Maurice Blanchot

The Demand of Writing

Carolyn Bailey Gill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134800414
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This timely collection of essays is the first to be written on the work of Maurice Blanchot in English. One of the finest writers of our time, Blanchot is a contemporary of Bataille and Levinas; his writing has influenced the likes of Derrida and Foucault.
Eminent commentators featured here include: Simon Critchley, Paul Davies, Cristopher Fynsk, Rodolphe Gasche, Leslie Hill, Michael Holland, Jeffery Mehlman, Roger Laporte, Ian Maclachlan, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Gillian Rose and Ann Smock.
The essays consider the political implications of Blanchot's questioning the relationship between philosophy and literature. In addition, the provocative issue of Blanchot's politics during the 1930s is clarified by a letter from Blanchot to one of the contributors, published here for the first time.
Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing is a crucial selection for all students of philosophy, literature or French studies.

1
Roger Laporte, reader of Blanchot

Ian Maclachlan

In recent years, the work of Derrida, Lacan and others has reminded us that thought and writing of compelling originality may go hand in hand with the scrupulous reading of the work of others. Indeed, such work has given rise to a revision of the very notion of reading, a revision in which the work of Maurice Blanchot holds a privileged place. One might say, summarily, that this is a notion of reading which involves an infinite attention to the Dire, the Saying of the other which resists the homogeneity of the Said. To put it in such terms is, of course, to evoke the figure of Emmanuel Levinas, who may be said to participate with Blanchot and others—such as Bataille, Derrida, Jabès, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy—in a heteronomous community, the sort of community described at various times by Bataille, Nancy, and of course by Blanchot.¹

Despite attracting the admiration of Blanchot himself, as well as that of Levinas, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy and others, Roger Laporte’s work has yet to receive the wider recognition it deserves. Laporte’s lifelong creative relationship with the work of Blanchot, in particular, is of exemplary significance for anyone who would seek to understand the nature of this community of voices. Taking the lead from Laporte’s own distinction between the different plumes (pens) which characterize his writing, we can briefly outline the manifestation of this relationship under two headings.

Firstly, there is Laporte’s own contribution to the critical reception of Blanchot’s work, a contribution which itself occupies an important position in Blanchot criticism. It was Laporte who, in collaboration with Michel Foucault, prepared the special issue of Critique devoted to Blanchot in 1966 at a time when, as Laporte has subsequently remarked, there were few who were prepared to offer critical comment on Blanchot’s work. Laporte’s contribution to this field has to date taken the form of four articles and two longer studies, and, in 1989, the organization of a colloquium Autour de Maurice Blanchot under the auspices of the Collège International de Philosophie.²

This contribution may itself be further subdivided between studies such as ‘Le oui, le non, le neutre’, which remain broadly within the realm of conventional literary criticism, and essays such as ‘Une passion’ and ‘L’ancien, l’effroyablement ancien’, which are accounts of a singular experience of reading, an experience which, for Laporte, must in turn give rise to writing. In a gesture which is itself indicative of the scrupulousness of his reading of Blanchot, Laporte’s subsequent dissatisfaction with ‘Une passion’ has led him not only to repudiate it but to forbid further printing or partial reproduction of it. The later study, ‘L’ancien, l’effroyablement ancien’ has been reprinted in a collection of Laporte’s recent critical writings entitled Etudes; it is a remarkable exploration of writing, death and the ‘disaster’ in Blanchot which, in common with Blanchot’s own critical work, is characterized by an unsettling limpidity which eschews any oversimplification of the intractably difficult domain which it examines.

Exceptional as this critical work is, readers of Laporte would, if need be, readily sacrifice it for the sake of that other manifestation of Laporte’s involvement with Blanchot, his own creative output. The importance of Laporte’s reading of Blanchot for his own writing is signalled in the studies already mentioned, as well as in the published extracts of his Carnets,³ which between them trace the beginnings of this involvement to Laporte’s reading of Faux pas in 1943 and of Blanchot’s regular contributions to the Nouvelle Revue française in the 1940s and 1950s, followed by his discovery of Blanchot’s fictional work in the 1950s. It was also at this time that Laporte published his first récits, Souvenir de Reims, first published in 1954, and Une Migration and Le Partenaire, published in 1959 and 1960 respectively.⁴ The last two in particular attest to the impact on Laporte of Blanchot’s work, the first being dedicated to him and the second bearing an epigraph from The One who was Standing Apart from Me.

Laporte’s subsequent work, from La Veille, first published in 1963, to Moriendo, of 1983, is collected as Une Vie, published in 1986.⁵ This collected volume bears the designation biographie, first employed in 1970 for Fugue. It is a designation which marks the ambition of this generically unclassifiable writing, an ambition described hesitantly by Blanchot, in his ‘Post-face’ to Laporte’s Lettre a personne, as being ‘to write writing and, thereby, to create life or to subvert it, by accepting from life what does away with it, in other words, what pushes life to the limit where it bursts open—to infinity’.⁶ In the course of Laporte’s extraordinary attempt not to write on writing but to write writing itself, we may at times read the trace of Levinas or, particularly in the Fugue series, of Derrida, or of others in the community which I mentioned earlier, but the impact of Laporte’s reading of Blanchot remains discernible throughout, returning with particular force in the two final volumes, Suite, which is once again dedicated to Blanchot, and Moriendo, which bears an epigraph from The Step Not Beyond. These two volumes, which Laporte has said together constitute the work—or perhaps the nearest approach to the work—towards which he had been striving over the years, are the culmination, the suspended termination of an interminable adventure of writing, of a biography which is haunted throughout by thanatography, of an oeuvre whose accomplishment is deferred by an endless désoeuvrement. The singular opening to reading effected by this necessarily incomplete work marks a relation to the other which is analogous to the relations which obtain in the heteronomous community, relations which the work of Blanchot and of Laporte allows us to begin to think.⁷

NOTES

1 Cf. Maurice Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983); Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986). For Bataille’s conception of community, see, for example, the chapter ‘Principes d’une méthode et d’une communauté’ in L’Expérience intérieure (Paris: Gallimard, collection ‘Tel’, 1978), pp. 22–42. A recent English discussion of the heteronomous community may be found in Timothy Clark’s Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 139–42.

2 Laporte’s studies of Blanchot are: ‘Le oui, le non, le neutre’, first published in Critique, 229 (1966), pp. 579–90, reprinted in Quinze variations sur un theme biographique (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), pp. 17– 30; ‘Une passion’, in Laporte and Noël, Deux lectures de Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973), pp. 53–155; ‘Nuit blanche’, in Critique, 358 (1977), pp. 208–18; Maurice Blanchot: l’ancien, l’effroyablement ancien (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987), reprinted in Etudes (Paris: POL, 1990), pp. 9–50; ‘“Tout doit s’effacer, tout s’effacera”’, first published in Lignes, 11 (1990), pp. 13–21, reprinted in Etudes, pp. 51–62; ‘Vers “L’absence de livre”’, in Revue des sciences humaines, 221 (1991), pp. 33–4. Since the writing of this piece, Laporte has also published A l’extrême point: Bataille et Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994).

3 Carnets (extraits) (Paris: Hachette, 1979).

4 These are collected in Souvenir de Reims et autres récits (Paris: Hachette, 1979).

5 Une Vie (Paris: POL, 1986) comprises La Veille (1963), Une Voix de fin silence (1966), Pourquoi? (1967), Fugue (1970), Supplement (1973), Fugue 3 (1975), Suite (1979) and Moriendo (1983).

6 Lettre à personne (Paris: Plon, 1989), pp. 94–5; my translation.

7 There is, to date, only one brief study of Une Vie available in English, but fortunately it is one which can be warmly recommended: Andrew Benjamin’s ‘The redemption of value: Laporte, writing as Abkürzung’, in his Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 197–211. My own study Roger Laporte: The Orphic Text is to be published by Berg in 1996.

2
Maurice Blanchot today

Roger Laporte

I have been reading Blanchot for precisely half a century, since the appearance of Faux pas in 1943, the year in which Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Bataille’s Inner Experience were published. Perhaps it would be helpful to give a comprehensive outline of his work— specifically, his work as a writer, not his journalistic output, about which other contributors to this volume will write. Blanchot’s books fall into three genres: the critical work, the fiction, and finally two books for which there is no generic term, The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster, which appeared in 1973 and 1980 respectively.¹

The critical work comprises Faux pas, The Work of Fire, The Space of Literature, Le Livre a venir, The Infinite Conversation and L’Amitié. To this list may be added some more recent short studies, of which I shall just cite The Unavowable Community and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him. Blanchot’s latest book Une Voix venue d’ailleurs, devoted to the poetry of Louis-René des Forêts, appeared in September 1992.

How can one do justice in a few words to this critical work? Blanchot owes much to Mallarmé, Kafka, Artaud and many others, but it should immediately be added that Mallarmé, Kafka, Bataille, Char, Levinas and many others owe much to Blanchot. How would we read Kafka today if Blanchot had not devoted ten studies to the author of The Castle? It is impossible to answer this question: we read Kafka through Blanchot’s commentary. When we read the text entitled ‘The “sacred” speech of Hölderlin’ in The Work of Fire, we are reading, not Hölderlin, but Blanchot, who reads Heidegger, who reads Hölderlin, who reads the Greeks; and yet, contrary to any egocentricity, Blanchot not only turns, and turns us, towards Hölderlin, clearing a path for us to his work, but above all elicits the faint resonance of that fascinating, incessant call of the remote to which ‘literature’ tries to respond. Blanchot makes us contemporary with the works he discusses; he draws them together in the same present moment, even if they belong to different periods, or to different genres, some pertaining to literature, others to philosophy or to mysticism.

Blanchot is not simply one great commentator amongst others, for the unique character, the principal feature of his work consists in disengaging works from their past and from their present by opening them to their outside, by taking it that all ‘writing’ is oriented towards a book-to-come which, according to Blanchot, will only ever be conspicuous by its absence.

The fictional work falls into two periods: that of the great novels, Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab and The Most High, followed by that of the récits, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, Thomas the Obscure (new version), When the Time Comes, The One who was Standing Apart from Me, The Last Man. L’Attente L’Oubli, the final work of this second period, published in 1962, does not bear the designation récit. In the various new editions of his works, Blanchot has eliminated any indication of genre.

Blanchot has published no further novels or récits for over thirty years; barring an unlikely indication to the contrary, we can therefore consider the fictional work, in the strict sense, to be concluded. The importance of this renouncement cannot be stressed too greatly: Blanchot has abandoned fiction precisely because it was no longer compatible with his enterprise. The place of the récits has been taken by a new style, a new genre represented by just two books, but major ones: The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster. If one insists on labelling these works, one could call them fragmentary, as, on reading them, one cannot help but think of German romanticism, and more precisely of the Athenaeum. Blanchot’s fragmentary works, like the fragments of Schlegel or Novalis, neither set apart nor merge philosophy and literature, but seek what is beyond them: the unmediated experience of thought. In The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster, ‘writing’, with its stakes, its enigmas, its ruptures, its abysses, lays itself bare and tries to say itself. Blanchot puts Nietzsche’s watchword, ‘One must shatter the universe’, to literal effect, but, for Blanchot, fragmentary writing is not the consequence of a choice, but the result of an experience of dislocation, to which we shall return. Blanchot has long sought the origin of writing, of the work of art, the point where inspiration and lack of inspiration coincide, but this pursuit of a centre has foundered, or has been halted by an opposing force, and thus it is that, in Blanchot’s words, ‘the idea of an origin has faded into itself, as it were, leaving behind as a sign the idea of difference, of divergence as the primary centre…, a centre which is the absence of any centre, since it is there that any unity is dashed; in a sense, the non- centre of non-unity’; but is it not precisely in this initial break (brisure) that the fragments find their ‘origin’, if we may put it in these terms?

* * *

I shall endeavour to set out the main features of Blanchot’s work, but shall be unable to do so exhaustively. My discussion will comprise three parts, each referring to a myth, a narrative, an emblematic figure, let us say. I shall discuss, then, in the following order, the Sirens’ Song, the Hunter Gracchus, and Orpheus and Eurydice.

Let us begin with the Sirens’ Song, of which Blanchot gives us a version very different from Homer’s: ‘The central point of the work’, writes Blanchot, ‘is the work as origin, the point which one cannot reach, but the only one worth reaching.’ Blanchot also writes (one could add many more quotations): ‘The work draws whoever devotes himself to it towards the point where it undergoes the ordeal of impossibility: an experience which is precisely nocturnal, which is that of the night.’ Are we not the victims—and Blanchot, first of all—of a strange fascination? Undoubtedly so, but to maintain that Blanchot’s work is linked with fascination is only to say that it responds, that it tries to respond to the call of the origin. The sirens’, writes Blanchot,

with their imperfect songs which were only a song yet to come, were drawing the ship towards the space in which singing would really begin. What happened once this place was reached? What was this place? It was a place where the only thing left to do was to disappear, because the music in this region of source and of origin had disappeared more completely than in any other place in the world…as if the mother region of music were the only place entirely devoid of music, a place of aridity and drought where silence sc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the translations
• Introduction
• 1: Roger Laporte, reader of Blanchot
• 2: Maurice Blanchot today
• 3: The felicities of paradox
• 4: Crossing the threshold
• 5: The work and the absence of the work
• 6: Il y a—Holding Levinas’s hand to Blanchot’s fire
• 7: Conversation
• 8: On unworking
• 9: The trace of trauma
• 10: ‘A wound to thought’
• 11: Potter’s Field
• 12: A Letter
• 13: Pour Sainte-Beuve