Folie a deux, the madness of lovers separate from the world. Levinas will condemn it as a solipsism; Blanchot will discover in this madness the link to the communities outside constituted politics - the protestors who remembered those killed at the Charonne metro station in 1962, for example, as they demonstrated against French colonialism, or those who rose up in the streets of May 1968 in Paris: those streets which, beneath a sky no longer cosmic - no longer linked to a particular world (kosmos), to a given people or nationality, where there arose a horde of no one in particulars, each the anyone whatever sharing what affirmed for each in what he calls, after a book of Char's poems, common presence.
So too the presence of the lovers, one to another in Duras's The Malady of Death: each is wagered according to the attempt to love. An attempt formalised in his accession to the contract she offers to him. How did it work (I've forgotten): seven nights, was it, together in a room by the sea? In the end, he finds it impossible to love - do not assume he was homosexual - and she departs. To where does she go? To find others whom she might love and from whom she might receive love.
Common presence: this names the 'people of Paris', as they were called (though Blanchot is quick to say these were not a Volk): marchers who marched without leader in memory of those killed. Who marched and then dispersed, without being given the order to gather or disperse. In silence and in memory, though great strength was there. The same, perhaps, as the one of which Blanchot writes in relation to the demonstration against De Gaulle's return to power, helped by mercenaries, in 1958. Refusal: that is Blanchot's model. A word to which he will return, just as Duras will take it up in her turn, in her books.
Common presence: I think at once of those little groups who were gathered in political hope in the wake of 1956, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the triumphs of Guevara. And in the face of the French Communist Party which expelled Duras, Antelme and others. I think of the group who gathered at the Rue Saint-Benoit, who were they? Mascolo, Schuster, Duras, Antelme (and later, his wife, who still lives), and of course Blanchot whom, as a correspondent once wrote to me, came like Gandalf from the South, full of magic and mystery. They assembled in the evenings to eat. Feasts were prepared. They would edit the collective paper 14th July, to aid the movement of refusal of de Gaulle's return but also that of French colonialism in Algeria.
Marvellous to read of those days and the efforts which succeeded them - the failed International Review which drew Barthes to the rue-Saint Benoit (Lacan, too, was a visitor - and what of Bataille?) and saw Blanchot write to Gunter Grass and Iris Murdoch, to Enzenburger and Vittorini (another friend of the group, whose Red Carnation was admired by Bataille (I still haven't read it)) with the aim of establish a review adequate to the overcoming of colonisation, to the achievement of a world citizenry and, perhaps, to the common presence of all, the great sharing of the world. Then came May 1968, and the dispersal of those at rue Saint-Benoit: Blanchot became too ill and retired from the world (he no longer saw even his closest friends whom, strange irony, he would outlive, all except for Derrida, who outlived Blanchot only by a year), Duras turned to film-making, the others continued to work ...
Common presence. But what if this model of politics, of a democracy that would answer those who refused and were capable of refusal - strange capacity, as it involved a receptivity to receptivity, a responsibility which begins in a response not to the Other as for Levinas but to world as it was what Deleuze might call virtual, to the possibility of a countereffectuation of what is, that same responsibility which Gillian Rose, for one, will find wholly objectionable and a symptom of a postmodern lability to endless melancholy - itself fell short of what was announced in Char's poems: to the common presence of all - of the reserve of being, to the refusal implicit to matter?
Char is not a bucolic poet; beware the attempt to celebrate nature for it is still cosmic - still belongs to that order which would find stars in the sky to steer by. What if the stars have fallen? What if it is not to the cosmos we belong (celestial order, the appeal to nature) but to the disaster (des-astres, without stars)? How pretentious! Blanchot sought with the International Review the creation of an anonymous fragmentary writing which, he thought, was so lacking in those who tried in their writings to alert their readers to the fate of the world (Jaspers, for one). This is admirable. He sketched many topics for his contributors to write about. He asked for translators to make the journal available for those of many languages. In the end, the project failed. Barthes, for one, was angry; Blanchot dissuaded him from commemorating the project, aware of the fate of those groups whose brilliance was eclipsed by the brilliance of their disputes (Surrealism).
But what was my point? Oh yes: common presence would draw also on those forces outside the human - on reserves of fresh water, on supplies of energy, and the revolution cannot be one of refusal, of marches in which the plight of the world (the plight of the fixity of the world, its determination) is witnessed, but of those relations to impersonal forces. No longer is the subject the centre of political science. No longer is it the mulitude which must awaken. Now it is impersonal, transpersonal forces which much be engaged. Unless this is what the multitude and refusal already mean; unless it is a question of that counter-effectuation which return to each of us that commonwealth of fresh water, fresh air and fresh food ...
Not the molar revolution, perhaps, bodies on the street - or rather, not just that. The scientist who struggles to unleash new energies and those energies themselves is also part of the revolution, as are those who make sure our monocultural agriculture is not vulnerable, because of the paucity of seed varieties (am I right to think our crops are grown now from a handful of seed-types which could be wiped out quickly?) to obliteration. As are those who work to control the flow of finance capital, not just to steer or to administrate it (our new model of government), but to regulate its devastation of peoples and of the environment.
All this without the suspicious return to the pathos of the 'natural' (itself part of the cosmic order), of nature. To the cosmic, Blanchot will also link a molar image of writing. He dreams of a new collectivity, each responsive to what can only be received in a kind of passivity: that opening to each of what being is not, of the becoming of being, of being's virtuality (however it might be put) and hence for the chance of counter-effectuation, of counter-memory, of forgetting (however that might be put). Why do I entertain the idea that this writing is present in Will Oldham's songs?
Watch the G8 concerts and you will see what were called in Rock school 'rock positions': a system of codes which would express the rock performance, codes which have long voided their content and now repeat themselves not even as farce (the spectacle of, say, Whitesnake in the early 80s) but as the worst kind of postmodern cynicism - every style is up for grabs; even U2 can play punk. Listen to Will Oldham, watch him speak or perform and at every stage there is a refusal of position. Not by chance will he write over and again of an unspecified 'it' - peculiar object, peculiar, impersonal agent which acts upon those of whom he sings. No consolation for him of the great cynicism. Reborn is a new a commitment - not for what was called rock and not even for punk (though punk is a different word to rock, is its refusal). Songs of part-objects and fragmentary things (always the word things in Will Oldham's songs). Songs of couples in rooms. And passing through the words, flowing with them, sometimes, but also against them, forcing the singer's voice to rise and break, there is a music which allows there to be sung something like the heart of being, the lining of the world.
These are beginning songs, but what begins are receptivities and new alliances, new relations. There are no stars above Will Oldham. Old verities have disappeared. Begin again; you can rely on nothing. The old forms have been hollowed out and the new a form of form must open. Not by chance does Will Oldham speak of the importance of Big Black and the Minutemen to him, and of the new collectivities which gathered around these groups. Punk repeated itself in them, as it did, later, in Slint and then in Will Oldham (his first album sees him accompanied by several members of Slint), which is only possible if the punk is repeated as a revolution, and not as a repetition of empty forms. When Will Oldham writes of God, this is not the God of monotheism. Not is a postmodern and cynical God, meaning everything and nothing. God now names a kind of relation: the one who asks for a wager. Will Oldham's music is then exemplified by Abraham's journey to the mountain in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. The knife is held over Isaac, which is to say, over himself as singer, over what he has taken himself to be (and what is taken as being). But God intervenes and a new Will Oldham is born.
Who is Will Oldham? Not the actor who hides himself under pseudonyms, but the one who knows that there are no names but false names, and each of us is the monster who cannot be named. A monster? Rather a horde of monsters, a whirling multitude. Who is Will Oldham? Interviewee who responds differently to the questions he is asked each time he is asked them again. Singer who begins anew with each album, working with new people, working differently each time. Who is he? One who watches over punk as it names the being of becoming.