Two Thoughts at Once
Bacchylides, Blanchot remembers, says that because human beings are finite they must harbour two thoughts at once. Two thoughts, ways of thinking, as they presumably accord with what Blanchot calls the possible and the impossible. Blanchot attempts to sustain a difference which will not close up into a unity – a vacillating movement which does not come to rest. As such, one cannot speak simply of two orders of thought, or of two different ways of thinking; nor can the possible be simply counterposed to the impossible.
There is thought as comprehension, the attempt to understand the world, and then the experience where thought is exposed to what thought and the thinker cannot enclose. There is the thinker who throws thought like a falcon up from his arm - who hunts by thought in obscure forests, and the subject of a thinking that seizes him in its talons. But both experiences of thought must be thought together: the hunter is hunted in turn; the forest crowds up and fills his vision and he is torn apart by a thought too great for him to bear.
We must begin with words, for Blanchot, in the midst of words, since it is language which grants the possibility of thought, of thinking. But this possibility is doubled by what is named by the impossible: the corridors of prose risk turns and detours; byways of thought become overgrown, and the forest path leads not to Heidegger's clearing but to a labyrinth of branches that cover the sky. The thinker is lost because he is lost from himself. Who is that wanders in his place, lost before he has composed a line?
The Tone of Writing
There is an experience of language that reveals itself in a certain tone, says Blanchot; the work trembles, and something is indicated rather than said. What speaks? Language thickened and congealed; the clot of language as it blocks the arteries of what is ordinarily understood as sense. Now the heart of meaning beats no more; there is no commerce between language and what it names. Language is impassable; every word has been put out of use.
But now, in its impossibility, language is pressed upon itself, thickened, until it resembles the things of which it would speak. Words lie idled like the tanks in Stalker's Zone; sentences place great parentheses around themselves. Language refers, it means - and yet by way of meaning, it indicates what is impossible to say: the fact that it is more than a medium, that it does more than convey.
Wittgenstein: 'the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world is not any proposition in language, it is the existence of language itself' (via). The existence of language, that it is and that there is communication, which is more than the content of what is said - isn't this a way of understanding what is meant by impossibility? Only if the existence of language is understood to be parenthesised with the existence of its user; if it is known that no one speaks in the place of the one who would make language do his bidding.
No one speaks - but how is this marked in prose? How is it marked even after the writer has recovered strength after its lapse? By itstone. It is tone in which the difference between the possible and the impossible are maintained; by tone the prose work brings to birth its secret récit.
And now I imagine the work of prose unfurling the secret of its inception, a bloom opening by darkness. Unless it is the night that blooms from the heart of the day of meaning and the sky is flooded black. That there is language. That language might speak of its own address. What sort of speech act theory could lay bare this event? One risked as it is writing, which performs what it cannot say directly. Not a theory, then, but a kind of practice: both at once and neither one nor the other.
Then I can write as a theorist of experiencing language, but I must experience it, too. Am I a practitioner, then, and that first of all? But in practice I am also commenting, doubling up what happens as language becomes language. My practice is already a repetition; to write is always to rewrite; to work by beginning over. And then it is also a kind of theory - an elaboration, that while bent upon its own occurence must unbend like an inchworm who moves forward on the branch.
To move thus is also to theorise; theory and practice are folded each into the other. But this means the theorist is also a practitioner; and writing must always re-echo with the saying that precedes it, the fact that, as language, it is more than a tool which gives itself to our disposal. Then all writing is practice and theory both; or writing is exclusively neither one nor the other. Any word, any sentence might open the difference between language and itself, that is, between the possible and the impossible as language, across language: the neuter.
What is fiction? What is poetry? That Zone in which words lie abandoned and new rules apply. Who is the poet, the writer of fiction? The Stalker who's lost his way in the Zone and is unable to lead others there. What has he made? He does not know. And how to find his way there? That, too, he has forgotten, being exiled from his work.
Let's say I write of the damp in my flat, of the yard that spreads before me; I write - and that damp, that yard are sea- or water-changed like the items over which Tarkovsky's camera pans in the film. The items of Stalker's nightstand are there in the water, ancient. And so with every detail, with every 'occasional' circumstance my writing sets itself back into the past, into the Zone which is only a name for that past that writing endlessly recalls and repels behind it.
Dream of the philosopher who, beginning a paper, loses herself in her occasional remarks, or in the examples she uses to illuminate a point. But dream, too, of the writer who becomes a philosopher by writing; who abandons the simple romanticism that lets him think that critics are only failed writers.
Arrogance of the practitioner: to think, after ready out his poem, his prose, not to expect questions as exacting as those faced by the philosophy. But then imagine the philosopher who can give no account, who has journeyed like Kurtz to the heart of darkness and has gone mad there. Then is that what the philosopher is to become, a mutterer in darkness like Marlon Brando's Kurtz? Only if the practitioner, passing him on the way up the river, becomes a speaker in the full light of the day, accountable for every word he says.
Between Parentheses
Very simply: Blanchot both allows language to double itself, to become its own image, as he would put it, and comments on this doubling; he is a practitioner and a theorist of writing, whose intertwining of fiction and theory in his fragmentary works continues a process that began when he started Thomas the Obscure in 1930.
I will try in vain to represent him to myself, he who I was not and who, without wanting to, began to write, writing (and knowing it then) in such a way that the pure product of doing nothing was introduced into the world and into his world. That happened 'at night'. During the day there were the daytime acts, the day to day words, the day to day writing, affirmations, values, habits, nothing that counted and yet something that one had confusedly to call life. The certainty that in writing he was putting between parentheses precisely this certainty, including the certainty of himself as the subject of writing, led him slowly, though right away, into an empty space whose void (the barred zero, heraldic) in no way prevented the turns and detours of a very long process.
These lines close to opening of The Step Not Beyond. But 'Doing nothing' - how is it that writing can be understood according to this phrase? To write is to act - to produce words on the page. An act, Hegel says, that depends upon a kind of negation; that of which I want to write is transformed so as to reach the page. Negativity is recuperated; the positivity of words is the result of a labour that involved a plunge into the night of negativity. But this night abides in another kind of writing, that seeks to suspend the work of negation, understood as what allows the death of its 'object' to give way to its resurrection on the page.
(And one should remember that the 'object' is co-constituted by what the process that allows one to evoke it: isn't this Nietzsche's lament, who would attempt to make language sing, to make incarnate, insofar as it can, what he discovered in musical dissonance? Tragedy and language, time and the return, body and the will: all are thought, by Nietzsche, close to the experience of music and of language as it tries and fails to give body to the musical.
Dionysian music, for Nietzsche, as is emphasised in Schmidt's interesting study, does not seek what Nietzsche called revenge against time; it lets joy and mourning coincide, and loss and fullness to be present at once. Nietzsche's problem is to lead language to the 'site of dissonance', as Schmidt calls it, 'to the very site of the pain and contradiction of life that get plastered over by the so-called truths of religion and philosophy'.
For Blanchot, of course, there could be no site of dissonance except in language; the musical must be thought of first of all through language, and not as its alternative. But perhaps the musical names, too, the doubling of language upon itself - its withdrawal to wander in its own corridors without reference to the world. Writing lost in its own forest, its own labyrinth, and without that clearing in which truth would bring the world to light.
Pain should have sung, not spoken, writes Nietzsche in the preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Sung - but as the Sirens sing in every word, for Blanchot, and any word can detach itself from the order of what is usually called sense. But can it be called song, that errancy, that wandering in which another experience of truth reveals itself? To write in lieu of truth, but not mourning its absence. In lieu - and wandering in truth's long shadow, the dark path that stretches for as long as the absence of time to which writing belongs.)
This 'other' writing aims to incarnate the thing itself in words - to make language itself into a thing, heavy and obdurate, so that language is no longer the medium that would permit of the transparency of communication. And in this process, the ordinary existence of the one who writes the word 'I' is likewise suspended so that it is no longer certain what it means to consider the writer as a writing subject.
There is a kind of bracketing instead, of 'the daytime acts, the day to day words, the day to day writing, affirmations, values, habits, nothing that counted and yet something that one had confusedly to call life'. Ordinary life is placed between parentheses; the author is given to dying in some important way, or seeks to remain in death, on the side of the object not yet transformed into words, into the ideality of meaning.
In this way, 'the pure product of doing nothing was introduced into the world and into his world'; but this is not the result of a deliberate effort: '... he who I was not and who, without wanting to, began to write': to write is to suspend what depends on the work of negation, letting the 'I' gives way to the 'il', to the 'he', or 'it'. Personal life gives way to dying; time to the return of the incessant.
Blanchot allows the word writing, like the word récit a double meaning - it refers to a determinate activity, or a body of work, but it can also name the event that gives itself as the prior hollowing of the writer's self. It names a 'doing nothing', a worklessness on the hither side of the time of projects and accomplishments.
To write as a question of writing, question that bears the writing that bears the question, no longer allows you this relation to the being- understood in the first place as tradition, order, certainty, truth, any form of taking root - that you received one day from the past of the world, domain you had been called upon to govern in order to strengthen your 'Self' although this was as if fissured, since the day when the sky opened upon its void.
This passage, from the same fragment in The Step Not Beyondmeditates on the composition of Blanchot's first novel. How should we read them? As an account of how the young Blanchot, the political journalist, concerned precisely with tradition, order and certainty - with the root of France, with the Monarchy, with Catholicism was turned from these certainites?
This is at least part of it. By writing, Blanchot unlearnt his radicalism - how could his life be fixed to a root?, or, more broadly, to any system of values, order and certainty, all truth and enrootedness. The self was not to be unified; writing confirmed the fissure by which the self was set back into what it could not accomplish or overcome. Gradually, 'by turns and detours', Blanchot will draw the consequences of the demand of writing, and attempt to live and think as a response to this event.
