Swimming in the Real
'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort ...' What kind of sea is this, and what kind of swimmer? Blanchot's Thomas swims in an ideal sea - a sea that he can pass through because of his capacity to think. Is he really swimming? Is he really risking himself? He reminds me of Scholasticus, who was said to have learnt to swim from books, on dry land, and when he swam drowned at once. But Thomas's ideal sea quickly becomes real; he nearly drowns ... What, then, of Blanchot's account of narrative, and its risks for writers, for readers, as they attempt to tell by way of a récit of that becoming impersonal that is also implied by our relation to language? I would like to consider this question alongside a recent post of Sinthome's.
For Blanchot, we relate to the world symbolically, through language. But this is scarcely a relation, for it is set so deeply enough within us it no longer we no longer constitute a subject that would stand over and above an object (the referent, the state of affairs) - what then? It is the condition of relation; the medium that allows us to open our eyes and see. As theorised and practiced by Blanchot (the two, in this case, are not so different), the récit (tale, narrative) pertains to that telling in which this condition breaks down - in which relation, by way of the text (the récit as a literary genre, relating a particular event in the past) is broken from its object and from its subject too. No relation between them, no condition of relation, except for what he calls the 'relation without relation' as it points to the 'there is' of language as it is broken from teller and what is to be told. Unless what is to be told is only that breaking - only language as it attains itself, its own being, its thickness, its density. But note this 'there is' is reached by way of language. That it depends upon a certain experience of meaning and happens by way of it.
Some writers are unafraid to let the narrative voice speak in place of a narrator's voice, where this names now language telling of itself. Writers who, by way of the events they report, by way of them, also tell of this other telling, this non-pulsed return of the itself of language. In Blanchot's récits, a kind of fascination seizes you (if it does) and carries you through the pages. Until it is what is told by way of the story that fascinates - by way, for example, of the insect of Kafka's story as it hovers, as Steve says, between the symbolic and the non-symbolic (between language and the fact that there is language). Perhaps it is a cockroach. But it is also more than an insect, for it speaks of a belonging to the same 'there is', to language as it flees in the opposite direction to the reader and seems to lead her into the page. Reading becomes a risk.
After the Fact
The French après coup can be translated as 'after the fact'; after - a little too late; regretfully. Something has happened over which we are helpless. Hyphenate après coup and you have the French translation of Nachträglichkeit, that deferred action that presents what was not evident the first time. It is thus that for Freud a primal scene reveals itself - after the fact, not at once; it can be discerned and deduced from its effects: it is the task of psychoanalysis to uncover that primordial event.
The author who adds a preface to his récit risks defusing what happened in it by linking it too strongly to his name. The narrative voice risks being confused with the narrating voice, and that with the author's own, who has forgotten the risk he took in writing the récit that made him no longer a subject and the referent no longer that object he could communicate through prose.
He has usurped the no one who wrote in his place - that absence of self considered in relation to the experience of language, to that writing without power, that writing without being able to (sans pouvoir). A paradoxical expression - for isn't there precisely a text, a written text that produces a writer, an author?
Certainly, but there is another experience that belongs to writing, and it is this the notion of the récit captures - that beside any telling, any roman (novel) there is also a récit, that secret tale of how language became opaque, how it withdrew into itself, how a relation unravelled itself from its terms and unravelled them, its terms, subject and object.
A récit within the roman, accompanying it, that the reader senses, and the critic - Blanchot - would expose. A secret story, a secret telling wherein language is concerned only with itself, and this by way of the surface of the text, its meaning. As the details of the telling - the glass of water the narrator would fetch, the snowflakes that brush against the window - are part of something massively dense, something unreal. As they point beyond themselves as to the plinth upon which the artwork rests. A plinth that is greater than the work and dwarfs it, as it sometimes does with Giacometti. The material support of an artwork that exceeds it, engulfs it and thickens itself into infinity.
The Idyllic Law
What is the significance of the reference to events on the historical stage in Blanchot's récits - to the Munich accords in Death Sentence, for example, or the bombed synagogue on the rue de la Victoire mentioned in passing in When the Time Comes? Here is Leslie Hill:
Blanchot's récits do not recount historical events, even when those events correspond to crucial turning points in modern history, like the ill-fated signature of the Munich accords that forms the political backdrop to Death Sentence, or the bombing of the synagogue in the rue de la Victorie in Paris in October 1941, recalled almost exactly half-way through When the Time Comes. Such events are nevertheless present in the margins of Blanchot's texts, but not as episodes in a completed narrative sequence. Events like these are not just crises in history, Blanchot suggests; they are crises of history, and they challenge the possibility of narrative itself.
Crises of history: is this a name for what happens in the récits? Is crisis the word, with its etymological links to the idea of division, of a cut? A break in history, in the order of history - is this the equivalent of what happens in the récit to narration? Is a crisis, a division, already marked in the récit with respect to that narration that is the possibility of history?
Questions Blanchot seems to address himself in his short essay 'After the Fact' when he reflects on his early story 'The Idyll' that seems so strangely to anticipate what was to come. Eerie scenes of work without purpose, where prisoners take stones dug out of a mountain in the heat of the day, and rebury them from where they have been dug. Executions assured by a sense of absolute justice, with kindness, even, but with a sense that it must be done.
'The Idyll', Blanchot says, cannot be read as an augur of the terrible events to come. The story of the stranger, the exile, cannot be read allegorically; the story, to this extent, remains 'a stranger to itself'; it must not be reduced to its ostensible contents, 'to anything that can be expressed in any other way'. It remains obdurately itself; happy in itself without reference to historical events. '[I]t itself is the idyll', Blanchot writes, and a little further on, recalls the arguments from The Infinite Conversation that come together to constitute his theory of the récit.
... before all distinctions between form and content, between signifier and signified, even before the division between utterance and the uttered, there is the unqualifiable Saying, the glory of a 'narrative voice' that speaks clearly, without ever being obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what it communicates.
A dense passage. Saying, the to-say, is Levinas's expression for the relation to the Other that is marked and remembered in all speech in writing, in the order of what is said. Marked so that it sets itself back from what is communication, from the contents of the said, but also from what can be said, insofar as this capacity rests upon the capacity of the 'I' to speak and write in its own name, to pull together past, present and future, synthesising them in the present of enunciation.
It is to this extent saying breaks with the economy of signs, with the distinction between signifier and signified, marking not to what can be said, but that it is said by the very fact that is addressed to another. This 'that' is saying as it accompanies and bears the said, even as the said seems analysable into signifier and signified. But of course, to remember Levinas, it is also what attests to the Other, the addressee, who escapes the order of being, insofar as the order is predicated on the form of the 'I', its subjectivity.
It is the Other who gives speech a direction and orientation - who calls speech from 'I' such that it reveals the play of the Other in the Same, the prior investment of the 'I' by the Other. As such, speech may be said to be responsible, and from the first - or, as Levinas says, from before the first; responsibility is pre-originary, to the extent that it precedes the interiority of the subject. Saying is that 'passivity beyond passivity' in which subjectivity is subjected to the Other.
The narrative voice is Blanchot's own expression, and to be contrasted to the voice of a particular narrator in literary fiction. It belongs, rather, to language itself - to that experience of language which, in the récit, doubles what is said, accompanying it with a narrative that bears upon the materiality of language itself, its heaviness or density as the words of which it is comprised are understood not as they lend themselves to the construction of a fictional world, but as they reveal their own stolid indifference to reference, their own withdrawal from sense (from a certain account of the measure of sense).
Language becomes imaginary, to use another Blanchotian word - that is, it pertains to the material substrate of language, to the impersonal grammatical forms and the heavy particularity of words in a natural language as they give themselves to be animated by speakers and writers, but also resist that animation, being themselves dead. Or rather, remembering Hegel's use of the word death as a synonym for that act of negation by which, through language the 'real' world is taken up into the 'ideal' world of language, those words remain in a dying that exceed death, and cannot be captured by negation.
Dying exceeds the measure of death, of negation. The imaginary exceeds the reality of the world that language, on Hegel's conception, makes possible: it is of this the narrative voice speaks, figuring dying and the imaginary in the episodes of the récit. Characters no longer quite coincide with themselves; events do not happen punctually; strange moods drift like fog through the events; what remain of dialogue seems to fall away from verisimilitude: the strangeness of the récits is due to that narrative voice that would allow its episodes to indicate a certain experience of language.
This is the law of the récit, as Blanchot identifies it. Its idyll, even as what is narrated is the idyllic law of the house reinforced by punishment, by absurd labour and beatings, administered with a smile, for this is what is supposed by its inhabitants to maintain its comfort and happiness.
Then the idyllic law of the récit - or perhaps what is usually called a récit - answers to a faith in the comfort, the luxury, the happiness of telling. That telling is possible, that hope will follow despair, and, as with the end of Kafka's story, after Gregor Samsa's death, his sister will leap up and stretch her young body in the sun.
Crises of History
In his essay on the récit in 'The Sirens' Song' (an essay that is also a récit, as perhaps all Blanchot's are), he will separate récit and roman, allowing the latter to name the bright book of life that bears the confidence of telling, that has confidence in its ability to speak of all, of everything. And the récit? It names, now the impossibility of telling, of narration, and of the sense of what is usually meant by récit. It names, that is, what bears fidelity to what cannot be told.
The roman, then, answers to the order of the possible, of the voice of a narrator, of the said, the récit to the impossible, to the narrative voice, to saying ... as does, of course, Blanchot's by turns creative, literary critical and philosophical oeuvre, all of which can be read, as he commented on the oeuvre of Paulhan, as a récit, as a series of récits. Then we must distinguish what is usually called the récit, a literary genre, and Blanchot's theoretical practice, which attempts to tell what it cannot. To run up against the impossible, and more than that - to indicate and remember it.
'[T]here can be no fiction story about Auschwitz', Blanchot writes; what happened there can be recounted only 'by the impossible witnesses, witnesses of the impossible' who can speak of what happened only singularly, 'in the singularity of each individual'. And Kofman, commenting on Blanchot: 'About Auschwitz and after Auschwitz no story is possible, if by a story one means: to tell a story of events which makes sense.'
Antelme only wrote one book, The Human Race, that tells unforgettably of his experiences in Ganderscheim and Dachau. If he had written another, he wrote to a friend, it would have been like a récit of Blanchot. One of those récits that spoke of the impossible in its own way. The récit, then, not only concerns an experience of language. Or it concerns that experience insofar as it is also bound up with what happened in the camps, in those crises of history that tore history in two. And it is peculiarly able to do so because of the way in which it works, because of its form.
In what sense can a récit witness an event? Think of the moods from which the recits' characters seem to emerge (and into which they often return), in the repeated actions that seem to break into a weird kind of eternity (Louise combing Claudia's hair in When the Time Comes); and think, alongside them, of the bombed Synagogue on the rue de la Victoire, the Munich peace accords. The récit is obsessed with what returns as the indeterminable, the incessant - with what cannot be integrated by the order of narration that characterises the roman (even if every roman, as Blanchot shows, harbours a secret récit). Roman versus récit, the possible versus the impossible, death versus dying, saying versus the said ... how is the relationship between these coupled terms, these crises of history to be thought?
Saying Sense
Sinthome quotes from Blanchot's Thomas. 'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort ...' Thomas enters an ideal sea, which quickly becomes real. He nearly drowns, but this does not disturb him as it should.
Sinthome comments that Thomas becomes impersonal, 'as he and the sea become the same. The sea within which he swims shifts from being the "ideal sea" to the "real sea". He fades as a distinct subject, carried along as he is by the tide'. This as part of Sinthome's discussion of receptivity where, he emphasises, world and the agent who acts must be thought together.
'[W]orld and agent are both precipitated out of this process like by-products, introducing a bit of order into the infinitely complex bramble of chaos'. This is Sinthome's 'slice within chaos' that marks 'the space of an engagement', which happens 'in between'. The relation, here, alters its terms; it is a question neither of agent nor world by themselves, but their interaction; information, understood as noun and a verb, marks the emergence of information from chaos. Information that is, as Sinthome says, 'always in-form-ation; or more simply, it is in formation. It is something perpetually coming-to-be'. And this, I think is how we can see the first term in the apparently binarisms I have drawn from Blanchot's oeuvre.
Sinthome goes further, showing how information, as verb, as noun, is that site in which we cannot distinguish the active from the passive as, for example, Kant does in the distinction between the spontaneity of the understanding and the passive receptivity of the aesthetic of intuition. This passivity beyond passivity, to borrow Blanchot's phrase involves both an aesthesis, understood etymologically as a sensing and that production of form that might be thought in terms of an aesthetic making. Sinthome gives us the example of the artist who gives form to the medium which in turn gives form to the artist, joining both aesthesis and what we know as aesthetics. The artist who in-forms and is herself in formation; a slice within chaos where each term - artist, medium is altered.
What does Blanchot's récit accomplish? The narration of this encounter, this slice within chaos. Of that passivity beyond passivity that recalls the originary production that is always at work in our receptivity. A production, however, that has to be understood differently from what Hegel calls work, since it is conceived on the basis of negation, which is insufficiently nuanced to understand the process of emergence that the récit narrates.
Mourning and Melancholy
In her beautiful book Mourning Becomes Law, which The Young Hegelian (his blog has gone!) inspired me to reread, Gillian Rose claims we need an activity beyond activity rather than Blanchot's passivity beyond passivity. Blanchot refuses, says Rose, the work of mourning - the labour of entering into that learning process through which one accepts one's complicity in structure of power, in tyranny without turning entirely away from them, remaking thereby my sense of myself, 'the bonding and boundaries between me and me, subject and subjectivity, singular and individual, non-conscious and conscious'. It is not that all wounds will be healed and the dead rise again, but that others can learn of their complicity in what happened, so that they can mourn and reintegrate what occurred - not all at once, but over time, and with difficulty. A necessary labour.
Then it is the integrity of the subject that must be kept - its subjectivity, its personhood, will and resoluteness; its capacity for reflective and involuntary action - its positing, its self-positing: this is what must be reachieved by that work that does not dissever the impossible from the possible, but thinks them together. The singular must become the particular, an instance; the nonsensical must be brought into the light of meaning so that melancholy is not infinite.
And here we might remember the Hegel Zizek presents in For They Know Not What They Do - not the strawman for whom the onroll of the dialectic sweeps up the totality, but the figure for whom history is about what is learned painfully and through terrible trials, who describes that Bildungsroman through which substance becomes subject, through which ever more complex self-positings succeed one another until ... until what? Zizek's Hegel never finds rest in Absolute Knowledge. History as Nachträglichkeit, a learning what was already there. The Bildungsroman that speaks of the whole of the past?
The Re-ject
A necessary labour, work? A long time ago, Sinthome wrote with great candour of his frustration (here I am understanding it in my own way) of those who are theoretically committed to x or y without living that same commitment, without their lives being risked by their 'work'. This is what being a psychoanalyst means for Sinthome. Risky work, work without quotation marks: a suffering person to be diagnosed and, if not 'cured', then led to that point at which life is once again possible. Work, however, that implicates those who are part of analysis, changing them in a manner very similar to what Sinthome describes as a 'space of an engagement', or the 'in between': '[W]e always want to treat the object of analysis as independent of our analysis of it and ourselves as independent of the object we engage with, not seeing the manner in which our engagement with that object produces it while it produces us.'
What kind of work does Blanchot's récit permit? It is not a Bildungsroman, to be sure. In another post, Sinthome tells us how he recoils in horror when he is asked what is philosophy, or what his research is about. 'To ask what someone's research or philosophy is, is to ask them to simultaneously formulate a proposition and state the sense of that proposition. Yet I can say what I mean or mean what I say, but I cannot say what I mean and mean what I say.' Then I only know what I'm working on once I've finished work; the preface to a book, making sense of the project as a whole, comes after the fact, after the book is complete. I can only know the pro-ject as a re-ject, as Sinthome says; which means Nachträglichkeit is the law of the work.
This might remind us of Hegel, and the adventure of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit: the course of the dialectic is not given in advance; its onroll, totalising as it may appear does not emerge into clarity except as its particular phases come to an end. Can Hegel ever say the sense of what he says (language and that there is language)? Zizek's Hegel can; to say the sense of what he says means the dialectic is kept perpetually open. This is what means to say with Sinthome that all philosophies are lived - that thinking is experiential and experimental, a projection into a future whose course is unknown.
Philosophy discovers what it is as it proceeds. In this sense, is it so different from the Blanchotian récit? For the Blanchotian writer it is language itself that is of concern. It is the image of language which fascinates the writer - its material presence, its rhythms and sonorities, its grain, and perhaps every writer has something in her of the poet, for whom every word must also sound.
'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort ...' This passage from Blanchot is also an account of the experience of writing, of experience the reality of words, as it is indistinguishable from what he calls the imaginary. Words' reality, words become imaginary paralysing the movement of sense, idling every word, and joining every work to worklessness.
What can Blanchot offer in the face of Rose's argument? What risk? Language broken, the world in fragments, worklessness ... a woeful vocabulary, that speaks only of failure. But perhaps, each time, these are way of naming another kind of work, one which, like philosophy (Hegelian philosophy) is ruled by Nachträglichkeit, and discovers itself only after the fact; one that is experiential and experimental. And one that speaks negatively of what Sinthome affirms as a 'space of engagement', the 'in between' or that 'slice of chaos' which, in the récit - naming a practice of fiction, but also, perhaps, a kind of theorising which keeps memory of the real conditions of production (of information as verb) - achieves a marriage of aesthesis and aesthetics. But what, then, is the relation of this kind of work to Hegelian work, or to what Rose, after Freud, calls the work of mourning? Do the récits, remembering the crises of history, accomplish their own kind of work?
