Spurious

Hindu Stories

Have we failed? W. is certain: we are complete failures. For my part, I am never sure. I never wanted as much as you did, I tell W. I didn't expect as much from life. W. says he expected much more from himself and from me. We should be drowned like kittens, he says, for the little we've achieved. But what opportunities did we have?, I ask him. That's always my question, he says. You're always looking for excuses. It's your Hindu fatalism.

For him, says W. my Hinduism emerges most strongly in my Hindu stories. He remembers them very lovingly. They soothe him. When, for example, we were stuck in a queue for the Greyhound in Memphis, he delighted in stories of the elephant god, what was his name? Ganesha, I say, and that guy who ended up with the head of a goat, who was he? Sati's father, I say. We sat on the floor of the Greyhound station and the hours flew by, says W.

Friends, sighs W. should push each further. What do I do for him, apart from tell him Hindu stories?  

Messianism

How are his studies of Messianism progressing? W. is burrowing back through Rosenzweig and Cohen to Schelling, whose books he can only get hold of in Gothic script. He can't read Gothic script, he says. Nevertheless, he's made some discoveries, says W. It's all to do with infinite judgements, he says. And the infinitesimal calculus.

Messianism's got nothing to do with mysticism, says W. He can't abide mysticism. It's maths, it's all about maths! He can't do maths, W. says. There's some great flaw in him which prevents him really understanding Messianism. But then too it might have something to do with the two kinds of the negative in ancient Greek, W. says. The two kinds of privation, the second of which is not really a kind of privation. It's like the in- of infinite, W. says, which is not simply an absence of the infinite.

But W.'s studies of ancient Greek are not progressing well, he says. It's the aorist, it defeats him every time. W.'s bumping his head against the ceiling of his intelligence, he says. I often have that feeling, I tell him. No, you're just lazy, W. says. What are your thoughts on Messianism? I tell him I have no thoughts on Messianism.

Apocalypticism

We should hang ourselves immediately, I tell W., it's the only honorable course of action. We are compromised, utterly compromised. W. feels he has to pull me back from the brink. It's not that bad, he says. We should stab ourselves in the throat, I tell him. I over-react to everything, says W., it's my dramatic nature. I'm an hysteric. He, by contrast, takes the long view. He's more grandly apocalyptic than I am. You have to see it all in terms of the apocalypse, says W. I do have my great apocalyptic moments, W. concedes, but I do not have the sobriety and longness of view required by apocalypticism. You see it's not just you or I, W. says in Birmingham art gallery, it's everyone. I'm calmed by his words. The disaster is everywhere.

Blowholes

How are your wedding plans?, W. asks me, and I tell him just fine. W. said he'd feel intimidated if he were me about my wedding. How will you keep yourself under control? How will you stop yourself going on about monkey butlers and blowholes like you usually do? How will you prevent yourself from telling everyone you have the head of a baby?

I tell him that as an oldest child I have a very developed superego. You're pure id! says W., who often says this. I give him permission to behave badly, he says. No, I tell him, I secretly desire control and tradition. Ah your spurious psychoanalysis, says W. It's like your spurious sociobiology. Anything that will give you an excuse for your behaviour.

W., for his part, is tortured by his behaviour. How can I be a better person?, is his constant question. It torments him. It's what comes of being a Catholic Jew, he says. His father's side were Jews who converted. His mother's side were Catholics. He's full of guilt, says W. He's in constant torment. I'm the opposite, however. I never feel any guilt, do I? I tell him the concept is foreign to me as a Hindu.

W. says my entire worldview is organised so that I never have to take responsibility for anything, even my supposed Hinduism. He looks pleased with himself, he's discovered something. You never have to take responsibility for anything, do you? I laugh and tell him that's what everyone says, but that in fact I'm very responsible. Not when you go on about blowholes and looking like a baby, says W.

Sebald, from an interview:

I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

No longer natural - why do I think this is what allows us to get closer to writing? Closer: because writing is not natural and was never simply an extension of life. Write the words 'it is night' on a piece of paper one evening and by the next morning it is no longer true. Nothing I write here has anything to do with my life. Tyranny of the personal, of the authentic voice. No voice is close to you. Find another voice, an impersonal one. Let it discover itself in you, writing looking for itself through you and finding - only writing, only more occasions for writing.

Unnatural writing - the dream that blogging might permit this as it might interrupt the great circulation of information. There's too much communication. Or only a personal communication according to the general standard of what passes for life, our lives in this time. A new austerity. Speech that withholds itself in speaking. Terseness that guards a gap in speech. Here, I think immediately of This Space, the only 'literary blog' (ridiculous expression) that is necessary.

From an interviewer's discussion with Sebald:

The wandering that the prose does, both syntactically and in terms of subjects, reminds me a bit of my favourite of the english essayists, de Quincey: the need, in a sense, to almost sleepwalk, somnambulate from one centre of attention to another, and a feeling in the reader that one has hallucinated the connection between the parts.

Reading this, I think immediately of one of my favourite blogs, the mysterious Red Thread(s), and in particular a post like this one.

(Blog virtues: anonymity, fragmentary speech, a writing that reflects on the gesture of writing and marks it in writing (its voice does not come from nowhere, but nor is it personal either. Avoidance of the cute. Discretion. An interruption of writing (by way of writing) rather than more prose. A subtractive prose.))

Where do I end this rambling post, with its darkness and light, chapels and death, friendships and incommunicability; the general strangeness of things, attempts at speech, of being present?

The Boiling Earth

Finishing William Golding's The Spire, I felt the same way as I had done at the end of Muriel Spark's The Hothouse on the East River: a need to read about the book and about Golding if only to contain what I had read, to contextualise it. Above all, I couldn't allow the book its distance, the distance it seems to take from itself in itself such that I was never quite sure what was happening, or rather that what was happening was (in the world of the book) really happening; Dean Jocelin, with whom the narrator sticks, seemed untrustworthy - or was it that he had entrusted himself to something else, manifest as a kind of madness. That he was entrusted to a rambling, coagulating madness that had thickened itself into the narrative.

Either way, I never felt on solid ground with the novel. I even put it away for a few days, returning to it last night after a long evening of computer games because I could think of nothing better to do. It had been waiting for me. It held me once again at its own distance. I read but I wasn't sure what I was reading. It seemed vague somehow - not wispy or cloudy but somehow blocky. It seemed too heavy for a book, or that its features had emerged as those of the Sphinx from some heavier, non-readable material.

What had happened in the book? I wasn't sure. I googled 'William Golding The Spire' for study notes to help me. What had happened? I lacked the distance. No: I lacked my distance by which I could hold what I read apart from me. I was struck to its surface like a fly ... Little to say about the book itself, though. Itself: as if it wasn't too heavy for commentary. As though it were not already lost in itself, falling into itself, a book like the spire and cathedral it describes unable to sit squarely on the restless earth. A book beneath which a kind of abyss opens, an anti-spire, the stirring of the earth 'like porridge coming to boil in a pot' which means everything, therefore is as unsure as the visitations Dean Jocelin receives.

Plot and character are like those visitations, those angels and devils which may only be the way Dean Jocelin's spinal tuberculosis manifests itself - pain and pain's alleviation, as if the novel were only made from that: pain and pain's alleviation, the possibility and impossibility of writing overlapped. It was almost impossible to read. I had to force my way through it. Even now, looking back, I wonder, what was it about?, and this after reading the study notes. Really, I have nothing to say about it. Relief that it is over. And a kind of wonder at this anti-spire of a book.

But I must have more Golding - immediately. I need to read everything if only to have done with it. I need to know of what this book is part - what movement. Madness - but not a private madness. Not the malaise of one character. A kind of existence-madness, being gone mad, the boiling earth ... and this as the law of writing to which the book corresponds. A madness that has come from some strange law of writing, where language takes a weird detour into itself, becomes thick, clots up the veins of sense. 

An Empty Cage

Remember that strange fragment from Kafka: 'A cage went in search of a bird'. A cage - empty - looks for what might fill it. And now I think of Bernhard, after reading his early novellas: a style looks for its subject matter; a way of writing for a content to fill it.

Didn't his style precede his rage and his despair? Wasn't the Austria of his Extinction only an attempt to find a topic commensurable with the demands of his style? Fortunate for him he had the Nazis to write about! Fortunate the dead weight of offical culture!

Bernhard's style finds its subject matter; a cage finds its bird. But now imagine a cage that still aches in its absence - that searches without finding an appropriate content. A cage bereft, a style wholly grotesque, wholly gratuitous. 

But now imagine a style that seeks to lose the content it finds, to burn it up: style that lives madly on the fuel of content. The cage has become a bird and content a cage, and writing doubles Joyce's chaosmos that burns in all things.

Hatred of Writers

Conventions of blogging: begin from a time, a place. A post is dated, after all. Very well then: a warm day, a bright day after days of clouds and rain. A warm day, this day, in the middle of the year. And I've broken the surface of ordinary life to draw a breath upon - what? What is it that I would like to invite writing to say that could not be said in another way?

Ordinary life: even that expression is wrong. As though the extra-ordinary - writing, the capacity to write - would be higher or loftier, as though to write would be to ascend to a point where everything, all of life lies open and distant before you! As though it were not the other way round - that writing was infinitely less than life, infinitely lower, and with no importance, with the least importance of all.

Nothing extraordinary about writing. Nothing that does not make it utterly negligible, and the perspective it affords - its non-perspective - entirely spurious. From the perspective of life, writing is of no importance. But from the perspective of writing? Life seems merely a gap in writing: an interruption. Life down below, life lived elsewhere than on the plateau. And from the perspective of life, the whole sweep of life? Writing is a part of life lost from the whole, in a separate eddy. And it is as such, in my fantasy, that it must be made to rejoin the river.

Through what Cultural Revolution might writers be made to live again, in the world? The dreadful phrase 'my work'. Horror of the words 'creative writing'. The privatisation of consciousness, the opposite of that kind of collective from which life lives.

Nothing worse than writers burrowing into the night. Nothing worse than all the books written by burrowing into the night. Times of revolution demand the impossibility of private life. All life is public, the street runs through your living room. Writing, if there is to be writing, is collective: tracts, posters, bulletins, graffiti on the walls. Writing is of all and for all, with no permanence.

The walls of the Sorbonne will be scrubbed: good. The graffiti will not last: better still. Writing has joined with life; it has no separate existence. There must be no art, above all that. No private consciousness. Nothing kept from what streams in the streets. Every word must be everyone's word, everyone must write, even if they do not write ...

Immediate Speech

1. Appeals to the immediate should awaken our suspicion: isn't consciousness itself, as Hegel would say, the very organ of mediation? But perhaps the appeal to the immediate, far from answering to what is most obvious of all in contemporary capitalism, allows us to reflect upon what escapes consciousness in the very act of mediation - to rescue a worklessness (désoeuvrement) that precedes its mediating labour.

That, at least, is how I understand Blanchot's use of the notion of immediacy when he characterises the kind of speech evidenced during May 1968. Speech, he claims, was immediate during the Events; in the action committees and on the streets, the participants achieved a remarkable freedom to speak that was both collective and anonymous. Here was a freedom other than that of bourgeois individualism, a speech in response to the Other, free from particularity, that each participant became for their fellow protesters. As Blanchot remembers, differences in age, fame and social status seemed to matter little in the Events (as Sartre, he notes somewhat cattily, had to learn quickly). There were incessant debates in the committees and demonstrations, but there was also an extraordinary capacity to speak, a 'saying' that, until then, was unable to reveal itself.

The immediacy of speech, then, circumvents prior forms of mediation that, until the Events, held sway over language. I can only sketch them here, but May 1968 saw the prestige of the old nationalisms, the old religions fall away - though in truth, this was something already in process - and with them a certain relation to language and to existing political, legal and economic institutions. I have explored the significance of the Events for Blanchot, and his own part in them elsewhere. Here, I want simply to explore the notion of the immediate with the aim of understanding what Blanchot calls speech.

2. We might recall Hegel's chapter on 'sense certainty' from the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he argues that what is present here and now, the immediate, is in fact already mediated. Any attempt to grasp the truth of the immediate requires one to render it in language, translating the singular into more general terms. Write at 10PM 'Now is night' on a slip of paper and look at next morning; the statement, obviously enough, is no longer true. The word 'now' that is supposed to grasp a singular moment, also means any now. The word is a universal; as soon as I express the real in language, I have lost its singularity.

For Hegel, however, one can only articulate the truth of the real in language. Language, in that sense is 'truer' than immediacy; it allows the immediate to become determinate for self-consciousness. For a thinker like Kierkegaard, however, as a recent book has shown us, language is not truer than immediacy, and the loss of the latter in the act of expressing it leads to the mistaking of 'reality as represented' for 'reality as reality', even as consciousness, for the most part, is unaware of this duplicity.

With Hegel, Kierkegaard agrees that determinate sense experience is always mediated; against him, however, Kierkegaard maintains that mediated reality is also duplicitous. Unlike Hegel, who maintains that reality is what exists for consciousness, for Kierkegaard, reality is what is presupposed by consciousness. We can thus make a distinction between an 'originary time' and time as represented.

3. Blanchot, who had an abiding interest in Kierkegaard, giving him as an example of one of those thinkers who, outside the academy, was able to develop a form of fragmentary speech, also distinguishes between originary time - which he calls the origin - and the time of beginning (The Space of Literature). In so doing, he does not want to celebrate an ineffable or non-linguistic immediacy, but rather to show how literature retains a moment of the origin (of the real) within language, even as it retreats from the conscious awareness of author and reader.

But how is this possible? The special virtue of the language of poetry as opposed, say, to that of the philosopher is that it is often supposed to attend to things in their immediacy, celebrating this tree, for example, or this heroic deed. The poet's virtuosity would lie in awakening the sense of the singular 'this', even as it is lost to other kinds of discourse (to that of biology, say, or history). Philosophy, by contrast, would rely on generalities, passing over the singular in favour of the universal.

Blanchot's argument is different. Although we might take the immediate to designate this tree or this patch of colour - what is given to us here and now as immediate for consciousness - he directs us to an immediacy that precedes the constituting work of consciousness. For Hegel, consciousness is mediation, confirming its work each time we speak in the first person. For Blanchot, by contrast, the immediate lays claim to each of us such that it precedes the positing of consciousness as it occurs through mediation.

Beneath or beyond any simple minded appeal to the immediate (whether as the indefiniteness of this tree or this battle, or as the supposed naturalness of poverty, exploitation and rivalrous relationships in contemporary capitalism), Blanchot points us to the irruption of the origin - to a non-personal experience wherein the locus of consciousness gives way to an anonymous 'it', the 'il', analogous to the 'dummy subject' of such phrases as 'it is raining'. The 'il', crucially, is impersonal, maintaining a relation to the 'I', to consciousness, while not being identical with it. (But I will not explore this notion at length here)

This dummy subject reveals itself, for Blanchot, in various ways. First of all, it can be found in a particular kind of affective states - he lists suffering, affliction, etc, exploring them both in his fictions and his more philosophical writings (The Infinite Conversation). Secondly, it is there in the encounter with a object that escapes its conventional use - here, Blanchot remembers the 'perverse, unusable' knick-knacks Breton finds at a flea-market, but there is also his famous example of the corpse (see discussion of the image in The Space of Literature).

Thirdly, Blanchot discovers the 'il' in the encounter with language, on the part of literary authors and readers of literature (see virtually any of his collections of criticism from The Work of Fire onwards). Blanchot finds in literature an encounter that suspends the intentionality of author and reader as they seek to animate a fictional world on the basis of what is presented in language. It reveals itself in what he calls the 'narrative voice' of a story, in a 'saying' that interrupts the reader's attempt to form what is read into a fully realised fictional world (of course, Blanchot also writes literature that lets this narrative voice resound).

Fourthly, and this is what interests me here, from the late 1950s onwards (after his return, that is, from the south of France, where he had spent ten years in solitary writing to a period of political intervention and, in his theoretical writings, a marked broadening of interests), Blanchot points to speech as another way in which the experience in question happens.

4. For Hegel, the real, being as such, reveals itself only in language, as the sayable. Blanchot argues that immediacy, although it does not escape language, reveals itself in the very specific linguistic act he calls speech. Like Kierkegaard, Blanchot argues that consciousness is always in untruth with respect to the immediate, since it loses its relation to the immediate as soon as it attempts to express it, but as he will also argue, speech attests to this relation, answering it and letting it resound in language.

This argument receives its most detailed elaboration in the first third of The Infinite Conversation where, in a series of long conversations between unnamed discussants, he engages with Levinas's Totality and Infinity. As is well known, Levinas focuses in Totality and Infinity on a particular kind of relation, the relation to the human Other, Autrui, which he claims obtains in a particular act of language, as speech. He characterises this relation as asymmetrical, insofar as one of its terms, the Other, is said to be higher than the other, the ego, and unilateral, insofar as the Other is said to face the ego and to call it to its responsibility.

For Levinas, this moment of facing, of expression grants the ego a stable and enduring ipseity, a selfhood. Prior to this moment, we have what can be called a proto-self, separate and selfish, concerned only to secure its nourishment in an uncertain environment. At the moment of expression, the self comes together in its response to the Other, which Levinas thinks as the linguistic act in question. Speech opens in the response of the ego to the Other's silent expression. It is in discourse, language, that I can come to myself as an ego.

What does this mean? I become a self only at the moment when I can say 'I' (or imply the first person position in my response to another) in response to the face of the Other. As such, I owe my egoity, my ipseity to the alterity of the Other which, with respect to the meditation which occurs, for Levinas, at a practical and conceptual level by the ego (he calls it the same), is immediate.

Whereas the philosophical tradition, according to Levinas, has privileged the mediating activity of consciousness, this activity is predicated upon a linguistic act of acknowledgement and hospitality that is upstream of anything the ego might want or not want to do. Consciousness cannot help but be affected by the Other such that its constitutive activity fails. That is to say, consciousness does not measure the form of the relation to the Other in advance, which is why Levinas says the Other reaches me as the immediate. (All this presumes a lengthy and complicated discussion with Heidegger which I will not revisit here. Suffice to say that the work of the same, meditation, is thought by Levinas as a particular kind of form that governs our relation to things, but which comes apart with respect to the relation to the Other.)

Here, speech is very different from the ideality that consciousness introduces in the form of language. As we have seen, language, to the extent that it depends upon universals, passes over the singularity of the immediately given. But for Levinas, speech, understood as the address to the Other, acknowledges this immediacy (that is, it responds to the singularity of the relation to the Other) by suspending the constitutive work of consciousness.

Speech, accordingly, is not voluntary, since it does not stem from the will (which is governed by the same autonomous demand that governs consciousness), though nor can it be called involuntary either, since consciousness is not present to speech such that it might struggle against it. Speech simply happens as the acknowledgement of the Other as it suspends the form of relation that Levinas calls the same. This is why Levinas uses formulations such a 'relation without relation' when writing about speech: what he wants to emphasise is the suspension of the constitutive work that makes reality the result of linguistic mediation.

5. There is, however, a danger implicit to Levinas's presentation of the Other to which Blanchot is very alert that the relation to the Other is accorded a status that merely reproduces the constitutive activity of consciousness, mirroring it in a different form. Rather than constitution, the work of mediation lying on the side of the ego, it would lie on the side of the Other in its relation to the ego.

Blanchot worries that the special nature of the relation to the Other is determined by Levinas in terms of a particular feature of the Other that grants it a kind of power or authority. Blanchot, by contrast, wants to emphasise that the relation to the Other implies that just as the identity of the ego is broken apart in the relation in question, so too is the Other. Neither term is allowed to rest in a simple self-identity.

We can understand Blanchot's argument as a way of placing emphasis upon the interhuman relation rather than upon the Other as a term of the relation. In this way, he guards against understanding the Other as a self of commensurable power as the ego. What matters for Blanchot is internal to the relation in question rather than drawing on a quality of either of its terms (either as the ego, a consciousness as the guarantor of mediation or on the Other as the equivalent of a more powerful ego).

Blanchot supplants Levinas's emphasis on the Other in the interhuman relationship with an emphasis on what he calls conversation, entretien. Drawing on an obscure passage in Totality and Infinity, Blanchot notes the reversability of the unilateral, asymmetrical and exclusive relation to the Other with respect to the ego. Since there is no special feature of the Other that explains the alterity of the ego's relation to the Other, the ego can, in turn, become the Other for this other human being. Even as I am exposed and obligated in my relation to you as the Other (as a generic human being, a man or woman without qualities) you can be exposed and obligated in your relation to me as the Other (as I, in turn, become generic for you).

This is not a reciprocal relation, since, each time, it remains dissymmetical and unilateral (that is to say, it suspends, each time, the constitutive work of consciousness). Nevertheless, it is also possible that, between two people, there will be a criss-crossing of relations, a series of reversals, which Blanchot will call a 'redoubling of irreprocity', a 'double dissymmetry' or a 'double signed infinity', but also, surprisingly, community: 

And then too, we ought to say the following: if the question "Who is autrui?" has no direct meaning, it is because it must be replaced by another: "What of the human 'community', when it must respond to this relation of strangeness between man and man - a relation without common measure, an exorbitant relation - that the experience of language leads one to sense?'

It is not Blanchot who speaks here, but one of the conversationalists he allows to discuss Totality and Infinity, who continue to this double dissymmetry without, however, bringing up the word community again. Nevertheless, however fleetingly it is used, it is meant to mark the oscillation wherein each term of a relation between human beings becomes in turn Other for the other.

6. As Blanchot emphasises, the happening of community is rare. We are, for the most part, bound by the societal forms that divide us according to class, wealth, gender, race, religion etc. But in the late 1950s, Blanchot was already looking towards the promise of the dissolution of those particularities - nationalisms, religions, ethnicities - that kept humanity, until recently, bound to specific territories on the earth.

A promise that looks towards events that can only happen briefly (instanteously), but that nevertheless overcome old kinds of enrootedness, the allegiance to great histories, to political leaders, to territories of all kinds, and above all to possession, to one's possessions and the desire to possess. The men and women of the street, this coming, perpetually coming form of humanity, have nothing in common but a few generic traits. But they assemble, the crowd, the people, at the moment when, according to Blanchot's image, the walls fall, and in which the freedom of speech, understood as the response to the Other as the 'unknown-familiar' reveals itself in the open.

This, indeed, is what happened for Blanchot during the Events. Speech, for him, marks a relation to the Other that can be called immediate, as it escapes the constituting work of consciousness, answering to that worklessness (désoeuvrement) which -sists (it does not subsist, it does not exist) in place of consciousness and its object. It addresses others in the crowd in view of the future it has brought to the brink of the present - that utopia of a humankind without particularity. I address you by way of this future that we bear in common, and you, addressing me as any other, and therefore as the Other, continue to affirm this movement of effervescence, speech, as it runs aflame through the crowd (but it is nothing other than the crowd).

When the 'I' becomes 'it' in responding to the Other, when the 'il' in the other person comes forward in turn, a kind of community occurs in which neither term, in its relation to the other, is able to maintain its ipseity. In calling it friendship, understood as a 'camaradarie without preliminaries', Blanchot is not thinking of a relationship founded upon shared interests, upon a symmetrical mutuality and reciprocity that would occur between two commensurate terms.

Who is the Other marching beside me? Anyone at all; no one in particular: I am not sure who I am addressing. And who am I who addresses the Other thus, upstream of conscious deliberation? Likewise no one, likewise a generic placeholder in place of a person that Blanchot marks as an 'il', an 'it'. The walls fall: speech marks the uncertainty as to who the speaker and the addressee might be, and in this way, as the relation is multiplied, a kind of break happens: the unknown future (Blanchot calls it the messianic) quivers through the crowd (but that quivering is also the crowd).

7. Whence the beautiful phrase we find in a handbill from the Events: 'Tomorrow it was May'. Tomorrow it was May; tomorrow awakened in the act of speech, in a speech act that cannot be brought back to the form of the self. Tomorrow, then, a tomorrow-in-today, as it breaks with the system of relations that maintain the stranglehold of the present, was the crowd that was formed of Others addressed and of the selves that addressed them.

The revolt of May 1968, for Blanchot, was first of all a revolt of speech; this is what the wall-writings and handbills confirm, answering as they do a capacity to say, to speak immediately that revealed itself in the action committees and demonstrations. But this is not an immediacy that places itself at my disposal - it is not revealed to a self that remains sure of its self and its capacities, including the capacity to be.

When Blanchot writes of the authorities, the men of power, discovering in the movement the carnivalesque redoubling of their own disarray, it is to mark the difference between constituted forms of political, legal and economic power and the powerlessness of the participants. But it is also to mark the impossibility of submitting the pre-voluntary opening of community to a determined political will.

The crowd, whom the action committees never merely represented, according to Blanchot, and who never permitted themselves to be organised, revealed another kind of politics, or, to draw on Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's notion, the political as it remains the condition for any particular politics. But this other politics, this re-opening of the political in a kind of living question can never settle into an institutional form.

As soon as speech is channelled, mediated, it disappears. Community cannot tolerate organisation. Thus the people of the revolt, such as they are, can have no part in duration. They assemble, they disperse; what matters for the movement of May 1968 is simply to affirm the break, to maintain that suspension of ordinary relations that allows the question of the political to resound.

8. The objection must come very quickly: isn't this a revolution without revolution, a riskless communism (Blanchot calls it that) which suspends any relation to those real struggles in which the workers have been engaged? Certainly the May 1968 movement was vulnerable to established political institutions; demonstrations were banned, tanks were seen on sliproads near Paris - how, in the face of military might and police violence could it be expected to last?

But why nevertheless on the first days of the Events, when the movement caught everyone by surprise, when it spread like wildfire through the universities and factories, wasn't the Elysée stormed and the government overturned? Why didn't the students and workers capitalise on the panic of the authorities and the immense popular support they seemed to enjoy? Why didn't the Events lead to forms of political organisation that superseded the moribund French Communist Party and the trade unions? Why did the workers go back to the factories and students to the university? And why, above all, was the existing government, already in power for ten years, re-elected in the summer of the Events, as if nothing had happened?

If we allow that politics, thus far, has always existed in a moment of untruth or duplicity with respect to what Blanchot calls community (to immediacy), then how might this untruth be overcome? If it is implicit in any form of political representation, in which the relation to the Other (and the chance of its repetition) is forgotten by a Member of Parliament, the Trade Union head, or the leader of the French Communist Party, then what chance lies open for any politics? Must politics always betray the messianism, the communism (but what is at stake in using those words?) waits in potentia at the heart of all social relations?