntary either, since consciousness is not present to speech such that it might struggle against it. Speech simply happens as the acknowledgement of the Other as it suspends the form of relation that Levinas calls the same. This is why Levinas uses formulations such a 'relation without relation' when writing about speech: what he wants to emphasise is the suspension of the constitutive work that makes reality the result of linguistic mediation.

5. There is, however, a danger implicit to Levinas's presentation of the Other to which Blanchot is very alert that the relation to the Other is accorded a status that merely reproduces the constitutive activity of consciousness, mirroring it in a different form. Rather than constitution, the work of mediation lying on the side of the ego, it would lie on the side of the Other in its relation to the ego.

Blanchot worries that the special nature of the relation to the Other is determined by Levinas in terms of a particular feature of the Other that maintains it as a kind of power or authority. Blanchot, by contrast, wants to emphasise that the relation to the Other implies that just as the identity of the ego is broken apart in the relation in question, so too is the Other. Neither term is allowed to rest in a simple self-identity.

We can understand Blanchot's argument as a way of placing emphasis upon the interhuman relation rather than upon the Other as a term of the relation. In this way, he guards against understanding the Other as a self of commensurable power as the ego. What matters for Blanchot is internal to the relation in question rather than drawing on a quality of either of its terms (either as the ego, a consciousness as the guarantor of mediation or on the Other as the equivalent of a more powerful ego).

Blanchot supplants Levinas's emphasis on the Other in the interhuman relationship with an emphasis on what he calls conversation, entretien. Drawing on an obscure passage in Totality and Infinity, Blanchot notes the reversability of the unilateral, asymmetrical and exclusive relation to the Other with respect to the ego. Since there is no special feature of the Other that explains the alterity of the ego's relation to the Other, the ego can, in turn, become the Other for this other human being. Even as I am exposed and obligated in my relation to you as the Other (as a generic human being, a man or woman without qualities) you can be exposed and obligated in your relation to me as the Other (as I, in turn, become generic for you).

This is not a reciprocal relation, since, each time, it remains dissymmetical and unilateral (that is to say, it suspends, each time, the constitutive work of consciousness). Nevertheless, it is also possible that, between two people, there will be a criss-crossing of relations, a series of reversals, which Blanchot will call a 'redoubling of irreprocity', a 'double dissymmetry' or a 'double signed infinity', but also, surprisingly, community: 

And then too, we ought to say the following: if the question "Who is autrui?" has no direct meaning, it is because it must be replaced by another: "What of the human 'community', when it must respond to this relation of strangeness between man and man - a relation without common measure, an exorbitant relation - that the experience of language leads one to sense?'

It is not Blanchot who speaks here, but one of the conversationalists he allows to discuss Totality and Infinity, who continue to this double dissymmetry without, however, bringing up the word community again. Nevertheless, however fleetingly it is used, it is meant to mark the oscillation wherein each term of a relation between human beings becomes in turn Other for the other.

6. As Blanchot emphasises, the happening of community is rare. We are, for the most part, bound by the societal forms that divide us according to class, wealth, gender, race, religion etc. But in the late 1950s, Blanchot was already looking towards the promise of the dissolution of those particularities - nationalisms, religions, ethnicities - that kept humanity, until recently, bound to specific territories on the earth.

A promise that looks towards events that can only happen briefly (instanteously), but that nevertheless overcome old kinds of enrootedness, the allegiance to great histories, to political leaders, to territories of all kinds, and above all to possession, to one's possessions and the desire to possess. The men and women of the street, this coming, perpetually coming form of humanity, have nothing in common but a few generic traits. But they assemble, the crowd, the people, at the moment when, according to Blanchot's image, the walls fall, and in which the freedom of speech, understood as the response to the Other as the 'unknown-familiar' reveals itself in the open.

This, indeed, is what happened for Blanchot during the Events. Speech, for him, marks a relation to the Other that can be called immediate, as it escapes the constituting work of consciousness, answering to that worklessness (désoeuvrement) which -sists (it does not subsist, it does not exist) in place of consciousness and its object. It addresses others in the crowd in view of the future it has brought to the brink of the present - that utopia of a humankind without particularity. I address you by way of this future that we bear in common, and you, addressing me as any other, and therefore as the Other, continue this movement of effervescence, speech, as it runs aflame through the crowd (but it is nothing other than the crowd).

When the 'I' becomes 'it' in responding to the Other, when the 'il' in the other person comes forward in turn, a kind of community occurs in which neither term, in its relation to the other, is able to maintain its ipseity. In calling it friendship, understood as a 'camaradarie without preliminaries', Blanchot is not thinking of a relationship founded upon shared interests, upon a symmetrical mutuality and reciprocity that would occur between two commensurate terms.

Who is the Other marching beside me? Anyone at all; no one in particular: I am not sure who I am addressing. And who am I who addresses the Other thus, upstream of conscious deliberation? Likewise no one, likewise a generic placeholder in place of a person that Blanchot marks as an 'il', an 'it'. The walls fall: speech marks the uncertainty as to who the speaker and the addressee might be, and in this way, as the relation is multiplied, a kind of break happens: the unknown future (Blanchot calls it the messianic) quivers through the crowd (but that quivering is also the crowd).

7. Whence the beautiful phrase we find in a handbill from the Events: 'Tomorrow it was May'. Tomorrow it was May; tomorrow awakened in the act of speech, in a speech act that cannot be brought back to the form of the self. Tomorrow, then, a tomorrow-in-today, as it breaks with the system of relations that maintain the stranglehold of the present, was the crowd that was formed of Others addressed and of the selves that addressed them.

The revolt of May 1968, for Blanchot, was first of all a revolt of speech; this is what the wall-writings and handbills confirm, answering as they do a capacity to say, to speak immediately that revealed itself in the action committees and demonstrations. But this is not an immediacy that places itself at my disposal - it is not revealed to a self that remains sure of its self and its capacities, including the capacity to be.

When Blanchot writes of the authorities, the men of power, discovering in the movement the carnivalesque redoubling of their own disarray, it is to mark the difference between constituted forms of political, legal and economic power and the powerlessness of the participants. But it is also to mark the impossibility of submitting the pre-voluntary opening of community to a determined political will.

The crowd, whom the action committees never merely represented, according to Blanchot, and who never permitted themselves to be organised, revealed another kind of politics, or, to draw on Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's notion, the political as it remains the condition for any particular politics. But this other politics, this re-opening of the political in a kind of living question can never settle into an institutional form.

As soon as speech is channelled, mediated, it disappears. Community cannot tolerate organisation. Thus the people of the revolt, such as they are, can have no part in duration. They assemble, they disperse; what matters for the movement of May 1968 is simply to affirm the break, to maintain that suspension of ordinary relations that allows the question of the political to resound.

8. The objection must come very quickly: isn't this a revolution without revolution, a riskless communism (Blanchot calls it that) which suspends any relation to those real struggles in which the workers have been engaged? Certainly the May 1968 movement was vulnerable to established political institutions; demonstrations were banned, tanks were seen on sliproads near Paris - how, in the face of military might and police violence could it be expected to last?

But why nevertheless on the first days of the Events, when the movement caught everyone by surprise, when it spread like wildfire through the universities and factories, wasn't the Elysée stormed and the government overturned? Why didn't the students and workers capitalise on the panic of the authorities and the immense popular support they seemed to enjoy? Why didn't the Events lead to forms of political organisation that superseded the moribund French Communist Party and the trade unions? Why did the workers go back to the factories and students to the university? And why, above all, was the existing government, already in power for ten years, re-elected in the summer of the Events, as if nothing had happened?

If we allow that politics, thus far, has always existed in a moment of untruth or duplicity with respect to what Blanchot calls community (to immediacy), then how might this untruth be overcome? If it is implicit in any form of political representation, in which the relation to the Other (and the chance of its repetition) is forgotten by a Member of Parliament, the Trade Union head, or the leader of the French Communist Party, then what chance lies open for any politics? Must politics always betray the messianism, the communism (but what is at stake in using those words?) waits in potentia at the heart of all social relations?

Freedom of Speech: Blanchot and May 1968

1. He was, said Derrida, involved 'body and soul' in the Events. Michel Leiris, in his journals, laughed at him: what was he doing running along with the students? Couldn't he see it would lead nowhere? Levinas, his closest friend, wrote, without identifying him, of an eminent man of letters who 'participated in the May Events in a total but lucid manner'. 'Blanchot is not an ordinary man, a man whom you can meet in the street', says Levinas in an interview. But there he was on the streets, a demonstrator (Denis Hollier writes of his surprise at seeing him at an action committee, 'pale, but real ...'): what was Blanchot's role during May 1968, which he later called 'the most significant political and perhaps philosophical event in the last 20 years'?

Early May 1968 saw the first occupations, expulsions, the first demonstrations. Blanchot was staying with the Antelmes in Paris, and it was with their joint friends Jean Schuster, Dionys Mascolo, Marguerite Duras - they had known each other for 10 years by this time, working together against French colonialism in Algeria, drafting the 'Manifesto of the 121' - and many others (Klossowski, Sartre, Sarraute, Lefebvre) that they signed a petition published in Le Monde supporting the students.

Blanchot was also present on the first night of the barricades, from the 10th to the 11th May, and participated in the great march of 13th. He was there at Stade Charléty to hear former prime minister Mendès-France offer his protection to the movement, in some measure legitimating it, without realising that it did not want or need his help, and at the protests at the Renault factory at Flin on the 10th June, which saw a young militant chased into the river by riot police and drown. And he was present at the end, marching after demonstrations had been outlawed and therefore more at risk of police violence than ever.

But above all, Blanchot was involved in the Students and Writers Action Committee, created on the 20th May, whose participants initially included Michel Butor and Jacques Roubaud, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Roy. There were 60 writers, journalists, students and television reporters present on the first day, though their numbers quickly dwindled. With Duras and Antelme, he remained at the committee until the end of August.

2. The Committee were responsible for many handbills, posters and bulletins, which were the result of a collective labour and meant as a collective enunciation. Above all, they were not to be read not as representing what happened at the Events, supplementing the accounts of May that were already being published, but to continue their movement, reaffirming what was occurring.

The writing on the walls, the tracts distributed in the street, posters are 'disorderly words', say one of their texts (published, many years later - with his consent? - under Blanchot's name), words 'free of discourse' that, accompanying the rhythm of the marchers and their shouts belonged, simply, 'to the decision of the moment'; transitory, ephemeral, 'they appear, they disappear'.

What matters is not what they say - the form of signification they would maintain, the idea that something might be said about what is happening, but that something can be said. 'Written in insecurity, received under threat', they are present only to 'affirm the break' - whether their message is lost, forgotten or passed on.

What break? The break with the powers that be, hence with the notion of power, hence everywhere that power predominates. This obviously applies to the University, to the idea of knowledge, to the language relations to be found in teaching, in leading, perhaps to all language, etc., but it applies even more to our own conception of opposition to the powers that be, each time such opposition constitutes itself to become a party in power.

A break with the powers that be ... We remember the well known incidents across France from February 1968 onwards, where students demanded freedom of speech and movement. There came the occupations (Nanterre by the so called 'Movement of the 22nd March' and the Sorbonne on the 13th May, after the suspension of courses there) the day of the national strike, the Théâtre de l'Odéon), teach-ins, the battles in the Latin Quarter between students and the police which saw paving stones and metal grilles wrenched from the street and barricades spontaneously thrown up.

Beyond the university, in a movement that was continuous with that of the student revolt, factories were occupied and strikes planned. By the 16th, says this useful document, 50 factories were occupied including the 6 main plants at Renault; the ports of Le Havre and Marseilles were closed; by the 17th, 200,000 workers were on strike all across France, and by the 18th, 2,000,000. Then there was a general strike of 10,000,000 people. Barricades, sit-downs, refusals to disperse, battles with the police, the tricoloeur set aflame ... each time it was the whole of French capitalist society that was being brought into question.

3. Remembering the Events in 1983, Blanchot writes,

It was not even a question of overthrowing an old world; what mattered was to let a possibility manifest itself, the possibility - beyond any utilitarian gain of a being-together that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity through a freedom of speech that elated everyone. Everybody had something to say, and, at times, to write (on the walls); what exactly, mattered little. Saying it was more important than what was said.

A being-together, a community, a communism ... in which, as he says in another text, it became 'almost easy [...] 'to forget all particularity, and impossible to distinguish between young and old, and unknown and the too well-known'. Despite the incessant disputes and differences, debates and controversies, Blanchot says, 'each person recognised himself in the anonymous words inscribed on the walls'; like the handbills and posters, the graffiti 'never declared themselves the words of an author, being of all and for all, in their contradictory formulation'. What was happening belonged to everyone.

It is to this kind of 'freedom of speech' that Blanchot looks as quite the opposite of the speech of the engaged intellectual - of the thinker who would speak on behalf of everyone else. The movement needed no political representation - whether through political channels like the French Communist Party (which repeatedly condemned the student left, even as it sought to associate themselves with the movement) or the various trade unions (which sought, in the main, to use the Events merely to bolster their bargaining position), they need no one - no vanguard - to speak on their behalf.

In the action committees, Blanchot remembers in 1996, the street demonstrations, 'there were no friends, only comrades who immediately addressed each other without formality and accepted neither age differences nor the recognition due to prior celebrity'. Then the role of the action committees was merely to answer to and uphold the freedom of speech in the same manner as the collective, anonymous writings of the Students and Writers' Action Committee.

Freedom - from what? From conventional social structures, to be sure, that kept student and worker apart - and also the workers within an organisation, the shop steward from cheap immigrant labour. But also from the ordering of speech, of language, by the university, the system of knowledge, and, more generally, culture at large.

Here, I suppose, it should be acknowledged that the France remained at once powerfully conservative but also ready for change. Schools and universities remained rigidly conformist, factories undemocratic. But then, too, the new France of the consumer boom, which demanded long hours and commutes for its workers was equally intolerable. Capitalism was also a target for the movement, and in a manner far different than was permitted by existing political parties and trade unions.

Alongside conventional media and the whole system of publishing which reflected both old and new France, overseeing the transition into consumerism, handbills, bulletins and posters circulated in the streets. Alongside conventional politics, the committees allowed anyone allowed to speak, breaking with old hierarchies without, however, replacing them with a bourgeois individualism.

Speech was collective without being subordinated to a unitary source of power or value. But it was so insofar as it was drawn back into a capacity to speak that belonged to everyone. It was enough that anyone could speak, and that speaking, thereby, was withdrawn from the familiar channels in which language was organised.

4. What does this mean? In Grammar of the Multitude, Virno points us to the importance of what Heidegger called idle chatter as part of a more general attempt to rethink political praxis. As he notes, the Marxian analysis of labour power comes to complete itself in the wake of the Fordist mode of production. Marx's notion indicates 'the aggregate of those mental and physical capacities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being'. Under contemporary capitalism, with the transition from material to immaterial forms of employment, labour power includes the most generic of human aptitudes, says Virno, 'the totality of poietic, 'political', cognitive, emotional forces', thus encompassing every aspect of experience.

Considered for itself, idle talk resembles background noise, Virno argues; it is not tied to anything in specific, as a drill is to drilling or the roar of an engine to a motorbike. Open-ended and improvisational, operating without script, idle talk does not describe or represent the existing world so much as open beyond it - temporally, spatially - by breaking apart the perfect fit between production and execution to which labour power seems to lend itself. As idle talk, language vouchsafes another commons, another sense of being-in-common as it awakens those poietic, cognitive and emotional forces as yet uncaptured in contemporary models of capitalist production. But it does so, crucially, by refusing to speak in the first person, and it is here that it resonates with Blanchot's conception of speech.

5. Speech, for Blanchot, is primarily the capacity to speak, to say, but not simply to speak in one's own name. For him, like Virno, the value of idle speech is that it is generic, escaping the authentic self to which Heidegger contrasts it. When Blanchot writes of the crowd or the people, it is as an anonymous mass, precisely the kind of which Heidegger feared - Das Man, the 'they' or the 'One' encountered all at once, in which no one can lay claim to speech in the first person.

Here then is a freedom of speech that manifests itself in the 'immense common powerlessness' of the crowd - the way it escapes all kinds of organisation. A freedom that, for Blanchot, becomes possible only in the 'change of epoch' for whose signs he searches in many of his essays from the late 1950s onwards, where old nationalisms and racisms, all forms of enrootedness or attachments to place have begun to wither away. A speech that belongs to the man or the woman of the street, free from allegiance to a particular homeland or a people, and, as must be made clearer today, from a bourgeois separatism that dissolves any sense of the collective.

The crowd must remain, for Blanchot, disorganised and unorganisable. If the action committees of the Events, to be sure, took on some of the responsibilities of civil administration, but in no way formed a rival centre of government. They were only 'pretending to organise disorganisation while respecting the latter', says Blanchot; they did not distinguish themselves from the "anonymous and innumerable crowd, from the people spontaneously demonstrating"'. The committees did not represent the movement, articulating the interests of the men and women of the street, but allowed them to speak and thereby give voice to the generic power to speak, confirming a new way of being together, of being-in-common, speech, even in their vigorous debates.

Confronted by the crowd, the old powers did not know how to act; something new was happening, something altogether unexpected. Mendès-France, sympathising with the protesters, was still unaware that the movement was not a political force like any other (it was 'a movement that was only movement'). When, on the 19th May de Gaulle spoke on behalf of the men of power at the Élysée, 'La reform, oui; la chienlit, non' this was only a way of marking this ignorance. The word chienlit, which means a ragtag, a mess, from chie-en-lit, shits in bed, gestures feebly at what Blanchot found in the 'common powerlessness' of the crowd.

What did they want? They quickly rejected offers of an increase in the minimum wage and average salaries; they refused the offer of a referendum. The offer to release the students imprisoned at the beginning of the Events did not placate them. De Gaulle's fumbling address to the nation on French television on May 24th impressed no one. When, on the 29th, de Gaulle left France altogether, panic spread in government circles. The people on the streets were the 'carnivalesque redoubling [...] of a command that no longer commanded anything, not even itself, contemplating, without seeing it, its own inexplicable ruin'. 

But for this same reason - its disarray, its lack of leadership, the sense that it belonged to everyone and no one, the movement was at the mercy of the same institutions whose structure they refused to reduplicate. On the 29th, de Gaulle, holing up in Germany with the French military, had no idea what to do. But by the next day, he returned to Paris, having decided to deploy the military if necessary, and called for a General Election. The revolutionary movement began to fade away even as the French communist party welcomed this new turn.

Addressing the nation once again on TV in June, de Gaulle threatened to introduce a state of emergency unless the ferment died down. On the 12th June, far left groups were banned and subjected to intense harassment, and the student union called for a stop to demonstrations. On the 16th, as the result of a massive police effort, the Sorbonne was retaken and the police infiltrated schools and universities. Workers returned to work, and by the end of June, the Gaullists were voted back to govern with a respectable majority.

5. What, then, had happened? The revolution failed. This, on Blanchot's account, should not surprise us. A movement that exhibits an 'absence of reaction' to already constituted powers leaves it vulnerable to those powers. Historians tell us that the Events, nevertheless, saw the transformation of French society - this is the generation of 1968 Sarkozy affects to despise. The revolution failed - but did it fail?

For Blanchot, writing in the 1980s, with Mitterand's government in power, what mattered in the Events was speech - not simply the fact that one could speak, that anyone was allowed to speak, but that speech was directed towards others, fellow marchers, fellow strikers, in a form of 'friendship, a 'camaraderie without preliminaries' without precedent. Freedom is given in the relation friendship would name, insofar as one can address the other anonymously, impersonally, speaking as no one in particular to no one in particular in the turbulence of the crowd.

What, indeed, was the crowd but this field of relations, in which freedom belonged not to the individual who would possess speech, laying claim to it in the first person, but to the speaker who is borne by friendship and camaraderie? Did it fail - or was this success success enough? Is the revolution given only in speech or does the gap between camaraderie and politics open too widely?

A Literary Satellite: Blanchot and the Revue Internationale

1. “If the idea proves to be utopian, then we should be willing to fail as utopians”: what utopia opens to us in the pages associated with the failed project of the Revue Internationale? What arrow has landed at our feet, and how might it be shot through the fog of our political present?

2. Recalling more than 10 years later the way his friendship with Jean Paulhan was tested when, in May 1958, de Gaulle returned to power, Blanchot makes the following remark:

Communism is this as well: the incommensurable communication where everything that is public - and then everything is public - ties us to the other (others) through what is closest to us.

Communism demands that the private becomes the public. The distant - de Gaulle's unconstitutional return to power - must reach us in the intimacy of our relationship; it must find us there and interrogate us, as, perhaps, Hiroshima did the lovers of Duras’s screenplay. How to become worthy of friendship as communism, communism as friendship? Blanchot’s friendship with Paulhan was tested by their disagreement about the significance of de Gaulle’s return to power on May 13th 1958. But it was also in name of friendship that he allied himself with Dionys Mascolo, Marguerite Duras, Jean Schuster and others over the same issue, contributing articles to the anti-Gaullist Le 14 Juillet.

Invoking the solidarity granted by the refusal to allow the reconciliation of what happened on May 13th by the authority of de Gaulle’s name, Blanchot writes “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”. Then what he calls in the next sentence “the friendship of this certain, unshakable, rigorous No” is a solidarity that belongs to a time out of joint.

A break has occurred. When we refuse, we refuse with a movement that is without contempt, without exaltation, and anonymous, as far as possible, for the power to refuse cannot come from us, nor in our name alone, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first to those who cannot speak.

Friendship, here, is a solidarity with those who are deprived the power of speaking. The aim is not to speak in the place of others - but to preserve, anonymously, that speechlessness in its simplicity, reaffirming it, and allowing it to resound. A kind of silence, then, that suspends the movement of good sense to reconcile everything in the continuity of discourse. Friendship, communism are set back into an incapacity, in much the same way as the literary work, as Blanchot argues in his literary criticism in a similar period, lets speak the impossibility of speech.

But what, then, is the relationship between literature and politics?

3. Speaking of the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War, whose signatories gave their support to those who refused to bear arms against the Algerians, or who offered them assistance, Blanchot says he signed it “not as a political writer, nor even as a citizen involved in the political struggle, but as an apolitical writer who felt moved to express an opinion about problems that concern him essentially”.

A surprising declaration - because in the same period it is out of the experience of literature that Blanchot will attempt to think the “change of epoch” he feels is underway - the technological uprooting of old mythologies and the media-driven appearance of new ones, the eclipse of other forms of violence by the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, and which calls for a dialogue with Marxism. This the project of the Revue Internationale, which occupied him from 1960 to 1965, emerging directly out of his engagement with Mascolo and others on Le 14 Juillet and his opposition to the Algerian War.

The Revue Internationale was the Italian novelist’s Elio Vittorini’s idea, Blanchot remembers in 1996; he recalls that Italo Calvino, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann and Uwe Johnson being associated with the project; Louis-René des Forêts was its secretary, and Maurice Nadeau and Roland Barthes were also involved.

The Revue only appeared once, in April 1964, as a supplement to the Italian review Il Menabò, containing translations of Blanchot’s texts “The Name Berlin” and “The Conquest of Space”, as well as “Archipelagic Speech” and the final page of “Everyday Speech” as it was published later in The Infinite Conversation. In 1990, Michel Surya published the texts associated with the Revue, Blanchot’s “Proposal for the Revue Internationale”, along with letters between the participants, in his magazine Lignes.

What kind of dialogue is Marxism to seek with literature in the Revue? One that will also have to come to terms with the fact that, in Blanchot’s words in the “Proposal”, “Literature represents a distinctive kind of power, a kind of power not predicated upon possibility (and the dialectic has to do only with that which is possible)”: “a power without power” associated with a “literary responsibility” that is irreducibly different from “political responsibility”. Both kinds of responsibility “engage[...] us absolutely”, Blanchot writes to his fellow participants, “as in a sense does the disparity between them”. One of the tasks of the review is precisely to explore the possibility of a solution to the clash of literature and politics.

4. But how is this possible, when Blanchot’s notion of literature seems to be founded on a refusal of any notion of political commitment?

Recall the general account Blanchot offers of language and literature. For the most part, I am able to speak in my own name, using language to the extent that it seems transparent, barely interposing itself between what I say and what I might want to say. Everything seems expressible; language is obedient, docile; speech and writing are part of the economy of what possible for human beings. I refer to the world; I express my feelings: language answers to a faith in human ability, and in the ability to be able, to the power and possibility that is proper to each of us.

But this is not always the case. Remembering his clashes with the examining magistrate who sought to prosecute him in the wake of the publication of the Declaration, Blanchot recalls, “After I had finished giving my statement, the examining magistrate wanted to dictate it to the clerk of the court: 'No, no', I said, 'you will not substitute your words for my own'”. If Blanchot repeats the exact same words he had uttered earlier, it is not because of any difference in the content of what he would say, but because of the place he would reclaim for his utterances within a network of power. To speak in his own name is not to arrogate speech to himself as to an individual as powerful as the magistrate within a given institutional context, but to disclose the operation of this context as it makes of speech something more than mere information. Blanchot expresses a solidarity with those who are unable to reclaim their speech as it is made to speak without them - attesting to speech as non-power, to the “cry of the Other” unable to speak in an institutional context. A speech that can also be reaffirmed as a kind of refusal, and that is the basis of what Blanchot calls communism and friendship.

Literature, too, belongs to this refusal. True, the novel seems continuous with the world in which we live, but there is a practice of writing in which language brackets its capacity to refer, interposing itself in its thickness and opacity in place of that transparency it assumes in ordinary communication. Poetry emphasises the rhythm or the sonority of language, its flesh. Fiction - even the vastest novel - can wear away the world it seems to carefully construct, dramatising the way in which language withdraws from its referential function. To read Kafka’s The Castle, for example, is to lose oneself into a labyrinth without issue, as language wanders like K., unable to take refuge in the intentions of its author, in his ability to conjure a world from ink and paper.

For Blanchot, a writer is never quite a writer, or never writer enough, since language does not grant itself to the measure of power. But nor does it grant itself to the power of a reader, insofar as it carries what it says beyond the intentions of any particular reading. This is not because it gives itself to be read in any number of ways, but that it lets itself be experienced as the double or the image of language.

For Blanchot, both author and the reader both sense their distance from what does not cease murmuring in the work; for the former, this is why it is necessary to start writing again, to enclose the unfinishable work in a book; for the latter, it draws the reader to read anew. Both, then, have a relation that passes by way of the work as it sets itself back from writing and reading. Both find themselves elected or commanded by what has no power. This, indeed, is what literary responsibility might mean: the attempt to maintain a response to what lays claim to both author and reader, and to answer that response anew.

The passion of this encounter, which means the writer is never quite a writer, can be hidden by the imposingness of the narrative. Even the vastest novel bears, at its heart, a simple récit, if this word is allowed to name not only a literary genre, but the event upon which the creation of literature depends. And likewise, any critical study is engaged by the same event, repeating it in turn, even if it is overwhelmed by the imposingness of criticism, of literary judgement.

This is the responsibility Blanchot lets claim him in his fiction and his criticism. His récits seem to pare themselves away until they are concerned simply with the act of narration in its possibility and its impossibility. Only a minimal realism survives; the most tenuous link with the world. What matters is the narrator’s journey to the “truth” of the narrative - the interminable, incessant return of language as language, of language as it appears in place of itself. A journey which requires that he be sacrificed as he falls from that power, that measure of possibility to which language normally grants itself, all the while keeping up his narrative. Until, at the end of each récit, he returns to the world of the present from the peculiar passion of his narrative.

Blanchot’s fiction is that path of research that drives his encounter with the texts of others, discovering a récit in literary narratives that narrates the return, from writing, from the experience of language, of the double of ordinary language. Before it can be analysed in terms of metaphor and imagery, the poem has always retreated from the world in which it seems to be able to be read, bringing its reader close to the image of language as it retreats from signification, from what it can be made to say.

It is thus that Blanchot seeks to answer literary responsibility, experiencing the work, undergoing it as though it were a kind of fate, and finally, in his fiction and his criticism, welcoming it, affirming what happened as it had done just as Joë Bousquet, Deleuze reminds us, claimed his wound pre-existed him. Blanchot lets himself be haunted and doubled by the “other” language as it seems to dispose of him in order to return to itself through his fiction and his literary criticism, and thereby suspending those relations that bind him to the world.

Who am I, as author, as reader? For Blanchot, I exist only as my double, just as language, too, wanders in itself. A double, now, that is not subordinate to its original, but that indicates the way in which the original is always doubled, that what exists can do so otherwise. I am fated by what I cannot even will, by what returns over and again. And as it returns, engaging me as language, as the non-power of language, the “I” becomes “it” - as, in Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche, the capacity to say “I”, to speak in one’s own name appears and disappears. I am all the names in history; I am none of those names. Amor fati: the self is not yet itself, and lives as this “not yet”, in the interval where it is turned to language as it resounds ceaselessly in its mute murmuring.

5. What, then, when literary responsibility passes over into political responsibility? Communism names the attempt to answer the cry of the Other and to maintain it, affirming what reaches each of us so as to command solidarity. True, it is possible to fall short of this responsibility, to let it wither, in the same way as a literary writer attempts to escape the call that singularises him and awaits his response. But this escape is also a kind of relation to what does not cease to call. Communism is the attempt to acknowledge what first gives itself as this relation: to language as it escapes power, and calls for us to respond.

It is this response, one presumes, for which he intends the Revue to answer. But an answer, now that must be appropriate to that call. The text of the column is to be dispersed throughout each issue, being interrupted by other texts. The “disrupted continuity” of the column will be an opportunity to experiment with the “short form”, a term Blanchot says he has borrowed from contemporary music, which he characterises in another essay as “a-cultural”.

Each national editorial board, he suggests, will jointly devise a fragmentary column or essay, “The Course of Events” exploring a particular intellectual event, be it philosophical, poetic, or sociological. The production of fragments must be a collective practice, Blanchot notes, each writer transcending the limits of his or her thought, putting their name to fragments for which they feel themselves jointly responsible. “We must not be afraid to roll up our sleeves”, warns Blanchot: the work will be laborious, challenging.

6. “If the idea proves to be utopian, then we should be willing to fail as utopians”, wrote Blanchot of the collective editorial policy of the Revue. It did fail; the documents passed down to us which survive of the attempt to hold this utopia ahead of us not as an unrealisable dream, but as a programme that overturns our conceptions of literature, writing and authorial agency as well as our model of political activism on the other. But what survives?

In his proposal, Blanchot gives a long list of possible topics for discussion in the Revue, one of which, reflecting on the overcoming of the limits of place with Gagarin’s ascent into space, is sketched in detail. Technology, Blanchot claims, promises to dissolve the fascination with nations and peoples. Upon his return, Gagarin is greeted by Khrushchev on behalf of his fatherland, but he was nevertheless able to deliver a new kind of speech: a speech from outside.

Blanchot extends these gnomic reflections in an article he wrote for the Revue; in Gagarin’s rambling speech, he says,

something disturbs us and dismays us in that rambling: it does not stop, it must never stop; the slightest break in the noise would already mean the everlasting void; any gap or interruption introduces something which is much more than death, which is the nothingness outside entered into discourse.

Gagarin becomes “the man from the Outside”, whose speech says “the truth is nomadic”. Tantalising rather than dully developed, Blanchot's fragment is indicative rather than being fully developed, bringing together a surprising constellation of topics. To what does it point? To the challenge of formulating an “adequate response to the enigma of these changing times” - a response that is fragmentary. How should this be understood? The literary fragment, Blanchot writes, “points to a linguistic space in which the purpose and function of each moment is to render all other moments indeterminate”. The fragmentary writing Blanchot calls for in the Revue is linked to the same indeterminacy, reaffirming the murmuring of speech, the image of language as it is sensed by the literary author.

Reflecting on Blanchot’s musings on Gagarin, Hollier and Mehlman suggest the journal “had [...] the ambition of becoming a sort of literary station (a communication vessel) launched in literary space”. A satellite that would broadcast in a number of languages, raising questions about translation, Blanchot suggests, “as an original form of literary activity”. The linguistic difference between languages need not be abolished, but deployed - altering the language into which a translation is to be made.

Moving more rapidly, Blanchot also sketches a number of other possible themes: a reflection on the new treatment of text in contemporary music, for example, as found in Boulez’s use of Mallarmé in Pli Selon Pli, and in his lecture on the relationship between music and poetry; an exploration of the meaning of violence in a world where total destruction is possible: what is the revolutionary significance of this violence? what is its relationship with de-Stalinisation? what changes has de-Stalinisation accomplished in political language: how to understand terms like cult of personality, or peaceful coexistence? What questions, Blanchot asks, are raised by Fanon on violence, Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind or Pernoud’s book on the bourgeoisie?: a swarm of topics which begins with the particular into order to open into the general - to broach the question of the whole.

Why did the Revue fail? Blanchot suggests in 1996 that it was because its German contributors were overwhelmed by the Berlin War; as they departed, the whole project faded away. But what if they had instead joined Blanchot in reflecting on the fate of that divided city? In another fragment he wrote for the Revue, Blanchot suggests Uwe Johnson’s novels are uniquely able to answer “the singularity of “Berlin”, precisely through the hiatus that it was obliged to leave open, with an obscure and unflagging rigour, between reality and the literary expression of its meaning”. An indirect approach to the problem of Berlin - but one which, if the Revue had indeed gone about its work, might have maintained the literary station in its solitary orbit, continuing to hold its participants in friendship, in communism.

Nuns and Dogs

People are avoiding us, I tell W. He agrees. They can smell failure, he says.

W. makes it a rule always to include a nun and a dog in his books for purposes of pathos, he says. He has an imaginary dog, whom he uses in tender examples about animals and has had an imaginary encounter with a nun in a hospital. She was selfless, he says, utterly selfless. He got the idea from Raymond Gaita, he says, who has a nun in one of his books and a dog in another. In his book-before-last, W. invented imaginary children in a particular tender example. It made him weep, he says.

His book-before-last is better than him, W. and I agree. What's it about?, I ask him of a particularly difficult section. He's got no idea, he says. The book seems to stream splendidly above us both. Neither of us can follow it.

For his part, W.'s mission is to reduce the French poetic style to clear Anglo-Saxon prose. Mine, I tell him is to reduplicate the French poetic style in an Anglo-Saxon poetic style very badly, like an ape.

Your Letters

One afternoon, another. Any one was any other, they were all equally exchangable. And wasn't that true of us, too? Weren't we exchangable, infinitely exchangable, weighing nothing at all, swarming in the summer like midges? We were the same, each of us exactly the same. If one of us disappeared, another would come. We were replaceable, and this was our solace. We were anyone at all, and this was happiness.

How long ago was it now? Ten years and more than ten. But I wasn't any younger then. I can't say I lived through those times. I didn't understand what happened. I didn't know, how could I know? I was barely there. And you - were you there? What did we see in one another, then when we were no one at all? What was there to recognise? Only that, perhaps, only our looking like anyone else, like everyone else. I've never been so anonymous. Never fallen so far beneath my own name.

Later on, you sent me some letters. A few, not many. I lost them a long time ago. I must have thrown them away. I couldn't keep them. Couldn't bear that they lay face up in a drawer, the words staring upward. I neglected them, I remember that. They dwere lost among piles of newspapers. One had a coffee stain. A brown ring over the blue, faintly lined paper and the words. It didn't seem to matter to me. It seemed in keeping with what you wrote.

I don't think you said much. I mean, there wasn't much to read. Hadn't you told me everything already? Hadn't you told me about your life in those long, interchangable afternoons? I remember the cafe, pots of tea. We took the sun. We spoke. You told me ... what? About your life, the whole of your life. And I think I told you about mine.

How easy it was to sum up! It seemed to roll on far above me, my life. I wasn't living it. Someone else was living it. Someone who lived in my place, far from me. And I was content, content to be lived rather than live. And you? How did I find you, in those near-identical afternoons? How among the cafe goers who looked exactly the same? Someone was living your life, too, you told me. Someone was living in your place; you'd given up. And that was your happiness, that giving up.

They came later, those letters. We'd broken up, hadn't we? We didn't see each other anymore. What happened? When was the break? I'd gone back to work, I think. I'd started to work again; I was rising. I was working my way back into my life. I wanted it again. Wanted to live and in my own name, equal to it. And you, what of you? You fell away from me. You fell - but was it only because I was rising? Or was it that you were disappearing into a deeper current, that you'd found a falling below our falling, a deeper nothingness, a deeper anonymity?

I couldn't follow you there, I remember that. And I couldn't stay with you there, in those afternoons, those interchangable afternoons, I remember that. What else could we do but break up? It was late summer, wasn't it? Late summer passing into autumn. After a few weeks - one letter, then another. Then a few more.

Did I reply? Only to say little. Only to acknowledge your words, nothing more. To acknowledge them, as though only to repeat them back to you. To echo them, to amplify them, as though I were only a space for your words to resound. A few letters, handwritten, on blue, faintly lined paper. Envelopes addressed to me, with my name on the front, my address, and these letters, that seemed hardly concerned with me, that moved towards me only to move away.

They had nothing to do with me, I thought then. They were reaching towards what they could not reach, for I was not there where they wanted to find me. I had already left that place, that non-place. What did they say? Nothing, nothing at all. Nothing, nothingness, but by way of a few details, some pieces of news that concerned us and the people we knew.

The Secret

How many years is it now? More than ten. It was another time. Things were completely different then. There's a kind of brain injury you can get when you fail to recognise people. People you know. People you should know. I don't think anyone could recognise us - not me, not you. I don't think we could recognise each other, and I think that's what held us apart, our faces worn away. You were no one at all, and I, likewise, was no one.

Ten years ago, more. I was ill, you were unemployed. Or was it the other way round? Was I unemployed? Were you ill? Ill, unemployed, we'd fallen from the world. Both of us, fallen. I don't think we liked to see it in each other. I think we wanted to see anything but that. Anyway, you had your excuse - or was it me? - your illness. And I had mine - was it mine? - unemployment.

You said my trouble was that I was ill. And I said you were ill because you were unemployed, you had nothing to do. Didn't you have your business? The recording studio - what had happened to that? You'd placed it in the hands of your business partner, you told me. He was willing to take sole charge. He sent you cheques, you trusted him. He was half in love with you, you said. He'd do anything for you.

And now you had all the time in the world. Time for - what? Going to cafes in the late afternoon. Into the cafes, a pot of tea to last you all afternoon. Take a bit of sun. Sit out in the sun. Or in, in from the rain and the cold. The seasons turned. You were always there, talking to this person or that. And I was always there, wasn't I? I wanted somewhere to go, somewhere away from the house and its distractions. The cafe, for the afternoon, when you were there, talking with the others. A pot of tea - that, for the whole afternoon. I'd make it last, until the switchover of the waitresses. They'd forget to charge me. The new shift would think I'd already paid. The old shift thought I'd pay the waitresses of the new shift ... And you, why were you there? What did you want, drinking tea, taking the sun or sheltering from the rain?

One day you saw me, or I saw you. One day you - or was it me - emerged from the small crowd who gathered there. Who introduced us? Who told one of us about the other? There we were, talking. There, and as though we'd always known one another. You were ill, you told me. I was unemployed, I said. And I thought you were ill because you'd given everything up, because you were resolved to do nothing with your life.

You'd done too much, you said, you'd been too busy. A job in the South, near Brighton, and then one in the North, nearer home, and then the recording company you set up with your dad's money. You wanted some time out, you said. You wanted to think about things. What were you going to do with your life? What did you want to do?

I said I thought that running your own business was enough. Who wouldn't want to run their own business, setting their own hours? You'd overseen the recording of a famous TV programme, hadn't you? You produced the session? That's what you told me. And you'd begun recording your own album, hadn't you? You'd cut a few songs. You had some more songs written, or you'd write some more, that's what you told me, wasn't it? But you weren't in a hurry, you told me. You wanted some time out, and besides the business could run itself. Your business partner could run it, you said, I think that's what you said, one afternoon or another.

I was unemployed - I'm sure of that. You were ill, you told me, and you said you saw some of that illness in me. I said I was just unemployed, that was all, and that illness followed from unemployment, unless you're careful. You told me you felt tired all the time, that you couldn't do anything, and I said I thought that was because you were doing nothing, because you weren't busy enough. You have to have a plan, I said, to get through the day. You have to be careful of having too much time. But you said I was ill and you could see it, and we had a similar illness, if not exactly the same one. We were both ill, you said. You could see it in me, and I knew I could recognise it in you, my ailment, you said. Was I ill? I wondered.

The days were all exactly the same. The afternoons. Every day was the same; every day, in the morning, the cafe, then I walked, then, later in the afternoon, again the cafe, where you were. I'd see you there, talking to this person or that person, as I'd seen you for some time. There was a security guard who liked to talk to you, I remember that. He had epaulettes. I thought it was some fancy fashion thing, that he was some kind of fashion victim, but it seems he really was a security guard whose shift had finished, and that was where he ended up, like us, in the cafe.

Soon, others could see it, there was something between us. We'd become accomplices. We shared something. Even the security guard could see it. He liked you, that was for certain. He liked to sit next to you. He called you by your full name which no one ever used. Your full name ... it sounded too intimate. As though you shared a secret. But, in truth, it was we who shared the secret, you and I. I knew your secret name, you knew mine. I knew how to undo your name, and you mine.

We were ill, unemployed. And we were the most ill, the most unemployed, wasn't that it? Things were hopeless for us, wasn't that it? We'd been beached and stranded in life, wasn't that it, by the shore, on the coastal sands?

How many years is it now? Ten? More than ten? More than ten years ... set adrift in my life. A part of my life adrift in my life. A kind of floater in the eye. What happened then? What happened back then? Something is buried there, back then. Something important, important for me to know. A kind of secret. Something I knew then I do not know now. Something I knew ... or that knew me. A kind of secret I was locked in, that kept me, rather than the other way round. I lived in a kind of secret, as between parentheses. A life in brackets, enclosed, that had become exceptional ... in that there was nothing exceptional about it. In that it was the most ordinary life of all.

And I think you, too, knew the secret. That it was wrapped around you, too, that it drew us together back then, and now in my memory. We shared something that you called illness and I unemployment. We shared it and it held us together and apart from one another, kept each in orbit around the other like double stars.

You received sickness benefit, I remember that. The cheques came from your business partner, but you were also on benefits, as I was. I lived on my unemployment cheques, and you on the sick.

I should try and get on the sick, you told me. You'd get more money on the sick, that's what you said. You wouldn't have to go in so often, you said, because I'd told you how I disliked going in, how I disliked the dole office. The queues! The long queues! And the despair! Such unhappiness there. Such unhappiness in me when I was there, when usually I was content, or at least half content, numbed. And having to explain what I'd been doing for the past two weeks - no work, of course, nothing earned, and what I would be doing, what kind of work I was looking for.

How I disliked it!, I explained to you. You should go on the sick, you told me. I wouldn't have to go in except for once every three months. That's what you did, you told me - you went into the benefits office every three months with a doctor's note. Your doctor was very sympathetic, you told me. I could register with her, you told me. She'd be sympathetic with me, too. She'd send me to the counsellor, who had an office in the cellar.

You had a friend, you said, who had the same doctor, who'd got sheltered accommodation. She was ill, really ill, you said, but she'd got a flat, quite a big one, and lived there on her own. That's what I could get, if I wanted one, you said. I could register with the doctor, get a sick note (you'd have to see a counsellor, you said), and then get sheltered accommodation, a flat, you said. You'd help me.

What happened next? Then what happened? I remember ... but what do I remember? I feel confused. I feel I've lost something. Part of my life has broken away. Part of me. But it's important, I tell myself. I need it. I need to understand what happened.

Ill and unemployed. Unemployed and ill. Did I get myself a flat? And you, what happened to you?

Fallen. We were both fallen, but in the end you fell farther, I remember that. I rose again. But you - you kept falling, I remember that. You thought illness was a kind of ruse, didn't you? That you could gain a few months by it, a few years, living on your benefits and the cheques of your business partner? You thought you could take some time out with impunity, that you could see out the 90s and the new millennium as though at the end of everything, at the mouth of all rivers, didn't you? But you fell a little further, didn't you? The illness hollowed you out too far. You fell too far, didn't you? The illness fell inside you and hollowed you away.

You disappeared. I saw nothing of you; and when I asked, no one had any news. Did I ring you? I must have received no answer. But then I've never liked phones, I still don't. Disembodied voices. Voices in the air. Did I call on you? Did I kock on your door? But you lived a long way away, two bus rides, and I've never liked to travel, I still don't. Until - when? when was it? I heard you'd been sectioned, that you were in the mental hospital. How had you wound up there? Sectioned - and in the mental hospital, that's what I was told.

I shuddered that morning in the winter sun when I heard. Shuddered. I was on my way up. Somehow - an upward eddy - I was on my way up, rising in the winter sun. I wasn't ill, not any more, and I wasn't unemployed. I don't think I'd recognise you, if I saw you again. I don't think I'd know your name.

I always wanted to tell the story of my life. The entire beginning of my analysis was me telling a story. A linear, continuous story. I never lost the thread; I 'strung things together', always knowing ahead of time what I was going to say: never the slightest break, the slightest gap, never the slightest flaw where a slip of the tongue might have a chance to sneak in, where something might happen. And thus nothing happened. From the other side of the couch, nothing. 'My life' was met with indifference.

Everything 'started' when I had nothing more to say, when I no longer knew where to start or how to end. At that moment, what I had recounted before came back, but in a way that was entirely other, in a discontinuous way, in different forms (memories, dreams, slips, repetitions), or it never came back. I understood that I had tried, by telling the story of 'my life', not to recount it - it is too much for words - but to master it. I had been at once foolish and unfaithful.

My mouth then stopped being the place from which flowed a reassuring discourse and became a cave from which more or less articulate and intelligible words burst forth, cries whose extremely variable tone (booming, evanescent, barely audible, halting, melodious, etc.) surprised even me. I had never heard myself speak like this, and 'I' did not recognise 'myself'. [...]

from Sarah Kofman, '"My Life" and Psychoanalysis', Selected Writings

I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

Conversations with W.G. Sebald

A Secret Collision

India continues to collide with Southern Asia, I read; the Himalayas are still being forced upwards and their folded roots downwards; the earth's crust thickens there where two tectonic plates are forced against one another. And now I remind myself of those collisions in life that have not ceased - of the secret movement that complicates the surface of the body, that keeps inside and outside apart, into a soul. The soul, I tell myself is made, not given, and as a complication, a folding where inside and outside are lost each inside the other.

When I try to select a novel to buy in a bookshop, it is for evidence of this strange origami that I look. I want to read of the folding of a life, its secret blossoming, not outwards to the sun, but inwards to that dark recess that loses itself in itself. To a find a prose that speaks of an involution, an event that has continued to happen as one plate rams against the other, lifting and deepening itself into thickness.

And what kind of prose? One that not only reports the event in question, but speaks from it and is nothing apart from it. That finds its origin in that same confusion that opens the dimension of what is too quickly called interiority. And that redoubles the origin in the surprise of its own birth, so that to write of the event is to re-enact it again, to let it bloom into a narrative.

How to reach what folded the soul into itself? I don't think it can be reached. It hides itself, there on the other side of the narrative. It was lost straightaway, as soon as you began to write, but also as soon as you began to live - as soon as a soul opened as the locus of life, a place that was yours. All narratives are detours, I tell myself; writing is always on the way to an Origin it cannot reach.

In this sense, all plots are arbitrary. When I find the novel on the bookshelf, I want the sense from it that all plots are arbitrary, and what matters is to begin, to set out. To begin writing and then to follow through this beginning, being loyal to it, letting the narrative reverberate with the Origin it cannot reach. I want to know that it is no plot that matters, but another kind of intrigue, in which Writing has been caught by Writing; in which the Origin is allowed to speak in what is only the beginning of a story, an arbitrary story.

That is why I welcomed Nooteboom's The Following Story when I found it a few months ago, saving it for a long journey when I could read it all in one go. On the opening page, a mystery - what was it? a Dutchman awakens in the Portugal he visited many years ago. Last night, he fell asleep in Amsterdam (was that it?), and this morning he is in Portugal in another body, another life, such as has become familiar from David Lynch's recent films. I think I could tell at once this was an arbitary way of beginning, a way for Noteboom to engage the Origin. It gave the appearance of a plot, it set a narrative on the way, and that is all.

I can't remember much of the story because I lost the book almost as soon as I read it (this happened before with Sebald's Vertigo). Perhaps it is still in the Lost and Found in Chicago O'Hare. I remember a few barely sketched characters, figures from the narrator's life. I remember long, very boring passages, particularly in the second half of the story. And I remember discovering that everyone in the novel was dead, or the narrator was, and that the incident with which it began dissolved in this greater mystery. The narrator was dead and being rowed across the river familiar from Greek mythology - was that it?

In a sense, the story did not matter. In another sense, only the story could matter; a plot - the semblance of a plot - was necessary for something to get underway ... and it had to be sporadically absorbing, even - had to give some measure of narrative suspense in order to keep moving (a suspense which, for me, INLAND EMPIRE lacked, and was certainly absent from Kis' Hourglass, which I tried to read more recently). But that it kept moving was the thing, or it kept track of that secret movement that meant Nooteboom had to write and has, each time, to hang his writing on a plot only to dissolve that plot entirely. A plot indifferent to itself, that is somehow in lieu of itself, a novel that writes and erases what is written even as it is written. A novel whose pages are as though blank or that let that blankness shine through....

Necessity

Almost any post at This Space is, for me, like a drink of cool water. With almost any new post, my hope returns of a writing specific to this new genre of blogging - fragmentary, near anonymous (names might be given, but not the clue that would allow us to situate the named), sometimes occasional (a post prompted by a contingent event, to be sure, but that engages some measure of necessity thereby. Necessity: the law this new kind of writing near-anonymous and fragmentary might discover), or sometimes more direct, speaking only of a desire to write, or that to write is to somehow to fall short of writing; that there is a Writing beyond writing; that writing lives only as the hope of that other Writing which is also the hope of another Life.

The Pulley

What day is it? Monday afternoon. But which one, which Monday afternoon? Any one, any Monday at all. Stolen time in the office. An empty desire to - what? Write? Is that it?

Begin by quoting someone else, I tell myself. By making an occasion for writing, I tell myself. Writing needs that - an occasion, and particularly when one Monday afternoon is like any other. But who should I quote? A book by Bolano on my desk - I haven't opened it yet. A daunting book by X. ... shouldn't I be writing in the direction of something like that?

The inescapable feeling that it all went wrong somewhere. That writing turned a corner and ran into a swamp. And what is this afternoon but that, that swamp? Begin with an observation, I tell myself. Test your powers by observing the world. A hazy blue sky through the row of office windows. A view of the suburbs from the sixth floor. What should I write about them, the suburbs? And what of the sky?

If I was writing on a horizontal surface I could say I wanted the page to mirror the sky. A page written without occasion, lost in the mirror play of Mondays all exactly the same would lose itself in a sky that belongs to no particular day. A Monday sky like any other; a Monday page like any other. But the page (it's not a page, but a monitor, exactly like every other monitor) is vertical, and I'm typing, not writing.

There's no notebook here. No handwriting. Words appear letter by letter behind the vertical line of a cursor. There's no occasion, nothing to mark by writing, and no reason to write. But it's Monday, and I would like to begin. It's Monday afternoon and I would like to mark a new phase by beginning. I suppose you should have projects, something that you're working on. I suppose that is the way it's done, a way to bind day to day, to assemble them in a single chain and pull yourself up through the weeks and months. The project as pulley; the task that turns the swamp of Monday afternoons into a cliff face.

Climb, then; haul yourself up. By the task you will continue to be born. I'm working on ... I'm writing ... And when you're without projects? When your task has come apart and there's no movement through the day? You've failed the beginning; you've failed the test of beginning. Writing, that would need an occasion, has none. Even the poorest writing has that, an occasion. The poorest part of an oeuvre: occasional writing, merely occasional writing, still has that, an occasion, which you so signally lack.

Monday afternoon. One hour, that's what I'll allow myself. One hour ... I want the wheel of the day to turn. It's Spring, the days are lengthening, and therefore it's more important than ever to get the wheel of the day to turn. Nothing worse than the sense of being stranded in the middle of the day, when it becomes eternal.

It's the indifference of the day that's frightening. At least you can huddle against the night. At least close the curtains and turn on the light ... The sky's not as wide, the day's not everywhere. At night, a kind of beginning is made by switching on a light; in the day, the eternal day, the light was already on, and will always be on.

No beginning, then. No occasion when the day's back is turned. It'll drive you mad, the day. There's a kind of claustrophobia in its sheer breadth. Light falls upon all, equally. Light upon everyone, and eroding everyone. We're all dying, and I'm like anyone else and, I tell myself, especially similar to everyone else, though it makes no sense.

There is something terribly alluring to me about the past. I'm hardly interested in the future. I don't think it will hold many good things. But at least about the past you can have certain illusions.

Conversations with W.G. Sebald

Kafka wrote, 'A cage went in search of a bird'. What does this aphorism mean?[....] All the bird's movements, all the freedom it knows, are seen from another perspective as only flighty divagations from impending capture. The bird belongs to another's project: it is the cage that is determining.

Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form

Martyrs

Things are bad. We should kill ourselves, I tell W. For his part, W. says he's thought of setting himself on fire before a crowd like Domenico in Nostalghia. 'Not that it would do any good', he says.

The Lion of Judah

W.'s hair is very long now. It's a year since he last had it cut. Some of it falls in ringlets. It's his Jewishness, he tells me. He looks leonine, I tell him, like the lion of Judah.

Why don't you grow your hair long?, says W. I tell him I'll never grow my hair long. I like to be sleek and streamlined like a swimmer.

W.'s street. The houses at the bottom are no longer derelict, he says. You used to be able to see the faces of children behind the cracked windows like ghosts, but now developers have moved in. Flats are still popular in Plymouth, despite the housing slump. Once we toured the new developments at the Royal William Victualling Yard, where they took us for affluent lovers, we remember. The wide boulevards and the military grey of the buildings calmed us. W.'s street is all flats now, except for his house. We stand outside and admire its storeys.

W. and I are supposed to be thinking about Messianism, but our minds are blank.

What are your thoughts on Messianism?, asks W. I don't have any thoughts on Messianism, I tell him. What about you? W. isn't able to think about Messianism, he says. He's not capable of it, and neither am I.

This is how proper people think, says W., his arms held behind his back and his head raised. Do I look as though I'm having lofty thoughts?

He's reading Cohen's Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism at the moment, W. says, and there are whole stretches that he doesn't understand. I don't know what he's on about, W. says, but it's got something to do with maths.

W's studying differential calculus again. He's got a textbook and doing an online course. No matter how hard he tries, he only gets as far as the chapter, What is a Number? It's like parallel lines running to infinity but which never meet, W. comments of his relationship to maths.

The End Times

Sand beneath an exposed cobblestone. 'Under the paving stones, the beach', I say to W., who's showing me old Plymouth. Not much of the old city survives, W. comments. We pass through a walled medieval garden, with a low maze and a fountain. Alcoholics drink beneath a portico, listening to a radio. There's no one to move them on, W. says. He approves of that.

These are the end times, we both agree. It's enough to be left alone like the alcoholics, but our time will come just as their time will come. We'll be rounded up and shot, W. says.

A Pointing Tour

A tour of Plymouth, which was blitzed by the German airforce during the war. We compare the pictures of the city to those from before war in the books on the local history stand at Waterstones. In Germany, they would have rebuilt the city brick by brick, W. observes. That's what happened in Freiburg. Not here, though.

W. admires modern Plymouth, with its elegant lines and wide streets. We read about Abercrombie's Plan for Plymouth, published during the war, which saw the city organised in long boulevards, transected by the avenue that runs from the station to the Hoe. The building that houses Watertones was one of the few to survive the Luftwaffe, W. says. It was the quarters for the Plymouth Herald, and journalists went out onto the roof to kick the incendiaries away. Later I take a picture of him pointing to Waterstones, and we go on a 'pointing tour' of the buildings that survived the war in the city.

Mountbatten

The water taxi to Mountbatten. We're in choppy water, but we sit out on the exposed part of the deck. Poseidon must be angry, says W. Homerically. W.'s learning Greek again. Is the fifth time he's begun? the sixth? It's always the aorist that defeats him, he notes. Every time!

It's choppy! We should libate the sea, says W. Then he asks me if I know why the sea is salty. I tell him I don't. It's because mountains are salty, and the sea is full of broken up rocks, he says. The sea makes him happy, W. says. It's the ozone. A choppy sea releases ozone into the air, which makes everyone happy. What are your feelings about the sea?, asks W. Oh it makes me happy, I tell him. It's majestic.

The round, stubby tower at Mountbatten Point. W. seemed rueful the last we were here, two years ago or so, reading the plaque as he does this time. He must have been hungry, W. says. Hunger makes him very depressed. First his nose aches, then his teeth ache then he gets depressed, he says. What do you feel when you're hungry?, asks W. I never get hungry, I tell him. I'm careful about that. I think it was more than hunger, though, I tell W. That wasn't why you were rueful. For his part, W. is sure that I was the one who was rueful. I have no memory of that, I tell him. Either way, it would have had nothing to do with my being hungry.

W. cherishes my special love for the town of Turnchapel, near Mountbatten. I become gentler when I'm there, he notes, kinder. He likes my tender side. In another life, I would have lived here, I tell W. We muse wistfully on what I might have been like. A better person, W. thinks. Taller, with some nobility of character. I think I would have been gracious and other-oriented. I'm not other-orientated at all, I tell W. It's because I'm a troubled person. W. finds this very amusing. What are you troubled about? - Oh everything, life in general. - Well, you wouldn't have been troubled if you'd lived in Turnchapel, W. says.

At Jennycliff, high on the promotory, we find concrete sockets sunk into the ground, besides an abandoned bunker. There were guns here once, pointing out to sea from Plymouth Sound. We remember similar unoccupied sockets at Tynemouth Priory. W., who has a keen interest in military history, is intrigued. He thinks they date from World War One. The tower at Mountbatten was itself a Tudor fortification, W. remembers from the plaque. Then there was the construction of the Royal Citadel after the Civil War, which we can see from the promotory, with its cannon pointing both out to sea and into town, to remind its citizens not to rebel against the crown, W. says, Plymouth being a Parliamentarian city. Then the forts built in the early nineteenth century to defend the country against Napoleon, W. says, and notes that Napoleon himself spent two weeks in the city in the HMS Bellerophon before being shipped to St Helena. Now of course the forts are being converted into flats and leisure complexes, says W.

On our way back to the city, W. finds a plaque near Jennycliff which explains that the Sound is a flooded estuary or rea. 10,000 years, after the last ice age, the water must have broken in. Drake's Island was once a hillock, and the breakwater must have been built atop an existing ridge, to keep ships from running aground, we muse. Rea means estuary in Spanish, W. tells me.

Out of Use

Nikolai Dvigubsky's set for Mirror, says Tarkovsky (as related in a recent book) 'was an apartment in which time itself lived'. Time itself: but how was the director to show time, to let his audience feel its pressure? The secret was the shot, and preparing for the shot - for particular conditions of light, of weather. The shot, and a minimal number of takes for the shot. A single take was ideal, rehearsed but one-off: Tarkovsky wanted to allow time to flow, living and aleatory - wanted to capture and release what he called 'the ceaseless flow of living life that surrounds us'. To capture it and release it, both at once: the shot must breathe, live. And it must let time live ...

In the end, I'm not sure what this means. I must think about it my own way. Morning, the acid-cleaned yard, dry and bright like the surface of the moon. The rearranged plants. The new table at which I write, at right angles to the window, no longer looking directly out. Pink painted wallpaper instead. A quilt made for hanging instead; a pot for pens. A CD - The Drift. My appointments diary, and then the book on Tarkovsky from which I quoted. This, all this and the light that falls indifferently upon everything, shady in this room, bright outside. The light, indifferent and calm ...

How to let time live? How to give life to the shot (the imaginary shot that pans around my flat ...)? I would like to lift the occasional to the eternal, write that. That's what I'd like, without knowing what it means: to lift the morning into the eternal and let it be bathed in its light. The eternal: and in writing as clear and luminous as the moon's surface. Writing that receives its light from the hidden source of the day, from the sun above the hazy cloud. That burns with that light, with its indifference, its distance.

And now I imagine that that's not the way time might be found, but something else. A kind of undoing, an uncoupling of moment from moment. The wearing away of time, of linearity, of succession. Sometimes I imagine there is a kind of passion of daylight. That, seen from a certain angle, light will fall into itself and the day turns inwards and away, discovering another dimension. That just as the third dimension might unfold from a second - a line becomes a cube, and with the fourth, is set in motion, there is a fifth and a sixth ... an infinite succession. The day unfolds itself in itself, it blooms there. Only this is the opposite of a bloom, its movement is different. The day is discovering itself. The day explores itself in itself; the sun not only shines outward, but inward, light pressing into light.

Where is time alive? Right now? In this room? Or outside, over the acid-cleaned yard? In the sky, or in the sun above the sky? I would like the gates of writing to enclose and free this other time. For writing to lose the eternal and to keep it. Tell a story in order to admit what cannot be told. A narrative that speaks of what fails to happen and withdraws. That loses an event in the Event, time in the fraying of time.

I am in Manchester again, write that. It's the middle of the 90s, write that. There's the meadows and the river that runs down to Didsbury, write that. Who was I talking to? What were we talking about, wandering along the path? I don't think we had plans. We were too old for them, and too young. Too old - we thought nothing unexpected would happen. The same would remain the same. One day would pass, another, and here we were, in the middle of life, already lost. And too young - because we had no come up against the world; the city hadn't been regenerated, the unemployed hadn't been called in for training. Benefits rained munificently upon us. We were unemployed, ill, and lived on the benefits that fell everywhere like soft rain.

No plans, nothing to talk about. In truth, we'd worn away every topic. There was nothing of which to speak, nothing in particular, and therefore everything. Speech, voided was filled with light. Our long days - it was always summer - seemed to live not only in our words, but in the silences between them, in the inanity of our humour. We joked, we wore jokes away. We spoke and wore down speech: what was there left to say. But, as we reached it, it was this void we seemed to have in common. Or that seemed to me, at least, what we shared, what was held between us, and that made us the terms of a relationship that seem to precede us and would outlast us. As though it looked only for speakers who had worn away speech. As though it waited there at the edge of speech, for speech to lost its referent, and wander, like the day, into itself.

A wandering speech. A speech lost from what there is to speak about. A speech that has left behind topics and issues. Who were you, and who was I? No one in particular. Neither of us was anyone in particular. It was summer, eternal summer, and the sun blazed above the clouds, lost in itself. The day drew itself up to its fiery point. And speech was drawn into itself between us. And speech drew us, I imagined, to the fiery point at its centre. A point that was, in truth, only an involution, a crossing point to another dimension. Speech had its passion there, between us. Speech looked to attain itself there.

Once I went out with a girl into the uncertainty of the meadows. Was it my birthday or hers? Were we carrying a picnic? We sat in the grass - was that it? We spoke - but what did we speak about? I think