Spurious

Great Problems

W. feels a failure, he says. Who can help but feel a failure? Ah, but I expect he thinks I luxuriate in it. True enough, I admitted it, and said: ‘I know my problem. I can’t begin anything’; nothing begins here. ‘Well that can be your problem then’, said W.

We had just been talking of those who had been seized by a Great Problem and how much better at philosophy they were than us. I have no problem with this. W. suspects it’s because I think I have a Great Problem. ‘What, the inability to begin?’ I say. He detects a pride in my failure. He thinks I write of my failure far too much. ‘Spurious is just about what a failure you are’, he says. Granted … And then he said, the previous day, that he liked the posts on buffoonery. ‘That’s my concept’, I said. ‘Michel Serres has written a whole book on it’, he said.

Writing Unknown

I’m tired, R.M. is tired. Why write in order to say: I am tired. For the gift of ringing changes on that tiredness. For that strange achievement which is words on the screen. As if to say: there is a part of you which is not entirely tired. Strange triumph. Why some people write and others do not: some need that peculiar alienation by which they need words to stand outside them. Not to express themselves – nor is there the desire to make a temple out of suffering, to draw a literary edifice into the air. But to leave a monument, a kind of tomb in which no one in particular lies.

Unknown. Walk home from work across the field. Hope the flat next door will be quiet. Pass the cows who sleep standing up. Along the row of houses until you can see you own. No flashing alarm, no burglary. There it is: the place to which you come in the hope, almost as soon as you are assured of its existence, to leave by another route.

The Rift

From what do you write? From where? What calls for writing? A kind of excess, perhaps – but this is vague. A kind of gift, a giving – but this, still, is vague, and still too passive. A rending, then – a kind of fissure or tear.

Heidegger called it a rift, that division in the work of art – that struggle between what discloses itself as a world and what withdraws from that disclosure, presenting itself even as it withdraws as what he called earth. Earth: the materiality of things, the hither side of a world which disappears too quickly into use and familiarity. The rift opens because that disappearance is too quick – because the heaviness of things still comes forward in their brightness or their clamour, because there is a weight in their very texture or because their scent is surprising. There is a struggle at the heart of things, and why not at our hearts, too? Isn’t it there, in the heart, that a writing asks itself to be written which would allow language to resound with the same earth Heidegger evokes?

But it is not a matter, as for Heidegger, of coming-to-dwell, of opening a time-space in which a folk would find itself at home. Nothing is inaugurated in the struggle in the heart. It is, rather, a turning from the dwelling place, an exile analogous, perhaps, to the one which took Abraham to Mount Moriah. But there is nothing to sacrifice – no Isaac in whom Abraham was given the future of the chosen people. Nothing begins; it is a sterile time, what happens is only a repetition, the same, the same which makes you despair of writing anything which would differ from itself.

Yet it is not a trap and it does not defeat you. Is it because this repetition is analogous to that response to the Other which Levinas calls saying? Is it because all writing can do is repeat the empty fact that it is and nothing more? Is it that writing is nothing more than earth as it struggles with world and does not cease struggling?

Writing: contentless affirmation. Writing: repetition of nothing, the return of nothing.

Last Days

Summer. Weeks when we had the office and the campus to ourselves. When we took up tennis, inspired by Sharapova. When we worked night and day. When we walked in the Lakes and North Yorkshire, and visited festivals and conferences. Weeks of discounted salads at Boots. Of snacks in the office. Of foccacia and guacamole. Of rice crackers and salsa. Of Ikea furniture and potted shrubs for the yard.

Soon R.M. leaves permanently for a life faraway, outside academia (though she hasn’t finished her dissertation quite yet) and for me the new academic year begins, the descent into winter and short days, the audit and the pass-the-beanbag learn-how-to-teach course. Summer is ending and it is as though a great epoch has come to a close. Or that everything which came to an end in my life ends once again as the door into summer closes behind me.

When I was twenty, I told R.M. as we crossed the field on the way back to my flat, I loved the intervals between work, time reading long novels or wandering streets, times of journeying (leaving and departing) – time to dream because my life had not found its course. And now? The channel has been cut and the river moves swiftly. There is no time, and time between is a haunted time, no longer open, drifting air, but a frightening expanse. The correspondences I used to keep by letter are ending, or have come to an end. Is there time? No time for that great giving of time to which reading and writing belong. There is only work-time, only today and tomorrow.

Mortal Derangement

Capitalism is deathless: it does not know death, or at least, death does not touch it. Yet we will all die. An illegal immigrant is beaten to death – but how does this alter the American Dream? Floods wreck Bangladesh – but how does affect the ideal of a world market? These ideals arise from the body of capital, facilitating its movement. The existence of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the G8 summit only propagate these ideals. But unlike the codes which governed the pre-capitalist world, they do not mean anything. Capitalism has already destroyed all codes.

The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.... Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away , all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air...

We know it well: changes in means of production means workers are perpetually de- and reskilled; capital moves in real time from one place to another; production and consumption are continually revolutionised in view of the desire for profit, for surplus value, upon which capitalism depends and makes us depend.

What is to be done? Rethink the revolution which allows the ongoing revolution upon which capitalism thrives. Engage the crisis upon which capitalism depends.

A fundamental instability of meaning is built into capitalism from the start. Values are stripped away by capitalism insofar as they are unbound from traditional structures; the danger, however, is that they are replaced by the values of the market: with the value of work, the value of money. Constant movement: labour power is unbound from a particular conjunction of resources and bound again by others. If there is always a turbulence, a revolutionisation that is constitutive of capitalism, it is one whose movement is regulated. What is it regulated by? That process through which various factors of production (money, skills, technologies, raw materials) are conjoined into order to extract a surplus, a profit. This is not a simple reification.

As measure of value, money comes to supplant all other values; as a means of access to goods and services, it remains even when all other values break down. You tell yourself you do not desire money for its own sake, but for the goods and services to which it proves access. But the financial market does not seek those goods and services, but only money, since it is the means of access to more money. Money is sought in the financial market as sheer investment potential; its value is measured not in terms of particular assets, but of rates of speculative return. Beyond any financier or investor, capitalism desires and desires its own increase. As indebted or enthralled labour, we are enmeshed in the impersonal operation of capital.

We are mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital. Our future is wagered because of what capital owes to itself. How do we resist? How do we retrieve another meaning of time, of money? It is never a question of returning to the security of older values. A derangement has already occurred; the circulation of capital escapes the coded, despotic system whose inhabitants obey a model signal. The task is to engage the revolution itself insofar as it implies a gap or an interval. But what can compete against money?

Capitalism is deathless. But says the philosopher to the rich and the powerful: even you will have to die. We are all mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital. Our future is wagered because of what capital owes to itself. Capitalism is like a cell whose DNA is damaged and which spreads cancerously from a particular tumour. A normal cell in an adult grows and divides only to replace a worn out or dying cell, or to repair an injury. With cancer, cells continue to grow and divide; cancerous cells are those which have forgotten how to die. Spreading to other parts of the body, they grow and replace normal tissue. Cancer, metastatising, is deathless, but there is the paradox that it will eventually kill the host body and thereby kill itself. Cancerous cells will die even as they do not know death. And capitalism will die with its host body when the ecological limit is reached.

Then how to awaken to ecological catastrophe? To the misery of those who merely try to subsist amidst the storm of finance capital? To the apocalypse that has already happened? Perhaps death opens its eyes in us. Perhaps there is an experience of suffering upstream of any other experience. What faculty permits this? What shaping category, what transcendental? Philosophers will suggest that they have a special relationship to death. It’s the oldest story: Plato tells it, but so does Heidegger. Live as close to death to possible, Socrates advocates. Relate yourself to your death, Heidegger says. But what of the catastrophe which has already happened?

Bataille:

Nothing in sacrifice is put off until later – it has the power to contest everything at the instant that it takes place, to summon everything, to render everything present. The crucial instant is that of death, yet as soon as the action begins, everything is challenged, everything is present.

It is a question of death, of establishing a relationship to death in life. But now death is not the inevitable that awaits each of us such that, by relating ourselves to it, we can lift ourselves from the hoi polloi and reclaim our possibilities and impossibilities for ourselves. There is not enough time. Instead, before I gather myself up - before, that is, I am gathered to myself such that it would even be possible to write of Da-sein, there-being - there is the experience of catastrophic loss, expenditure, sacrifice. The death of the other person is this sacrifice.

We live events according to a double relation. As that which can be borne and mastered, even if this is difficult, by relating it to a particular end; but then also as that which escapes end and employ. Then the latter is the interruption of the project and of the power which would enable me to relate myself to my death. The ability to comprehend, bear, master, but fundamentally, the ability to be able, depends upon the ‘I can’, upon the modality of possibility which enables the opening to the future. And when this ability fails us? When, in sacrifice, there is no temporality upon which the human being might be projected? When, that is, there is no one there, no time and no place to be-towards-death? When the death of the other awakens us?

Perhaps there is a way of experience this death. Of living it in turn. And perhaps this provides a way of rethinking the general equivalent upon which the value of money depends. There is another capital, an experience of a giving. No longer is the monetary sign substituted for the thing that is sacrificed. There is no general equivalent which can fix the value of money in relation to its referent. The desire to create surplus value is defeated for as long as the time of the project is sacrificed - for as long as there is nothing upon which the human being is projected.

Common presence: a system, a non-system of exchanges so marked by loss that nothing therein would hold together and that the inexchangable would no longer be caught and defined by the desire for profit. It is as though the currency we most trust, the general equivalent which mediates all value, transformed itself into the inexchangeable. 'Fire is an exchange for all goods' Heraclitus writes; it is the exchange which ruins exchange, which replaces the value of money with the sacrifice of money. There is a celestial currency which has value only insofar as it is catastrophic.

Weariness

R.M. and I worked alongside one another all summer; she is spending a week tying her life up elsewhere (finishing her Ph.D.) and will be back soon (but then she will go again, and for much longer this time). Meanwhile, I am alone in the office as it comes to the end of the long summer teaching break. And alone, no longer bringing us splendid lunches to eat, no longer playing tennis after work and arriving back at the flat late (too late, it always seemed to me), my time is unstructured, I lose all grip on my projects, I'm overwhelmed by work ...

Why am I entrusted with so much bureaucracy? It is unreal to me, or I am too unreal for bureaucracy…. But there’s task after task, all leading up to the quality audit. I’m hopelessly behind, as always. And there’s the project of the new book and a paper which has to be done by October 1st, and then a review article … everything written up to the wire, always half-realised, semi-botched, full of typos and poor grammar.

And the flat? Bare-walled, awaiting lining paper and wallpaper. Slugs die on the repellent at the back door … the shower needs an element and there are holes where the skirting board should be. Damp rises up from the darkness under the house. Ants find their way across the floors.

I read Bataille in the gym – what a contradiction! and feel, as usual, a nostalgia for a life I’ve never led. Bataille sleeps on Balthus’s floor during the war … Bataille reads aloud from Inner Experience in his lover’s flat. Bataille cycles in the fields during wartime. I attempted a kind of chronology of Bataille’s war five hundred posts ago.

How poor this writing compared to Guilty or On Nietzsche! I am one of those weak vessels who is smashed by the work of a great writer. I am so surprised such work exists I cannot muster my critical faculties. It all seems incredible to me that people still write in our world and regard it as important. I read an interview with Samuel Weber in which he speaks of French philosophers who will not let a day go past without going into the study. I still live from that great period when the translations of Bataille and Blanchot began to appear – Inner Experience, The Space of Literature …

Sometimes what I read and what I write seems to stream very far above me. As though what I read and wrote bore no relationship to my life as it is lived. At those times – and tonight is one of those times – a great power of unbelief seizes me. I reread my own book – painful experience! – I turn idly the pages of Bataille. It is always of Bataille that I think since he is the one who protests he is too weary for philosophy, or that philosophy makes him weary. He hasn’t the strength to develop a system of thought. He plunges, and he plunges as he writes, he plunges in a writing which falls away from him. And when you are only capable, like tonight, of writing of what you cannot write, of failing to let writing fall away, of clinging to writing, writing ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’ …

New neighbours: lads, more lads, loud music, a roaring car. Gone the quiet old lady. I’ll have to sleep in the lounge for the noise, with earplugs handy (I went and bought a fresh set today). Weariness of a weariness which will not let relinquish myself and plunge into reading and writing …

The Impossible

Bataille’s The Impossible:

Day is falling, the fire is dying, and I’ll soon have to stop writing, obliged by the cold to retract my hands. With the curtains drawn aside, I can make out the silence and the snow through the window panes. Under a low sky, this infinite silence weighs on me and frightens me. It lies heavy like the intangible presence of bodies laid out in death.

Klamm's Pince-Nez

Recall the lines from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting…. There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – such were the furnishings.

Quoting these lines in the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton complains:

I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.

Breton refuses, but others have been tempted. We relate the words we read to our own experience, rendering them concrete. It seems churlish to claim that this concretion is a sham: after all, this is just a novel, and we know, as readers, how a novel works. But then Breton wants art to be more than a matter of entertainment or even edification. This is why he claims the descriptions in the novel are vacuous: ‘they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés’.

Clichés? One might object that it is this accumulation of details which permits the verisimilitude of the novel – it becomes tangible, concrete, we accompany the characters in the journeys across St. Petersberg.

Levinas observes of the reader of Dostoevsky that 'what holds his attention is neither Dostoevsky’s religious ideas, his metaphysics, nor his psychology, but some profiles of girls, a few images: the house of crime with its stairway and its dvornik in Crime and Punishment, Grushenka’s silhouette in Brothers Karamazov’. Is this the case? I am not sure. But Levinas is taking us in an interesting direction:

Introspection is taken to be a novelist’s fundamental procedure, and one supposes that things and nature can enter into a book only when they are enveloped into in an atmosphere composed of human emanations. We think, on the contrary, that an exterior vision – of a total exteriority [...] where the subject itself is exterior to itself – is the true vision of the novelist.

This is a difficult thought. Why does Levinas on the one hand assert the importance of 'a few images' in Dostoevsky's fiction and then proceed to write with what seems the greatest abstraction of 'total exteriority'? A great deal is at issue in this question, which addresses, I think, an issue Steve once touched upon at In Writing. Steve remembers a distinction in Karl Kraus between those readers who take joy in the details the novelist offers us: in the 'ponies and boots and shoes' (George Eliot's phrase) and others who look instead for a theme, obsession or an idea beyond those details. Beyond them? But, as Steve notes, one should not think of there being a simple choice between details and ideas:

It's a fair distinction, I suppose. I'm in the latter camp for sure. Sometimes the first line is enough for me to reach for the handrails. But I would say that the themes, obsessions and powerful ideas of the better novels are also found at the level of ponies, boots and shoes.

This is what Levinas indicates when, in the same essay, he links particular images in the novel to exteriority - although the latter should not be understood as an idea (obsession is a better word). What, then, does it mean? One approach to this question is to consider Blanchot's reflections on Hegel's notion of symbolic art.

Hegel associates symbolic art with that the ancient Orient, in particular the Egyptians, who represented their beliefs through animal symbols. But if, as he writes, ‘what is human constitutes the centre and content of true beauty of art’, then depictions of animal symbols of the divine can only be deficient; if beauty is the sensory appearance of the idea, for Hegel, Egyptian art is not beautiful. When he calls it sublime this is a sign, for him, of its deficiency.

For Hegel, the symbol fails; it remains inadequate to the idea it would bring to expression. But through its failure, its very inability to embody its idea, it might be said to indicate a kind of excessiveness or strangeness which Levinas calls exteriority. Perhaps this is why Blanchot discovers in Hegel's symbolic art a way of approaching what is most uncanny in the work of contemporary novelists.

‘The symbol is always an experience of nothingness, the search for a negative absolute’, Blanchot writes. But what does this mean? The positive absolute might be understood in term of the absolutum which Nicholas of Cusa used to name God or das Absolute of post-Kantian philosophy as it indicates what is unconditioned: what is at issue here is something which is both self-contained and perfect. But Hegel breaks from the conception of the absolute in both cases claiming the absolute has been separated from the phenomenal world, stripping it of what precisely renders it absolute. It is necessary, for Hegel, to think the absolute and the phenomenal world alongside the knowledge human beings have of the relationship between them. The absolute, for Hegel, is the conceptual system which is contained by the phenomenal world as it develops and gives itself to human knowledge.

What, then, is Blanchot’s negative absolute? One might say it is a resistance to such a conceptual system: it is the weight, density and materiality of matter itself as it refuses dialectical development. Then it is a matter of what escapes human knowledge as it were in the very act of knowing. It is the dark side of what is known even as it seems to allow itself to be known. It is not sheer indeterminacy, but a kind of reserve or resistance in that which gives itself to be known or understood. This is how we might understand the relationship between the particular details of a novel and exteriority.

The classic novel aims at verisimilitude. It wields the abstract power of language to aim at the depiction of concrete things and relationships in the world. But what if, conversely, the details of the story, the same concrete things (Klamm’s pince-nez, the icy light on the snow, the faces of the peasants) are only indications of something which cannot be directly presented? Here, the 'object' of such indications is not separate from those details in the manner of, say, Schelling's absolute. It is not Nicholas of Cusa's God. But nor are those details merely a moment of the presentation of the absolute to human knowledge, in the manner of Hegel. Those indications are disturbing even as they remain as what they are. They are disturbing because they resonate with a reserve which cannot be known. It is as though they bring with them a vast reserve of materiality, in the manner, perhaps, of the heavy plinths Giacometti sometimes attached to his sculptures.

Then the kind of novel in question indicates what slips from us in the world through its details. In so doing, it embodies not so much a body of knowledge but a black hole which escapes the measure of knowledge, not so much a theory of the world, but an excessiveness over any particular theory. The novel, in its details, keeps memory of what resists the measure of knowledge not because it would constitute an unknowable thing-in-itself, but a reserve in things. It presents the shadow of the real.

Let's go further still. It is possible to discern in certain novels the attempt to seize this shadow for itself - to make every encounter a movement towards its reserve. Perhaps this is how one might understand Kafka's The Castle. It is a system of indications comprised of specific encounters and details (I'll try and substantiate this claim another day).

The novel, one might say, is on a perpetual quest to discover its own condition of possibility (rather like the story by Josipovici Steve mentions).

A story which tells its own story, which seeks to reach behind itself and seize upon its genesis: to manifest, through its details, the outside from which it sprung. A kind of concrete emptiness, a material nothingness which reverberates in the things of the story: these are mysterious formulations, which may sound hopelessly pretentious. Nevertheless, it is this concrete absolute which manifests itself through the most powerful fictional works of the last century (and isn't it there, too, in a film like Last Year in Marienbad or The Adventure?).

Sometimes I think that the time of such novels and such artworks has passed, that the end has already been reached. But then I remember the music of Smog and Cat Power ...

No one bears witness for the witnesses

In the opening paragraph of “The Last One to Speak,” Blanchot writes:

Plato: for of death, no one has knowledge, and Paul Celan: No one witnesses for the witness. Nevertheless, we always choose a companion: not for ourselves, but for something inside us, away from us, that asks us to be absent from ourselves to cross the line we can never reach. The companion, lost in advance, is henceforth the loss in our place.

Why does Blanchot bring together Plato and Celan, the themes of dying, witnessing and the notion of the companion?

One might suppose one knows about dying, about its causes, it course and its outcome, it is, after all, something that happens to others around us, but this is to mistake death as a solely physical process with death as a stepping over, and for Plato, a transcendence into the real. Of death, no one has knowledge; but death, as Socrates tells us in the Phaedo, grants knowledge to the immortal soul that was previously incarnated in the body. To strive to know it is necessary to strive to live close to death, as Socrates demands, to attempt to maintain a necessary distance from a body always prone to error. One knows nothing of death, but death is thus just the condition of possibility of knowledge; one sees, but it is the blindspot of the seeing eye that permits sight. Death, in this sense, is double, it allows knowledge, but of death we know nothing, permitting us to attain what is only possible for human beings only by withdrawing from us as something over which one could have power.

How then is death bound up with testimony for Blanchot? One is said to give or provide testimony, it is something of which the one who testifies is capable, that is, which falls within their powers to recall and to put on record what befell them. To use the figure of the companion, as Blanchot does, who is chosen for me is to point to another giving, to a passivity wherein the “il [he/ it]” is brought forward as someone who is “inside us, away from us,” as someone who comes forward in each of us in order to receive. Why does he invoke a companion as it were “within” us, or more precisely, who is away, that is, outside whilst remaining inside each of us? To “die” or, in the sense under discussion, to “witness” is to be traversed, but here it is a notion of death or witnessing that is at stake, that demands a new reflection on receptivity, on passivity.

The companion invoked so briefly in these passages from “The Last One to Speak” should be understood as one who witnesses “in” me when my capacity to witness is impossible. Memory usually allows us to bear witness, to recall something undergone, something taken on or assumed, but in the experience of the sort that Blanchot evokes, I do not bear witness in the first person. Upstream of its capacity to act in the world, the “I” has undergone something unbearable that cannot be recalled in an unequivocal manner. The notion of the companion sets the one who witnesses in place of the “I” at a distance from the “I” who emerges after the experience.

Celan’s phrase, “no one bears witness for the witnesses [Niemand/ zeugt für den/ Zeugen],” that Blanchot cites alongside the quotation from Plato* points to the difficulty of unearthing and testifying to certain experiences that are endured in another sense. The “other” witnessing in question is precisely what is claimed to have occurred in the camps. The paradox of the notion of witnessing in Blanchot bears exacting ethical stakes, for it bears upon the possibility of receiving the testimony of the survivors. The survivor has borne witness as the companion (understood as the locus of an experience of witnessing before the “I” has assembled itself), or, better, the companion survives in place of the “I,” enduring the unendurable. How does the survivor attest? And how can others receive the testimony of an event that barely offers itself to memorization?

In one sense, Celan’s phrase can be interpreted in terms of the impossibility of witnessing for the witnesses – for others, perhaps, who die around me, for the helpless ones whom the survivors resolve to remember. But it can also be interpreted in another sense, referring to the vigilance of a self that endures as “no one” [ne personne], as a traumatized spacing in which the companion as it were steps forward to experience something in my place. The latter can also be said to constitute an impossible witnessing, where impossibility is to be understood in terms of the impossibility of enduring an event in the first person. This is the interpretation of this line that Blanchot seems to offer, pointing to the experience of witnessing that is also an experience of dying: to a traumatized spacing that “survives” the disappearance of the “I”, living on as the companion.

Let us be these children

In The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot evokes the cries of children playing in the garden, evoking: a muffled call, “a call nevertheless joyful, the cry of children playing in the garden: ‘who is me today?’ ‘who holds the place of me?’ and the answer, joyful, infinite: him, him, him [il, il, il]’. As he comments in a later essay, 'Who?' in which he cites his own passage: ‘only children can create a counting rhyme [comptine] that opens up to impossibility and only children can sing of it happily’. Only children, then, could make a game of the ordeal of the self in which what one might call exposition occurs.

But the game and the children are themselves figures; if, as Blanchot writes, ‘all words are adult’, it is not because children would speak in a way that is absolutely pure or absolutely true. The child is itself a figure of the ‘il’, of the locus of the ‘he’ or ‘it’ that, as it were, says itself over again without ever lapsing into self-coincidence. It is the play of the ‘il’, of exposition, the neuter, always in default, to which the figure of the child refers.

In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot relates the story of the son of the camp Lagerführer feared lost among the children of the camps who was made to wear a placard in order to prevent the chance of a terrible substitution:

At ten years old, he sometimes came to fetch his father at the camp. One day, he couldn’t be found, and right away his father thought: he’s gotten swept up by mistake and thrown with the others into the gas chamber. But the child had only been hiding, and thereafter he was made to wear a placard for identification purposes.

This fragment is the emblem of the fixity of relations, of an ordering and mastery that absolutizes the power of the subject – of what, perhaps, one might think under the heading of adulthood. The identificatory placard, the insistence on retaining a proper name which indicates filiation and race, prevents the child being caught up in affliction (but affliction, for Blanchot, is another way in which the neuter gives itself to be experienced). If it is childhood in its infinite substitutability that is a figure for exposition – the neuter as the placeholder that is itself without place – the relationship between SS and prisoners in the camps is the refusal of childhood.

One can see then when he writes, as he does in ‘Who?’, ‘let us be these children’, Blanchot asks us to welcome a certain experience of substitution without arresting it or determining its form. In so doing, he asks, in the name of our childhood, our secret neutrality, to articulate a responsibility that would answer to events – horrible and joyful – in which exposition is at play. This is the chance of ethics, which is to say, of answering to the substitution which occurs in our opening, our greeting to the other person.