Spurious

When Will You Come?

'Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature - this cannot be sufficiently emphasised - a theory of catastrophe', says Scholem. In disastrous times - when the stars that crowded the sky of Western civilisation fall one by one - the Messiah would arrive in the midst of the disaster as the redeemer, the most just of the just: is this how we should understand Blanchot's reflections on the Messianic idea? Only if we remember that this arrival will not occur once and for all - at the end of history, say, at the wrap up; it promises neither a stable utopia nor a restoration of a lost order. 

The Messiah comes, if he does so, without having a part in duration. It is certainly possible to wonder whether anything happened. Whether it did, for Blanchot, can be decided only if we abandon that variety of narrative which raises the representation of the past over against the lived past, albeit a living or being-lived that is very close to what he will call dying. We will have to learn to speak of ourselves in another way; a task for which Jewish monotheism - as rethought by Blanchot in dialogue with his friend Levinas - is peculiarly fitted.

The Messianic Now

Towards the end of The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot retells the familiar story of the Messiah who waits in hiding with the beggars and lepers at the gates of Rome. He is recognised and asked, 'When will you come?' Blanchot comments: 'His being there is, then, not the coming'. The Messiah is, on one sense, present - he is there with the others, a beggar among beggars, a leper among lepers; he is one to whom questions can be asked. But, for Blanchot, 'His presence is no guarantee'; 'With the Messiah, who is there, the call must always resound: "Come, come"'.

When will you come? The Messiah, as Scholem comments, is often understood in the Rabbinical literature to be already amongst us. He is present, but occulted; and here, Blanchot highlights that this occultation occurs even in the Messiah's ostensible presence. It is as though the Messiah were here and not yet here, present and not yet present, still to come.

This, to be sure, is also in keeping with the literature on the Messiah. The Jewish idea of the Messiah is not eschatological, as it is in Christianity. The Messiah does not arrive at the end of a linear course of time, but interrupts it, redeeming it. Is it for this redemption that the questioner of the Messiah, on Blanchot's account, is asking? 'Today', the Messiah replies to his questioner (traditionally the Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, although Blanchot does not name him).

On its usual recounting, the Rabbi doesn't believe him, and complains to Elijah, suspecting he is being lied to. Elijah explains that what is meant is 'Today, if you will hear his voice'. In The Writing of the Disaster, this explanation is put into the mouth of the Messiah. To the unnamed questioner's 'When will you come?' we find the answer, 'Now, if only you heed me, or if you are willing to heed my voice'.

When will the Messiah come? The Messianic literature sometimes suggests a causal link between the morality of human beings and the Messiah's coming. The Messiah will come only if specific conditions are met. Is this why the Rabbi is unable to truly hear his voice? Certainly, the Messiah is, for him, a man among men, a human being as ordinary as you or I. But in another sense, he is not there yet; he is still to come. Then to hear the Messiah means a condition must have been met. One would have to have been able to receive the Messiah's speech, to have earned it.

Still commenting on the Messianic literature as it passes through the readings of Levinas and Scholem, Blanchot notes that the Jewish Messiah is not necessarily divine. Certainly he is a comforter, even 'the most just of the just', as is his traditional apothegm, 'but it is not even sure that he is a person - that he is someone in particular'. As Scholem comments, the figure of the Messiah is always vague in the literature. 'Features of the varying historical and psychological origins are gathered into this medium of fulfilment and coexist within it so that they do not furnish a clear picture of the man'.

But Blanchot sees in this vagueness something other than underdetermination. 'When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I, he is not exalting himself. Anyone might be the Messiah - must be he, is not he'. Anyone might be the Messiah: this is truly surprising. For Scholem, the Messiah is occulted, waiting in hiding; perhaps there are conditions set for his arrival. But now Blanchot suggests that the Messiah is hidden in each of us, inseparable from us and that we each of us might be in some way the 'comforter' and 'the most just of the just'. But how so? What licenses this interpretation?

Speech

Blanchot is indebted, of course, to Rosenzweig and Levinas who, as Martin Kavka has shown us, seek to embed religious notions into the deepest categories of human existence. Both place emphasis on the uniqueness of the uniqueness of the interhuman relation, whose terms are claimed to belong to no genus, and to the importance of love as a commandment, as a summons to take responsibility for the Other.

For both thinkers, redemption occurs through the task of loving. But for Rosenzweig, the revelation of God does not take place solely in tems of the interhuman relation. It still bears a relationship to a revelation whose source is extraworldy. Levinas's adherence to phenomenology, however, demands he search for the source of religious notions in what is concretely given. God, for him, is revealed exclusively through the relation to the Other. But what does this mean? 

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), can be called immediate.

Whereas philosophers have, according to Levinas, traditionally 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.

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 seem to be the result of linguistic representation.

For Levinas, God is not revealed with the Other, a face behind the face, as a kind of divine supplement, but is present only in my spoken answer to the Other. When I speak to the Other, God likewise speaks. It is not that there is anything specific about the Other outside of my relation to him, that commands this response. A kind of commandment is already present in what I say to the Other ('the command is stated by the mouth of him it commands'). In speech, in what Levinas calls witnessing, there is produced something in me that is not of me ('the-other-in-the-same'); the infinite, conceived by analogy with Descartes' idea of the infinite in the third Meditation - breaks into the closed order of my finitude.

But how is the infinite actually experienced? Levinas coins the word illeity in order to indicate the way in which God is transcendent. This word is formed from il or ille, indicating the passing of the infinite, that is, the way in which the infinite reveals itself without yielding to the meaning-giving powers of intentionality. The word illeity, he-ness or it-ness, is meant to express the way in which God is given to be experienced.

Why does Levinas refuse to speak in the manner of Buber of God in the second person, as a you-ity? Why does illeity remain in the third person? In speaking, in witnessing, the 'il' of illeity is a word for the impersonality of the relation to the Other. It thus expresses the enigma of this relation insofar as it holds God apart from me, from my finitude, even as it interrupts that finitude (the-other-in-the-same that is Levinas's notion of the subject). Illeity, in its impersonality appears in the particular personality of the Other.

But this bestows the possibility of another reading, where the impersonality of illeity is understood as a name for a feature of speech. In order to explore this fully, I would have to take a long detour, showing how Blanchot is suspicious of a certain Platonic tendency in Levinas's account of speech, elevating speech above writing, before following an important recent reading of Totality and Infinity that places emphasis upon fraternity as a model for understanding the relation to the Other. I would have to show how it is in terms of the relation to the child that one might understand the structure of what Levinas later calls the-other-in-the-same. 

Here, it will suffice to say that for Blanchot, the 'il' of 'illeity' can be understood to refer to another sense of the-other-in-the-same, and another kind of witnessing, and that the relation to the Other must be understood in terms of speech, and not the way the Other attends speech, accompanying and validating it as ethical by its silence presence.

What is crucial to the relation to the Other for Blanchot is that it commands and reawakens a new source of speech: a upsurge of creativity in the responding 'I' analogous, perhaps, to that which he claims to occur in literary creation in the response to the work. I can speak, addressing the Other, because I am claimed by a 'merciful surplus of strength' that might be understood as a kind of virtuosity (I am thinking of Virno's use of this word) not because of my eloquence but because of a kind of stammering or stuttering that is the condition of everything I say.

That is, I speak in two times, one which can be understood in terms of what I say - the contents of speech, its message - and the other as the continual surprise that I can say it, that I am drawn to speak by the-other-in-the-same. Here, this diachrony of speech depends on a doubling of the speaker - there is the one who can speak, who can make speech personal and the other who cannot help but speak as the 'il', the placeholder or dummy subject who gives issue to impersonal speech.

What sense, in this context, can God have for Blanchot? Why is this non-Jewish athetist able to reaffirm Jewish monotheism in The Infinite Conversation? Following Levinas, God never names an entity that was 'there' or present, considered in relation to the temporal order as it is conceived in terms of a synthesis of past moments. As such, God is never encountered as a unitary One, and Jewish monotheism must be understood to refer to a difference and a pluralism, to a diachrony that cannot be closed up into the linear order of time.

Blanchot's Messiah

Blanchot's 'God' - what he calls God - can be known only through the act of speaking. We must say the same of Blanchot's Messiah, who is revealed only in the performative of my saying as a response to the Other, that is, in the diachrony which sees the occurrence of one instant in two times. 

As such, the Messiah is always occulted, since the performative in question is not experienced by a conscious 'I'. Anyone might be the Messiah, but no one need know anything about it, since the Messiah lives only in a particular speech act, in and through the dispersal of the ego that occurs when the 'il' is called forward by the relation to the Other.

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 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 would lie 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 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 grants it 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 to affirm 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.

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 learning, 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, the 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 established channels like the French Communist Party (which repeatedly condemned the student left, even as it sought to associate itself 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, old 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 it 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.

Materialism of the Other

In enjoyment, Levinas explains, and as I attempted to unfold previously, the ego is produced as the result of an involution of the cosmic womb of the elements. Living from the various media or milieus of the elemental - on light, air, water and food - the ego is able to maintain itself over time, although it is always exposed to the uncertainty implicit in its dependency on what lies outside of it. The fruit may wither on the vine, the river dry up - the ego can never be sure of its future. Fortunately, there opens the phenomenon that Levinas calls dwelling - through the setting up of an 'extraterritoriality' set back from the immediacy of elemental life. The ego continues to join what it receives from the element, but is now able to deepen a movement of interiorisation, consolidating its independent identity. Such a movement comes together, in dwelling, with a movement of labour and acquisition, Levinas argues; dwelling is the node wherein the ego sets itself back from the world in a home, even as it maintains an opening to the element. But dwelling cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of the possession of a home - it expresses, rather, that position which allows the capacity to possess. A capacity that, Levinas argues in some obscure and troubling pages, is dependent on an act of welcoming.

The ego can come to dwell in the home because it is made welcome there, says Levinas, by a feminine other - to 'the gentleness or the warmth of intimacy'. Like the goddess Hestia, who remains in the hearth, the feminine extends an invitation to the ego into the privacy of dwelling, in the interior space that will become a home and permit of inhabitation. Compared to the 'timeless and carefree' paradise of enjoyment (although always menaced by the 'concern for the morrow'), we find instead 'a perpetual postponement of the expiration in which life risks foundering'. Levinas argues the 'very dimension of time' opens in dwelling, through that act of welcoming that separates the ego from the immediacy of the element. The welcome of the feminine permits a collection and consolidation of egoic existence. The dimension of labour, which in turn allows the ego to possess the items it brings into the home, is dependent upon the initial invitation the femininely coded space of intimacy extends to the ego.

Levinas tells us such intimacy is not to be confused with the actual physical presence of a woman. Femininity would simply provide an appropriate metaphor for a private space. Nevertheless, this is not an innocent metaphor, but confirms a whole history of thought wherein the feminine is made to stand for a ground that absents itself in order to allow the existence of a self which is always coded as masculine. Levinas, to be sure, wants to break with ideas of a nourishing, maternal sense of the earth, of the primordial matrix at the source of the world in pagan cosmogonies. The cosmic womb of the element that Levinas seems to reference in his account of enjoyment can easily become opaque and unnourishing matter. Levinas's feminine is, by contrast, discreet, belonging to a hidden fold in the earth - but this merely perpetuates the cliche of a benign and self-abnegating maternal presence, enabling others without wanting anything for itself.

But what does it enable? The welcome of intimacy grants the possibility of having time - of a deferral of the 'concern for the morrow' which threatened the hedonism of enjoyment. It permits labour to transform the element, letting the hand (for Levinas, the organ of work) grope towards what it can then apprehend as things. I am able to begin what he calls the 'Odyssean journey ... where the adventure pursued in the world is but an accident of a return': what matters is the movement that consolidates the identity of the ego.

The pages on dwelling, dense and troubling are difficult enough. But no sooner than he has articulated its structure, Levinas imposes another on top of it. The ego, he argues, is exposed to the alterity of the Other [Autrui] - to that relation that is experience as the good, as responsibility at the same moment it has come to dwell. I will not rehearse Levinas's well known account of the opening of the ethical here. But this opening - a welcoming of the Other - occurs simultaneously with the welcome that feminine intimacy bestows. From the first, the dwelling is not securely possessed by the ego, but turned towards the Other to whom the ego is engaged in responsibility. This is why Levinas can write, 'The chosen home is the very opposite of a root. It indicates a disengagement, a wandering [errance] which has made it possible, which is not a less with respect to installation, but the surplus of the relationship with the Other, metaphysics'.

The home, then, is not the basis of subjective identity - the root it sends down into the earth - even though feminine intimacy is said to grant the possibility of an increased independence from the element. For that independence is, seemingly simultaneously, turned over to the Other who, it must be understood, cannot be identified with the intimacy with the feminine. The Other is not encountered in the home, but as coming from outside of it - the alterity of the Other is in no way the indefiniteness of the element, but the infinity of a relation that contests any attempt on the part of the ego to close itself up. Dwelling, says Levinas, is the node that joins the movement of interiorisation to the movement of labour and possession; I am able to commence an Odyssean journey. But this journey is subject to a detour from the first - I am never allowed, it seems, to journey back to myself, since the Other before me - anyone at all - disengages me from my identity and deracinates my home (I wander from my home in my home, the interior having been unfolded and exposed to the outside. In it and outside of it, the home, now, is entirely exposed, entirely open ...)

'No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of an economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home'. The circulation which seems to be permitted by a domestic space (Levinas calls this economy) is broken by the relation to the Other. The space into which I am welcomed becomes immediately a space of hospitality. Note that hospitality bears upon what my dwelling has allowed me to make into a possession - it is a giving of what I have wrested from the element. Hospitality has a material content. As Blanchot writes in another context, reflecting, no doubt, upon his reading of Levinas:

Materialism: 'my own' would perhaps be of little account, since it is appropriation or egoism; but the materialism of others - their hunger, their thirst, their desire - is the truth of materialism, its importance.

I am never allowed to tend complacently to my own hunger, my own thirst; my desires are, from this point no longer my own, since they come from without. Although I may indeed decide to follow only those desires I take to be mine, this is a movement of reaction. Appropriation and egoism have already been challenged; the hunger of the Other - his thirst, his desire - has already laid claim to me in dwelling.

Great is hungering - this phrase, which Blanchot quotes from Levinas, and which I quoted in a previous post finds another significance: great is the hungering of the Other ...

Blanchot again:

If I cannot welcome the Other by answering the summons which his approach exerts to the point of exhausting me utterly, it is surely through awkward weakness alone (through the wretched 'after all, despite everything', and through my portion of derision and folly) that I am called upon to enter into this separate, this other relation. I am called to enter it with my selfhood gangrened and eaten away, altogether alienated (thus it is among lepers and beggars beneath the Roman ramparts that the Jews of the first centuries expected to discover the Messiah.)

The relation to the Other implicates me as I exposed in a new sense - not, now, to the uncertainty of the element, but to the infinity of a relation that separates me from the root that my home might otherwise become. It is not that my home is open to the Messiah for Blanchot (explaining Levinas), as though it were sufficient to leave a place within my dwelling for him that he might come. I myself am the Messiah who would welcome the Other in my home. I myself - and only as my egoity, my selfhood is eaten away to nearly nothing. Must I become hungry in order to feed the Other in turn? But hunger, now has a new significance. My hunger is no longer mine, it is not my first concern ...

When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I, he is not exalting himself. Anyone might be the Messiah - must be he, is not he. For it would be wrong to speak of the Messiah in Hegelian language - 'the absolute intimacy of absolute exteriority' - all the more so because the coming of the Messiah does not yet signify the end of history, the suspension of time.

It announces a time more future, as the following mysterious text conveys, than any prophesy could ever foretell: "All prophets - there is no exception - have prophesised only for the messianic time [l'epokhe?]. As for future time, what eye has seen it except Yours, Lord, who will act for him who is faithful to you and keeps waiting". (Levinas and Scholem)

The coming of the Messiah - the opening of my dwelling to the Other - belongs to the time prophesised by the prophets, Blanchot suggests (following Levinas, following Scholem): what matters is not the time I have, but that which I can now give to the Other. But this formulation gets things the wrong way round: it is the Other who brings the gift of time as it arrives from outside the closed economy of the ego. Or rather, it is the Other who gives sense to the time that dwelling has allowed me, orienting it in a particular direction.

With the Other, Levinas explains comes the condition of language, of reason - of the ability to grasp cognitively what the hand only groped towards (I do not have the space to discuss these topics here). Labour, says Levinas, is only able to shape the indefiniteness of matter, it is not able to make it renounce its anonymity. But my address to the Other, acknowledging his identity (the Other is a he, for Levinas), opens the dimension of language that allows for such a grasping. I no longer feel my way into the future, groping uncertainly; to think is to change the quality of the time that I have. But of course, my time is no longer mine; it belongs, Levinas says, to the Other - just as it must be judged according to another relation that opens in the relation to the Other.

He points here to the relation to other Others - to those alongside to the Other to whom we open our home. From the exclusivity of the ethical relation, we pass to the domain of politics, of judgement: we must now measure up carefully what we are to do and to whom we should give our time (even as, according to Levinas, time is given to us by the Other). The Messiah gives way in us to the judge who lives in a world of competing claims. I must decide what to do with the time that has been given me. And the moment I am brought before this decision - which is to say immediately, all at once - I am no longer the Messiah - or the Messiah is not the only one I am. Who am I to feed - this Other? this person standing before me? But what about the other Others - what about the ones who are genuinely starving? How am I to weigh up their demands upon me?

Great is the hungering of others in the world around me! Great is the whole burden of human suffering as it implicates me!

The demand of justice for always greater justice: in me, outside of me and in justice itself, thus also in the knowledge and exercise of justice. All of which presupposes what may be called the tragic imbroglio of the other and others; whence the intervention of the social and the political, under guarantee of the law, in the service of all that is far (first of all) and of all that is near - whence perhaps the repetition of the word peace, that this last word may be enriched by this echoing of itself in an incomparable repetition.

The long road of justice is a hard one. Like the journeying of Abraham, who departed alone, travelling towards all - from particularity to universality - under threat from the night and with all the hopes of the day.

I quote from a newly translated essay by Blanchot, 'Peace, peace to the far and to the near', without justifying here why his words can stand in for those of Levinas. The Messiah (who Blanchot evoked in a previous paragraph) gives way to the wanderer Abraham, perpetually en route from the ethical to the social and the political - from the particularity of the relation to the Other to the universality of the relation to the other Others. The latter, since there will always be hunger, and I can never do enough, belongs to a tragic imbroglio - a word that belongs to the other people Blanchot mentions in this essay - to the Greeks who have passed down to us 'the logos, philosophy, beauty, and a certain idea of democracy'. Tragic because there are all too many ... but hopeful, too, since there is always a surplus over the universal, over our inheritance from the Greeks: a particularity that, says Levinas, says Blanchot, lays claim to us as the ethical.

Great is Hungering

The account of the birth of the ego in Levinas's Totality and Infinity resembles a cosmogony. It is said to originate through a relationship with a series of media or milieus - in the plenitude of a cosmic womb that bears distinct elements within it: the earth and the sea, light and warmth, but also the familiar expanses of the city. The ego, from the first, is immersed in these elements, bathing in light and warmth, and nourishing itself in a movement that sustains and consolidates its existence.

This dependency on the non-self does not belie the independence of the ego, its happiness. Need - Levinas's term for the relation to the other, to the things which nourish the ego or bathe it in light and warmth - is not first of all a lack. 'Enjoyment is made', writes Levinas, 'of the memory of its thirst; it is a quenching'; certainly, enjoyment contains a memory of privation, but this is only as a dissatisfaction that has already been answered. The ego remembers a withdrawal from sustenance such that its plenitude can be experienced; lack appears only in the realisation of its appeasement, and it is inferred rather than experienced.

It is in this act of remembering - this enjoyment of enjoyment, which has always fulfilled a need - that the ego comes to itself in its independence. To live on or from the series of elemental media - to relish the taste of fruit, the coolness of the river, the familiar vistas of the street - 'delineates independence itself, the independence of enjoyment and happiness'. For Levinas, the ego is given in a 'contraction of sensation, the pole of a spiral in which the trajectory of turns and involutions is inscribed in joy' that is itself enjoyed.

With this claim - and his whole account of enjoyment - Levinas seeks to break from what he sees as the intellectualist bias of phenomenology. The ego is given in its ipseity through a contraction of sensation - no ideal self needs to be understood as the basis of this involution. And likewise, Levinas insists, we do not first of all represent what we enjoy to ourselves, ascribing value to something already represented, but conversely; it is upon the non-objectifying acts of breathing, eating and drinking that we live from, and whose value is no way separable from the immediacy in which they are given. Intentional consciousness, understood to constitute its objects, rests upon a prior act of positing - of the achievement of an embodiment that serves as the basis for consciousness.

Just such an autoaffective positing takes place within the sights, sounds and sensations - qualities apparently without support (the ego is not concerned from whence they come, but only that they come) - in which we bathe. For Levinas, the ego emerges from the not-I, the other, but this is not accomplished once and for all. Certainly, the ego is singularised and autonomous before the appearance of consciousness, but this happy self-sufficiency has to be constantly reachieved; it depends on a movement of becoming that is the basis of the life of the ego. It depends upon the movement for which alimentation, says Levinas, expresses the essence: that which passes from the other to the same.

As such, intentional consciousness depends upon a prior, bodily intentionality - upon a series of elements whose form it cannot constitute in advance - the immediacy of light and warmth as they gratify me all at once, as well as the indeterminate milieu from which they emerge. In this way, enjoyment breaks from the subordination of the things we encounter to a 'technical finality' such as, he suggests, we find in Heidegger. 'As material or gear the objects of everyday use are subordinate to enjoyment - the lighter to the cigarette one smokes, the fork to the food, the cup to the lips. Things refer to my enjoyment'. In place of a single finality, then - the for-the-sake-of-which of human existence that gives sense to the things we encounter - we find a series of finalities that are autonomous with respect to one another. Here, Levinas waxes positively Batailliean: to enjoy something is to do so 'without utility, in pure loss, gratuitously, without referring to anything else, in pure expenditure'. Happiness is the suspension of a single finality; it belongs to 'the disinterested joy of play'.

But what happens when food cannot be found, and the sun sinks beneath the horizon? what, when the river has dried up and the fruit on the vine withered? For the most part, the absence of immediate gratification is still to be understood as a mode of enjoyment: our distress and trouble are merely part of that movement of alimentation that provides invigoration, continued life. Sensibility is passive compared to the activity of thought - I am the mercy of the elements that provide me with light, warmth and food, but I am still confident in my ability to consume the other, transmuting it into the same. I still hold myself separate from the world, looking to absorb what I encounter into a higher unity; perhaps we find here a doubling of the constitutive activity of consciousness in the way the ego, in enjoyment, partially and provisionally constitutes the habitat which sustains it.

Pain and trouble, for the most part, belong to the rhythm of enjoyment - the uncertainty of finding nourishment does not belie the confidence that there will something, once more, to eat. In enjoyment, sensibility is given in an egoism - a monadic separation - whose essence is this confidence. Yet enjoyment is precarious; there is the threat that confidence will not be enough, and the element, far from affording sustenance and invigoration, becomes indifferent matter. Water, water everywhere and nor a drop to drink ... Coleridge's becalmed mariner knows the element only as what Levinas calls 'an opaque density without origin, the bad infinite, or the indefinite, the aperion'.

Suffering, says Levinas, is not a state more basic than enjoyment; it is, he argues, an inversion of joy - a vulnerability to matter that is no longer an immersed, oblivious participation. One can never take for granted what is expressed by Levinas in the infinitive - to eat, to drink, to sleep, to warm oneself - since each can be prolonged into the indefinite reserve that resists the egoic movement from the other to the same. What, then, does hunger become when it is no longer part of the rhythm through which the other is measured by the same?

Remembering Antelme's The Human Race, which relates its author's experience in the camps, Blanchot writes,

We must meditate (but is it possible?) upon this: in the camp (as Robert Antelme said while enduring it) need sustains everything, maintaining an infinite relation to life even if it be in the most abject manner (but here it is no longer a matter of high or low) - if need consecrates life through an egoism without ego - there is also the point at which need no longer helps one to live, but is an aggression against the entire person: a torment which denudes, an obsession of the whole being whereby the being is utterly destroyed.

Blanchot goes on to evoke that 'egoism without ego' which reveals itself in a need for nourishment that is no longer part of the structure Levinas calls enjoyment. Need, now, has displaced itself from the ipseity of the ego, which thrives on the contents of what it ingests. In lieu of itself, enduring only as an empty craving, the ego absents itself from the autoaffection in which it was born. Or this auto-affection seems to outlive it, need become impulse, ipseity voiding itself in the mechanism of existence.

Enjoyment, now, reaches its limit. If for the most part, we are steeped in an instinctive hedonism by which life is first of all a 'love of life', and whose worth is given in terms of its contents as they are 'more dear than my being', Antelme shows us what happens when need destroys the ipseity it formerly sustained.

We live, says Levinas, from "good soup", air, light, spectacles, work, sleep etc.' - but our dependency brings with it what we cannot possess. If I am grounded by the relation to things as they are given to me in enjoyment, I might also be uprooted by their absence. And if the carnal ego - Levinas's rebuttal to what he sees as the separation of mind and body in phenomenology - is not yet the formal identity from which consciousness constitutes the world, it is vulnerable when the elements become indefinite, bad infinities, and lack all determination.

Sensibility, which seems to grant the life of the separated ego, may also threaten this separation. Hunger is not only a pause, a momentary rest that has the certainty of sustenance before it, but menaces the very ipseity of the I. In enjoyment, the elements withdraw as they allow individual things - this piece of fruit, this cleared patch of woodland - to be absorbed into the same. But enjoyment also vouchsafes that uncertainty Levinas calls the 'concern for the morrow'. It describes, on the one hand, the movement from the other to the same, that maintains the ego in its independence within dependence, but on the other, threatens to let the other become indigestible and thereby undo the ipsiety of what it sustained.

Even as enjoyment is exaltation (the enjoyment of enjoyment, its doubling up in joy and gratification) it is also inhabited by uncertainty. One cannot by certain of having time to enjoy. What else is the experience of pain and suffering, for Levinas, but the absence of the prospect that seems to open to the ego in enjoyment - an immediacy that is given as the return of what detaches the present moment from any kind of future?

Blanchot again:

Dull, extinguished eyes burn suddenly with a savage gleam for a shred of bread 'even if one is perfectly aware that death is a few minutes away' and that there is no longer any point in nourishment.

This gleam, this brilliance does not illuminate anything living. However, with this gaze which is a last gaze, bread is given us bread. This gift, outside all reason, and at the point where all the values have been exterminated - in nihilist desolation and when all objective order has been given up - maintains life's fragile chance by the sanctification of hunger - nothing 'sacred', let us understand, if something which is given without being broken or shared by him who is dying of it ('Great is hungering', Levinas says, recalling a Jewish saying).

But at the same time the fascination of the dying gaze, where the space of life congeals, does not leave intact the need's demand, not even in a primitive form, for it no longer allows hunger (it no longer allows bread) to be related in any way to nourishment.

In this ultimate moment when dying is exchanged for the life of bread, not any longer, in order to satisfy a need and still less in order to make bread desirable, need - in need - also dies as simple need. And it exalts, it glorifies - by making it into something inhuman (withdrawn from all satisfaction) - the need of bread which has become an empty absolute where henceforth we can all only ever lose ourselves.

Beyond the awareness that death is close, there is the impersonal need for bread that has come too late for sustenance. Food is the parody of food. Bread appears as what it is - but only as it is no longer a content that nourishes life. It appears as what it is - but only when enjoyment has collapsed into bare existence, and need has become an empty absolute detached from any particular existence.

Here, we might remember that for Hegel, the absolute names the conceptual system contained by the phenomenal world as it develops, granting itself to human knowledge. For Blanchot, the absolute is lost in the negative absolute, which is in no way to be understood as its dialectisable correlate. The absolute, for Hegel, must be thought in its relation to the world, as well as the knowledge the human being has of this relation, but for Blanchot, hunger withdraws the ego from the relation in question and from the measure of knowledge. Ego and world - the ego and the elements - intermingle in an experience of brute existing that no longer permits of particular existents.

Great is hungering - great indeed, as it turns the ego inside out, revealing it to have been only ever a knot tied in the continuity of being. The experience Antelme describes, and that Blanchot recalls is, to be sure, exceptional. But it also indicates in what the uncertainty that inhabits enjoyment consists: the 'concern for the morrow' is a concern that life will become impersonal, its contents no longer more dear to it than its existing. The body, dependent in its independence, is exposed on all sides to the threat of a sensibility that no longer sustains its separation.

Great is hungering - and all the way up to the 'there is' in terms of which Levinas presents the empty absolute, the collapse of the world into the aperion. If the ego, as Levinas will recount, seeks to make a dwelling in the uncertainty of the element, setting up its home, it is in order to leave behind the threat of a future in which the 'there is' cannot be held at bay. But the home, like the digestive system, cannot maintain a simple dichotomy between inside and outside, as it allows the movement that converts the other into the same. 

The Last Récit

One might take Blanchot to be an altogether calmer writer than Bataille; after all, he has at his disposal a pellucidly readable style - his essays are written in the serenest French. But his fiction - and in particular, his récits - places the same clear style at the service of the most opaque of thoughts.

Who has not had the experience, reading of him, of being unable to discern what is happening in the events he reports, and especially in the second half of some of his récits, where everything becomes unclear: who is speaking?, what is happening? Still, although most of the récits are written in the first person, and it is tempting to reflect on their autobiographical origins, it may seem that Blanchot holds us apart from his life; that his fictions are like the multiple rooms the narrator of Death Sentence rents at the same time.

Rooms, spaces that must be left to cultivate an absence undisturbed even by him, the narrator - he likes to muse upon the absence in those rooms he has rented, and does not like to receive visitors in order to preserve what he can of absence in the apartment in which he is currently domiciled. Absence - now conceived as it pushes itself into experience, as it asks to be experienced as the most vehement of presents.

Blanchot's narrators will call it cold, vast - the rooms and his corridors in his fiction seem to expand to encompass the whole universe; how is it possible even to cross such a room? how many steps will it take? But each step, too, is a step not beyond - it is the absence of movement, its paralysis, an arrest that also fascinates Blanchot and that he will let his narrators present as a dying without term.

Where is Blanchot in all of this? Is he the narrating 'I'? Is he the one who speaks, or looks to discover himself speaking - or, beyond that, to listen to the other side of language as it speaks - the 'it speaks' that resounds, murmuring beyond anything you or I might say. I refer to that thickness of literary language which he often evokes - a kind of density that removes, in fiction what an author had intended to write. A literary remove - the space of literature as it simultaneously expels the author and solicits him, asking for books to write themselves from his pen, even as it burns blackly beyond him as the work, unseizable and, in its distance, free.

Let me say too quickly that it is this same distance that absents Blanchot's récits, that seems to void them, denucleating them, drawing their reader to that point that seems to maintain itself at its distance. And that it must absent them for him, too, according to his own literary criticism - that Blanchot is certainly the author who completes his books, has them published, and refuses to publicise them in interviews, or appear in public, but that he is also the adventurer who is lost in the detour of his fiction - of a kind of literary desert, far greater than the Biblical one, that aches, vast and absent, on every page of his work.

And now imagine Blanchot, like the narrator of Death Sentence, revelling in the absenting of himself he accomplished in his fictions. Imagine him, writing another one - one more récit - and happy in that absence he has already effected, in those books that bear his name but that also tear it apart.

Who is he, the writer? Not the author who lives in the world, in an apartment in a prestigious suburb of Paris. Not the one only a few friends saw, who lived surrounded by photographs of friends, it is said, and who was gradually losing his ability to hold a pen. Blanchot the writer lives in that absence that burns in his books and comes to us in that suspension when our reading asks in vain for linear continuity, and his récits seem to fall back into a language that absents itself from all reference to the world.

From all reference - and yet, and yet ... The narrator of Death Sentence says little of the events of the war. That's not what concerns him, he says. Tiny, seemingly insignificant events impose themselves on the second part of his narrative. The first is almost a well-rounded tale; it bears upon an event that barely seems to complete itself; the death of J., the dying of J. And the second? Event links to event in an obscure, almost free-associational pattern. But there's an urgency to the telling, a sense of movement. Something important is being communicated. Something great significance asks to be said.

If it is to do so, it is by way of reference, of the measure of some literary verisimilitude; the world of Death Sentence, though removed from us in time and space, is still our world; we can make our way across the narrative, which is composed almost entirely of concrete events and only occasionally breaks into that strange abstraction that comprises the second half of the fictions that follow.

'Virgil, that's Broch', says Blanchot in his reading of The Death of Virgil. And who is the narrators of his fiction? Who writes his criticism? What speaks in his narrative? What rumbles there? The war? No - beyond the war. Beyond the world. Or an absence that devours it from within. A hovering, an incompletion - isn't it language, somehow, that is allowed to speak? Language, and so that what is told becomes an allegory of what cannot be told, or that speaks only indirectly?

There is nothing 'behind' the details of the narrative. A book proceeds. Characters, plot - there is still something of these in Death Sentence. And yet what, too, speaks by way of them? What seems to cloud the clarity of speech - what great opacity, what looming cloud that obscures the sun? Blanchot, that's Monsieur X. - that's all we learn of the narrator's name: X. - but as it marks what spot?

The work is freeing itself from the book. The work - the unseizable that draws after it all writers, all readers for whom literature vouchsafes itself in its remove. The work - and it burns beyond Death Sentence now. Burns - and after we put the book down, after we read the final sentence. It is over - but it is not over. There is something unreadable in reading, as Steve reflects. Books like Death Sentence (but are there many of those?) are still as though untouched by reading; they remain perpetually uninhabited - room-husks that ache with absence that is our own absence; mirrors in which we cannot see ourselves. 'Read me'. 'You will not read me'.

The Fact of Language

Language cannot appear as what it is; it cannot speak itself, the fact of its own communication; it cannot reach back into its own origin. It comes in every other guise than itself - in a fiction, for example, in the form of incident, of character. But how, nevertheless, to join writing to writing? How to let a fiction speak - provisionally, hintingly - of what language is?

By doubling, in the narrative, the what-it-is of the world - for the same dissimulation rules its coming-to-appear. By affirming the erosion of the world as it would double the erosion of representational language. The origin of the world - the fact that it is, and the fact that this fact is irreducible to what is experienced - finds its correlate in the origin of language. Both origins are entwined in the passion of narrative, in the fraying of a fictional world.

What is meant by world? That contexture of relations that gather things into a meaningful whole. A contexture ordered by a sense of the possible, of the future that is possible there, even when it takes the form of a fiction. Mr Darcy can propose to Miss Bennett; it is eminently possible. Alice can shrink and grow. What of the origin of the world? The collapse of the sense of the possible, of the possible as sense. It becomes impossible even to cross a room. Can this impossibility be spoken directly in fiction? Only in terms of the possible - only as it breaks the measure of the self for whom things can be done. Narration, say. Crossing a room, say. Thus the kind of paralysis that seems to strike the narrators of Blanchot's récits.

What is meant by language? In one sense, what enables communication; what allows things to be expressed. It overlays the possibility that governs the sense of the world. But in another, and understood as origin, it is what the first sense of language cannot communicate as its condition, as its possibility. Language, that is to say, cannot speak that it is; it cannot speak the fact of its own existence. Or if it is to do so, it is only by way of the possibility that language affords - that is, by way of that faith in sense upon which language depends.

The prose of Blanchot's récits is clear, pellucid at the level of the phrase. But at the level of the sentence, the paragraph? Who understands what's going on? How would you paraphrase the 'action' of the second half of The Last Man, or The One Who ...? It is not that Blanchot abandons clarity, but he lets it speak of what is too great to communicate. And this takes the form, in his narratives, of the impossibility of action, of clear thought, of the endurance of the form of the 'I'.

Likewise in his essays on writers. He is concerned not only with the accomplishments (and unaccomplishments) of a particular fiction, but the life of those authors who sensed the demand of the fact of language. The reading of Kafka, say, passes by way of a review of his hesitations about writing, his dreams of leaving it behind for Palestine, for marriage. The reading of Rilke of the search for the 'proper' death writing deprived him. These essays, like Blanchot's fiction, speak of the origin of language - they let it speak. And in this sense, there can be no absolute generic difference between the essays and the fictions, and it should be no surprise that they eventually come together in fragmentary works.

Each time, it is a matter of the récit, of that French genre concerned retrospectively, musingly with a past event. Each time, with Blanchot's writings, the origin of language, as it is entwined with the origin of language, of the world that takes the place of that event. The origin of language speaks by way of the origin of the world. And does it work the other way around? Isn't there a kind of mirror play between both senses of origin, as each can only substitute for the other? It is not ultimately with reference, with the meaning-to-say with which his writings are concerned, that should be clear. Unless there is sense of reference that points to what cannot be said, and of a meaning-to-say that no longer refers back to narrator or author.

Sense and Nonsense

There is a kind of fiction where the fictional world wears through - the characters leave it, perhaps, to go in search for the author; or they hear the clatter of the typewriter used to write the novel, as in one of Spark's books. There are novels where authors become characters, and characters authors - why not? But what about a fiction where it is language, that of which the story is made that is allowed to tell its tale?

The concern of French genre of the récit is retrospective - it does not follow the unfolding of events like the novel, but looks back musingly upon them, allowing what has occurred to return in various ways, to the extent they can never be said to be completed at all. It names, thereby, a genre characterised by reflection rather than action, bearing on a single episode, or group of episodes as they present themselves as an occasion for meditation.

Blanchot's récits muse on past events, to be sure - we think of Death Sentence ('these things happened to me in 1938') and When the Time Comes, which seems obsessed with an incident that occurred at some point in the past, in the South, even as it unfolds novel-like in the present - but it is a certain experience of language to which they are directed.

A few loose, casual notes on this experience.

Language and Death

The old prejudice: words written down are dead, poor proxies for real presence. Better speech as it is animate, as it is brought close to the animating voice or presence of a speaker. A kind of detour, then, as if the flat surface of the page were an open doorway. Only it is language that now leads into itself - that, even as it refers to the things, to the world as a horizon of intelligibility, suspends the capacity to refer, allowing the words themselves to become heavy, impenetrable, rendering opaque the communication they were supposed to let happen.

Unless it is what is communicated is that heaviness - the impenetrability of words is now rendered present not because the text is written in an invented language, a kind of gobbledegook, but because it pulls apart, in itself, sense and nonsense, sense from nonsense, not in order to divorce them altogether, but to show the latter is the material support of the former; that the heaviness of words must bear even the lightest of messages.

But what of the communicator of the words? Alongside what the writer wants them to say, there is a second message. This is nothing to do with the style of the writer. Or rather, it is what, by way of that style, turns what is said in another direction. Communication depends upon the material base of this style - upon what words are used, what phrases, and how. It depends not only on the way words are animated - the way the impersonal forms of language are given life - but by the way they deanimate what is said.

Language entails a detour from sense, from intended sense. Words slide - and with them, whole phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Nonsense bears sense away even as the words remain on the page, making sense. And what of the one who would receive the communication? What makes sense to her depends upon the materiality of words, their sense. It does so by way of what also deanimates words. The life of what is said depends upon death. That is the condition of writing.

And what of speech? Does that heaviness not bear what is said in that case, too? Isn't speech likewise divided, linguistic sense and nonsense held in a kind of tension that reveals itself only in limit-situations? When is the grain of speech revealed? In particular ways of singing. In cliches, perhaps - when words are on the edge of meaninglessness. In that passing of words along that receives Heidegger's approbation. Words of which no one really takes possession. Words spoken by no one and by everyone.

In what form does the struggle between sense and nonsense reveal itself? Is it a tragic diremption? A version of the tension between freedom and necessity, the former rising heroically up against the latter, and then falling back? Or is it comic, ludic - does a kind of laughter mark this detour from sense - is it accompanied by pratfalls and horseplay? Do we laugh at it as it passes between idiots who always come in pairs, better to lighten speech and let it play: Bouvard and Pecuchet, Vladimir and Estragon?

Or does it happen negligently, in the carelessness in which Duras began The Lover, in that wandering writing that, she said, no longer belonged to Literature? And what about that careless speech, in that gossip everyone passes on without forethought; in the impersonal wave of rumour which crashes through the everyday?

Survivors

In a strange way we are all survivors of what we say and write. That language asks from us that we animate what in the end remain empty, abstract forms. I speak, I write, by laying claim to the personal pronoun. Does it let me speak in the first person as though stood outside language and used it as a tool? Or does the first person pronoun whose position is presupposed in what I say, allow me to apprehend myself?

It is an open, empty form I animate and bring to life. But it, too, can sometimes stir and be said to awaken. It stirs and wakes up - but as what deanimates speech, what drives it deeper into death. It clouds the surface of speech; it clouds the transparency of what is to be said. Until that said does not let itself speak by way of it, and its sense is sent on a kind of detour.

What is like, the sound of death? How does it let itself be read? By means of language, and by way of it, even though death cries sometimes, and death rumbles. Even though, on the page, it looms upward through the surface of the text. By way of language, of the horizon of sense, operating alongside the fiction, accompanying it and returning, kraken-like to darken its surface.

What does it return as? What returns? Language as it breaks itself from the task of referring. Language that loses itself in itself - but now as it engages what happens in the incidents of the narrative - as it draws them into its own happening. A happening, though, in which nothing happens. In which something dark swims up and darkens the surface - and that's all.

Language as it presents itself in its withdrawal from sense. That is there, but not there. There, but subtracted from itself, language minus sense, language minus the capacity to mean. As it engages the ordinary course of language in the narrative, but exceeds it - or falls below it - and takes a direction into the heart of the page, directly away from the reader. Rising to the surface only to flee, and drawing something of your experience, as reader, with it.

What is that has reached you? What caught you? Not this book, nor these pages bound between covers. But the work as it is more than the book - as it names the narrative at the heart of narrative, the récit in the récit. The work as what laps up to refuse your gaze. That looks at you by turning away.

Then refusal is the contact with the work. It darts back into the darkness like a startled fish. But it is also that darkness; it is what, in the pool is not transparent to meaning. And yet what you want as you read. Yet is also that lack, that excess, that more than meaning that never happens once and for all in the narrative, but returns in it, over and again.

Returns - not as itself, but as something happening slightly away from the narrative events, and from the voice of the narrator. Away, because it cannot give itself all at once, cannot be made complete, or even to begin. Does it even happen? Can it be said to do so? Or is it rather what undoes itself in any narrative event, and undoes those events, streaming, incessant, and never happening in the instant?

In the end, it escapes chronological time. Escapes, and draws within the events that happen in the time of the narrative. Not an event so much as a way things do not happen. That fall back, incomplete, into the darkness. And this is other drama to which the récit also answers. What happens by not happening, and divides the event from what does not round itself off into an event.

Not the voice of the narrator, then, but the narrative voice. And not even the author's voice, if this is still understood according to the measure of the 'I' in charge of language. For the author, too, is engaged by the narrative voice - not understood according to the old cliche, where the characters run away with you and live their own lives, where the plot does not pan out as you planned it, but rather that the telling of the narrative itself, its narrating, seems to veer, seems to be drawn into another, stronger channel. And, following it, engaged by it, this voice speaks of more than the author intended to say.

Such is the narrative voice as it draws what is said like a ship into shipwreck. But nothing is wrecked, not really. The ship sails on; it reaches port, a story is told and a book finished. But then too, at the same time, the boat is wrecked at each moment; as every event of which it tells is seized by what does not close itself into an event: the interminable, the incessant, in its perpetual storm.

And so too is the author wrecked - and this is the only way he can come into contact with the work. It is the way he lives it, or that it is brought close to a life. The story is told; the book was finished, but the author is lost in contact with the work, for loss is this contact, and he will sink by this contact to the bottom of the sea.

That's what it is to tell, really to tell. And to tell today, as older forms of telling have fallen away. Of what is there to narrate? what stories? Only a handful, says Goethe, who charts, for our benefit, all possible plots. A handful - but it is what that is told by way of them that matters now. By way of them, with them, and even as though using them, living from their life like a vampire bat. And isn't there another in the author, too, who is like a vampire? Another engaged by the work as the work - who lives as the companion to the author, in that intermittent becoming by which he is substituted for his living double?

The Other Side of the World

But what is told? What speaks with the narrative voice? The other side of language, I said. Language in its thickness, its heaviness, all of that. The material bearer of language, all that. Blanchot says more. For him language is also the relation human beings have with the world. Scarcely a relation, really, so deeply is language lodged within us. But that is the condition of experience, that does not merely answer to the order and structure of the world, but constitutes it.

Then what the récit shows in Blanchot's hands is not merely an aspect of language: it is also, in some sense the world - or rather, what is not disclosed as the world discloses itself. What does not appear in the light of that appearing - as the phenomena that are first of all linguistically given. That come with their names, that bring them with them. No, the récit narrates what is on the other side of our experience, and of the brightness and visibility of the world. Or, if it can still be called experience, then it reveals what is hidden by that same brightness, just as what is told by the narrative voice is hidden (but only partially hidden) by the voice of the narrator.

There is also a way the world can be said to happen, but beyond chronology. A way that it can also be said to occur, as it is engaged by the interminable, the incessant. The récit is peculiarly suited to speaking of this hither side. It does so by way of the narrative voice, as it breaks into the narrative. But how does it break? Via particular incidents. By deforming, transforming those incidents and the characters who endure them. This is why the events of the récits are as though captured - why the task of walking down a corridor or fetching a glass water becomes impossible. Why it is difficult to tell what happened in any of these narratives.

These incidents are the double of what could happen to us, according to the implicit phenomenology in the récits. They are, in their telling, endlessly strange - but they are not so in the manner of a fantasy. They could happen, and they are recorded to bring the reader into the sense of their happening. Receptivity to the récits will depend upon whether you can make sense of their occuring - whether you can relate it to something that has happened to you or to others. To make sense of it enough to follow them as they wind their way into obscurity.

And it is in this sense, I think that these récits are elective: only some will be engaged by them. And only a few of them who'll read to the end. For they also constitute a kind of research; they adumbrate a phenomenology of our ordinary lives; they depend on it, for the life of the narrative. And it is of this that they tell, however strangely. It is of this they attempt to find an idiom such that they might tell.

The calmness of that telling is, I think, eternally surprising. Not that it is tranquil, or at ease with itself, but rather that it speaks with an everyday speech, with ordinary words. Words, it is true, that quickly become strange. But still, the speech is calm, quite unobtrusive. But then, all of a sudden, it is swept up by an abstract storm. The sentences seem to fall faster; the tempo of the story speeds up ... these paragraph flurries happen characteristically towards the end of the récit. I picture them as great banks of cloud swept by great internal winds and flashing lightning.

How to read these passages that take up a large part of the last part of most of the récits? There's narrative momentum, to be sure - the sentences are short, forward moving, urgent. But what is happening? What's going on? An abstract storm, like I said: ordinary words used oddly, their sense strained, buckling, having already been put under pressure earlier in the narrative. Tense becomes uncertain - what's happened/happening/about to happen, and to whom?

We have lost our hold on time - how many hours have passed? Days? And the characters themselves seem to come apart - what are they undergoing? Narrative momentum, certainly, but to what end? Can the récits really be read for themselves, by themselves? Don't they require a theoretical supplement - the literary criticism? In what sense can a récit like The One Who ... be enjoyed for itself, by itself? But I will leave these questions open, rather than address them here.

Common Presence: Blanchot at 100

I think reading Blanchot is elective; it matters that you are claimed by his work and that it becomes necessary to read further. But claimed by what? Blanchot's literary critical and philosophical writings are secondary, in his own estimation, to his fiction with respect to the central movement of his thought. How do we read the fiction, lacking as it does conventional plotting or characterisation? How do we understand that peculiarly tenseless time upon which it seems to give, and that is also brought forward in Blanchot's theoretical writings as it is claimed to occur in the fiction, the philosophy of others - and eventually, as happening in the very relation to the human Other as it is the condition of our experience of the world?

Fiction and reflection assume, with Blanchot, a peculiar unity, but one whose sense cannot be given outside their textual performance, as Kierkegaard supposes he can provide his own work when he writes The Point of View of My Work as an Author. There is a sense that the divide between fiction and theory does not count for Blanchot, and in which everything he has written is by way of narrating an experience whose theoretical elaboration must always be tentative, insofar as it must pass through language (a point that may well hold for Kierkegaard too, placing the meaning of his work outside the retrospective claims he made for the aims of his authorship), and language gives itself to be experience in the manner Blanchot seeks to answer in the general endeavour (a movement of thought, of research) to which his fiction and his theoretical writings belong.

But an experience of what sort? Blanchot's concern with language as the 'outside' remembers an experience of language over which the 'I' has no power. Sometimes, Blanchot presents it as a kind of silence, but this should not be understood too quickly: gaps in language are readily assimilable by the common order of sense. Silence stands in for an interruption of language as it is experience in the absence of the form of the subject. This may seem absurd, since the position of the 'I', the subject, is presupposed in all speech and writing. But the Blanchotian subject is unstable; it does not come to itself once and for all, but can break down, its power scattering like sand, like J.'s pulse in Death Sentence. And so with the experience of the outside, where what is reached is the hither side of language, language unsubordinated to the intentions of anyone.

This is not mysticism. The experience of language as the outside is perfectly ordinary, says Blanchot; it is the way we live the everyday and the idle chatter that fill it. Heidegger has a horror of Das Man, the anyone in particular whose willingness to talk about everything endlessly distracts it from struggling to lay claim to its own existence. But to pass the word along, gossiping about this and that is to experience language as it is disowns any particular existence, in a manner exactly analogous to those elected to undergo reading and writing in the way Blanchot describes.

How is the outside given in literature? Summarising in a late essay some of his famous arguments about writing, Blanchot takes up Hegel's general claim that doing takes precedence over being. Consciousness, for Hegel, is the act of relating to oneself, from which the world outside the 'I' cannot stand apart. Consciousness and world interpenetrate; the talents, strengths and abilities of the individual unfold through his actions. For Hegel, it is through the transformation of the world through negation that we might learn who we are, which means we can only know what we were working on as the exercise comes to an end.

Hegel can write the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit only once the owl of Minerva has spread her wings, making sense of his project as a whole - and the project that the whole of human history has been. Hegel can only know the project by what has already been done - as a re-ject, as Sinthome once wrote, playing on the etymology of this word. Hegel's philosophy is lived, his thought is experiential and experimental; but still, Hegel himself had faith it might be brought to an end. He writes a preface, which as everyone knows, makes sense after you've read the Phenomenology, and rounds off the book, and with it, the whole of human history.

The Blanchotian writer, however, is engaged by what can never promise to round itself off, nor even, properly speaking, to begin. He experiences language, the claim of language, as it refuses to provide the support from the presentation of particular theses, nor indeed for the subject who would articulate them. Literature, for Blanchot, bears upon a fascination with the literary act itself, insofar as it brings the writer into contact with an experience of language as the outside, as it is turned from its usual role of referring to things in the world, of facilitating communication. True, one can never turn language altogether from this role. But by way of the capacity to refer, by way of communication, Blanchot shows us how a different sense of communication, even a kind of community is shared between the writer and the readers of a book.

What, now, is important, is the way language, in respect of its capacity to refer, is experienced in its retreat. Blanchot argues that the writer senses this retreat in his or her awareness of the fascination of what he calls the work that lies beyond any particular book. The work is Blanchot's name for the experience of the murmuring anonymity of a language that permits of neither subjects nor substantives - of the fact of language, whose impersonal streaming he allows to run close to the surface of his own fiction, and detects in the fiction and poetry of writers he admires.

The literary writer will discover what he has achieved in a finished book even as a re-ject, since he cannot present what he has done thetically, as a theoretical position or argument that can be stated unequivocally. His own work is like a riddle he cannot solve, but to which his life as a writer is bound. Who is he? An answer cannot be found to this question, since if, like Hegel, one believes one is what one does, then the writer can be said to be perpetually in lieu of what he sought to achieve. The work rides ahead of him, without him; but it also stretches back behind him, beyond him such that he was only ever a latecomer to the creative process he set in motion. As unseizable Eurydice, as the Sirens' song, the work never lets itself be grasped as a project that unfolded through the writer's life.

Is it even his project? In a sense, it is: he initiated the course of writing, and saw it through to the end, such that a book could be published. And yet in another, the origin of writing lies back beyond the writer; the work names what engaged the writer from the first, or even before the first as it sets itself back from the beginning he made and outlasts the end of the project (whether it was one book or an oeuvre). As such, it is as though the writer were only the completed circuit through which the current of language could pass, seeking only to relate to itself in writing - in the act of writing, the literary act, the power to achieve it that writing only lends to a writer. Then any literary book - and perhaps some philosophical ones too - tremble with what they cannot say; with the work, with the experience of language as it interrupts human initiative.

Death, famously, is Blanchot's name for the relation of the writer to the work that is experienced as the withering of subjective power. Death, as it cannot be annulled and elevated by the work of Hegelian negation, invades and weakens it from the first and from before the first. Before the work, the writer is nothing yet, but after it, still nothing, since it is not linked together with his labour.

As such, the author is a mere actor, given over to an 'intermittent becoming' that leaves him, with respect to the experience to which he belongs, none the wiser. Certainly, the writer can take on the airs of a creative genius, laying claim to the work of art as it reflects the triumph of his sovereign will, but this is bad faith itself with respect to the work and its origin. For the author never quite coincides with himself; there is always a double who shadows his labour. A second Orpheus has disappeared into the underworld; a second Ulysses lies drowned in his wrecked ship on the seabed.

To exist is to act; to be is to do - but how can you take responsibility for your literary work when it implies your dissolution? What is specific to literary responsibility as it also includes the double who is also you? Invited in 1975 to submit work to the journal Gramma which was concerned with his work, Blanchot declined with these words, 'My absence [from this issue] is a necessary step rather than any decision on my part. I would like nobody to be surprised nor disappointed by it. Publishing is always more difficult. Publishing on the basis of the name is impossible' (anecdote via).

Blanchot's absence from the journal parallels the absence he was so scrupulous to maintain, refusing to meet scholars, to attend events celebrating his work, and refusing to be photographed by his publishers, or, except on one occasion, to be interviewed. What effort did it cost him not to see visiting scholars, or to accede to the demands of the great machines of publicity? Perhaps a great deal; perhaps very little. Either way, it is completely continuous with his work. Blanchot's refusal to appear is bound up with the demand of writing, which lets itself be experienced in its retreat.

But if it is as a writer that Blanchot disappeared in the postwar years, following his own political disaster, it is also as a writer that he reappeared, lending his support to the efforts of those determined to resist the claim to Algerian independence. As he says in his only interview, granted to clarify the aims of the so-called 'Manifesto of the 121', he is an essentially apolitical writer. But let us not misunderstand this to suggest political quietude. It was as a writer, too, that Blanchot sought to join his voice to others in the failed collaborative project of the Revue Internationale, which occupied him and others in the early 1960s. And it is as a writer that he takes part in the Events of May 1968, again working collaboratively. Blanchot grants that what he calls 'literary responsibility' is different to 'political responsibility'; but he also says both kinds of responsibility 'engage [...] us absolutely as in a sense does the disparity between them'. This engagement (so different from what Sartre meant by that term) reveals itself in Blanchot's commitment to what he will allow himself to call communism, in both the foreword to The Infinite Conversation (1969), and the anonymous writings he allowed to circulate during the Events.

Communism and friendship are words Blanchot will often use in proximity to one another. Reviewing a book by his friend Dionys Mascolo in 1953, Blanchot argues that there is an alternative to the account of need and value as it is found in Marxism. Friendship, for Blanchot, suggests a way in which we might look to a future world that is not comprised of human beings who have become little more than things. We must live two lives, says Blanchot - one in which we struggle against the values that conceal the truth of our condition from us, and another wherein we live according to what we share, which Blanchot, from the late 1950s onward, will call speech.

A concern with speech, and its implication in relations of power, is of vital importance in the earliest of Blanchot's fictions, as is a marginal reflection on friendship and community. It is in dialogue with Bataille and Levinas that Blanchot will develop a philosophy of speaking, where the relation to the human Other is understood to suspend our familiar relations with the world. Unlike Levinas, Blanchot will not locate the origin of speech in the extralinguistic presence of the Other. If the Other can be said to be 'higher' than me, for Blanchot, it is only because of the thundering silence to which the Other gives issue, which I, as an interlocutor, am always struggling to determine. Friendship is an experience of this thunder, this silence.

With the word friendship, Blanchot would preserve the sense that what matters is not simply what is said between us, but that it is said. Levinas will capture this distinction in his later contrast between saying, the address of the Other, which all language, whether spoken or written, is claimed to bear witness, and the said, which is to say, language in its ordinary acceptation as it facilitates communication concerning a shared world. Blanchot borrows Levinas's formulation to make a contrast between ordinary language, as it conforms to the course of the time of the subject, and the language of the outside, as it escapes the subject, even as it fascinates it. Just as Blanchot will say that fiction represents nothing, witnessing the fascination with the work by way of its details, its narrative incidents, what he calls speech is concerned only with itself, with the fact that it happens in the relation to the Other. Speech, now, is thought not in terms of what I say to the Other who silently exceeds language, but with the experience of language as it belongs to the outside, and hence also to the future.

Communism and friendship name, among other things, practices with which Blanchot was always engaged, and in company. Bident's biography movingly reminds us of Blanchot's friendship and alliances with Levinas, Bataille, Char and Antelme, but also with Mascolo, Schuster and Duras. Derrida was in regular contact with Blanchot, driving him, I've been told, to his last visit to Levinas, who died in 1995.

But communism and friendship also describe the relationship that reaches to those of us who are claimed, elected by his writings. How to carry forward what Foucault called in his tribute from 1966, 'the thought from outside'? Perhaps we can begin by recalling the play of the Other Blanchot also was in his fictions, his criticism, and in the great narrative that was his oeuvre. And is it not, if we are elected by his writing, this double who also steps forward in us as we read it? Language helps us speak of a world we have in common, certainly. But what we also have in common is another sense of the world that reveals itself only rarely.

Common presence: these words translate the title of a poem and an anthology by René Char, and that Blanchot evokes in passing in The Unavowable Community. But they might also remind us of Heraclitus, important to both Char and Blanchot, for whom the logos is said to be common. Common presence: does this refer to Char's version of the logos which maintains itself beyond what we take to be opposites, but which Heraclitus tells us in his fragments are always in struggle and interchange? Blanchot's too, perhaps, as he doubles Heraclitus's fragmentary attempt to think that struggling discord the Greek called harmonia. Blanchot's favoured word neuter expresses the neither ... nor he himself put in place of the certainties of philosophy (of a certain kind of philosophy), in his own kind of fragmentation. The phrase common presence, recalling Char, recalling Heraclitus, was used by Blanchot in the context of his account of 'the people of Paris' who assembled spontaneously and marched silently in memory of the protestors crushed to death in the Metro station of Charonne. 'Common presence': 'the people of Paris'. What kind of presence do we have, as readers of Blanchot? What do we bear in common?