[Chapter three of my book, Blanchot's Vigilance]
Irony Mastered and Unmastered
Giacometti destroys his statues, dozens of them. His aim is simple: he means to sculpt the human being in a manner sculpture has been as yet unable to achieve. Upon what techniques does he draw? There is the influence of Egyptian art which, according to Schaefer – an authority with whose work Giacometti was familiar – attempts to depict the essence of a person rather than their real appearance.[i] Schaefer attacked the Greek discovery of the artistic representation of perspective because it breaks with the way in which we remember images – frontally or as a profile. Giacometti says enthusiastically: ‘no other sculptures as closely resemble real people as Egyptian sculpture’; but what do they resemble? Not simply the sculptor’s models.[ii] True, the portraits of Diego, Giacometti’s brother, are noticeably portraits of this and not another individual. But perhaps Giacometti has another kind of resemblance in mind.
Giacometti claims in an interview he always turns familiar models into strangers: ‘You are no longer the person I thought I knew. You no longer have any particular characteristic. As for individuality, you become a generalised head, the head of everyone’.[iii] Such impersonality was already a practice in Egyptian art: it is difficult to tell a sculpture of Akhenaten from one of his wife Nefertiti, for example. Laurie Wilson speculates that this was to provide a political stability in maintaining the appearance of an unbroken continuity in the royal line. Perhaps, too, it was a way of keeping something from death, and some speculate that Egyptian sculptures are ‘doubles’ or ‘ka’ figures, depicting an ethereal replica of the body. The aim of sculpture was to preserve the double, the soul, from its 'second' death. Were Giacometti’s post-surrealist figures likewise a way of keeping something alive?
Sartre is in no doubt: the statues attest to the power of the human being to begin. Giacometti presents a living human being and not a corpse; this is his great achievement. Giacometti’s aim, Sartre writes, is ‘not to glut galleries with new works but to prove that sculpture is possible by carving’.[iv] But how will he accomplish this? It is as simple, Sartre says, as Diogenes proving the possibility of movement to Parmenides and Zeno by simply walking up and down. Yet that simplicity is hard to achieve. Giacometti: ‘If I only knew how to make one, I could make them by the thousands ...’[v]
Giacometti's workshop is covered in the dust made by his tenacious carving. If he destroys his statues, this is the correlate of a desire to escape the heaviness of the material with which he works. ‘Never was substance less eternal, more fragile, more nearly human’, Sartre comments.[vi] ‘Giacometti's substance – this strange flour that slowly settles over his studio and buries it, that seeps under his nails and into the deep wrinkles on his face – is the dust of space’.[vii]
The dust of space: this is what remains as Giacometti resists the attempt to erect a monument, to fill space. ‘Giacometti knows that there is nothing superfluous about a living person because everything is function. He knows that space is a cancer that destroys being, that devours everything.’[viii] Everything is function: this is why, for Sartre, it is necessary for the sculpture who would seek the true semblance of the human being to pare away all superfluity, to reduce what is sculpted to a bare frame. Giacometti’s intention ‘is not to offer us an exact image but to produce likenesses which, though they make no pretence at being anything other than what they are, arouse in us feelings and attitudes ordinarily elicited by the presence of real men’.[ix]
How is this possible? The classical sculptor is constrained by his own imitative practices. His temptation is to concentrate in the sculpture every likeness to his model he can find. In this way, he seeks to eliminate his own perspective, to attain, with the sculpted form, an absolute semblance; but it is in this ambition that the absolute is lost. For the sculptor is burdened by presumption that the human being occupies perceived space as would any object.
How, then, might one sculpt the absolute? Giacometti accepts the relativity of a perspective, pushing the sculpture back into an indefinite space, away from any attempt to remain faithful to every semblance in his model. For Giacometti, Sartre emphasises, the human being is presented at a distance: ‘He creates a figure “ten steps away” or “twenty steps away”, and do what you will, it remains there. The result is a leap into the realm of the unreal since its relation to you no longer depends on your relation to the block of plaster – the liberation of Art’.[x] The image is liberated from the material, retreating to that distance at which the human being is always held.
Even Rodin still took measurements when making his busts. He didn’t model a head as he actually saw it in space, at a certain distance, as I see you now with this distance between us. He really wanted to make a parallel in clay, the exact equivalent of the head’s volume in space. So basically it wasn’t visual but conceptual.[xi]
Giacometti goes on to claim that to model what is seen would lead to the creation of a ‘rather flat, scarcely modulated sculpture that would be much closer to a Cycladic sculpture, which has a stylised look, than to a sculpture by Rodin or Houdon, which has a realistic look’.[xii] He also outlines the dangers of monumentality – even large sculpture is, he claims, ‘only small sculpture blown up’.[xiii] The five metre tall sculptures in front of the Egyptian temple only become sculpture when seen from a distance of forty metres. Compared to prehistoric art, or to that of the Sumerian or the Chinese, contemporary sculpture remains conceptual, cerebral: it depicts what is known rather than what is seen.
For Sartre, the point is more complex. ‘From mere space Giacometti therefore had to fashion a man, to inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things’.[xiv] The sculptor is able to close the gap between the great bursting forth of existence, and the rocky substance of his medium. What we see is what we live; the sculpture is as close it can be to an ethereal replica of human existence; before Giacometti's figures we come face to face with our freedom stripped as it were to its bare frame.
There is another possibility. It is not a question of our freedom, of our initiative or ecstasis, but of a freedom which presses in from the future. The ‘distance’ of the sculpture is such that it reaches us from a future that is not ours, that we cannot determine. Giacometti’s sculptures do not present me with an icon of my freedom, but with a freedom I cannot possess. Nothing in the sculpture is function; it dramatises not the explosive power of human existence, but the struggle of the image to withhold itself from existence. To present this struggle in the sculpture of the human being is to attempt to realise a true resemblance of the human being. But with what does he present us? Not with the loquacity of signs, but the inertness of a thing; not the opening of the future, but the suspension of the present, not the absoluteness of the human being, but the negative absolute as it is made to assume human form. The human being has become a thing; it is not an ethereal replica of the human body I confront, but the body become matter, the body that has collapsed into the body of everything.
What if this materiality, this resistance, is already implicit in our relation with any other person, any Autrui? What if the freedom presented in the sculptures was that of the Other as she resists my power not because of any initiative of her own, but because she is Other for me? ‘Lazarus come forth’ says Jesus to the dead man. Lazarus goes towards him, Blanchot suggests, even as another Lazarus remained wrapped in his winding sheets and stinking of death. For Sartre, Giacometti’s sculptures celebrate life, the great leap into existence. But what if they present something more akin to the cadaver of our friend, that is, the stubbornness of matter as it refuses to resemble the one we knew in life? What if Giacometti reminds us that the corpse reveals a materiality which was dissimulated in life?
*
Blanchot’s remarks on the corpse in The Space of Literature provide an orientation.
He who dies cannot tarry. The deceased, it is said, is no longer of this world; he has left it behind. But behind there is, precisely, this cadaver, which is not of the world either, even though it is here. Rather, it is behind the world. It is that which the living person (and not the deceased) left behind him and which now affirms, from here, the possibility of a world behind the world, of a regression, an indefinite subsistence, undetermined and indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, upon finishing, reconstitutes its presence and its proximity.[xv]
Lost is the relationship between the cadaver and the one we knew when she was alive. The horror of the ‘world behind the world’ must be understood relative to the power we take to be our own.
It is striking that at this very moment, when the cadaverous presence is the presence of the unknown before us, the mourned deceased begins to resemble himself.
Himself: is this not an ill-chosen expression? Shouldn't we say: the deceased resembles the person he was when he was alive? ‘Resembles himself’ is, however, correct. ‘Himself’ designates the impersonal being, distant and inaccessible, which resemblance, that it might be someone's, draws toward the day. Yes, it is he, the dear living person, but all the same it is more than he. He is more beautiful, more imposing; he is already monumental and so absolutely himself that it is as if he were doubled by himself, joined to his solemn impersonality by resemblance and by the image.[xvi]
The corpse does not present the ‘ka’ which survives death, but the materiality which survives life. ‘No man alive, in fact, bears any resemblance yet’, Blanchot writes.[xvii] The friend we know through her many attributes – her gestures, her laughter, the tone of her voice – conceals a materiality which presents itself only after she dies.
Why does Blanchot write that the corpse resembles itself? How does a thing sustain itself as itself such that it can be experienced? It is held together by our interest, our understanding; it is animated by our existence; such is the power of human life as Sartre celebrates it. What of the Other? For the most part, I understand her through the cultural categories through which my relation to others is mediated. You are my employee; I am your client; I know you as a service provider; you know me as a vendor of your company’s products – each time, it is a question of passing over the alterity of the Other in favour of relations which are instrumentally defined. That is to say, others are sustained in their coherency for me in terms of my understanding of their place in the world.
What, though, about the corpse? Something in the corpse resists that power; which means, too, I cannot situate myself with respect to what happened as I approached the cadaver of my friend. To claim the corpse resembles itself is not to invoke a magical power it would possess but rather to indicate the way it withholds itself from my capacity to accommodate myself with respect to its differentiation. Here collapses into nowhere: the place I hold, the hypostasis I maintain, becomes uncertain; my hold on time falters.
Had I not been vouchsafed this experience before, while my friend was alive? Did it not present itself as it were behind all I took to be informal and easy-going in our friendship? Many years after the Events of May 1968, Blanchot remembers that tutoiement, the second person familiar, was demanded of everyone; he preserved the formal ‘vous’ for his friends. What he shared with his friends is analogous to what Breton demanded of the Surrealists – friendship is also, for Blanchot, a relation to the impossible, but it is one that allows each to be experienced as if he or she were removed from the categories which organise our relationships. To say ‘vous’ to the friend is to acknowledge that she escapes my attempt to identify and determine the others around me.
Is it appropriate to write of the image of the Other? To recall: the image foregrounds itself when the thing is cut off from the tasks and projects to which it is usually subordinated; the image thereby resists the basic impulse of our existence to create meaning, to ‘exist’ things by grasping them first of all as potential tools or as raw material. No longer does the thing offer itself to be deployed. Fascinated, I am as though pressed up against the image of the thing even as the image holds me apart at what Paul Davies calls ‘its distance’.[xviii] It is as if what was revealed preceded the thing; as if the image were the condition of possibility of the thing and not the other way round.
What happens when we confront the image of the other person? She holds herself at a distance from any determination; she maintains herself at a distance. In the case of the corpse, this has happened too late; but the closed circuit of my interiority is interrupted as the Other comes to resemble herself. The unknown keeps me at a distance – at its distance.
*
Its distance: is this what Blanchot remembers in a short meditation written in the wake of Antelme’s death?
In The Human Race, his testimony to his experiences in the work camps, Robert Antelme learns that K. is going to die; he’d been in the infirmary for a week. He looks for K. at the infirmary, but cannot find him, although he recognises a few of the patients as he passes a row of beds. ‘Where is K.?’ he asks a nurse. ‘But you passed him. He’s over there’.[xix] Antelme must have passed right by K.’s bed. The nurse points out K.; Antelme goes across; he sees a man with hollows instead of cheeks and expressionless eyes. Formerly, the man had been lying down, now he has raised his head on his elbows. Perhaps he is smiling. Now Antelme goes towards him, thinking this patient was looking at him. But where is K.?
‘I went over to the next bed and asked the guy lying on it, “where’s K?”’[xx] He turned his head and with it motioned towards the person propped on his elbows’.[xxi] Then the patient with the long nose and the smile was K. But this frightens Antelme: ‘I looked at the person who was K. I became afraid – afraid of myself – and I looked at the other faces, seeking reassurance. I recognised them clearly enough. I wasn’t wrong; I still knew who they were. The other person was still leaning on his elbows, head down, mouth halfway open’.[xxii]
Where is K.? Antelme looks into the blue, unmoving eyes of this patient. Then he looks at the other patients, whom he recognises. Then Antelme addresses the unknown patient (the one who has taken the place of K.): ‘Hello, old man’.[xxiii] ‘There was no way I could make myself more visible. He kept that appearance of a smile on his face. I didn’t recognise anything’.[xxiv] Antelme moves away. ‘Still nothing but the drooping head and the half-opened mouth of nobody in particular. I left the infirmary’.[xxv] In one day K. had become unrecognisable. A double had substituted itself for him.
K. was dying; he would die that night. Dying, K. was no longer the man Antelme knew. Now Antelme asks another question: does he, Antelme, the one who knew K., exist? The question is similar to the one Breton asks himself at the outset of Nadja. Who is he, the one once called Robert Antelme, as the body K. once occupied begins to resemble itself? ‘Because I no longer found the man I’d known, and because he didn’t recognise me, I’d had doubts about myself for a minute. It was to reassure myself that I was still me that I’d looked at the other guys as though to recover my breath’.[xxvi] The ‘stable faces’ of the others grant him a sureness in his own existence. But K.? His identity is no longer stable; even his death will not reassure Antelme. ‘It would remain true that between the man I’d known and the dead K., whom we all know, this nothingness had existed’.[xxvii]
Blanchot comments on this passage in his tribute to Antelme:
Not recognising, in the infirmary, a companion he had come to see, who was still alive, he understood that even in life there is nothingness, an unfathomable emptiness against which we must defend ourselves even while being aware of its approach; we have to learn to live with this emptiness.[xxviii]
It may happen when he dies that I will no longer recognise the one who was close to me in life. A dying man stares at me; staring back, I confront a face that has become unrecognisable. The Other holds me at its distance; I cannot be sure who it is I confront. ‘Each living man, really, does not have any resemblance yet’, Blanchot writes; but he adds: ‘each man, in the rare moments when he shows a similarity to himself, seems to be only more distant, close to a dangerous neutral region, astray in himself, and in some sense his own ghost, already having no other life than that of the return’.[xxix] K. has become his own ghost, the phantom double of Antelme’s friend.
The corpse, the friend, the dying man: Blanchot allows his conversationalists in The Infinite Conversation to claim the Other is always ‘close to death, close to the night’ – that the encounter with the Other, with any Other, already implies a relation to the neutral double of the human being.[xxx] No longer is it a question of the exceptional cases in which we come face to face with a dying person or a corpse, but of any encounter with anyone at all. The ‘il’ which awakens in me in response to the dying or the dead awakens in relation to the Other too; to be thus fascinated is to be drawn from oneself, to be summoned by a call which remains free of determination. If this call is free, it is not a freedom possessed by any particular human being; what calls me is not the Other herself, speaking in her own voice, urging me to draw close, but her alterity. This is not of course something she possesses – it is not a property or attribute, but what makes her Other for me. She resembles herself – but she does not do so for herself. She resembles herself for me, that is to say, with respect to my relation to her as it is measured by the power implicit to my existence.
Is this what Giacometti’s sculptures indicate? Perhaps the attenuation of his figures is a way of attesting to the peculiar relation Blanchot calls resemblance. Giacometti struggles to realise a likeness of something which cannot be realised, to present an image of what cannot be represented. He destroys his statues and remakes them because he would attempt to repeat the encounter with the Other, to allow it to reverberate in sculpted matter. His sculptures are not ‘ka’ figures, an attempt to preserve something from death, but would allow dying to press towards us. It is the density of matter, not space, which would destroy everything. Matter is cancer.
As we have seen, the artwork might be said to ‘work’ (which is to say, permit the play of worklessness within the work) as it brings the viewer into relation with the image, the materiality that lies dormant in the material from which it was made. But what is the relationship between this materiality and the Other? It may appear that the materiality of the Other and the materiality of the artwork are analogous since both would be images. But this is too simple. As I will show, the relation with the Other, for Blanchot, occurs by way of language. Materiality (as it names the image, worklessness, the negative absolute etc.) is indeed the bridge between the relation to the work and that to the Other, but this claim needs to be refined through a discussion of Blanchot’s account of language.
*
Blanchot quotes the following remark from Jacques Dupin on Giacometti: ‘the spectacle of violence fascinates and terrifies him’, commenting.[xxxi]
Whence the experience he had of presence. It is out of reach. One kills a man, one does violence to him; this has happened to all of us, either in act, or in speech, or as the result of an indifferent will; but presence always escapes the power that does violence. Presence, in face of the destruction that wants to reach it, disappears but remains intact, withdrawing into nullity, where it is dissipated without leaving any traces (one does not inherit presence; it is without tradition). To the experience of violence there corresponds the evidence of the presence that escapes it.
[…] Presence is only presence at a distance, and this distance is absolute – that is, irreducible; that is, infinite. The gift of Giacometti, the one he makes us, is to open, in the space of the world, the infinite interval from which there is presence – for us, but as it were, without us. Yes, Giacometti gives us this, he draws us invisible toward this point, a single point at which the present thing (the plastic object, the figured figure) changes into pure presence, the presence of the Other in its strangeness, that is to say, also radical non-presence.[xxxii]
Read in terms of Blanchot’s reflections on the corpse, one might say Giacometti’s sculptures show us how human being can come to resemble itself, bringing together, for its audience, presence and absence, here and nowhere. The real and the image alternate, displacing one another in the same space and in the same instant. Blanchot subjects the word presence to the same transformation as the word immediacy. No longer is it reserved for what is evident before me here and now, but to an encounter which escapes with the measure of human capacity. Time does not offer itself the possibility of working to help me situate myself with respect to the encounter in question; space does not grant itself as what can be measured by the light of understanding. Mediation is impossible; the capacity to negate fails me; no third, extrinsic term serves to hold me apart from the Other. Presence is a name for what overwhelms; its immediacy does not permit me to endure before it. It is said that whoever sees God dies; whoever encounters the Other no longer exists as an ‘I’. The distance Giacometti’s sculptures interpose between the viewer and themselves cannot be negated. Presence, non-presence: both words are deployed in Blanchot’s mediations on Giacometti to designate the effect of this distance, which he will also call fascination.
What does this mean? In a passage from The Human Race, when Antelme recalls marching with four thousand other prisoners, led by the SS, on a track through the woods. They hear a deluge of shots; the prisoners do not turn. One of their number has been shot. The column moves ahead. In the silence they hear ‘the sound of solitary fear and nocturnal, diabolical terror’. Terror: but the column march, they can only march. What will happen? Each fears another fifty will die then another fifty until all the prisoners are dead. They will march until there is no more column for the SS to lead.
An Italian prisoner is summoned by the SS: ‘Du, komm heir!’ The SS man is looking for a man to kill; anyone will do. The victim blushes. He knows he has been selected by chance. He does not ask: ‘why me? Why not another?’; there are no criteria. None of the marchers is worth more or less than anyone else. The column is silent. Each tries to ready himself to be chosen at random to die. Each is afraid for himself, but Antelme notes ‘we probably have never felt such solidarity with each other, never felt so replaceable by absolutely anybody at all’. Think of the one who stood next to the Italian. Hearing: ‘Du, komm heir!’ and seeing another go forward in his place, Antelme writes, he 'must have felt half his body stripped naked'.
Terror: someone will die in your place, just as you might die in the place of another. It is the possibility of this mortal substitution which allows each to feel solidarity with the other. But is it the chance of this same substitution, where one prisoner might be taken for the Other, where each comes to resemble no one in particular, that offers the chance of a kind of hope?
What the SS fear is the relation which implicates from the side of the huddled magma – the near-interchangeable prisoners who are brought by affliction to the point of dying. The SS fear to acknowledge they belong to the same human race as the deportees. A fear which leads to more death, but, as attested in Antelme’s book, reveals that there are always too many people to kill, and the mania for destruction has, at its limit, the numberless human race.
The prisoners fear death, but the SS fear the prisoners. Terror and fascination are mixed, which is why, on the march, they neither kill everyone at once nor let them all go. They are bound to them, the SS, even as they know the war will be lost. But to whom are they bound? To the ones they might become, to the Other. It is not a question of empathy but of alterity. Beyond fellow feeling, the sense of what I might share with the Other as an equal, there is an awareness of what cannot be so shared. Unless what Blanchot calls community were thought as a sharing which passes through the relation to the Other – one, then, which involves an experience that cannot be exchanged or measured by a common unit. This is why the son of the camp Lagerführer feared lost among the children of the camps was made, when he was found, to wear an identificatory placard.
Resistance vouchsafes itself in the ones who have fallen beneath need, who had died to everything but a naked desire to survive. It is those who are most weak, the ones on the brink of death, who come to resemble themselves. Is it thus that they present themselves in the same way as the image of things? When his friends found the starving body of Antelme alongside other dead and dying bodies at Dachau was it a thing that they found? Blanchot writes: ‘Each time, we receive from Giacometti this double discovery that is, each time, it is true, immediately lost: only man would be present to us, only he is alien to us’[xxxiii]. For Blanchot, the otherness of the human being is qualitatively different from all other others. How can this be reconciled with Blanchot’s discussions of the negative absolute or the neutral double of the world – of the ‘there is’ of language and the world that has become image? To think through Blanchot’s argument, it is necessary to trace his negotiation of the work of Levinas.
*
Dasein is bourgeois: this is the upshot of Levinas account of the conditions of the genesis of the ego. The ego, he explains, needs material to produce its own identity; the effort to be takes the form of the attempt to organise the world into sources of food and nourishment. Labour and possession are required for the ego to consolidate its being in the world. Likewise, reflection and comprehension are needed if the ego is to protect itself from the uncertainty of the future.
Drawing on Heidegger’s claim that being is in each case mine, Levinas claims the activity of the verb ‘to be’, the verb of verbs, is accomplished in the structure of mineness. Just as Heidegger uses Wesen as a verb, Levinas argues ‘esse’ is ‘interesse’; essence, with the human being, turns upon and hypostatises itself. As such, the ego’s practical and theoretical involvement with the world answers the interests of being. Even Heidegger’s transformation of the notion of the understanding from the ‘knowing that’ of purely theoretical speculation to the ‘knowing how’ of practical engagement with the world is ordered by the need for the ego to maintain the security of its hypostasis. The same holds for the related notions of the project, temporal transcendence, the for-the-sake-of, and being-towards-death as Sartre inherits them and uses them as interpretive tools in his account of Giacometti’s sculptures.
The Other, for both Levinas and Blanchot, is experienced as an interruption of the spontaneous need of the ‘I’ to lay claim to existence, to seize and digest being. The hunger to be, to exist, is also the need to have done with the Other. Practically, I work to meet my needs, consolidating my identity; this is a way of confirming my essence as active interesse. Theoretically, I reflect in order to increase my emprise, com-prehending the world, reducing everything that is different to the measure of the same. Thus it is that the singularity of the Other is transformed into a particular.
That the Other resists this transformation is not a tribute to her agency. The word Other only makes sense as the term of a relation; as Other, she does not exist for herself as an ego with powers commensurate with my own. The Other resists, this is true, but she does so because she is the Other for me, and what she resists is the power implicit in my existence as it confirms the tautology of being. The Other resists, but she does not do so as another ego. This means she is vulnerable to the demands of the labour which confirms the economy of being, of mineness at a practical and a theoretical level. At the same time, she resists in her singularity and throws off violence – she refuses to be killed, which is to say negated, because she addresses me.
It is my response to this silent address, for Levinas, which happens as the primal event of language. Language begins and rebegins in this address; the relation to the Other as it is marked in language animates the dead letter of speech or writing. The Other addresses me; but this does not mean there is anyone ‘behind’ the address; she does not ventriloquise God or speak in place of anyone else. Nor is it a matter of what she would want to say since she does not exist as the Other for herself. The Other resembles herself, Blanchot maintains, holding us at her distance. But when he presents this self-resembling as a relation to language, the response to the Other is analogous to that of the literary author to the anonymous murmuring of language. The Other brings me into contact with the ‘there is’ of language as though she were a living incarnation of the narrative voice. It is in this claim he differs from Levinas.
Early to late, Levinas attempts to avoid the neutralisation which occurs as soon as one attempts to write of the relation to the Other, or even to talk of the Other to someone else. How is this possible? With the word the Other, I betray the Other – to speak or to write of the Other is to risk understanding the Other as a particular. At the same time, this risk is necessary if the Other is to be spoken of at all. Then there must be a way of speaking without universalising, or at least of marking in the text what cannot be grasped by means of the text. This is why he will have to make a special claim for the status of Totality and Infinity as a work of philosophy in the context of a discussion of what he calls fecundity. For Levinas (the apparent misogyny of this example should not concern us so much as its structure) the birth of a son transforms the father’s existence. His son is of him but different from him; the birth of the son happens as a break in the self-relation of the father, opening a future for him which is no longer bound by the structure of the same.
In fecundity the I transcends the world of light – not to dissolve into the anonymity of the ‘there is’, but in order to go further than the light, to go elsewhere. To stand in the light, to see – to grasp before grasping – is not yet ‘to be infinitely’; it is to return to oneself older, that is encumbered with oneself. To be infinitely means to be produced in the mode of an I that is always at the origin, but that meets with no trammels to the renewal of its substance, not even from its very identity. Youth as a philosophical concept is defined thus. The relation with the son in fecundity does not maintain us in this closed expanse of light and dream, cognitions and powers. It articulates the time of the absolutely other, an alteration of the very substance of him who can – his trans-substantiation.[xxxiv]
Thus does the infinite enter the finite order; time is reborn in the son with whom the father cannot completely identify. It is not born for the son until that son becomes a father in turn. Fecundity is no longer measured by what I can grasp or comprehend just as it breaks, for Levinas, from the pell mell of the il y a. Youth is the alteration of a substance that would otherwise remain mired in itself. It overcomes the senescence of finite existence.
Levinas goes on to make a similar claim concerning philosophy, specifically, that which is being set forth in Totality and Infinity: ‘Philosophy itself’, he writes, ‘constitutes a moment of this temporal accomplishment, a discourse always addressed to another. What we are now exposing is addressed to those who shall wish to read it’.[xxxv] Totality and Infinity would, like the son to the father, reach us from the future, and in such a way that it shatters our relation to ourselves as readers. Like the son, it might be said to resemble itself.
Then Levinas would claim for Totality and Infinity the same status as the poem which would stubbornly refuse to offer itself to meaning, being composed solely of sonorousness, of rhythm. As we have seen, however, the poem must lend itself to meaning; Totality and Infinity must allow itself to be read, thereby yielding itself up to the measure of sense. As such, Levinas cannot escape the danger implicit in writing: that the circulation of words dispossesses the author, speaking anonymously and impersonally in his place. But once again, like the poet, Levinas can still attempt to interrupt the articulation of sense – this time, not to affirm the irreducibility of the poem, but of the relation to the Other of which Totality and Infinity would speak.
I can write or talk of the Other as I can write or talk of anything, but in so doing, I am unable to make the differentiation at the level of language between human others and other others. To remain at the level of the said, which is to say, that order of discourse which will only allow me to speak of the Other as a particular, means to pass over the saying which occurs in my acknowledgement of the singularity of the Other. It is this acknowledgement which, for Levinas, is upstream of the content of what is said. Yet the said is interrupted; saying occurs in the acknowledgement of the Other as the Other, which is to say, in its singularity. A singularity which, since it must be thought as a relation, singularises the one who acknowledges the Other.
Herein lies the demarcation between the relation to the human Other and other others put forward by Levinas and, in his own way, Blanchot. For both, although they understand it in different terms, what is called saying separates the Other from the world of things. While this claim is implicit in The Space of Literature, it becomes less so in works subsequent to it. It is marked in the essay on Giacometti in the formulation ‘only man would be present to us, only he is alien to us’ – a lesson we would receive from the sculptures.
How, though, if the Other is not merely the image of a human being, can Blanchot make this claim on behalf of a sculpture? The Other, Levinas writes, is ‘a being which surpasses every attribute. Through an attribute, it would be precisely qualified, that is, reduced to what it has in common with other beings; an attribute would make this being into a concept’.[xxxvi] To reduce the otherness of the Other to an attribute would be to create an idol; the prohibition against making representations of God also holds for the Other. But this is exactly what Blanchot does when he understands Giacometti to have presented the Other, if that is indeed what he has done, in material form.
The relation to the Other, for Levinas, is completely different from the relation to things. Levinas writes, ‘In expression a being presents itself; the being that manifests itself attends its manifestation and consequently appeals to me. This attendance is not the neutrality of an image, but a solicitation that concerns me by its destitution and its height. To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation’.[xxxvii] Blanchot, by contrast, presents the relation to the Other as analogous to the relation to the image as part of a more general concern with what might be called the materiality of language as it is indicated in its rhythm, sonorousness or texture. Like Levinas, Blanchot will present the relation to the Other in terms of language. But unlike Levinas, it is the image of language, its neutral double which the relation to the Other allows me to experience.
Blanchot is not presenting Giacometti’s sculptures as a depiction of the Other, nor indeed of the ‘il’ who experiences the Other. What, then, is he doing?
What Jacques Dupin has written on Alberto Giacometti is fitting to a work as clear as it is unapparent and always ready to escape whatever it is that might attempt to measure it. After reading these ‘texts’, I can better understand why such a work is close to us – I mean close to writing – to such an extent that every writer feels himself implicated by the work – although it is in no way ‘literary’ – experiencing the need to question it constantly and knowing that he cannot repeat it in writing.[xxxviii]
Why does the writer feel implicated in Giacometti’s sculptures? Because they present an indication of the relation to the Other as it obtains in language. A relation which, for Blanchot, shares several features with the relation to literature to the extent that he will blur the boundaries between speech and writing in The Infinite Conversation. For the Levinas of Totality and Infinity, this blurring is to be distrusted; writing places itself on the side of economy, answering the theoretical imperative that allows everything to be thematised, or else lends itself to the temptations of rhythm and sonority – to that poetry which sings of the world and the things of the world, and sings of the Other as another of those things. The sham sobriety of theoreticism and the drunkenness of poetry are the risks of a discourse which speaks not just in the absence of the writer, which already arouses Plato’s suspicion of writing, but in the absence of the Other.
This is why Otherwise than Being calls for a reduction of language that would allow us to watch over saying, restoring language to the encounter to which it bears witness. Language must be rekindled so that it keeps memory of the enlivening presence of the Other, that is, the excessive signification which means writing always falls short of speech. The reduction of which Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being resembles the special claims he makes for Totality and Infinity. However, Levinas now generalises the claim, allowing saying to happen not just because the Other is present before me, but because the relation to the Other is affirmed in all discourse. It is not just Otherwise than Being which would escape the strictures Levinas places on writing, but all discourse, written and spoken, as it bears witness to the Other and thereby interrupts itself, unsaying the said. Now everything written can be read against its dead letter, that is, as it actively unsays the order of the said. The same holds for anything spoken – discourse now appears out of step with itself; the said no longer has the last word.
In Otherwise than Being as in Totality and Infinity, Levinas allows himself to make a procedural remark on the status of his own discourse: ‘I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all the discourses are stated, in saying it to one that listens to it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse says, outside of all it includes. That is true of the discussion I am elaborating at this very moment’.[xxxix] At this very moment: philosophy, with Otherwise than Being, bears witness to the witnessing which occurs in the spirit if not the letter of language; it is vigilant over vigilance, attesting to an insomnia which awakens language from its slumbers. Otherwise than Being watches over the reduction which happens as saying.
Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster which, among other things, is a response to Levinas’s second magnum opus, is also a vigilant text. Over what does it watch over? It may appear that Blanchot simply takes over Levinas’s theoretical lexicon, aping the arguments of Otherwise than Being in order to repeat what he finds in the work of his friend. But the theoretical context in which Levinas’s term saying reappears is, with Blanchot, decisively transformed.
Take, for example, the role Levinas’s notion of scepticism plays when it is repeated in The Writing of the Disaster.[xl] According to the well worn philosophical trick, scepticism is made to refute itself: to articulate the thesis, ‘there is no truth’ is to already make a truth claim; the thesis contradicts itself. Or else, with Hegel, scepticism is the way in which the coherency of a given worldview brings itself into question; it thus operates a name for the motor of the dialectic, and is reconcilable with the completed philosophical system. For Levinas, by contrast, scepticism names the unsaying of the said. This is possible because saying is not to be understood as articulating a thesis; as such, it escapes self-contradiction. For the same reason, it is not identifiable within the system and escapes all attempts at reconciliation with the said. With the reduction performed in the text of Otherwise than Being, philosophy thinks in two times; it is marked by an irrefutable scepticism which unsays the said and steers writing away from the temptations of art.
What does Blanchot intend when he uses the term scepticism? The following quotation offers an indication:
Scepticism, a noun that has crossed out its etymology and all etymology, is not indubitable doubt; it is not simply nihilist negation: rather, irony. Scepticism is in relation with the refutation of scepticism. We refute it, if only by living, but death does not confirm it. Scepticism is indeed the return of the refuted, that which erupts anarchically, capriciously, and irregularly each time (and at the same time not each time) that authority and the sovereignty of reason, indeed of unreason, impose their order upon us or organise themselves definitively in a system.
Scepticism does not destroy the system; it destroys nothing; it is a sort of gaiety without laughter, in any case without mockery, which suddenly makes us uninterested in affirmation, in negation: thus it is neutral like all language. The disaster would be that portion of sceptical gaiety, never at anyone’s disposal, that makes seriousness (the seriousness of death, for example) pass beyond all seriousness, just as it lightens the theoretical by not letting us trust it. I recall Levinas: ‘Language is already scepticism’.[xli]
Part of this quotation makes reference to Blanchot’s suspicion of etymologism. The appeal to scepticism would no longer see language as traceable to its Greek roots, thereby awakening another memory – that of an indefatigable reciprocity between words and things, a dance which will not settle into a primal word.[xlii] What is important in the present discussion is the way in which scepticism is linked to the question of irony. It is in terms of the exploration of the notion of irony that Blanchot’s account of scepticism and saying might be understood.
*
When I speak ironically it is with the expectation that only some may grasp what it is I am saying. This is not a simple snobbery – it is not just that discourse itself is too common, too lowly to allow the philosopher to speak, but that there are different ways of hearing that same speech of receiving and understanding what is said according to one’s training in philosophy. To learn about the views of this or that philosopher is insufficient; what matters is to appropriate philosophy for oneself, escaping the cave to enter the real world beneath the real sun.
For those who have not escaped the cave, there is the chance the Socrates’ irony will at least point the way out. One knows at least that the Socrates of the dialogues is meant by Plato to be the real philosopher; the sophists and others with whom he discourses are pretenders. When Socrates says to Agathon in the Symposium: ‘you are inspired!’ his indirect message is clear: you are not inspired. Unlike Agathon, the informed reader can understand what Socrates means. What do we learn? The difference between a philosopher and pretend philosophers, between wisdom and sophistry. Why, though, does Socrates not just say what he thinks? Because his perspective is one which can only be appropriated after years of training. Simply to repeat an argument is not enough; the dialogue leads Socrates’ interlocutors up to the point where they might grasp the complexities of the issue for themselves. The same holds for the readers of Plato’s dialogues.
Irony, then, is carefully controlled; it is a pedagogical tool which operates in an economy where Alcibiades can crown Socrates with the laurel wreath Agathon won for his play. It is clear to Plato’s reader who the real master of poetry is meant to be. Socrates is already in command of speech: he says what he knows and knows what he means to say.
That he is made to do so in the written dialogues of Plato who so distrusts writing is ironic. Plato distrusts writing; but what does he distrust? The unmasterable irony of writing that exposes his books to the risk of misreading, compromising the uprightness of speech, that rectitude in which the speaker attends the words he speaks. A text can never master its own textuality; it is public and therefore must give itself to be read in the absence of its author. This is what a writer like Bataille embraces, dreaming of the unknown readers who will encounter his book. Bataille, as we will see, affirms the ‘there is’ of language in his writings and in conversation. Plato and Levinas are, by contrast, committed to the idea that a philosophical message can reach the reader intact, thus overcoming the ambiguity of writing. But what happens when writing is permitted to speak in another way? When writing gives itself to the bad faith of reading and ironises everything it is meant to convey?
Blanchot does not content himself with elevating written discourse above spoken discourse, absenting himself in order to let writing speak, but would attest to the way in which speech, whether spoken or written, allows the ‘there is’ of language to resound. What is called speech, for Blanchot, refers to writing and to speech, as I will show by considering in turn the relationship between speech and literary writing and speech and the relation to the Other.
*
There is little dramatic irony in Homer. The Homeric hero lives in the glory of his acts, in the splendour of immediate action. Action is the thing; characters rarely pause to think, and when they do, it is to puzzle choices before them: there is no monologue which is not part of the unfolding of the action. With Christianity, the chance of the richness of irony takes a huge leap when Augustine develops the first person narrative in the Confessions. No longer is it a matter of external observation or external action; Augustine gives us an allegorical presentation of an inward life which comes to climax in the conversion of book eight. With Augustine, the way is prepared not only for allegory, but for the psychological account of inner life. Inner monologue is no longer a pause in outward action. There is a new complexity in the displacement of perspective; an old man narrates the experiences of a young man; the plot is one of self-transformation.
With Rousseau, there is a mutation of interiority. The narrator of the Confessions is not a type like Augustine’s narrator, who would exemplify the attempt to live in conformity with Christ. Rousseau’s detailed portrait of his own emotional development is intended as an end in itself. His quest to display and justify himself before the world is intended to compensate for what he saw as his ill-treatment in his life; to win the world’s sympathy is not enough: he wants to be seen as a good man because he was true to the springs of his emotion. 'I may omit or transpose facts, or make mistakes in dates', says Rousseau in the opening paragraph of the seventh book of the Confessions, 'but I cannot go wrong about what I felt, or about what my feelings have led me to do; and they are the subject of my story’. This is why Rousseau sought to leave with the Confessions a witness in his favour, defending his good name against the plot against his reputation. The Confessions would set out his life from the appropriate perspective, interpreting events so that its pattern reveals the ‘blind fatality’ which draws him towards catastrophe. Catastrophe follows catastrophe – the book ends on the brink of a new disaster which Rousseau promises he will narrate in part three. The book breaks off there, but there is a sense, as with Kafka’s The Castle, that the book will never end. It is born and reborn, for Rousseau, from a terrible sense of foreboding. But what does he fear?
The dresser crab encrusts its shell with the disparate materials it finds on the ocean floor. Likewise, writing, the raw desire to write, clothes itself in whatever it finds. The one for whom words will not come, who cannot begin, is like a crab without a shell. He suffers from not writing. The wind that rips across his exposed body is the form of his pain. But to write, too, is to suffer. The sinners in Eden are ashamed because they are nude; the writer is ashamed of a surfeit of clothing. Every word exposes him; every sentence he encrusts in his shell is a sentence too many. He suffers from non-writing in the form of writing. Blanchot: ‘Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. May God help me. Which I translate modestly: In the space of writing – writing, not writing – here I sit bent over, I cannot do otherwise and I await no help from the beneficent powers’.[xliii] With Rousseau, Luther’s ‘here I stand, I cannot do otherwise’ becomes ‘I cannot stand and I can do nothing’; God cannot help him. Of what does he confess? He confesses to nothing; the Confessions, in his place, lets speak the ‘there is’ of language.
If Kafka does not attempt to write a confession it is because he is closer to language, to the streaming of language. His diaries mark that great moment when the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ gives birth to a literature which leaps beyond him. It is not Kafka’s suffering that is the secret topic of his writings, but the suffering of writing – a formulation that is absurd unless we understand that language refuses itself to the measure of human power. Now the ‘there is’ of language is permitted to refer to nothing but itself, opening a labyrinth into which the reader disappears. The literary text is no longer of the world, no longer a representation, an attempt at verisimilitude; it attains a kind of irony beyond anything which results from the author’s conscious manipulation of the relationship between characters and audience. Language ironises itself, interrupting the economy of the said.
The Castle, Blanchot notes, ‘does not consist of a series of events or peripeteia that are more or less linked, but of an ever-expanding sequence of exegetic versions that finally only bear upon the very possibility of exegesis itself – the impossibility of writing (and of interpreting) The Castle’.[xliv] K. goes from exegete to exegete, from commentator to commentator. Of what do they tell him? Of the experience that awaits us at the heart of reading. But what is this experience? ‘It may be that recounting (writing) draws language into a possibility of saying that would say being without saying it, and yet without denying it either’.[xlv] Saying becomes another name for the récit, the narrative voice which is the happening of the work.
The reader is in the same quandary as Antelme was before K. in The Human Race. ‘It would remain true that between the man I’d known and the dead K., whom we all know, this nothingness had existed’: the same nothingness opens itself in the instant between the lofty work of literature called The Castle by the celebrated author Franz Kafka and the book you opened by chance in the library which begins, ‘It was late in the evening when K. arrived’.
‘To speak in the neutral is to speak at a distance, preserving this distance without mediation and without community, and even in sustaining the infinite distancing of distance – its irreciprocity, its irrectitude or dissymmetry and without one or other of its terms beings privileged (the neutral cannot be neutralised)’.[xlvi] Irreciprocity, irrectitude, dissymmetry: each resonates with Blanchot’s own account of the relation to the Other as if the relation to the Other were only the relation to the narrative voice.
The other speaks. But when the other is speaking, no one speaks because the other, which we must refrain from honouring with a capital letter that would determine its unique presence, is precisely never simply the other. The other is neither the one nor the other, and the neutral that indicates it withdraws it from both, as it does from unity, always establishing it outside the term, the act, or the subject through which it claims to offer itself.[xlvii]
Blanchot does not refer, here, to the personal Other, Autrui, but to l’autre as it names the neuter. Yet it shares several features in common with Levinas’s Autrui. It is linked to a kind of saying: ‘it says nothing, not only because it adds nothing to what there is to say (it knows nothing), but because the narrative voice subtends this nothing – the “silencing and keeping silent” – in which speech is here and now already engaged; thus it is not heard in the first place, and everything that gives it a distinct reality begins to betray it’.[xlviii] What does this mean? It speaks without content; if, as Blanchot goes on to claim, even as it can take the voice of a character or a narrator, it cannot be confined to their voices. It is impersonal; it does not mediate information but presents itself in a manner analogous to what Blanchot writes of the Other. The narrative voice resembles itself. Thus it is possible to invoke the immediate presence of the language which, like the Other, does not exist at the same level as me. Like the relation to the Other, the relation with the language of The Castle is dissymmetrical; I speak as I am brought into contact with the inexhaustible murmuring of language such that I lose my rectitude. I do not speak; the ‘il’ speaks, and it does so without expecting speech to be reciprocated. Nothing is exchanged; there is only the donation of the narrative voice in the event Blanchot allows himself to be called saying.[xlix]
With literature, something else happens. Ironical complexity permits all manner of permutations on narration, but these techniques are only more complex renderings of what is already at stake when, in a certain kind of literary writing, the voice of the narrator is supplanted by the narrative voice. Now no one in particular speaks and the narrative itself no longer strives for verisimilitude.
Unmastered irony, the irony of a writing that would no longer permit the rectitude of the philosopher: this is what reveals itself when language holds us at its distance. When Blanchot allows himself to write of an ‘ironic outbidding’ of the reduction, this should be understood as what he would later call scepticism and saying: as the ‘there is’ of speech that resists the one who would command it as it occurs in literature and in the relation to the Other.[l]
*
What, then, about the irony, the scepticism of spoken discourse? When Blanchot remembers his conversations with Bataille, it is not to present his friend in the manner of Plato’s Socrates: true, there is a seriousness in his conversation, a sense that everything is at stake; what takes place between the speakers is a play or a game of thought. It is not the content of what is said which matters, but that it is said at all. What counts is not the order of discourse, spoken and written, which Levinas calls the said, but what he calls saying.
In what sense can this be called irony? It is a question of irony which no longer allows itself to be mastered, but which is implicit in language itself insofar as it escapes any attempt to bind it to what it is possible for you or I to say. Even though it is at play in all discourse, struggling with measure of human power, this unmastered irony reveals this struggle only in exceptional circumstances such as those Blanchot experienced in his friendship with Bataille.
Most often when we speak, and also when we hear someone else speaking, we do not fail afterward to experience a feeling discomfort, as though some shame were attached to using words, whether to say important or insignificant things; in the first case, because we have betrayed them by speaking too adroitly or too awkwardly, in the second because we have betrayed the seriousness of speech itself. I do not mean to say that every conversation with Georges Bataille was free of this feeling, but rather that speech then took up its own malaise, and as soon as it was sensed, assumed it and respected it in such a way as to offer it another direction. Here speech’s lack interceded on speech’s behalf, becoming the way that, through a decision each time renewed, one turned toward the other so as to respond to the frankness of a presence (just as the eminence of being, its height, cannot be separated from its decline).
[…] In the precaution from which Georges Bataille never considered himself free, even when speaking with a very old friend, there was no prudence nor even simply a concern for the interlocutor. There was much more: a silent appeal to attention so as to confront the risk of a speech spoken in common, also an accord with this reserve that alone allows one to say everything, and, finally, an allusion to a movement toward the unknown to which, almost immediately, two persons together who are bound by something essential are as though obliged to bear witness.
A precautionary speech, turned toward the interior, and by this precaution designating the impossible central thought that does not let itself be thought.[li]
Why would we feel shame when we speak, or hear someone else speak? Because to speak of serious matters is to risk betraying them by speaking too easily, as if the topic of discussion were entirely under our command, or too frivolously, thereby losing the seriousness of the topic altogether. To speak of insignificant matters is to pass over a seriousness no longer tied to that of a particular topic, but to speaking itself. The presence of speech would be a serious affair, one in relation to which we would feel shame unless, like Bataille we were able to allow this seriousness to speak.
How is this possible? By allowing language to reveal its malaise as it is vouchsafed in my inability to say something, to find the right word, failing, thereby, to turn language into something over which I could exert power. Language suffers; it undergoes a malaise. What does this mean? It comes to resemble itself as it refuses to lend itself to human power. As such, the one who speaks exhibits a kind of reserve with respect to speech. This was Bataille’s gift, and the gift he allowed those who conversed with him: speech was able to speak in what they said; saying was given its due.
No longer does speech lend itself to the economuy of the possible, subordinating itself to the communication of a message. Each conversationalist, like Moses, is a stammerer, but what stammers is the whole of language. This whole, the 'there is' of language, is not the Other’s speech, as if the Other possessed a power to speak that the ‘I’ does not, but the impersonal saying which affirms itself for the 'I' because of the relation to the Other, giving the 'there is' of language as it were a new direction, allowing the ‘I’ to acknowledge it in turn.
One could say of these two speaking men that one of them is necessarily the obscure ‘Other’ that is Autrui. And who is Autrui? The unknown, the stranger, foreign to all that is either visible or non-visible, and who comes to ‘me’ as speech when speaking is no longer seeing. One of the two is the Other: the one who, in the greatest human simplicity, is always close to that which cannot be close to ‘me’: close to death, close to the night. But who is me? Where is the Other? The self is sure, the Other is not – unsituated, unsituable, nevertheless each time speaking and in this speech more Other than all that is other. Plural speech would be this unique speech where what is said one time by ‘me’ is repeated another time by ‘Autrui’ and thus given back to its essential Difference. What therefore characterises this kind of dialogue is that it is not simply an exchange of words between two Selves, two beings in the first person, but that the Other speaks there in the presence of speech, which is his sole presence; a neutral speech, infinite, without power, and where the unlimited in thought, placed in the safekeeping of forgetting, is at stake.[lii]
Each in turn becomes the Other for the other person; each presents himself as the corpse who will not respond to Jesus’s call to come to life. Each becomes the ‘other Lazarus, the stranger who cannot be experienced by an intact ‘I’. This is experienced as a kind of speech – as a plural speech which happens as the opening of language to Difference, that is, to a saying which cannot be exchanged, but is given each time from one to another.
What Blanchot calls the seriousness of language is unrelated to the content of what is said. Each speaker, as he acknowledges the Other, which is to say the seriousness of plural speech, of the neuter, is vigilant in turn. Writing this essay, Blanchot would be vigilant over vigilance, remembering a scepticism or irony of language that would otherwise be forgotten.
The writing of speech, the speech of writing: Blanchot uses these formulations to indicate the interruption of the continuity of discourse. Vigilance is the locus of this interruption as it opens in the suspension of the measure of the speaking or writing ‘I’. It is thus that the ‘there is’ of language is witnessed, even as there is no determinate ‘subject’ of witnessing or a determinate ‘object’ to be witnessed.
What separates Blanchotian from Levinasian vigilance with respect to speech, to writing? Totality and Infinity presents a claim ostensibly similar to Blanchot’s; the relation to the Other, according to Levinas, obtains as language, as discourse. In this way, the Other might be said to resemble herself: the relation to the Other is not one of identification but of differentiation. Speech happens not because of this differentiation but as this differentiation; it is my response to the alterity of the Other.
For Blanchot, in contrast to Levinas, I am related to the Other such that I experience the materiality of language. What does this mean? The ‘there is’, for Blanchot, as for Levinas, is what is experienced in suffering, affliction and weariness. But Blanchot also thinks the ‘there is’ in terms of the malaise of language – the way it turns itself aside from those who would assert their power over its impersonal murmuring. Language suffers; it undergoes a malaise: these formulations should not mislead us; it is not a question of invoking an occult force implicit to language itself, but of indicating the way in which language resists our powers. One meets this ‘there is’ in The Castle and in Breton’s Nadja; it awaits us as the récit in the most compendious novel, and surprises us in the automatic poetry of the Surrealists. The narrative voice is a name for the ‘there is’ in the speech. But something like the narrative voice is also at stake for each of the participants in the ‘game of thought’ Blanchot presents in his essay on Bataille.
For Levinas, language begins as I face the Other, acknowledging her alterity. Saying accomplishes the reduction of the economy of the said as it neutralises the singularity of the Other but also the reduction of the drunken song of the poet, that only loosens the ties which bind us to the world of things, singing of a world where the Other has not yet appeared. To be vigilant is to have been awoken by this reduction, this interruption of being. But this vigilance is quickly compromised; the Other is forgotten in her singularity and I, too, forget the way I have been elected to my own singularity. Whence the need to repeat this reduction in turn, to redouble vigilance in the letter of Otherwise than Being. Levinas’s text would watch over all language; it is vigilant over vigilance as it occurs, if we have ears to hear it or eyes to read it, in all language.
With Blanchot, irony becomes a name, like saying and scepticism, for the materiality of language. Considering the statement, ‘the meaning of meaning would be neuter’, Blanchot allows a conversationalist to invoke ‘an ironic outbidding of the epochē’, referring, here, to the way in which ‘meaning operates or acts through a movement or retreat that is in some sense without end, through an exigency to become suspended’.[liii] What does this mean? The order of power and possibility are held in abeyance; the measure of time and space fails and the economy of meaning with it. Meaning finds itself inscribed into an aneconomy. The epochē that allows the phenomenologist to commence her labours is likewise inscribed such that thinking begins not with the lucid and self-aware transcendental ego, but with the ‘il’ that is deprived of any relation to itself. The outbidding of the epochē occurs because of the unmasterable irony of language.
Ironical discourse is necessary for Plato because he stands within philosophy itself and cannot address his readers directly. We have a sense as readers of Plato of the traits the philosopher would exemplify; if Socrates is an impressive figure, it is only as he embodies the seriousness of the love of wisdom. We are persuaded of his greatness not because of the miracles he performs but because of the power of reason. He has no authority other than that power. We cannot seize this power for ourselves if we merely repeat Socratic formulas. If I am to understand why Alcibiades takes the laurel wreath awarded to Agathon for the greatness of his poetry and places it on Socrates’ head rather than simply admiring the pathos of that action, I must take the leap into philosophy. Otherwise I remain as Johannes de Silentio does before the figure of Abraham: awed, but living in bad faith.
What if the natural language in which philosophy is always embedded bears a force of its own, a kind of irony which prevents this leap? What if the inexhaustible murmuring of language prevents the would-be philosopher finding a place from which to speak?
Georges Bataille had the power to speak no less than the power to write. I allude not to the gift of eloquence, but to something more important: the fact of being present through his speech and, in this presence of speech, through the most direct conversation, of opening attention even unto the centre. Not that he was prepared to play a Socratic role, initiate some sort of teaching, or even act in the subtle fashion that the words one utters one allow. Even less than Nietzsche would he have wished to move on the impulse to be right or to exercise influence, whether by the intermediary of signs or by example.
Independently of both content and form, what this power of saying made manifest to every interlocutor is that speaking is a grave thing: as soon as one speaks, even in the most simple manner and of the most simple facts, something unmeasured, something always waiting in the reserve of familiar discourse is immediately at stake.[liv]
The Bataille with whom Blanchot presents us in The Infinite Conversation does not stand within philosophy, addressing those of us who remain on its outside. He does not aim to instruct, but rather to let speech affirm itself in its irony, its scepticism. Bataille does not so much possess a power over speech as over what would allow him to remember speech’s powerlessness. His vigilance is such that he can permit the seriousness of language to resound, inviting his interlocutor to affirm it in turn.
For Blanchot as for Levinas, it is a question of maintaining a vigilance over vigilance. Speech happens as the malaise of language that brings forward the ‘il’ in place of the ‘I’ – or, better, reveals the ‘I’ was always an usurper, taking the place of an impersonal streaming which dissolves all places. Like the inspired Blanchotian poet who allows worklessness to resound in the work, Bataille exhibits power enough to allow this experience of language to resound. Bataille does not speak from within philosophy, addressing those who have yet to pass through that training which would allow them to deploy language in the service of a mastered philosophical irony. He lets speak that seriousness of speech which interrupts the seriousness of philosophy.
Let us return to Levinas. Blanchot is not rejecting Levinas’s account of the singularity of the Other, dispersing it into the singularity of all others, of everything. He does not seek to elevate literature above philosophy, placing the laurel wreath back on Agathon’s head, but to show how the ‘there is’ of language marks itself in literature and philosophy. For Levinas, the Other in her singularity interrupts the neutrality of discourse (the said) as well as the attenuation of that neutrality which he claims happens as poetry. As William Large argues, this is because the Other is said by the Levinas of Totality and Infinity to attend or assist the words she speaks in such a way that there is a surplus, an excessiveness over of the content of what is said.[lv] Levinas thereby betrays his own insight that alterity is to be understood as a relation because he treats the Other as the source of alterity.
Levinas finds himself in the position of the Plato of the later dialogues who, in order to guard against the poison of writing, gives Socrates more and more dominance over his interlocutors and that of which he would speak. He becomes a monster of continuity, threatening by his power and authority to displace the message Plato would convey by means of the dialogues. This is why Plato sought to interrupt by making others the protagonists of the Laws and the Sophist, and by allowing Parmenides victory over the young Socrates. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Symposium, where Socrates is made to describe the lessons about eros he learnt from Diotima. Perhaps Diotima becomes, according to a vigilant, ironic reading of the text Plato would not permit, a name for what Blanchot would call the unknown, for the ‘there is’ of language as it shatters Socrates’ authority.
In an analogous manner, the figure of the Other in Levinas’s text threatens to usurp the place of the alterity to which the Other would bring me into relation, as if it were no more than a powerful ego. It as though it is the Other’s qualities which would account for alterity, and not the relation itself.[lvi] For Blanchot, the Other brings us into relation to the scepticism which outplays the letter of Levinas’s text. Now it is a matter of another, unmastered irony, wherein writing can no longer be subordinated to the presence of the Other.
Footnotes
[i] Wilson, Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic and the Man (Yale University Press, 2003), 167-171. Blanchot’s remarks on Giacometti in the essay I am discussing here is one of the few places where he explicitly considers the visual arts. Does Blanchot privilege literature above other artforms when it comes to his account of the related terms work, worklessness, absence of work, etc? This is a difficult question. In Blanchot’s Communism, thinking of his comments in the last part of The Space of Literature, where the influence of Heidegger is very apparent – but also Blanchot’s attempt to distinguish his position from that of the author of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ – I tried to develop a more general account of Blanchotian aesthetics. The following chapter attempts to make the same argument in a more nuanced fashion.
[ii] Ibid., 171.
[iii] Ibid., 173.
[iv] Sartre, Essays in Aesthetics, translated by Wade Baskin (New York Press: The Citadel Press, 1963), 84.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid., 85.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid., 86.
[ix] Ibid., 58.
[x] Ibid., 88.
[xi] ‘Interview’, in Sylvester’s Looking at Giacometti (London: Pimlico, 1994), 211-239, 211.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid., 212.
[xiv] Essays in Aesthetics, 83.
[xv] The Space of Literature, 257; 345.
[xvi] Ibid., 257-258; 346.
[xvii] Ibid., 258; 347.
[xviii] Davies, ‘An Exemplary Beginning’ in Orpheus Looking Back: A Celebration of Maurice Blanchot (Bracknell: South Hill Park Trust), 3-5, 3.
[xix] Antelme, The Human Race, 172.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] Ibid.
[xxii] Ibid.
[xxiii] Ibid.
[xxiv] Ibid.
[xxv] Ibid., 173
[xxvi] Ibid.
[xxvii] Ibid.
[xxviii] ‘In the Night that is Watched Over’ in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentary, edited by Daniel Dobbels, translated by Jeffrey Haight (Evanston: The Marlboro Press/ Northwestern University Press, 2003), 55-60, 56.
[xxix] The Space of Literature, 258; 347.
[xxx] The Infinite Conversation, 215; 320.
[xxxi] Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 218; L'Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 247.
[xxxii] Ibid., 219; 248.
[xxxiii] Friendship, 219; 249.
[xxxiv] Totality and Infinity, 268-269.
[xxxv] Ibid., 269.
[xxxvi] Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1998), 39.
[xxxvii] Totality and Infinity, 200.
[xxxviii] Friendship. 217; 246.
[xxxix] Otherwise than Being, 170.
[xl] Ibid., 170.
[xli] The Writing of the Disaster, 76-77; 123.
[xlii] See, for a discussion of Blanchot, Heidegger and etymology, my ‘Logos and Difference’.
[xliii] Cited in Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 204.
[xliv] The Infinite Conversation, 394; 576.
[xlv] The Infinite Conversation, 386-387; 567.
[xlvi] Ibid., 386; 566.
[xlvii] Ibid., 385; 564-565.
[xlviii] Ibid., 385-386; 565.
[xlix] As we will see, the Other is the occasion of this donation of speech; the Other’s height is a name for the height which belongs to language; the eminence of the Other is likewise to be thought in terms of language’s inexhaustible murmur.
[l] The Infinite Conversation, 304; 448.
[li] Ibid., 212; 314.
[lii] Ibid., 215-216; 320.
[liii] Ibid., 304; 448.
[liv] Ibid., 211; 313-314.
[lv] See Large, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the Ambiguity of Language (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2005), chapter four. I am indebted to Large’s book in the present study.
[lvi] My interpretation of the Blanchot’s account of the relation to the Other in Blanchot’s Communism often falls into this trap.