Approaching Disappearance

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Anne McConnell. Approaching Disappearance

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APPROACHING DISAPPEARANCE

Anne McConnell

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After exploring the questions that arise with the definition of crude language, Blanchot turns to the way that essential language figures into Mallarmé’s thought. It would seem that the uselessness of essential language, its separation from the labor of the world, would take it out of the realm of constructive negativity; essential language makes no claim to signify and to make appear things in the world. In crude language, language is silent and beings speak. In essential language, “beings fall silent” (41). Blanchot then takes us to the next step in Mallarmé’s thought:

The poetic word is no longer someone’s word. In it no one speaks, and what speaks is not anyone. It seems rather that the word alone declares itself. Then language takes on all of its importance. It becomes essential. Language speaks as the essential, and that is why the word entrusted to the poet can be called the essential word. [ . . . ] From this perspective, we rediscover poetry as a powerful universe of words where relations, configurations, forces are affirmed through sound, figure, rhythmic mobility, in a unified and sovereignly autonomous space. (41-42)

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