Spurious

Double Dissymmetry

There is a moment in the thought of many thinkers when a local insight is transformed into a more general one, and this creative transposition permits a transformation of a whole cluster of inherited philosophical ideas and problems. At what point did Blanchot transpose what he had developed in his reflections on literature to the interhuman relation? Perhaps as early as his first novel, Thomas the Obscure, for example, in the scene of Anne's death, where she is aware of the significance (the non-significance) of her death for those around her.

This scene is already a presentation of what Blanchot would come to call community, in, for example The Unavowable Community, published nearly 50 years later. But this remains a fictional treatment of a topic that takes time to emerge in Blanchot's theoretical work proper. It is not until much later, and in particular in the years following 1958, that he writes explicitly of the interhuman relation, and in a way very close to his account of the relation of both author and reader to the literary work.

What he lets himself call responsibility in some of his fictional work, referring to the relation in question, is carried over into what Blanchot would be reluctant to call the ethical and the political sphere. (But the story I am telling is too simple, passing over as it does the relationship between the composition of Thomas the Obscure and Blanchot's period as a journalist of the extreme right, and passing over those essays in which Blanchot begins to reflect on the relation to the Other, notably in his reflections on Mascolo's Communism in 1953).

But even this is not simply accomplished. In the notes he circulated concerned with his plan for an international review, he merely says the relationship between literary responsibility and Marxism is one to be 'wrestled with'. But those are private notes, intended for circulation among the writers who were interested in the same project. In essays in the same period, and particularly in the lengthy negotation of Levinas's Totality and Infinity reprinted in The Infinite Conversation, a kind of turn becomes explicit, and the question of the relation to the Other moves to the centre of Blanchot's explicitly theoretical reflections.

The Passion of Determination

It is worth recalling some of the basics of Blanchot's account of literature, as outlined in The Space of Literature in order to set this turn into context. To write, for one compelled to write, and write fiction, involves a struggle to determine, to round off a finished piece. The writer must form a story, or a poem; but this process of formation foregrounds the material aspect of the artwork in a particular way.

Matter does not disappear into form, nor indeed does it exist in an exemplary harmony with respect to it; rather, it is foregrounded, particularly in the modern work of art, until it overspills the formal determination granted to it by the author. The specifically modern artist, for whom the gods are dead, or at least absent, struggles with determination. This is what happened, on Blanchot's account, to Holderlin; it was his greatness to hold himself into what has no contour, and to bring it into a poem.

For Blanchot, the poem, the fiction (récit) has, as its topic, exactly the passion of determination, in which the material aspect of the work of art looms forward in its indeterminability. It looms; it cannot be contained, but the way it does so for the readers of the literary work (but also, at least in Blanchot's earlier writing, for the audience of other kinds of artistic work) doubles what has already occurred with respect to the author.

Nihilism

To write is to struggle, and this struggle tears apart the life of author as well as leaves its crack in the finished work of art itself. The influence of Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art', delivered in the mid 30s, but not published until 1950, is clear; passages in Blanchot directly paraphrase Heidegger. But there are other influences; Bataille is paraphrased in the section on reading in The Space of Literature, and Levinas is a constant reference.

This does not mean Blanchot is derivative; the notions he draws from Bataille were ones he helped to formulate (recall Bataille's description of their conversations in Inner Experience); and Levinas, it is clear, learnt a great deal about art from his friend's essays and fictions. Finally, paraphrasing Heidegger's essay is a way Blanchot can clarify his own position, which he arrived at all on his own some years earlier.

Occasionally (and I will provide citations on another occasion), the word responsibility appears in Blanchot récits, referring to the vicissitudes of its characters as they redouble that of Blanchot's own authorship. This over and again in his fiction: the encounter with materiality, with the indeterminable, is staged in terms of the experiences of the characters, who, though not necessarily writers, are still brought into a condition analogous to that of the Blanchotian author.

This can lead the reader to wonder whether the récits are simply allegories of their own happening, repeating in what remains of plot and characterisation, the struggles Blanchot describes so eloquently and mysteriously in The Space of Literature. 'No one here wants to be part of a récit', says Claudia in When the Time Comes (this is repeated, as I remember, in Waiting, Forgetting). 'No more récits, ever again', says the narrator of The Madness of the Day.

And perhaps this is how they are meant, these récits, as though they were exhibiting an awareness singular to the modern work of art that knows its desolation, its abandoment. No récits - or rather, no récits that do not foreground the absence of possible stories, or the fact that all stories must bear upon the same absence.

Is this nihilism, then - a nihilistic storytelling, which can only narrate the impossibility of fictions, as though humanity had finally sobered up, and with these, Blanchot's récits? Has Blanchot uncovered the condition of all storytelling and laid it bare at last in its nudity, its barrenness? Or does the 'nothing', the absence at the heart of the récit bring its author and its reader into contact with what is indeed terrible and terrifying, but also in some way liberating, as though the nudity of the récit had rendered the world, which is always too close to us, distant enough for us to discern what will never let itself be determined?

In the early theoretical writings, this seems enough; it is a kind of critique, Levinas says, of a whole tradition that links art to truth, up to and encompassing, Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. A kind of reversal occurs, where Blanchot's fictions and critical practice show that literature and the work of art outbid any attempt to reclaim them in the name of truth, or of the institution of a people.

Critique

If the notion and practice of Blanchotian literature presents something like a critique of the cultural value accorded to the artwork, it still needs to be supplemented with an ethical philosophy, Levinas implictly claims. Blanchot disagrees, wanting to discover, as early as the essay on Mascolo, an ethial charge that is implicit in that same critique.

For the work of art, in revealing a relation to the indeterminable, seems in some way to prefigure an account of the relation to the Other, to the human Other, that is also indeterminable. Nothing is more other than the human Other, Blanchot will say on several occasions. A puzzling claim for readers of his work. How to read it? How to understand it, not simply as a break with what he'd previously thought, but as a way of repeating it anew?

It may seem Blanchot is making a claim similar to that of Levinas: the Other cannot be determined because the Other does not belong to ontology, that is, to what Heidegger would call the understanding-of-being. To write schematically, and without explaining these difficult ideas: the Other is 'higher' than I am; my relationship to the Other is, as Levinas says, asymmetrical because of this height. I come to myself precisely as I am awoken by the relation in question - I can speak in my own name, I can use language, only because I was first exposed to the silent presence of the Other.

All this is familiar in Levinas's work. Let me move quickly: for Blanchot, although borrowing many of Levinas's formulations, the presence of the Other is not what matters for itself so much as as a way of experiencing the indeterminability of language. That is, it is given as a kind of relay, as that direction from which a kind of speech would come.

For Levinas, such speech is thought as the silence of the Other, a mute address. For Blanchot, although there is a way in which the encounter with the Other suspends our familiar relations with the world, and can, in this sense, be called silent, this silence is bound to a kind of rumbling or thundering: it is at one with the material aspect of language foregrounded in the literary work of art.

Crucially, for Blanchot, speech is not bestowed by the silent presence of the Other. The Other has no authority; if the Other is 'higher' than me, it is only because of the thundering silence to which the Other gives issue, which I am always struggling to determine. For the most part, I am succesful; but there are moments when, Blanchot claims, this struggle becomes more difficult, and moves into visibility.

For Levinas, this is also the case; what differs, I think, in their work, is what both call the Other's presence: for Blanchot, this presence is to be thought in terms of the thundering silence of speech; for Levinas as the silence presence of the Other that precedes speech. True, a kind of silence is at issue for both thinkers, but there is a difference in the status it is accorded in relation to language.

What matters for both thinkers is not what is said, but that it is said. Levinas captures this distinction in his later contrast between the saying, the address of the Other, which all language, whether spoken or written, is claimed to bear in Otherwise Than Being, and the said, which is to say, language in its ordinary understanding as that which conveys information. Blanchot borrows Levinas's formulation to make a contrast between the language of the indeterminable, that is, the narrative voice that returns at the heart of the récit, and, once again, language understood as a tool, as a way of accomplishing communication.

This distinction can be made in many forms: for Blanchot, what is important is the fact of communication, that is, communicativity, not the communication itself (though Blanchot, following Bataille, will still use the word, communication). Or, once again, what matters is the 'that there is language', rather than what is said by means of a particular use of language.

Blanchot and Levinas share an emphasis on the importance of relation, and of the relation to the Other. Both think this relation in terms of the opening of language. But Blanchot, unlike Levinas, will allow this relation (which both qualify as being 'without relation', for reasons I will return to on another occasion) to resonate with that encountered by both author and reader as the work.

Obviously enough, a person can respond to you in a way a book, at least, cannot (though this would have to be rethought in the case of new media). As such, although Blanchot will use the same terms of literature and the relation to the Other, writing of dissymmetry (his version of Levinas's asymmetry), height, the Other and so on, he must take into account the kind of interactivity at issue in the relation to the Other. 

How can he do this if he is to retain, as he wants to do, the sense of dissymmetry that he adapts from Levinas's meditations on the Other? If he does not want to think the equality of human beings in terms of the symmetry, reciprocity or mutuality, how is he to retain the sense of the 'height' of the Other? By claiming that the unilateral and dissymetrical relation to the Other might be redoubled as the Other relates to me as the Other.

Double Dissymmetry

It is as though two books were taking turns to read one another in turn; each reads, then pausing to be read, and then reading again: this alternation is something like what Blanchot presents as the doubly dissymmetrical relation between two human individuals. Each becomes the Other in turn; the passion of determination is always switching sides.

This passage is prefigured by Levinas's brief discussion of double asymmetry. Unlike Levinas, however, Blanchot will not introduce a notion of the 'third' in order to move from the ethical (the face to face) to the political (the dimension of justice and law). Community, for Blanchot, is to be thought in terms of the perpetual movement between the 'I' and the Other. The ethical and the political must be thought together (even if Blanchot will not talk of ethics or politics with respect to the experience in question).

I can become the Other for you, just as you can for me. By relating to you as the Other, I am already transformed, being in the same difficult position as Holderlin before the indeterminable reserve that he was able, according to Blanchot, to bring to writing. When I become Other for you, however, nothing need change for me; what matters is only that relation in which I am, as Blanchot writes, 'close to death, close to the night', for the other person.

Both of us, indeed, are 'close to the night'; both of us, and by way of one another, share an experience that cannot be determined. But we share it as we each, in turn, 'othered' by the relation to the Other (that is, we undergo what Blanchot calls the terror of what cannot be determined in that relation), and as we become Other for the other person in turn.

(Blanchot will on occasion allow a kind of awareness on my part when I become Other. Anne, in Thomas the Obscure, is already aware of what her gift of death might mean for those around her. This is also the case for the dying J. of Death Sentence. I will return to this.)

Communism, Community

The notion of community is not explored at length in the reflection on Levinas. Indeed, it seems to fall away into the massive body of The Infinite Conversation, only resurfacing at long intervals. This is, frustrating for those who read this book in order to attempt to make sense of what Blanchot, in its preface, calls 'the advent of communism'.

What is the relationship between community and communism for Blanchot?

(The phrase, 'political responsibility' should be used with caution, however, since Blanchot reserves this, at least in his notes on the International Review, for a reference to Marxism with which he wants to maintain a critical relation:

... there is an irreducible difference or even a clash between political responsibility, which is at once global and concrete (accepting Marxism as definitive of truth and the dialectic as a method of discovering it) and literary responsibility (which is a response to a demand that can take shape only in and through literature).

I will pass over this difference here, noting only that it was anticipated in the essay on Mascolo, and closely parallel the distinction Blanchot always wants to make between the two 'slopes' of literature.)

It is true, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The Inoperative Community, Blanchot's notion of communism is never explicitly or thematically developed in his work. When, indeed, Blanchot responds to Nancy in The Unavowable Community, published late in his career, he once again writes elusively. But it is clearer than ever from this book that Blanchot sees the entirety of his career as involved in a rethinking of community, or communism.

He also leaves signs that the march in remembrance of those killed at the Charonne Metro Station as they protested against French brutality in Algeria, and Events of May 1968 are also to be rethought in these terms: each happens as community, as communism. In a contemporaneous essay on the intellectual, Blanchot will also allude to the drafting of the so called 'Manifesto of the 121', which call on those conscripted by the French army to desert.

Of course, Blanchot co-drafted the Manifesto, just as he participated, arm in arm with Marguerite Duras, in the Events and march alongside the 'People of Paris'. And it was also Blanchot who dreamt up the idea of an international review, which was to be published in translation in several countries at once.

What happens when Blanchot's writings are refracted through the prism of what he calls community? They shift slightly, or shimmer in a different way. Without having considered explicitly what is meant by communism, or by exploring the relationship between ethics and politics - the ethical and the political - in Blanchot's writings, I will stop here, having simply cleared a path to a possible reading of his work.

'Make It So That I Can Speak'

Terror

Who better than Philip K. Dick has presented the terror of worlds that fall apart? In his most terrifying books, it is our world, the real one, that crumbles. Palmer Eldritch's face in the sky - even here, in our world. The sign of the Fish which attests to the survival of the Roman Empire and to its secret resistants.

In Blanchot's récits, the fictional world is, in a different way, subject to a wearing away, an erosion, which terrifyingly, seems to carry itself over to our real world. But now the face of Palmer Eldritch is everywhere, he looks at us from everything, and when we look in a mirror, his eyes look out from our own.

In the récits and the fragmentary writings, it is our world that is being presented - our world, but doubled; it is not just the field that opens itself to our grasp, but a great still opacity. And so it is with the narrators and protagonists: they, too, are doubled; their actions, their intensions are ghosted by what they cannot do and cannot have. Who are they, the ones who have lost their hold on life?

The setting of Blanchot's fiction is mundane, the prose is calm; what is monstrous is what is made to present itself by way of that tranquility. True, there are sometimes sudden leaps - Judith dies in the narrator's arms, J. is brought back to life - and moments where the prose leaps into a strange abstraction: words like fascination, image, return, are used as a telegraphic shorthand.

All this is odd enough, but Blanchot goes further still. What if the events of the narrative are not what matters at all - or rather, that what matters does so by way of them. In Death Sentence, the narrator says what is important is not what is told, but something else, as if the events of the book come to stand in for another happening, as though they sacrificed themselves to a greater demand.

The récit, Blanchot claims, bears upon its own happening, its own event. Indeed, the récit is just a name for this event, even as it needs to give itself body in terms of a specific narrative, and is nothing apart from what is given to be read.

How difficult this is! But I will not take the long detour that would be required in order to make sense of this claim. Let me ask, more simply, about the demand of the récit, of Blanchot's récits.

Fascination

For Blanchot, there is the faith in a kind of reading that sets you back from yourself, allowing an experience which does not have, as its measure, the 'I' of power and possibility. To read is to experience the 'I' as profoundly cracked; it is to open the fissure that, in truth, was always there, and which closed only as you, as a child, learned to speak.

For what comes with speech? The world is lifted from its hinges - or it seems to double itself; to speak is to speak of an ideal world, to know this table through the idea of a table. But then this table, the immediate, the here and now, is passed over in favour of the idea. Infancy, Blanchot says, is a time of fascination; the world is measureless, and does not hold itself at that distance that would allow it to be known (think of the boy Alexander in Bergman's film, or of the very young children of Woolf's The Waves).

But then comes the transition; language divides the speaker from what is spoken; this division is ideal, separating out what was joined to itself in the infant's fascinated embrace of the world. Now comes the Fall. There is nothing immediate; or if it is experienced, it is as though in the past tense; it reaches me before me, or in that place where I am still an infant, where infancy continues to accompany me.

And it is because of that infant, that continual infancy, that I am cracked and always cracked. This is what I forget. But I am made to remember again (or, at least, the infant 'inside' me, the outside inside, wakes up). What carries itself over to my ordinary, everyday world is the chance of an alteration that would make the world fascinating again. Fascinating - but also terrifying, for the adult is frightened, unlike the child, of losing control.

And now each thing, like a comet's head, bears a ghostly tail; the determinacy of the world is joined to the indeterminable; and it is as though space could at any moment give upon fascination and time upon the absence of time: themes explored at length in Blanchot's The Space of Literature.

But there is something missing from this book that is not missing from his fiction, which I now I understand to roamed always ahead of his critical reflections, like a scout. Rereading Thomas, I shook my head: everything is here, already. Everything, and already developed.

Then Blanchot had to refind what he had found by literature in his critical writings. To refind it, and then to discover its philosophical stakes. This in dialogue with Levinas, who wrote beside him. Perhaps it is in the essays written in the wake of Levinas's Totality and Infinity, which bear on the status of the relation to the human Other, that Blanchot reaches theoretically what was already found and by way of his récits.

True, Blanchot's fiction was always concerned with the relation to the Other, and in a startling way. What else at issue in the exchanges of the unnamed man and woman who are together and apart in the hotel room in Waiting, Forgetting?

Reading 'The Sirens' Song', one might suppose these dialogues are only a way of allegorising or redoubling the happening of the récit. The relationships between the characters in Blanchot's fiction would not matter so much as the relationship of the writer or the reader to the récit itself. Everything - plot, character development, the 'interest' of the narrative - would have been devoured by the black hole of the récit.

But this is misleading, as becomes clear when those récits are read alongside Blanchot's insistence on the absolute singularity of the relation to the human other.

Conversation

'Make it so I can speak to you', entreats the young woman of Waiting, Forgetting. She wants the man who she is with for a single night to write, to record their conversation, to write about the anonymous hotel room in which they find themselves. He writes; she reads what he writes, but she's not satisfied. They speak; he writes, but she does not believe she has spoken. It is his responsibility; he must help the one who came to his room when he made a sign to her from his balcony.

Sometimes she looks to him as one stronger than her; sometimes, it is clear she is stronger. Sometimes they are both weak, and their exchange becomes a litany. But he has been told, and more than once, what his responsibility is. And what of the narrator, who stands apart from both characters?

They are waiting for speech, all of them, but speech never comes. But what would it mean, speech? Is it analogous to what Blanchot will call the book to come - the way in which the artwork is never yet itself, as it recalls that infancy when the world becomes fascinating, when everything is made strange, and by way of the work.

Now the determinacy of the world is joined to the indeterminable, now there is the chance of an alteration that would let the world become fascinating. But the chance of that chance depends on the human other, and upon that communication that would reach the other. Not what is said - a determinable message, a clear communication, but the 'that there is' of communicativity, the saying that lets speak the indeterminable by way of the indeterminate; the ghostly tail that burns behind the world; the terror of the adult who has lost control of things. And this by way of the other, this shared - this 'that there is' of language, as it speaks by way of what is said. This is the narrative voice of the récit, which depends on the Other.

This is the voice that would resound for us, Blanchot's readers. But it also figures itself as what speaks between the characters of his narratives . Between - and as a kind of background, a murmuring that each side of the dialogue encounters, and in his or her own way. But can it be called a dialogue, an exchange in which nothing is communicated?

Conversation, entretien, that which is held between, that which holds itself between: this is the relation that the reader should have with the récit. And it is the relation, too, that is held between those who speak in Blanchot's récits. 'Make it so that I can speak': let speak in me what is held between us. Let speak that which burns behind all things, the fiery trail, the absence of the world in the world, and via what I say. What I say - what it says, this burning tail, this murmuring reserve that recedes as soon as speech is transcribed.

It speaks between them, the characters of Waiting, Forgetting, but speaks as it says nothing, as it conveys nothing. This is what they would like to capture. The male character writes; the narrator writes; and the woman, calls for that transcription which would show fidelity to the event that was happening between them. Calls, then, for that narrative, that act of writing which would let speech resound.

But there can be no transcription - you cannot write of that speech which is only indeterminable. The male character writes of the room, of the details of the room. He sets down what is said, and passes what he writes to her. But has he made it so that she can speak? And what of the narrator, who remains on the side of the male character, knowing more than him? He, too is a transcriber; he records, he remembers. Further still: what of Blanchot, who writes of this male character, this female character and of the narrator?

No transcription. But the récit, as a whole, is still an attempt to transcribe, to redouble, the relation of speech. The récit does not bear, simply, upon its own event, its own happening, but upon the happening of speech. In one sense, this is perfectly consistent with 'The Sirens' Song': what is exchanged between the conversationalists redoubles something of the relationship between reader and récit. Of course, reading is unilateral - but what if the book was altered in its encounter with you? Imagine that the relation of reading were redoubled, and both sides, now without common measure, responded to each as to the other. That is what is at stake in the doubly dissymmetrical relation to the Other, where both 'terms' of the relation are altered in turn.

Responsibility

No chance that his account of the relation to the human other parallels what Blanchot has already called 'literary responsibility', that is, the way in which the author determines a récit in his response to the murmuring of the indeterminable. Now, however, responsibility is doubled; it becomes communal, in Blanchot's understanding of the world, as the relation in question works in two directions.

Responsibility redoubled. The encounter with the Other. Do not think Blanchot has become Levinasian. For the encounter happens by way of the Other, at issue is a relation that is redoubled and to that extent shared - a community without common measure, that is, which no longer depends upon the primacy of what is said in the first person. What matters is the background of speech, its lack of determination, rather than the Other whose address would awaken me to speech. Or rather, that address is only the lack of determination, the reserve.

When, in the years aurrounding the publication of Levinas's Totality and Infinity, Blanchot also maintains the human Other is more other than anything else, this does not mean Blanchot has separated literary responsibility from that which awakens in the relation to the murmuring of language, to communicativity that happens by way of the relation to the Other. Blanchot has not turned from literature to ethics; nor does he rank the alterity of the Other (speech) and the alterity of the work (writing) with respect to one another.

The récit figures the redoubled relation to the Other, community. As such, it does not bear simply on its own happening, the happening of writing, but also upon the happening of speech. Both are relations to language (to communicativity, to the fact of language); both are ways in which which language gives itself to be experienced. The récit is only a particular folding of this experience - an implication of speech in writing, even as speech and writing are never separable. Speech and writing, as both are thought from the experience of language, are not distinct in kind.

Still, by emphasising the relation of speech in the period of The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot does indicate something like the ethical or the political stakes of the experience of language in question. This is not an ethics or politics of literature - not a way, that is, of showing the specific commitments that attend upon the act of reading or writing, but, in keeping with the broadening of Blanchot's concerns in this period, a more general reflection, alongside Levinas, but distinct from him, on language.

A reflection that continues to pass by way of a practice of literary writing, and by way of Waiting, Forgetting. It is not that this récit is different in kind from those that precede it, nor not even that it outplays the theorisation of the récit Blanchot provides in 'The Sirens' Song'. But there is a change of emphasis in Blanchot's writings in this period - a concern with the redoubled relation to language that occurs in what he calls community, that is, in the relation between two or more people such that each, in relating to another, is brought into contact with an experience of language.

Freedom

Terror: Palmer Eldritch's face appears in the sky, in our world. Terror: with Blanchot our world is no longer our own, and who are we, who wander like dazed oxen in the time of the récit? But with The Infinite Conversation it becomes clearer that this terror is also a liberation, that infancy's return as the experience of language, is the chance of freedom. A freedom, now, that I do not possess, that is not that 'ability to be able' in league with the unfolding of the world, but that possesses me, returning as speech or as writing.

Simplistic indeed to link freedom to indeterminability, to the experience of language. But let me leave this thought here, rather than take it further in an already overlong and convoluted post.

Protection

To give, to be given: do I envy what Gorchakov would have protected when he held a lit candle in cupped palms and went across the drained pool? Twice the flame was snuffed out by the wind; twice it was relit, until, on his third crossing, he fulfilled the promise he made to the madman: he was across, he had crossed. Then, a groan, off camera. The sound of a fall. Gorchakov has fallen; has he died?

Then I remember the letters Blanchot wrote to inquirers, 'Although I might like to meet, the circumstances of my work make it impossible ...'; 'Henceforward I live in such retirement that ...' He no longer saw even his closest friends, he told one inquirer, and Jabes, in an interview, said his communication with Blanchot consisted only of those short letters, written in an exquisite hand, such as all his correspondents received.

Then, as he approached his tenth decade, his hand became unsteady, and those epistolatory exchanges, often marked by long breaks, began to cease altogether. What was he protecting, what did he need to protect, so that he could meet no one, and that what he called friendship passed only by way of the exchange of letters?

The silence of literature, that is one name, but it says very little. Silence? Rather a kind of murmuring, an indetermination that makes the most decisive speech tremble. Did he need to be alone to let that experience be kept? Or was it that his whole life had been lived so it could best experience that indetermination, so he could let it claim him as one who could not help but write?

Do I envy that retirement, that separation from the world? Do I envy the sense that it was only possible to speak in one's own terms, or better, in the terms of that writing, that speech, that the course of thought, of a whole life was an attempt to honour? Light the candle; walk across the drained pool. Now I understand: to write here is also to protect writing. And to write of speech, of speaking, is, every day to attempt to cross again that pool.

Of what would you write? Or what, by writing, would you keep of speech? What you write must respond to what comes from afar, and unexpectedly. With, not alone - but with whom? Alongside whom? First of all, alongside oneself, which asks for that separation between one who writes here and the other who lives, who acts. To live alongside, to live that separation that holds the lit candle as between closed palms.

Do I envy him, the one around whom my palms are closed? But he is not here yet, as he will never come. Hope: I have cleared my life for his arrival. And what I have written is only that clearing. But there are others who also know that opening. Writers, readers: friends as they, too travel alongside themselves.

The Open Palm

No, there was no 'teenage angst', I do not remember that. The escape from the party, the walk to the lake at dawn in the frizzying rain: the world that had been closed opened to us like an opening hand. And we went across the open palm of the world, in the morning, that may as well have been the first morning of the world.

Of what did we speak? Of the others left behind, and, as all those do who are half infatuated, the chance of your meeting, its strangeness, and the kind of imperative it carries. With, not alone: we were always meant to pass here; the world was always meant to open. Now we are alone with the fact of our attraction; it is a fate held in common, and this first of all was the topic of our conversation.

But even this is wrong, for what conversation was there? Intervallic speech, speech that lightened itself in the opening between what is said: how was it that nothing seemed to say itself, or what we said was already undone, and there was the delight of letting those words float into the air and disappear?

What was said did not matter; that it said itself was everything, that, speaking, we were able to exchange the lightness of speech, able to lighten it: we were both smiling, I remember that. Smiling, and because we'd lent speech a kind of assistance. We had left the party; we made our way to the lake: you said you would always remember that.

So did I. But it stands, in my memory, as part a series of days, of nights we shared. A series marked by lightness, by the saying of nothing in particular, where what mattered was the lightness of speech, before what it was that speech bore. True, infatuation fell away, but wasn't there retained a memory of that first infatuation, a sense of youth, of the morning, and the promise held in the open palm of the world?

Yes, that's what lightness has always meant: it is youth, it is play of speech that lightens the world. Absolute youth. 'We never said anything', you said. Nothing was said, that's true. But by that nothing was spoken the between of speaking, its its demand, which asked, over the years, to be maintained.

And that's what held us together. Together? But who were we, speakers, in the exchange of the lightness of speech. No one in particular; no one, everyone, who gave up what they said to the sacrifice speech demands. A gentle sacrifice, a light burning, a flame in the drizzle of that first morning.

What joy there is to give, to be given! Joy of anonymity, of the open palm from which everything must rebegin. That's what it means to be young, to be very young, and finally for youth to name what cannot be lived, but that streams all around us.

You will not step into the same morning twice. And not even once, for the step is a gift, a giving, that will plunge you into the streaming of youth. To speak is also to come apart.

And after you have spoken? After the morning passed? That morning became the brightness behind everything, a sky behind the sky, the backdrop of our lives, obscured sometimes, sometimes lost, but that burned like the flame in the rain, in the sacrifice to which we were given.

The Fire Balloon

To be lost in the middle of life, that's it. Wasn't that what X. said to me this evening, outside my office? He, too was lost. Very well, he should come out with us more often; what is the summer for but the pub, the sun? That's how every evening must pass, and all the way to autumn.

But to be lost - or at least in a phase uncharted, that new, long period of crawling out of debt. I have a mobile phone contract, my first; next week, broadband, and the week after, a DVD player, a TV: this my reward for reaching my mid 30s (for clearing my debts). And I look back and say to myself, what have I done?

But I have an idea of prose that would bear everything that happened. Bear it - but be more than what is borne. More: and what could be borne would be borne along with everything, the whole world. Everything would speak; all would be spoken, in a prose, I imagine, that would intersperse great historical events with the most intimate occurrences.

But do not confuse it, this prose, with what is written here. It all goes wrong, I won't labour the point, but it's all botched - all this writing. But I've worn out that theme: writing botched and broken. Still, I tell myself that it is necessary to write because life isn't yet itself. Because it hasn't arrived, living. And what is lived repeats that non-arrival, it lives it, it is borne by it.

That is why the smallness of a life - mine - does not matter. I can't write anymore about failure. W. thought I'd be melancholy after our return from Freiburg. No, not anymore, I told him. I'm too weak for that. Weakness, but in more than one sense.

A kind of indifference: the affairs of the day no longer bother me. What should I expect? It is as I would expect. And then, in the still nights at the flat now the students have moved out, a bland tiredness. The day has gone, and the evening in the pub, and now the night. Now what? Sleep; wake up again.

The earth turns into the light, and once again, morning. Gone that sense of urgency I once had. It will all end soon, I thought. You only have so much time. So I rose earlier and earlier, to get a headstart on the day. And now?

But still, an idea of prose. By what massive book could I let the smallness of a life be borne away? What epic could be written of this, my everyday? Mine - but it is not mine. Anyone's; no one in particular's. All lives are small; no one's has begun. Life in lieu of itself: that too is life, and the life of life.

Nine o'clock, and it's still light. The longest day of the year, and its vague and grey. Tilt your head back and look at the sky, my brother in law told me, it's good for you. So that's what I do, and there it is, the whole sky. The whole: you know it only by walking, and through an open space - the field, my field, where they keep cows over the summer, though it is so close to the city.

An idea of prose. No themes, no characters. A kind of wandering speech. Like the voiceover in Eloge de l'amour when the camera is still by the river. A still camera, speech. What are they speaking about? Oh I could find out; I could work out the plot. But better that they just speak, better that plot no longer carries them, better than they are not even characters, but just nodes of speech, senders, addressees, and then not even that, as what they say is not even said to one another, but to the whole night, the whole sky and the river.

Worse for them, perhaps, that they speak by that river, and in that city.  I'm fortunate to live nowhere in particular, in the high latitudes, where there is light on the horizon at midnight. And now it's time to round off this post, to finish it. Think instead of that prose that could not end, laying itself in short paragraphs across a large page.

I think of the opening pages of The Decay of the Angel, in the collected Sea of Fertility. An absolute book. The book of the end, that's what I think to myself. Mishima was already beyond death when he wrote it. He wrote to us from the other side of death; and how could he mark its completion by his extinction? But I wonder if that wasn't his impatience: that he should have been condemned to live and condemned to write a prose that could never end.

Write. Write until nothing is said, or when what is said does not matter. Write until indifference blows through your words as through the fields. Write like a stone, or the river as it speaks back to the nameless speakers of Eloge de l'amour. What does it say, the river, the whole night, the whole sky?

There is a way that writing might come apart in writing. That by writing, what is held by writing would itself disappear. There is a way of lightening speech, the whole of speech, until it floats into the air like a fire-balloon.

Indifference

Introspection? No, not even that, for nothing is seen here, and nothing belongs to the inside. By writing of them, events become lighter. Write of them, and they begin to rise into the air. But nothing is seen. Writing, just writing - the sound of words, the rhythm of prose, and the play of concepts. It barely interests me.

Write, half-attentive. Write, after writing several posts, and only then might you attain that writing-indifference, that writing-disinterestedness that lifts itself from the particularity of your life. I want to write nothing special. To write nothing in particular, to join my prose to the great streaming of prose.

My prose? But it is not mine, and that is what I want: to relinquish what is mine, my life and my memories; to lighten them, and let themselves drift into the air.

Fantasies

Childhood fantasies. Novels of Diana Wynne Jones, where the gifted one never knows he is such until the end of the book, when it is revealed that his ordinariness hid his extraordinariness, and the others turn to him, modest one, in wonder. But my fantasy was that what was revealed thereby was only the absolutely ordinary, the more ordinary than ordinary, and it would be seen, in the end, that I was just like anyone else, but only there where (second fantasy) I was dying, or at least close to death.

How nice to be ill, and being drawn sweetly towards death. Who told me that dying of hypothermia was like falling asleep? To fall asleep into death, and that point to be the most ordinary, and anyone at all. Do you see, they would say, around my bed, or, better still, elsewhere, even far away, living their own lives - do you see, he was just like anyone else. Anyone, no one: what was the name of that girl who scratched my arm, just to see how I would react? But I let my arm lie there, and thought: this is how I will die, just lying there.

And a stronger memory: letting a boy, weaker than I, wrestle me to the ground. I was stronger, but I was weaker too: by what weakness did I let myself be brought down like a wild animal? I kept quiet; I said nothing. I liked his meanness, and the meanness of his brother; I thought: here it is, here at last, and now, before their meanness, I am anyone at all.

Thunder and Silence

'Write our story.' - 'There was no story.' - 'Write it.'

But it did not begin; it never stepped over the threshold. How can you speak of what does not belong to the continuity of time?' The story: the attempt to reach a story. Or a story of the failure of stories - not, now, of the limit against which stories are wrecked, but of a detour so vast, you can never come to a place from which to begin. How to speak of what has no contour?

'Speak. Tell me what happened.' What happened? Do you think I could tell you? Is that what you want - to be told, to round off the event? But it did not end and it will not end. Who can speak of it? 'But it speaks.' It speaks, saying nothing, saying itself, thunder and silence. And who are we except the speakers it elected, the relays it called for, that speaking that speaks only by withholding itself in what is said? But what was it apart from us, this speech? What was it, apart from its speakers?

But I know that when it used us, when it spoke in our speech, it was only to lighten itself, to disperse itself, to make it that it did not weigh upon anyone. It was to be kept afloat - alive, and by passing from the one to the other: yes that's what it wanted.

'Tell me what happened.' With what kind of telling? How to narrate a story that never reached a beginning? How, when that beginning will never be reached? It is deferral itself. It is detour. Why do you suppose that there's anything to be reached, or that we would have the means to reach it?

'We lacked the means.' Yes, that's true. But wasn't that why we were selected? Wasn't it our weakness that selected us? It was by our weakness that we found one another. And weakness that made us sink down, each beside the other.

To sink down - to rest: that's when we heard it, the thunder, the silence. That's when it was heard, in the background, withdrawing, and sounding in its withdrawal. 'That's what we exchanged, that speech.' No: we were what allowed it to lighten itself, to be heard, to be lightened. It was what spoke by what was said. 'What we said.' What spoke itself between us.

'Literary Responsibility'

Ulysses and Homer

There's no English equivalent of the French récit, which names a literary genre which tells of a single event. A few dense notes on what this word comes to mean for Blanchot in The Book to Come and elsewhere.

Ulysses journeys; this is what Homer remembers and recounts. The event of the journey is separate from the event of narration. But Blanchot argues the récit does not does not simply recount an event, whether real or fictional, representing it at a distance, but makes it happen. Ulysses and Homer are one. Then, on his account, the event would need the récit in order to occur, and the contents of the récit would allegorise the event for which they would substitute (Breton's encounter with Nadja, Ahab's with the whale).

But one should not be misled by what Blanchot apparently indicates about the event. The récit allows the event to complete itself, to be brought to form only as its narrative form is unjoined from itself. One might say (rather pretentiously) it is a kind of non-event that happens as the récit - and the non-event that spreads everywhere, devouring plot, character and the rest, like a black hole that turns at the heart of the book.

But if this is the case, event and non-event must be thought together. The récit allows an event to be narrated, to be limited, delimited so that it can be brought to language. But that limit is also subject to a kind of detour; it is indeterminable, or rather, that what is called delimitation or determination happens by solidifying a reserve that can never, in its entirety, be brought into focus.

The récit, it is true, always has a plot to devour, and characters to disperse; it is exposed to the danger of a kind of erosion or wearing away. At any moment, the limits of the récit threaten to come undone; the récit, especially in Blanchot's hands, seems to be perpetually on the brink of unravelling itself. But this happens exactly as the delimitation of the récit, and as a trembling of those limits.

This is what gives Blanchot's récits their uncertain status; they are like nothing else written. Do they bear upon a single event, or even the happening of an event? Or do they return, over and again, to those events which seem to unlimit themselves and are unable to be brought to a conclusion?

The Demand of the Récit

In Death Sentence, for example, the narrator will insist that everything he has told is but a substitute for another event, which he cannot reach. And not even an event - a kind of fall from the event, a drifting without determinacy (or perhaps determination should be rethought, and in a way equivalent to the event).

How should this be understood? The act of narration is divided. Language divides itself from what it is possible to say, to represent in terms of actions, of characters and of what befalls them, and what cannot be said: a kind of opacity in language which tears it from its referential function. Or once again, and the point is not difficult, there is what can be said by way of language - and by way of those characters and milieus language would allow the author to bring to life, and a kind of saying of language itself, its sonorousness, its rhythms, the way it seems to thicken itself into an idiom, saying nothing at all but the fact that it is.

Those compelled to write, according to Blanchot, are as though addressed by this opacity; they experience it, and the récit is one outcome of this experience - the narrative being shaped to figure an encounter with what will not allow itself to speak in terms of characters, plot, etc. An encounter with what remains intransitive in language - it is not simply that I cannot convey what I experienced of this or that day, of the beauty of that vista, of the singularity of that bouquet of flowers, but that language also resists the attempt to convey anything at all.

In this sense, it breaks from that same experience of power and possibility that, for Blanchot, following Heidegger, is the condition of our experience of the world. Higher than actuality is possiblity: the world gives itself as it is given to human powers and possibility; it depends upon that potentiality-to-be for its structure and coherence. But then, as Heidegger allows, that coherency is precarious: what is the Nothing but Heidegger's name for its withdrawal, when we lose grip on the world, and the world seems to stand outside of our powers, obdurate and unalterable?

As with Heidegger, so with Blanchot - but this has to be thought in terms of language (just as it does in the later Heidegger): there is an experience of language as the Nothing, when it does not speak of the world around us -  or if it does, it is only to redouble the becoming-opaque of the world. But then the world, for Blanchot, is only given through language; there is, in this sense, no redoubling - there is not the world and then language, only their cobelonging in a single experience.

There are times, then, when language and the world become opaque; times - or rather, what breaks the course of time, being those happenings which can never round themselves off into a completed event because they transform we who experience them. It is not just that the récit would represent these incompletable events, for the récit is also one of them.

This is difficult! The events in question, Claudia brushing Judith's hair, the attempt of the nameless narrator of Waiting, Forgetting, to make it so his companion could speak, transcribing their exchanges, and allowing her to read them, Thomas letting himself fall into an open grave seem to be such that, although in some sense incompletable, unlimitable, are nonetheless reported, represented, in the récit.

But to write a récit, to read one, is to undergo just such an experience; therefore, the experience of reading Blanchot is doubly strange - both for those events, those non-events that are narrated, and for the form of narration itself, when everything becomes uncertain. But in a sense, it is not simply that the narrative form is fitted to what occurred, even when it seems to be the case, as in the opening paragraphs of Death Sentence, where the narrator seems to want to tell us something immensely important, and that he has struggled to write a number of times.

No, the récit is not simply where what is told is allowed to happen, in the manner of a repressed experience that is allowed to be spoken at last. It is itself a happening (inverted commas around the word happening) - it is already an event. That is why the narrator of Death Sentence will say, in effect, that it does not matter what he writes, he is trying to speak of something for which the narrative he has written is a paltry substitute.

It is as though the récit, wanting to be written, wants to draw, phantom-like, on the life of its narrator, on the events (inverted commas around this word) he would report. But the récit is never satisfied with any of these events, knowing each of them comes undone. In Blanchot's hands, the récit is unappeasable; it demands too much. This is because it can never finish trying to bring itself into existence - even as it can never be brought forth thus, depending, as it does, on what makes language opaque and withdraws it from meaning.

Ulysses does not precede Homer; Homer is also Ulysses in the telling of the récit; both men are one, and the writing of the récit is the adventure that shipwrecks both of them. Homer writes; Ulysses tells of what happens to him. But Homer is a name for the demand of the récit; he wants to speak of that demand, wants to let it resound through everything that is said. Is there a struggle between the two parts of the author? Either way, what was written stands in for what can never bring itself into the light of meaning. Every reported event is substitutive; it only stands in for the happening, the non-happening of the récit itself.

The Passion of Determination

To write, Blanchot argues, is bring oneself into contact with the indeterminable, or it is to experience something like the passion of determination and delimitation. It is this experience for which any particular narrative would substitute itself: the narrative voice speaks of what resists power and possibility; it is an experience of language as it loosens its capacity to refer, to speak of the world in which we are capable of understanding and of action.

But then, at the same time, the récit needs words; it needs narrative - the author must be able to complete a written text, if only as a substitute for experience in question. The author, coming into the experience for which the récit is one name, must determine this experience, lending it form. It would be possible to sketch a history of narrative in terms of these forms, but what distinguishes our time, in which Blanchot writes his récits, is that this determinacy is understood in its passion, its trembling.

Higher than possibility stands impossibility; in place of actuality, there is an absence of world - or the world is given as what resists our powers: this is what presents itself in Blanchot's fiction. Once again, this is prefigured in Heidegger - in the idea (in The Origin of the Work of Art) that earth is what would resist world, struggling with it: that the earth resists human powers, human potentiality, and the open dimension of the world.

Even as it opens the world, the earth turns it aside from that opening, so that what seems to bestow itself - the brightness and brilliance of a world in a particular epoch - does so via a kind of withholding. Earth gives the world as what resists the dimension of light; it appears, but only as it is turned from us, its titanic face facing out into the night.

Above all, for Heidegger, it is presented thus - as a struggle with power, with light - in the work of art. He will even permit himself to dream of a great work of art that would found a world - a great inauguration whose chance is not closed to us yet, though we are deep in the epoch of technology. That is the dream of the 'other' beginning - the inception we cannot bring about through an act of will, but that may occur, perhaps thousands of years in the future.

With Blanchot, there are no such dreams. If one can speak of the earth with respect to his recits, it can never be foundational: it can never, by struggling with the world, tear wide a new beginning. Rather, it shows the limit of any possible world - the limit, but as it becomes limitless, as it unlimits any attempt to impose boundaries on the given in terms of human power, human potential.

But nevertheless, this does point to a kind of responsibility on the part of the author, and perhaps of the reader. That unlimiting given in the encounter with language as it seems to turn aside from reference, from referentiality, is preserved in the récit.

Récit and Critique

As Levinas comments, comparing Blanchot and Heidegger, art, with the former, is freed from the chance of offering a foundation, of the inauguration of a new epoch. It is unbound from what Heidegger calls truth. As such, it safeguards a kind of resistance, a distance from which the given can be called into critique. Art attains a critical function. This is not a formulation Blanchot would use. But he will write, as obliquely as always, of a kind of 'literary responsibility'.

How should this be understood? Simply as the way in which the author, the one compelled to write, gives form to the experience of language in a récit. The way in which the writer - one for whom writing is not an option among others -, elected by that experience, marks that election in his or her work. Examples would include Duras, Laporte, Breton, Kafka and even Melville - but one shouldn't think the récit presents itself only in literary forms.

In 'The Ease of Dying', Blanchot, commenting on Paulhan, can be read as allowing that theoretical works might also constitute récits - that to write philosophy, for example - to be compelled to write - may allow a work of philosophy to be read as a récit. Philosophy (but this is to move to quickly) would become literature, or something like literature; or a kind of research, seemingly specific to literature, would lay claim, too, to that theoretical practice in which writing - in a way, perhaps, unbeknownst to its author - is at issue.

Perhaps the word literature, like the word récit, is substitutive of the more general word, writing - a practice (is this the word?) that gives itself to be spoken (written) in a variety of genres. Then there is the task of attesting to writing - a task of reading, of critical commentary. A task that cannot spare itself from a meditation on the way commentary itself is written, and belongs to writing, that is to say, to the experience of language that writing names.

Commentary, then, is also responsible, and, with modernity, with Blanchot, explicitly so. Explicitly - and as such, unlike the implicit response to the demand of writing that determines the form of particular works in particular genres. Blanchot's practice of commentary reveals what is implicit; as such, it, too, might be said to be a récit.

It may seem this claim confuses two levels of discourse - there is the text to be commented upon, and then there is the commentary. But the récit, the work, is already a commentary upon itself - it is given form (even though its author may not be consciously aware of this) in response to the experience of language, yes, but a response that is also a negotiation of the laws of a particular genre.

A continual negotation - an attempt, on every page, on every line, to respond to an experience. To respond over and over again. Such a response is already a commentary; it comes after the event; it is a response to the event to which the récit is linked. This response is the condition of what Blanchot calls responsibility, and perhaps it is possible to say that each writer is responsible in his or her own way.

How? By putting the determined unity of the character under pressure; to suspend plot and plotting (Thomas the Obscure); to write not a dialogue, but to stage, in what is said, the impossibility of dialogue (Waiting, Forgetting). And even to dramatise the situation of the writer; to write about writing, or the attempt to write (The One Who ...) Each time a negotiation; each time the distinction between narrative and the narrative voice collapses in a new way.

Writing of Heidegger, Blanchot will, on one occasion condemn him as a writer - that is, as one who should have been aware of his responsibility. He was aware (the phrase, the experience of language is also his), but not aware enough; vigilant, but not sufficiently vigilant: how could earth and world be brought into relation with one another such that they would allow the detour of writing to come to a beginning?Above all, how could Heidegger have failed to maintain the passion of determinacy, that wavering which can never be hardened into a beginning?)

In summary, then, the récit does not name a literary genre, for Blanchot, but the practice of responding to the experience of language. Perhaps any piece of writing can be read as a récit. Perhaps, then, literary responsibility is misnamed; it refers to the way in which any author, whether consciously or unconsciously, negotiates the demand of the experience in question, and in whatever form.

A responsibility that reveals itself in and as writing, in the compulsion to write, whether it takes the final form of literature or philosophy. The final form - but there are no final forms. Or writing is what undoes the claim to finality, as it joins itself to the experience that remains on the hither side of what can be said.

Weakness

What happened? You detain me, is that the word? Detained - but from what? What was I doing? Something failed to happen, that's true. Or was it that what happened lost itself from the course of time? Detained - and how to reach the moment when something could happen? That it failed to do so is the way it continues to happen; it is its claim.

What does it want? To be past - to be let go - or is that what I want, to release the event into forgetting? It wants to belong to the future - yes, this is what it wants for itself -, but only by breaking the horizon of expectation, of bringing the future very close, so that it seems to burn between us.

But what burns? Nothing that could happen to us. Nothing possible. And yet that joins itself to what is humanly possible, and for us. Joins itself, unjoining the course of time. We are detained; we are held here, and we will always be held. This is the crossing, the crossing point. Which of us is here? Who am I for you, and you for me? What do we share?

Either way, there will be, for both of us, a way of feeling responsible for the event. As though it elected us, we who were not worthy of its demand. As though it called upon the ones who were least responsible, or least able to measure its demand. Why were we chosen, the weakest ones? Why when we will always be unequal to ourselves with respect to what occurred?

But it is by that weakness that we were chosen. Or weakness is its sign, that choosing. Henceforward, you will belong to the detour, that is what is said. You belong to what you cannot accomplish. It is by weakness that you will be responsible, even to the extent of wanting to repeat what happened - even in your weakness to want to re-enact it again, and as if for the first time.

'Let it happen again, and this time so that I can master it. Let it happen, and be brought under my control. I will make it happen. I will bring it under control.'

But this desire is only a sign of your weakness, and of your failure to complete the event. How can it be brought back into the course of life? How can it be let go, neglected, so that it joins the other moments that pass so quickly? But it will not allow itself to be neglected. Or it is neglect itself - it is what turns its face away from us. This is what we suffer, and suffer together.

'I can't help it.' - 'We can't help it.' - 'I'm too weak.' - 'We are each too weak.'