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.