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ОглавлениеChapter 1: Approaching Disappearance
In an essay in The Book to Come, Blanchot writes, “literature is going towards itself, towards its essence, which is disappearance.”7 The rest of the essay develops what he means by this statement, building upon Hegel’s famous assertion that art is “a thing of the past.” Interestingly, Blanchot does not disagree with Hegel on this point, but he comes to vastly different conclusions about what the end of art would suggest about the status of art and literature beyond this terminus. Hegel dismisses art from the realm of history and truth, which, from his perspective, pronounces its end.8 Blanchot, on the other hand, sees this end as a sort of beginning—one which does not have the power to begin or the power to end, but which slips into the movement of its own disappearance. He writes, “Only the work matters, but finally the work is there only to lead to the quest for the work; the work is the impulse that carries us toward the pure point of inspiration from which it comes and which it seems it can reach only by disappearing” (200). Not only does Blanchot’s argument demonstrate his characteristically atemporal and circular notion of the approach to the work (the work has its origin at the point it aspires to reach), but it also reveals an important paradox that travels the length of his discussion of writing, reading, and the literary work in The Space of Literature. In order for the work to come forward in some sense, it must be allowed to disappear—toward itself, its “essence.” For Blanchot, this disappearance depends upon a radical reversal where ends open onto an excessive remainder which eludes our power to negate, and therefore necessarily eludes our ability to grasp, perceive, complete, or make appear. With this idea in mind, we can turn to The Space of Literature and trace the process of disappearance, as it relates to the writer, the reader, and the work.
Before looking at the first section of The Space of Literature, I would like to begin with one of the appendices to this section, “The Essential Solitude and the Solitude of the World.” Blanchot reflects upon the separation of “myself from being,” as “I” function within the world, negating being in order to make the world appear to me, to my understanding. He explains, “What makes me me is this decision to be by being separate from being—to be without being, to be that which owes nothing to being, whose power comes from the refusal to be” (SL 251). Following Hegelian logic, Blanchot asserts that the power to negate constitutes man’s accomplishment and activity in the world, but he brings attention to the lack of being and to the question of what remains when being lacks.9 In other words, Blanchot wonders if this activity of negating the world, of refusing being, does not encounter, at the limit of its power, an essential inability to make nothing of the lack of being. He asks, “When being lacks, does this mean that this lack owes nothing to being? Or rather does it mean perhaps that the lack is the being that lies deep in the absence of being—that the lack is what still remains of being when there is nothing?” (253). Blanchot brings us to the question of disappearance here, in the sense that disappearance indicates the process of becoming nothing. And, further, disappearance places emphasis on the inability to see, on the recession of the world from our vision, beyond the power to bring it to light. Disappearance, like negation, can be understood in terms of man’s power—as giving rise to the appearance of something that would be available to comprehension—but, again, Blanchot’s interest concerns the remaining trace of disappearance itself, when the power to make disappear has been exhausted:
When beings lack, being appears as the depth of the concealment in which it becomes lack. When concealment appears, concealment, having become appearance, makes “everything disappear,” but of this “everything has disappeared,” it makes another appearance. It makes appearance from then on stem from “everything has disappeared.” “Everything has disappeared” appears. This is exactly what we call an apparition. It is the “everything has disappeared” appearing in its turn. (253)
For Blanchot, the apparition, the appearance of “everything has disappeared,” characterizes the literary work (though the work exceeds categorization in its very disappearance).10 Writers and readers are pulled into a space in their approach to the work that can only be affirmed in the depth of its concealment. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot explores this approach and examines the risk of disappearance involved for those who experience the inability and anonymity of the work’s invisible space.
When Blanchot discusses the “essential solitude” in the first section of The Space of Literature, he clarifies that this solitude does not result from a writer’s empowered choice to sequester him or herself from the world in favor of the work. Blanchot explains, “He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed. He who is dismissed, moreover, doesn’t know it. This ignorance preserves him. It distracts him by authorizing him to persevere” (21). There seems to be something about the work that resists, or even prevents, relation, even if the writer depends upon a relation with the work to write. The writer perseveres because the work is never finished, and it is never finished, first of all, because one cannot determine or define any criteria that would make it so. And the work thus draws the writer into an infinite process at the same time that it dismisses his or her participation in the process. The writer gives him or herself over to the work, but the work always recedes beyond the “giving over,” which affirms its essential solitude, and the writer’s. Blanchot writes, “He whose life depends on the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work” (22). The writer’s relation to the work arises out of his or her inability to bring it to expression, which becomes an affirmation of the work’s solitude and disappearance.
Blanchot explains that the writer grapples with certain illusions about the ability to write, or to produce work. With words at his or her disposal, the writer sometimes feels mastery over language, manipulating it as a tool of expression. “But his mastery only succeeds in putting him, keeping him in contact with the fundamental passivity where the word, no longer anything but its appearance—the shadow of a word—never can be mastered or even grasped” (25). Blanchot uses the example of a writer who clings to a pencil, not able to let it go, but also not able to grasp it. The hand that writes cannot stop writing because it engages in an incessant movement where it does not have the power to stop. The writing hand (Blanchot calls it the “sick hand”) depends upon the other, masterful, hand to interrupt the writing—to seize the pencil in its empowered grasp and to put an end to that which has no beginning or end. In this way, the mastery of the writer does not consist of writing, but of the power to stop writing. This mastery betrays the infinite movement of the work, bringing it out of the realm of shadows, but also, in doing so, marking the moment of its essential disappearance. Turning away from the approach to the work, in an act of betrayal (Blanchot will later call it impatience), the writer reveals the impossibility of the work, its refusal and exclusion of both writer and reader. And so the writer returns to work:
The obsession which ties him to a privileged theme which obliges him to say over again what he has already said [ . . . ] illustrates the necessity, which apparently determines his efforts, that he always come back to the same point, pass again over the same paths, persevere in starting over what for him never starts, and that he belong to the shadow of events, not their reality, to their image, not the object, to what allows words themselves to become images, appearances—not signs, values, the power of truth. (24)
The interruption of the writing does not cure the sickness, but suspends it, affirming the impossibility of the task and the interminability of the process.
One way in which Blanchot considers the decisive moment when writing stops, if only to start again, concerns the distinction of the book and the work. The writer opens himself or herself to the approach of the work, relinquishing power and activity, risking solitude and disappearance—but this movement is ultimately substituted by the book. “The writer belongs to the work, but what belongs to him is only a book, a mute collection of sterile words, the most insignificant thing in the world” (23). The writer produces the book, and, faced with the inadequacy of the book, he or she returns to writing, hoping that a little more time and effort will complete the task. For Blanchot, the writer’s illusion, or powerlessness to stop trying, remains important because it sends him or her back to work, even if “what he wants to finish by himself remains interminable” (23). While the book can have significance in the world, as the material or worldly aspect of the work, it has nothing to do with the writer’s approach to the work, which eludes signification; yet the book remains, paradoxically, as the only evidence of the writer’s task. John Gregg provides insight into the relationship of the book and the work in The Literature of Transgression:
The work, on the other hand, escapes comprehension. It contains an inexhaustible reserve that can never be completely explained away, accounted for, or summed up by interpretation. The “evidence of the book” seems to be a solid structure, but it is an edifice built on the ever-shifting sands of the work. The lack of solid foundation accounts for the inadequation of the work with itself, which Blanchot calls “the absence of the book.” [ . . . ] The work is and is not there. Its constant movement is an oscillation between apparition and disappearance [ . . . ].11
The work exceeds the limits of the book; it does not appear anywhere in the book. But this excessiveness remains at the heart of the book, as the book’s inability to contain it or to do away with it—to make it appear or disappear. The book remains as that which is available to comprehension, and, for this reason, refuses the reading of the work. Blanchot suggests, though, that this refusal and the non-coincidence of book and work provide a space of rupture where the disappearance or concealment of the work might paradoxically come forward, as that which must remain hidden. He approaches this subject first by considering the writer’s attempt to read his or her work.
In the face of the inability to finish the task of writing, or to bring forth the work in anything other than a book, the writer might decide to approach the book as a reader. In doing so, the writer confronts “the abrupt Noli me legere,” experiencing inability for a second time. Blanchot tells us that “the writer never reads his work. It is for him illegible, a secret” (24).12 But he also clarifies that the refusal, the Noli me legere, establishes the writer’s relation with the work.
It is not the force of an interdict, but, through the play and sense of words, the insistent, the rude and poignant affirmation that what is there, in the global presence of a definitive text, still withholds itself—the rude and biting void of refusal—or excludes, with the authority of indifference, him who, having written it, yet wants to grasp it afresh by reading it. (25)
The moment when the writer faces that which turns him or her away, that which affirms concealment, recalls the characterization of the work as the appearance of “everything has disappeared.” The writer, in his or her attempted approach as reader, experiences the depth of this concealment—a depth that otherwise remains unapproachable to the writer during the patient efforts to continue working. The Noli me legere affirms the disappearance of the work, if only for a moment, since the writer ultimately returns to work with no choice but to do so. We might imagine the sick hand again, especially since Blanchot describes the writer’s approach to the text as reader in terms of the desire to “grasp it afresh by reading it.” The sick hand grasps the pencil, unable to let it go, but in doing so, as we saw earlier, exposes the writer to “the fundamental passivity where the word, no longer anything but its appearance—the shadow of a word—never can be mastered or even grasped” (25). While grasping first suggests power and understanding, it reveals itself as a sort of passive movement that stems from inability. The desire to read, for the writer, reflects the loss or absence involved in his or her task, since it would ideally serve to recover what has disappeared, or has receded beyond the grasp of the writer in his or her approach to the work. The writer attempts to read with mastery, and in doing so encounters a refusal that constitutes his or her only relation to the work.
In Blanchot’s thought, the writer clearly does not operate from a position of ability or mastery, but rather slips into a movement where the power to speak, to say “I,” disappears. “To write, moreover, is to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time” (26). Writing turns language over to the movement of the work, which lacks time and exceeds the activity and comprehension of the world. And the turning over, or withdrawing of language, which is writing, also opens a space for writing. This space becomes a risk to the writer, who no longer inhabits the realm illuminated by the light of day, where language signifies the power to express oneself and the truth of the world. Not only does writing withdraw language from the world, but it also withdraws the writer from the world—again, not in the sense that the task of writing requires that the writer seclude himself or herself from the daily activity of the world. Rather, the writer is pulled into the dark of withdrawn language, where he or she can make nothing appear or disappear through language, including the “I.”
The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the extent that, being a writer, he does justice to what requires writing, he can never again express himself, or even introduce another’s speech. Where he is, only being speaks—which means that language doesn’t speak anymore, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being. (26-27)
Blanchot clarifies that the language of writing has nothing to do with claims of universality or objectivity; it does not signify the writer’s sacrifice of a subjective, personal voice in favor of one that attempts to speak a more general truth. Writing withdraws language away from a relation with truth, light, or understanding, and the writer’s sacrifice takes on a much different character—a sacrifice of the ability to speak, and thus to say “I.” Blanchot writes, “The third person substituting for the ‘I’: such is the solitude that comes to the writer on account of the work. [ . . . ] The third person is myself become no one, my interlocutor turned alien [ . . . ]” (28). In this case, the “third person” does not suggest a character, a carefully developed “he” who one might imagine finding in the world; the third person indicates no one, a voice that rises out of the inability to speak.13
When considering that the writer belongs to a language where he or she doesn’t have the power to speak, we can begin to sense the risk of disappearance that the writer confronts in the process of writing. Blanchot briefly touches upon the tendency of writers to keep a journal because he believes it reveals the writer’s suspicion of his or her disappearance in the impersonality of the work.14
When faced with anonymity, the writer often takes up writing of a different sort—one which might re-establish the writer’s place in the world, as an “I.” Blanchot calls the journal a “memorial,” suggesting that the writer seeks to remember what has been lost, perhaps in an effort to salvage something of this “I.” Of course, the writer problematically turns to language in order to overcome the withdrawal of language, and the exposure of the “I” to this withdrawal, which would seem to reveal the futility of the effort. But Blanchot proposes that the interest of the journal lies in its deliberate references to the mundane events of everyday life and the writer’s participation in this life. The writer is grasping:
Here, true things are still spoken of. Here, whoever speaks retains his name and speaks in this name, and the dates he notes down belong in a shared time when what happens really happens. The journal—this book which is apparently altogether solitary—is often written out of fear and anguish at the solitude which comes to the writer on account of the work. (29)
In his or her disappearance, the writer turns to the journal almost in an act of denial. In the journal, the writer believes him or herself to be able to speak, to say “I,” to belong to the present—that which the experience of the work refuses.
We might ask what it is about language that exposes the writer to the disappearance of himself or herself and the work. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot turns to Mallarmé as a means of exploring this question. I would first like briefly to turn to an earlier essay, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in order to consider the way that Blanchot characterizes the role of disappearance, or negativity, in language and literature. He writes:
Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and all poets whose theme is the essence of poetry have felt that the act of naming is disquieting and marvelous. A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, “This woman” I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being—the very fact that it does not exist.15
Blanchot is referring to Hegel’s discussion of language in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, which is a continual point of reference throughout the essay.16 A word must make what it names disappear, precisely in order to name it; this act of negation gives rise to the appearance of an idea, or a concept, which replaces that which has disappeared. Common language assumes that the woman (in this case) whom language negates can re-appear in the idea, which is given by the word “woman.” The word thus expresses the idea, fulfilling, and disappearing in, its communicative function. In this way, not only does everyday language involve the disappearance of that which it names, but also of language itself; its efficiency as a communicative tool would seem to depend upon a certain assumption of, and interest in, transparency. But in the passage above, Blanchot emphasizes the lingering absence, the loss of being, that necessarily arises in this process. The word points to the absence or disappearance of what it designates, what has been sacrificed for the appearance of the idea. Blanchot focuses upon the woman’s death, rather than her recovery—a death at the heart of that which remains, because it (death) has paradoxically become the condition for the woman’s existence, despite her absence.
In the previous passage, Blanchot notes the poet’s interest in the “disquieting and marvelous” power of naming—its ability to put to death in order to create the world. Instead of looking past death, the poet makes it the concern of the work; rather than accepting the act of naming as a constructive activity that provides meaning, the language of literature brings attention to what has disappeared, precisely by demonstrating its disappearance. Blanchot writes:
When literature refuses to name anything, when it turns a name into something obscure and meaningless, witness to the primordial obscurity, what has disappeared in this case—the meaning of the name—is really destroyed, but signification in general has appeared in its place, the meaning of the meaninglessness embedded in the word as expression of the obscurity of existence, so that although the precise meaning of the terms has faded, what asserts itself now is the very possibility of signifying, the empty power of bestowing meaning—a strange impersonal light. (385)
Literature’s refusal to name thus involves the obfuscation of the name, which negates the ability of the name to make something appear. Now, nothing appears—both in the sense that literature’s negation is not constructive, and also, in the sense that nothingness, the “empty power of bestowing meaning,” appears as the movement of disappearance, which is unable to make itself disappear. After the negation of the world and the name, negation confronts its own excessive persistence. In his essay “Crossing the Threshold: Literature and the Right to Death,” Christopher Fynsk discusses this moment: “The inability to avoid signifying, become the ‘empty power [of bestowing meaning],’ is the expression of the ‘powerlessness to disappear’ of the being of what is before the day, the existence from which one must turn away to speak and to understand.”17 In this way, the power of signification, negation, or disappearance (which work as synonyms here), reaches the point of its powerlessness to deal with itself, and thus expresses that which precedes and exceeds its power—the “primordial obscurity” from which it is always and necessarily turned away.
Returning to The Space of Literature, Blanchot’s discussion of Mallarmé engages many of the reflections developed in “Literature and the Right to Death.” The earlier essay can help elucidate Blanchot’s approach to Mallarmé’s exploration of language and poetry. Blanchot traces the “experience” of Mallarmé, as he does with a number of writers who continually emerge throughout his work. His discussion of these writers emerges as something closer to a conversation than a definitive critique where he takes a stand for or against what seems to be proposed by the writer. It is sometimes even hard to tell who is speaking—Blanchot, or the writer with whom he is conversing, or neither—as the voice of the text often seems to float between vague citations, developments, commentary, and questioning. This mode of writing becomes especially apparent in Blanchot’s later works, like The Infinite Conversation, but I would argue that his conversations with Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin in The Space of Literature already demonstrate the deliberate un-grounding of the voice of the text. In these conversations, Blanchot explores the various contradictions and difficulties that arise with attempts to respond to the demand and to the question of literature, emphasizing the persistence and the inexhaustibility of both the demand and the question.
Blanchot begins by considering some of Mallarmé’s early attempts to define “essential,” or literary, language, and to distinguish it from “crude” language. He explains that Mallarmé understands both crude and essential language in terms of their respective relations to silence. The crude word is “silent [ . . . ] because meaningless”; it designates the language of everyday exchange and functions within the “reality” of the world (SL 39). It seeks to make things appear, and to make them present to us—without mediation, or, in other words, as if language transparently expressed the idea or concept. Like Blanchot, Mallarmé is interested in the way that negativity functions in language, and he brings attention to what necessarily disappears in the act of naming. But Mallarmé’s characterization of crude language focuses on the assumption of what it can make appear; the role of silence, in the case of everyday language, refers to the way that language itself disappears into its function—“language as language is silent” (40). On the other hand, the essential word indicates a language “whose whole force lies in its not being, whose very glory is to evoke, in its own absence, the absence of everything” (39). Rather than relying on the power of language to make things appear, essential language exposes their disappearance—the silence of the world. “It is always allusive. It suggests, it evokes” (39). Unlike the crude word, the essential word does not function as a tool in the world, relying on generalizations in order to name and identify things, in the interest of communication and understanding.18
“Poetry expresses the fact that beings are silent” (41). But, here, we encounter a problem: if silence is the essence of essential language, then it would seem that everyday language touches upon this essence, in the sense that it must, like essential language, silence the world in order to name and designate things, even if it pretends otherwise. In other words, the crude word might at first seem only to silence language (because it encourages us to look through or past it), but it relies upon the essential silence of language in order to function, despite its efforts to hide it. The distinction of the crude word and the essential word by their relation to silence thus becomes problematic. Blanchot writes of the crude word: “A word which does not name anything, which does not represent anything, which does not outlast itself in any way, a word which is not even a word and which disappears marvelously altogether and at once in its usage: what could be more worthy of the essential and closer to silence?” (39-40). Since, as Blanchot demonstrates in “Literature and the Right to Death,” everyday language presents the absence of what it has made disappear, it does “[express] the fact that beings are silent,” just like essential language—perhaps even more essentially, precisely because it pretends otherwise, because it attempts to hide this absence. It seems that the distinction of crude and essential language relies on the ability of the crude word to make the concept appear, to make it immediate to us; this veils the more “essential” silence at work. Blanchot continues, “[ . . . ] it is nothingness in action: that which acts, labors, constructs. It is the pure silence of the negative which culminates in the noisy feverishness of tasks” (40). This usefulness, the activity of crude language in the world, does seem to distinguish it from essential language, in the sense that the latter separates itself from the labor of the world; but Blanchot draws attention to the way that everyday language merely presents the illusion of immediacy and actually hides within it the silence that characterizes Mallarmé’s notion of essential language.
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)
While the first part of this passage might recall Blanchot’s discussion of the neutral voice, the “third person substituting for the ‘I,’” it soon takes a decisive turn. In a sense, the power of the poet is exchanged for the power of language; in this formulation, the poet does not use language as a means of expressing himself or herself, or the world, but relies upon the language of the poem, as a self-contained totality, to bring itself to light. We already know that, for Blanchot, writing has nothing to do with power, but begins at the point of power’s exhaustion. For Mallarmé, it seems that the poem is able to make itself appear, to exist, through essential language. The poet constructs something out of absence and silence, even if it has no voice, and if no one speaks it; therefore, from this perspective, writing does not differ from the activity—the constructive negativity—of the world. The lack of voice seems to reflect the poem’s autonomy and separation from the world (including the poet perhaps), rather than a more radical turning toward silence and disappearance, in which it would lose itself. For Blanchot, at this point in Mallarmé’s thought, the poem remains “a particular being [ . . . ] and for this reason is by no means close to being, to that which escapes all determination and every form of existence” (42). The poem, as a thing or a being, still misses a more essential movement towards its own disappearance.19
Blanchot proposes that the “experience proper” of Mallarmé begins at the point when “he moves from the consideration of a finished work which is always one particular poem or another, or a certain picture, to the concern through which the work becomes the search for its origin and wants to identify itself with this origin” (42). Writing becomes a question for Mallarmé—the question of whether or not it exists, and the implications of such a question. The poem, as a linguistically manifest “thing,” would seem to affirm the existence of poetry, and, furthermore, the poet’s work would presumably require the writing of poetry. Even if essential language silences the world and the poet, even if it says nothing, the poem, as a thing, appears. But what, exactly, appears? And does that which appears have anything to do with the work? After all, Blanchot has already told us that Mallarmé falters when he thinks of a poem as a being, which would suggest that poems do not exist—at least not in the sense that we commonly understand things in the world to exist. It’s as if once the poem exists, poetry ceases to exist; once the poem arrives at the appearance of itself, as the work of poetry, it is lost. Blanchot insists on maintaining the openness and the endlessness of the question of literature, which is assured by the infinite self-referentiality of language and by the impossibility of arriving at the origin that would assure its existence. Blanchot explains, “[language] is wholly realized in literature, which is to say that it has only the reality of the whole; it is all—and nothing else, always on the verge of passing from all to nothing” (43). Literature takes us to the point of language’s accomplishment—a point that it realizes through a movement of negation, or disappearance. But this point of accomplishment, of wholeness, becomes a point of passage; as language achieves its own end, through the power to the make the world and itself disappear, it reaches its limit, where it passes from all to nothing. And, paradoxically, it is at this “end point” that literature begins, or starts over, in a time without time, where nothing appears, and where we can no longer measure the accomplishment of anything. Blanchot describes this as the “central point” of the literary experience: “This point is the one at which complete realization of language coincides with its disappearance” (44). Once completely realized, yet still lacking, language disappears into the superfluous movement of disappearance itself.
Blanchot considers the ambiguous “central point” of the work more closely once he has posed the question of literature as an endless search for its origin. He cites Mallarmé, writing that “the work must ‘allow no luminous evidence except of existing’” (44). The darkness allows nothing to appear, maintaining only the movement of negation and absence. Blanchot continues:
It is very true that only the work—if we come toward this point through the movement and strength of the work—only the accomplishment of the work makes it possible. Let us look again at the poem: what could be more real, more evident? And language itself is “luminous evidence” within it. This evidence, however, shows nothing, rests upon nothing; it is the ungraspable in action. There are neither terms nor moments. Where we think we have words, “a virtual trail of fires” shoots through us—a swiftness, a scintillating exaltation. A reciprocity: for what is not is revealed in this flight; what there isn’t is reflected in the pure grace of reflections that do not reflect anything. (44-45)
The work takes us to the point of its accomplishment, and therefore to the central point of the work. We arrive at the moment where the word, after turning itself over completely to darkness, seems to emerge as “luminous evidence.” But Blanchot explains that this evidence makes nothing evident; the words only reflect each other in an endless chain of signifiers that grounds itself in nothing. The moment of accomplishment therefore reveals the inability to grasp or take hold of anything that would assure it. Language opens onto that which cannot be negated, accomplished, or made to appear, precisely at the moment of its completion. “What is left? ‘Those very words, it is’” (45, emphasis in original).
Mallarmé describes that residual pronouncement—it is—as a “‘lightning moment,’ ‘dazzling burst of light’” (45, cited by Blanchot). The work reaches the central point of the work, where, after the negation of everything, nothing exists; but at this moment of brilliant achievement, the work simultaneously experiences its undoing. Blanchot writes, “This moment is the one at which the work, in order to give being to the ‘feint’—that ‘literature exists’—declares the exclusion of everything, but in this way, excludes itself, so that the moment at which ‘every reality dissolves’ by the force of the poem is also the moment the poem dissolves and, instantly done, is instantly undone” (45). And yet still for Blanchot this formulation does not quite reach the moment of radical reversal that makes the work impossible. Here, in Mallarmé’s words, the undoing of the work also constitutes the ultimate achievement of the work—the point at which it disappears in the movement of disappearance it has accomplished. “Those very words it is” appear as the extreme possibility of the work, even if only for a brilliant moment.20 This point marks the work as “pure beginning,” since the accomplishment of the work gives rise to the it is—the light of being that disappears at the moment it begins. But, Blanchot explains, “we must also comprehend and feel that this point renders the work impossible, because it never permits arrival at the work. It is a region anterior to the beginning where nothing is made of being, and in which nothing is ever accomplished” (46). The work exceeds the ability of the work to begin, which prevents its accomplishment and its initiation. Writing takes us toward the central point, toward the origin of the work—from which it issues, but also from which it is infinitely excluded. For this reason, the task of the work remains endless and impossible, but this condition sustains the work in the movement that characterizes it—a search for a beginning that cannot possibly begin. Disappearance, then, does not refer to an ideal moment where being momentarily pronounces itself in the absence of everything; rather, disappearance becomes the stubborn refusal of anything to appear, to begin, to be—even itself.
At the central point of his own work, Blanchot reflects upon the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the way that this myth recounts the infinite search for the work’s origin. Orpheus’s journey toward Eurydice demonstrates the power of art to open the nothingness of the underworld at the same time that it confronts the moment of the work’s impossibility and undoing. From the perspective of the world, Orpheus, in his impatience, fails to bring Eurydice to the light of day, but Blanchot suggests that Orpheus must fail in order not to fail the work. Orpheus’s betrayal and loss of Eurydice becomes a sort of faithfulness to the work, even if this faithfulness can only be achieved through a turning away. Blanchot explains that Eurydice “is the profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend. She is the instant when the essence of night approaches as the other night” (171). And, here, we can imagine that the obscurity of this point only becomes more obscure in the approach to it. If the first night—the space of the empowered descent toward Eurydice—maintains a certain clarity in its darkness, and promises the possibility of Eurydice’s retrieval, the other night looms in the distance, at the point where the power and possibility of art to make anything appear are exhausted.
Orpheus is capable of everything, except of looking this point in the face, except of looking at the center of night in the night. He can descend toward it; he can—and this is still stronger an ability—draw it to him and lead it with him upward, but only by turning away from it. This turning away is the only way it can be approached. This is what concealment means when it reveals itself in the night. But Orpheus, in the movement of his migration, forgets the work he is to achieve, and he forgets it necessarily, for the ultimate demand which his movement makes is not that there be a work, but that someone face this point, grasp its essence, grasp it where it appears, where it is essential and essentially appearance: at the heart of night. (171)
From this perspective, it seems that the ability to see poses the greatest threat to the work, and the turning away of one’s vision, in a sort of blind and backwards approach to the work, becomes the extreme expression of the artist’s ability. Concealment, here, rests upon the artist’s power to resist looking, and therefore arises out of the masterful patience of the artist. But, in order for there to be a work, one must eventually look, in an effort to see and to grasp the essence of the night. This moment marks the disappearance of the work, in the most profound concealment, which, paradoxically, responds to the ultimate demand of the work.
At the point when Orpheus looks back, Eurydice recedes beyond his grasp, and he loses her forever. He fails to bring her back up to the light and the world, despite his power to transgress the normal limits of human endeavor by opening the depths of Hades with his song. Orpheus achieves miraculous feats, accomplishes all that can be accomplished, but the myth tells us of his ultimate failure. His look back to Eurydice not only marks the moment of Orpheus’s failure to retrieve her, but also disposes of the value of the journey he makes to get to that point; in losing Eurydice, the journey is ruined. Blanchot writes:
When he looks back, the essence of the night is revealed as the inessential. Thus he betrays the work, and Eurydice, and the night. But not to turn toward Eurydice would be no less untrue. Not to look would be infidelity to the measureless, imprudent force of his movement, which does not want Eurydice in her daytime truth and everyday appeal, but wants her in her nocturnal obscurity, in her distance, with her closed body and sealed face—wants to see her not when she is visible, but when she is invisible, and not as the intimacy of a familiar life, but as the foreignness of what excludes all intimacy, and wants, not to make her live, but to have living in her the plenitude of death. (172)
The work requires that Orpheus not look if he wants to bring it to a successful conclusion. But the work also requires Orpheus to look, in the sense that his loss of Eurydice, his experience of her disappearance, affirms her obscurity, concealment, and infinite recession beyond his grasp. If Orpheus seems to have the power to retrieve Eurydice, to make her appear again in the world, it would rest upon his ability to transform her into something he does not seek and that has little to do with his work. Orpheus cannot capture the nocturnal Eurydice by making her visible, so he must look, in order to experience the only relation he can have with her—one based on her invisibility and her disappearance. Orpheus seeks Eurydice in her profound absence; when he looks, he does not experience her absence in a “lightning moment” that marks the accomplishment of the work, but, rather, confronts the depth of her concealment and refusal to appear.
Blanchot’s discussion of patience and impatience as it relates to Orpheus’s descent and ultimate look back at Eurydice demonstrates the resistance of his reading of the myth to dialectical understanding. Blanchot often describes the writer as a sort of wanderer whose work consists of an interminable, undirected movement, rather than an arrival at a final destination. This fits with the notion that the writer disappears into an anonymous, neutral space where he or she no longer operates from a place of power, individuality, or decisiveness. As we saw earlier, the writer’s mastery has nothing to do with an ability to write, but, rather, refers to the capacity to interrupt the errant and unending process of writing—to the moment when he or she decides to stop writing. The work would seem to require infinite patience from the writer, since it pulls him or her into a space and a process without a horizon and demands that he or she sustain an endless movement. But in order to have a work, and in order to confront the ultimate refusal of the work, the writer commits an act of impatience, an interruption, a look back. As Orpheus descends into the Underworld, he must exhibit patience, submitting to the law that forbids him to look back at Eurydice until she returns to the light of day. And the myth encourages us to imagine that if he sustained this patient movement while drawing Eurydice upwards, he would succeed in having her again, with him, in the world. But he can’t keep himself from looking:
Orpheus is guilty of impatience. His error is to want to exhaust the infinite, to put a term to the interminable, not endlessly to sustain the very movement of his error. Impatience is the failing of one who wants to withdraw from the absence of time; patience is the ruse which seeks to master this absence by making of it another time, measured otherwise. But true patience does not exclude impatience. It is intimacy with impatience—impatience suffered and endured endlessly. (173)
Blanchot shifts our attention from what the myth seems to present as a possibility—resurrecting Eurydice—to the impossibility of Orpheus’s essential work. The myth suggests that Orpheus’s task has a goal and an end point; there is presumably nothing infinite about it. But, again, this goal does not inspire Orpheus; that which inspires Orpheus requires an endlessly sustained movement—one where nothing can be accomplished or achieved. Therefore, his act of impatience responds to his desire to see Eurydice in her nocturnal state, rather than maintaining the interval and the infinite movement by keeping himself turned away.
While we might be tempted to conclude that Orpheus’s impatience results in his failure, and that patience would have guaranteed his success, we have already seen that success, from the perspective of the world, would not satisfy Orpheus’s work. In addition, in the passage above, Blanchot refers to patience as a “ruse” which is no more faithful to the absence of time than impatience. Infinite patience would fail to take Orpheus to the point where the work experiences its undoing—a point where it is exposed to the absence of time and to the excess of disappearance when everything has disappeared. Orpheus’s patient descent still requires a certain degree of mastery, and his look back marks the limit of his power; at this limit, he confronts a refusal that constitutes his relation with the work. His look back announces an end, and it also announces a beginning that cannot possibly begin. In this look, Orpheus experiences his own disappearance, along with the disappearance of Eurydice. He no longer has the power to speak, to sing, to say “I,” or to make anything appear in the light of day. Therefore, while we might at first see the moment of impatience as an empowered interruption of the interminable process of the work, it also marks the release of the work beyond its relation with Orpheus and his song. And, for Blanchot, this represents a moment of inspiration: “To look at Eurydice, without regard for the song, in the impatience and imprudence of desire which forgets the law: that is inspiration” (173, emphasis in original). Orpheus sacrifices everything in a reckless moment where his power to master the night disintegrates, and he experiences the profound disappearance of what his song seemed to have within its grasp. “But that forbidden movement is precisely what Orpheus must accomplish in order to carry the work beyond what assures it” (174). Orpheus’s look sends the work infinitely away, to disappear beyond a space where things can be made to disappear. Paradoxically, Blanchot explains that Orpheus must have already looked back in order to initiate his descent toward Eurydice. Orpheus enters the night through the seductive power of his song—a song that begins at the moment he turns back toward Eurydice to bring her in her absence to the light of day. His loss of Eurydice becomes the song, which always refers back to the loss of what inspires it. Orpheus’s work is the means by which he initiates his work, and this circularity reflects the absence of time of the work. The interminable error of the writer’s process, even if interrupted by an impatient look back, is maintained precisely in the impossibility encountered by the look back—the impossibility of beginning or ending. Blanchot explains, “One writes only if one reaches that instant which nevertheless one can only approach in the space opened by the movement of writing. To write, one has to write already” (176).
In one of the last sections of The Space of Literature, Blanchot turns his attention to the act of reading and its relation to writing. If writing depends upon a movement toward disappearance, loss, and impossibility, reading would seem to counter this movement in some sense. Blanchot often describes reading as a light and careless process, which strongly contrasts the serious risk involved in the task of writing. And, yet, reading plays a crucial role in the “life” of the book. “What is a book no one reads? Something that is not yet written. It would seem, then, that to read is not to write the book again, but to allow the book to be: written—this time all by itself, without the intermediary of the writer, without anyone’s writing it. The reader does not add himself to the book, but tends primarily to relieve it of its author” (193). Here, it is important to note that Blanchot is discussing the book, not the work—one that a reader might or might not open, depending on his or her mood or some other extraneous factor. But this lack of care or investment brings a sort of freedom to the book, which, without the reader, remains weighted down in its relation to the writer. Even if the work pulls the writer into a space of powerlessness and takes him or her toward disappearance, the book bears the traces of this grave struggle until the reader calls it forward and relieves it of its author. And if the work demands that the writer disappear into anonymity, the reader responds to this demand by picking up the book, without regard for the writer, as if this writer had no relation to what is written. Blanchot explains that this reader could be any reader:
The reader is himself always fundamentally anonymous. He is any reader, none in particular, unique but transparent. He does not add his name to the book (as our fathers did long ago); rather, he erases every name from it by his nameless presence, his modest, passive gaze, interchangeable and insignificant, under whose light pressure the book appears written, separate from everything and everyone. (193)
In this passage, we see that the reader’s anonymity parallels the writer’s, and the use of the word “gaze” perhaps suggests the myth of Orpheus. While writer and reader have distinct relations to the book (and to the work), Blanchot deliberately blurs the distinction at points in order to emphasize the way that the two processes mirror one another, never really sustaining a stable identity or role of their own. The reader’s anonymity suggests that the act of relieving the book from its author does not constitute a moment of power or mastery, where the reader makes the book his or her own. At this point, reading is simply a matter of carelessly gazing at the book; and though this gaze casually seeks to make something appear, it certainly does not experience the profound loss associated with the writer’s gaze. The writer’s anonymity, on the other hand, refers to a sort of sacrifice demanded by the work. And when the writer “gazes” in a moment of impatience, he or she loses everything and affirms the disappearance and concealment of the work. But even when recounting the myth of Orpheus, Blanchot continually comes back to the notion of the carelessness and lightness of impatience—the way that the sacrifice of the work and the look back to Eurydice require a moment where the writer forgets all the work, effort and patience that led him or her to that point. In the look back, the writer seems to act more like a reader, or even to respond to reading’s demand.
While the reader first approaches the book in a state of disappearance where he or she has no particular identity, reading soon seems to have a mission. In reading’s approach to the book, something becomes apparent: “The book is there, then, but the work is still hidden. It is absent, perhaps radically so; in any case, it is concealed, obfuscated by the evident presence of the book, behind which it awaits the liberating decision, the ‘Lazare, veni foras’” (195). This reference to Jesus’s resurrecting call to Lazarus evokes Blanchot’s earlier use of the command Noli me legere, which plays off of Jesus’s warning to Mary that she not touch him. Whereas Noli me legere represents a refusal—particularly the denial of the writer when he or she tries to read the work—Lazare veni foras would seem to suggest the reader’s power to make something appear in his or her approach to the book. The reader, who first opens the book in anonymity and lightness, soon experiences the book as the concealment of the absent work. Blanchot continues: “To make this stone fall seems to be reading’s mission: to render it transparent, to dissolve it with the penetrating force of the gaze which unimpeded moves beyond” (195). And reading thus calls forth the work, seeking to make it appear from behind the stone, through the power of its gaze. If the reader’s gaze was light and casual at first, it now takes on the seriousness of a task. And where Orpheus fails (in the sense that his gaze and attempt to resurrect Eurydice send her infinitely away), Jesus succeeds in bringing the dead Lazarus back to life. It would seem that reading has become the power to make absence appear.
Blanchot further explores the resurrecting power of reading by examining the significance of the speaking, breathing Lazarus:
To roll back the stone, to obliterate it, is certainly something marvelous, but it is something we achieve at every moment in everyday language. [ . . . ] In his well-woven winding sheet, sustained by the most elegant conventions, [Lazarus] answers us and speaks to us within ourselves. But what answers the call of literary reading is not a door falling open or becoming transparent or even getting a bit thinner. It is, rather, a ruder stone, better sealed, a crushing weight, an immense avalanche that causes earth and sky to shudder. (195)
Picking up the book, the reader becomes aware of the presence of the massive stone that hides the work and seeks to get beyond this stone by beckoning the work to appear. And in the Biblical story, Lazarus indeed emerges from behind the stone once again to take part in the world of the living. Blanchot, though, compares the resurrection of Lazarus to everyday language, which causes us to reconsider the significance of what is made to appear. Everyday language negates what it names in order to give rise to the concept, but what appears bears the absence of what has disappeared in the act of naming. Lazarus, then, appears—but as a sort of replacement or stand-in for what has been called forth from behind the stone; moreover, this resurrected Lazarus appears as the profound concealment of the dead Lazarus. One has to kill the already dead Lazarus in order to bring him into the light of day, and the resurrected Lazarus paradoxically bears the death of the dead Lazarus at the same time that he hides it by appearing alive, cleanly clothed, and full of life. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot continues his reflections on the resurrection of Lazarus:
But what does this Lazarus saved and raised from the dead that you hold out to me have to do with what is lying there and makes you draw back, the anonymous corruption of the tomb, the lost Lazarus who already smells bad and not the one restored to life by a force that is no doubt admirable, but that is precisely a force and that comes in this decision from death itself? (36)
Although the story of Lazarus’s resurrection at first seems to contrast the myth of Orpheus, Blanchot encourages us to see the calling forth of Lazarus in terms of constructive negativity. While Lazarus appears, through the force of a marvelous power, he announces the absence of what remains concealed.
Returning specifically to the relation of the Lazarus story to reading, we can see that reading’s mission to “roll back the stone” might indeed result in the successful appearance of Lazarus in the world, but that this appearance points to a profound disappearance. Blanchot tells us that “what answers the call of literary reading is not a door falling open or becoming transparent or even getting a bit thinner. It is, rather, a ruder stone, better sealed, a crushing weight, an immense avalanche that causes earth and sky to shudder” (195). Even though the reader calls forth the work, Blanchot shifts our attention from what seems to be resurrected to the “ruder stone” that refuses the reader’s call and power to make appear. The apocalyptic language of Blanchot’s description suggests that the stone marks an extreme limit—the end of everything—and that the dead Lazarus lies beyond, and in excess of, this end. In this way, the reader’s relation to the work does not differ from that of the writer; both confront the refusal of the work, even if the reader’s interpretive efforts might give the appearance of bringing the mysteries of the book to life. John Gregg explains, “Thus the noli me legere which Blanchot consistently invokes to describe writers’ incapability of authoritatively reading their own works, actually applies to all readers. No one can read the work. It is the book that lends itself to understanding, and it can be read by both author and reader.”21 Like the writer, the reader does not have the power to make the work appear; both can approach the book, but the work always escapes the grasp of this approach. For this reason, the lightness, carelessness, and anonymity of the reader’s process become the essential aspect of his or her relation to the work, in the sense that these characteristics contrast a sort of reading that would seek to impose an authoritative interpretation. It must be added, though, that the interpretive efforts of a reader confront the refusal of the work, and therefore affirm the disappearance of the work and constitute the reader’s only relation to the work. Again, Blanchot keeps us from being able absolutely to distinguish “good” reading from “bad” reading, ability from inability, calling forth from letting be. In this particular case, the calling forth of the book into the light of day, although it makes of reading an act of power, also affirms the disappearance of the work. Blanchot writes, “Disappearance, even when it is disguised as useful presence, belongs to the work’s essence” (206). Reading thus parallels the gaze of Orpheus, which paradoxically remains faithful to the work by betraying it.
Toward the end of The Space of Literature, Blanchot returns to a reflection on ends, on the final moment where the world’s truth appears through the labor of man and the process of history:
When all has been said, when the world comes into its own as the truth of the whole, when history wants to culminate in the conclusion of discourse—when the work has nothing more to say and disappears—it is then that it tends to become the language of the work. In the work that has disappeared the work wants to speak, and the experience of the work becomes the search for its essence, the affirmation of art, concern for the origin. (232)
In the chapters that follow, I will explore the way that several short fictions reflect the language of the disappeared work—a language that doesn’t have the ability to begin, or appear, or speak. Writer and reader communicate with this unspeakable language and face the threat of their own disappearance at the point that they turn over the power to bring their work forward into the light of day. All of the fictions address a space where, in one way or another, nothing can be done and nothing can be made to appear. In this way, they explore the dynamics of disappearance and the way that this movement of infinite recession characterizes the literary work.
