The word 'I' is not a concept, that would grasp this particular tree in terms of a universal. Nor does it refer to that particular in its singularity, since the 'I' is wholly taken over by anyone who speaks. But here, it is not as if there first exists a subject who then expresses himself using language. The 'I' is a position afforded by language that gives birth to the subject.
Benveniste (via): 'In some way language puts forth "empty" forms which each speaker, in the exercise of their discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his "person"'. But note the capacity of the speaker to relate such forms to himself depends upon his birth as a speaker. He does not take up the empty form of the 'I', since he, as a subject, does not pre-exist the personal pronoun. Then language is not first of all personal, but the condition of the subject who can then use pronouns. Somehow - strange miracle - the subject takes up a position with respect to the impersonal streaming, the 'empty forms' of language. It appears as a subject.
The subject does not pre-exist language. And yet now there is a self that can speak. 'Can speak' - but from where does this power come? Is the self (is it yet a self?) fated to language? Can it not not speak? Either way, as subject, it has the power to speak: the ability, with respect to language (and not just over language), to be able. Somehow, it is given that power. The power comes from that movement that catches up the not-yet-self, the pre-subject, and makes of it a subject.
Fated to speak, then, and to have power over speech. But only by taking over and animating the empty forms of language. Forms, concepts, that pre-exist the subject and will outlive it. Language that streams without it - without you or I - but to which we owe what we can be. The murmuring of language that streams behind us like the tail of a comet, and streams after us, the tail of other comets, speakers, who come to themselves as you came, and so did I.
But is there a way in which the subject might also disappear, losing the place it seems to have achieved - and even its own subjectivity? Or rather, alongside the subject, might one not think of another locus of experience, this time as it belongs to a streaming of the empty forms of language over which the 'I' has no power? Such is what Foucault asks us to think in his essay, 'The Thought Fom Outside'.
2. Foucault reflects on the Cretan Epimenides' statement 'all Cretans are liars'. Is Epimenides speaking the truth? This question generates what logicians have called the self-referential paradox, which can be solved, says Foucault, if we understand how a distinction is made in this statement 'between two propositions, the first of which is the object of the second'. The sincerity of the Cretan is called in question by the content of what he says; he may be lying about lying.
But this depends upon the idea that the speaking subject is simply the speaker about which it speaks - to speak is also to say that you speak. And yet, the position of the 'I speak' is not assured. Foucault finds in this simple statement also 'an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject - the "I" who speaks - fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space'. Language cannot be tied to the form of the 'I', and as such, Epimenides' statement is not longer part of any system of representation.
In short, it is no longer discourse and the communication of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse (what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what sometimes represents itself in it by means of a grammatical form designed to have that effect) than a nonexistence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues.
How do we access this exteriority of language? How does it reveal itself, language as the outside?
Foucault's essay concerns literature, and specifically the work of Blanchot. It is Blanchot who would have revealed to us, in his fiction and criticism, the play of the outside. And of course it is from Blanchot the word outside comes, but to name what? A simple answer would be to say what revealed itself to him as he wrote literature, and as early as his first fictions. This, I think would be the answer of those for whom his relationship to philosophy followed his own experience and was secondary to it. But as Steve quotes him,
To write in ignorance of the philosophical horizon, - or refusing to acknowledge the punctuation, the groupings and separations determined by the words that mark this horizon - is necessarily to write with facile complacency (the literature of elegance and good taste).
The philosophical horizon was formed, for Blanchot, by Heidegger, by Hegel (Kojeve's Hegel); there was also the encounter with Bataille and Levinas ... Whenever I think of the notion of the outside, it is with reference to the notion of interiority that we continue to find in Heidegger, which is thought in terms of 'mineness' - upon the hollow of the 'I', albeit an 'I' stretched into the future, distended - an 'I' that is given in terms of the possibilities that lie open before it, and the projection, the temporal transcendence against which things unfold.
For the early Levinas, the relation to being is impersonal; it does not allow mineness to be hollowed out, but, when it is encountered directly, undoes the form of the 'I' that Heidegger's being elects it to be. Dense formulations! A paragraph where there should be a book! But the 'I' for Levinas emerges out of a prior field - emerges, but can also fall back there, into the pell-mell that precedes the subject and that always threatens to return.
This is why, for Levinas, being is a threat, and is to be thought of in terms of possession, of impersonal participation; existence is not a leap into the future, a projection on the basis of the prior leap of transcendence, but the result of a struggle, ever active and ongoing, whose achievement is the sense of a future we as human beings hold before us precariously and, too often, in delusion.
Something similar holds for Blanchot, but the tone is different - being, existence without existents, is encountered not only in horror, but in a kind of melting delight - there is joy (as Bataille might say) in the little deaths that deliver each of us over to possession, to dispossession. Which is, perhaps, only to say that Blanchot revives the ancient sense of inspiration as it implies another, stronger force with which the artist must be in contact: an alien power, masked by figures of gods or Muses, that asks of the would be-creator that he or she must first undergo a loss of self, an exposure.
It is only by returning from this initial detour that creation can begin; the stamp of the artist upon the work depends first of all on that contact - possessing, dispossessing - with what Blanchot also calls (confusingly, provocatively) the work, meaning by this (paradoxically) being as it draws the creator from existence, as it interrupts that projection, that plan, according to which the finished artwork is to be made.
Contacting being, touching it, hearing it, pressed against it - which is to say nothing at all, for there is no 'it', only chaos, only a pell mell, only that turning over and over of what has no final shape or form - there is, for a moment at least (a moment that does not endure in the time of possibility, of the ability to be able, but turns it aside) no ec-stasis of the subject, no future ...
Sometimes, Blanchot will call this désoeuvrement. The artist's plan, the strength of his or her powers gives way to worklessness, to unworking. What Blanchot calls the work is exactly this: worklessness, the inability to work. That is his version of Levinas's account of the horror of being, just as Levinas's account is his version of the experience Blanchot places at the heart of writing, of artistic creation. Levinas and Blanchot, thinking together, suffering apart but in another way together, formulated these thoughts together, and each in his own way.
Yes that is what I think of with the notion of the outside: an account of an experience that falls outside of the form of the self and that requires an ontology, a metaphysics, than Heidegger's (and which I have not begun to sketch here, pointing lazily and shorthandedly to its results).
3. It is this experience that lies at the heart of Blanchot's fiction and his criticism, which, it should be remembered, broadens to encompass the plastic arts as well as the written ones (and even touches upon music). I think it is this criticism Foucault remembers when he sketches a genealogy of literary experience as the outside.
Sade and Hölderlin, for him, introduce an experience of the outside, 'the former by laying desire bare in the infinite murmur of discourse, the latter by discovering that the gods had wandered off through a rift in language as it was in the process of losing its bearings' that would be uncovered in its implications only subsequently. These contemporaries of Kant and Hegel wanted other than to interiorise the world, humanising nature and naturalising the human being, or to overcome alienation: they belonged outside the history of humanism.
The same in Nietzsche and Mallarmé at the end of the nineteenth century, respectively in the discovery, respectively, that metaphysics is tied to its grammar, and with the idea that poetry demands the speaker's disappearance. And it reappears in the twentieth century with Artaud, for whom the cry and the body rends discursive language, in Bataille, who performs the rupture of subjectivity, and in Klossowski, in whose work the double, the simulacra, multiply the 'Me' into dispersal.
But Blanchot, Foucault writes,
is perhaps more than just another witness to this thought. So far has he withdrawn into the manifestation of his work, so completely is he, not hidden by his texts, but absent from their existence and absent by virtue of the marvellous force of their existence, that for us he is that thought itself - its real, absolute distant, shimmering, invisible presence, its necessary destiny, its inevitable law, its calm, infinite, measured strength.
4. Foucault's text is published in Critique in 1966, a special volume dedicated to Blanchot. Paul de Man recalled that contributors to the journal were told to hurry: Blanchot, gravely ill, was going to die at any moment; of course Blanchot survived de Man and Foucault, dying only in 2003.
Blanchot himself, it has been said, offered to meet Foucault (he had been instrumental in getting Madness and Civilisation published); but his younger admirer, who said he once wanted to be Blanchot refused, wanting to maintain the mystery. Whether it is true or not, it reflects what Foucault observes in the paragraph above: Blanchot absent in such a way that his work was allowed to stand in his place, and this not by accident.
True, Blanchot made several important political interventions in the late 50s and early 60s, as he would again during the events of May 1968 (where he would meet Foucault, but without telling him who he was, since this would be to go against the implicit rule of the Events: that each was to act anonymously, refusing (Sartre was frustrated by this) to draw on fame and prestige), but he was removed from the intellectual circles of which other intellectuals were a part.
He'd spent most of the previous decade in isolation in a small town on the south coast of France, writing the works for which he was now renowned; soon enough (after May), he would retreat into near total reclusion (though he still saw some friends). And this is not by chance. In his refusal of publicity, interviews, providing photographs, Blanchot lived in consistency with his theory of literature, which insisted on the priority of depersonalisation - not of the ecstasis of the human being, but of the other ecstasis revealed in art (but not only in art).
Blanchot's retreat is an attempt to live in consistency with the implications of this other ecstasis - with this outbreak of being in the raw, without existents, to which the author owes his or her existence. How could Blanchot lay claim, in his own name, to what his fictions and criticism revealed, when it was his own name that had to be lost for them to be realised, his own name, and ours, too, as readers, if we are able to be touched by the outside, if it rises to the surface of those pages to meet us.
This is why Blanchot above all is not just another witness to the thought of the outside. But what kind of thought is this? Not, it is clear, the thought 'I exist' - to experience language as the outside with Blanchot is to be unable to say with Descartes, 'I am, I exist' - to write, or voice the Cogito. That it is written, or spoken, means it also slips away from the form of the 'I' as it seems to come to itself in language. The knot is untied - language is experienced in its dispersal there where the 'I' once was. Or rather, the 'I' is the gap, the silence, that lets the echo of another experience of language resound - that murmur without determination, that rustling that does not resolve itself into words.
Language itself - but as it has retreated from anything that can be uttered by a determinate subject. Language itself - but what, then, is it? Observe Foucault's distinction here:
Language, its every word, is indeed directed at contents that preexist it; but in its own being, provided that it holds as close to its being as possible, it only unfolds in the pureness of the wait. Waiting is directed at nothing: any object that could gratify it would only efface it.
In its own being: Foucault allows what is said by language to be separated by its own saying, its own happening. Contentful language, language as it refers, as it points to the world, is distinguished from language itself, language in its being, which is said to wait, but for nothing in particular. To wait - to remain beneath, behind, but also present in what is said by way of language.
What would it mean to refer to the being of language? Perhaps something similar to what is named by being - by impersonal being, by being as horror or being as dispossessing. It is the being of language that is experienced by Blanchot, according to Foucault. Language, then, as it forbids that ecstasis that would animate it and allow it to say what the 'I' would want. Language that pushes back, that reaches towards us by way of its own ecstasis, allowing us to read, but only insofar as we too are read; allowing us to express ourselves, but only as it expresses itself, reaching great pseudopodia into our mouth and lungs, and up through our typing fingers. Language like a sleeping giant whose dream is that world in which we can speak and hear, read and write. Yes, that is what Foucault points to when he writes of the being of writing, and thinks language as the outside.
5. But what does Foucault mean by the thought of the outside, the very title of his essay? To think is to grasp, is it not? To think is to subsume the singular to the particular, and the particular to the universal. It is a matter of the concept, of the general, of abstracting from the concrete and the specific. And thinking involves the unfolding of a human capacity: it is something of which we are capable, that opens from our innate capacity as homo sapiens: we, alone among animals, are able to truly think; thought lies within our power, and it is thus we conquered the world and flew to the moon.
But is there another thought and another thinking? Is there a way in which we might be dispossessed by thought, that the being of thinking has hatched its eggs in our brains? Can it be said that another thinks in us, in our place, usurping the place of the 'I' - our place?
Inspired thinking is older than philosophy, and returns to haunt it. What else was Socrates doing when he stood rapt on the porch of Agathon? Communing with his diamon. Perhaps there is a kind of thought that is likewise diamonic - not, now, as it names contact with the gods, but with what the gods had always hidden. For Foucault's Holderlin, the gods disappear through a rift in language, and it is this rift that the diamonic might also name.
The power to think is not always ours. Or rather, thinking implies another thinker in us but away from us, a double who thinks in our place. Is this what is meant by the thought from outside? Is it this exposed double who thinks in our place, displacing us? Are we thought as well as thinkers; is thinking passive and not only active, and all the way to the depths of the unconscious? Strange the name of Freud is absent, here, from Foucault's meditation - for what else is the unconscious but lost thoughts, dissevered from their affects?
To Blanchot, for Foucault belongs to another kind of thinking. 'It is extremely difficult to find a language faithful to this thought', notes Foucault. Theoretical reflection will tend to incorporate the outside in the interiority of the thinker'. Thinking is measured by the thinking 'I'; the 'I think' linked to the 'I am' of the thinker. How, then, to speak of another kind of thinking, that attests not to the 'I am' but to another locus of thought - to the bearer of the fact of thinking, of the that-there-is-thinking? How to invoke the passion of thought?
Literature, the language of inspiration is an alternative. But literature is all too ready to fall back into readymade images 'that stitch the old fabric of interiority back together in the form of an imagined outside': the outside is imagined by not experienced; the prose of a tale is not affected by what it would represent. Might one dream of a prose that is at one with what is experienced?
Foucault goes on to write incomparably about Blanchot's fictions and his criticisms. Like many of the essays in this great period of philosophy, it is almost too dazzling to read ... searing the reader, reducing him or her to silence. And like those essays, it exhibits a dizzying density, as though awaiting a calmer, darker age in which its meanings will be unfolded. Ah the style of the école normale - if that's what it is! Casual brilliance, luminous density and - style: so much more beautiful than what is possible today (at least in my imagination). Who wrote these works? Who published them?
Let me leap impatiently to the pages where Foucault reads Blanchot under two headings - attraction and the companion. What does this mean?
The song of the Sirens, in Blanchot's famous retelling of the story from the Iliad, is, Foucault says, 'but the attraction of song' - it is nothing in itself, but a kind of promise. But what does it offer Ulysses? 'nothing other than a duplicate of what he has lived through, known, and suffered, precisely what he himself is'. The song is a name for language, which must mean and refer. It seduces - but it draws you towards destruction - to that death, that work of negativity upon which language depends, in which the immediate is taken up into language, and that blooming tree before you is no longer, in discourse, that tree.
The singular becomes a particular, and, as such, a participant in those universal forms that lift themselves from the here and now of sensuous immediacy. An operation that depends on what Hegel has called negation or death. But for the artist, of whom Ulysses as hero is a figure, it is the power of negation that itself fascinates, and the sailor would have himself lashed to the mast of his ship in order to hear what has summoned others to their deaths.
To hear the song of the Sirens as the work of negativity, to seize it as what it is, as pure power, pure possibility, allowing the artist to seize upon a Language more essential than language - lifting the poetic word from the crude currency of everyday speech. But language must nevertheless mean; it must refer - negativity, the inverse of the world of stable and enduring meanings, asks as its price the death of the artist as hero.
Then Ulysses' boat is wrecked as others were before it; he drowns - even as, at the same time, he survives. Time divides in two - or rather, we must speak of time and its other, and of the other time that speaks of itself in the language that Ulysses, becoming, as Blanchot images, Homer, and sitting down to write his memoirs, cannot help but use to speak of his trials.
Beyond everything he narrates, beyond his personal history, language speaks of itself, and therefore of his drowning. Language speaks and subtracts author and narrator from the tale. Language speaks and who speaks - no longer Ulysses, no longer the hero, but the narrative voice that conceals itself as a récit in the telling of literary works. It is this voice that attracts the writer, and that attracts readers, too.
Attraction, then, is what draws the author to realise a work, and holds sway over the reader. For Blanchot, creation depends upon a dispossession; the work has a double sense, naming the completed artefact, and the relation to language as the outside upon which the literary work depends (there is also a sense in which the outside can be used with reference to plastic art).
What, then, of the figure of the companion? Ulysses is lured from himself as hero, as the writer in the first person ... and the 'il' endures in his place (endures the vacancy of his place, as it waits eternally for the 'I' to return. Waits as the lapping of the 'I', like the 'subject' of Klosswski's eternal return, reborn eternally as no one ...)
The companion names the double, the other, drowned Ulysses, the other who takes my place, being close to me, attracting me, fatal but also alluring. But repelling me in the same movement, pushing me back so I can preserve myself as 'I' - both at once, once and the same and neither one nor the other (ne uter).
Foucault:
The movement of attraction and the withdrawal of the companion lay bare what precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming of language. A language spoken by no one: any subject it may have is no more than a grammatical fold. A language not resolved by any silence: any interruption is only a white stain on its seamless sheet. It opens a neutral space in which no existence can take root.
A neutral space, the space of the ne uter - the alternation between 'I' and 'il' where existence can never be sure of itself, of its own power: this is what resounds in the language of the récit and makes of the narrative voice no more than 'a grammatical fold'. A fold, a pleat of a single surface - interiority is only that pocket hollowed out in a prior, seamless field, and that, as hollow can also be turned outside, its crease ironed away. Interiority as the alveoli of the lung, a glove finger that can be unfolded and smoothed out ...