Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing

A Change of Epoch

Leslie Hill

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441166227
• eBook ISBN: 9781441171276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire française

Writing in fragments is often held to be one of the most distinctive signature effects of Romantic, modern, and postmodern literature. But what is the fragment, and what may be said to be its literary, philosophical, and political significance? Few writers have explored these questions with such probing radicality and rigorous tenacity as the French writer and thinker Maurice Blanchot. For the first time in any language, this book explores in detail Blanchot's own writing in fragments in order to understand the stakes of the fragmentary within philosophical and literary modernity. It attends in detail to each of Blanchot's fragmentary works (Awaiting Forgetting, The Step Not Beyond, and The Writing of the Disaster ) and reconstructs Blanchot's radical critical engagement with the philosophical and literary tradition, in particular with Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Levinas, Derrida, Nancy, Mallarmé, Char, and others, and assesses Blanchot's account of politics, Jewish thought, and the Shoah, with a view to understanding the stakes of fragmentary writing in Blanchot and within philosophical and literary modernity in general.

1

A turning

I

A spectre

All becomes suspense, a fragmentary arrangement of alternating and facing elements, contributing to the total rhythm, which may be deemed the silent poem, with its blanks; translated only, in singular manner, by each pendentive [ Tout devient suspens, disposition fragmentaire avec alternance et vis-à-vis, concourant au rythme total, lequel serait le poème tu, aux blancs; seulement traduit, en une manière, par chaque pendentif].

MALLARMÉ,‘Crise de vers’¹

For more than two hundred years, testifying at once to the weighty legacy of the past and the uncertain prospect of the future, a spectre has haunted literature. Its name is legion, its signature nevertheless unmistakeable: it is the spectre of fragmentary writing, of the text as fragment and the fragment as text. Time and again, whenever a fresh break in continuity is diagnosed or a new episode in cultural history declared, under such grandly vacuous names as Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, even Postpostmodernism, it is repeatedly to the literary fragment that critics have turned in search of an emblem of the seemingly unquenchable desire to make it new. Since the early nineteenth century, the list of literature’s fragmentary artists is at any event a long one: Schlegel, Hölderlin, Keats, Novalis, Coleridge, Büchner, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Pound, Eliot, Kafka, Valéry, Proust, Musil, Artaud, Char, Bataille, Beckett, numerous others too, in whose work the fragment, whether calculated as such or merely abandoned to its fate, bears witness to the trials and tribulations, birthpangs as well as death-throes, of literary, historical, and cultural upheaval.

The time of the fragment, in other words, is never the fullness of the present. It is the time of between-times: between remembering and forgetting, continuity and discontinuity, obedience and objection; and what speaks most powerfully in the fragment is no doubt precisely this unreconciled tension between the artwork and its unravelling, between its gathering and its dispersion, between time past and time still to come. In that tension lies redoubtable energy, and this explains why, in critical discourse and artistic practice alike, the fragment today is little short of ubiquitous. Little has escaped its appeal: not fiction, not poetry, nor theatre; not autobiography, not memoir, nor essay; not philosophy, not theory, nor criticism. Notwithstanding its unassuming discretion, despite the intimations of apocalypse that sometimes follow in its wake, fragmentation seems now to have become almost synonymous with the possibility of writing itself. But the phenomenon is not limited to the printed word. Much the same goes for other artforms, too: for painting, music, sculpture, dance, film, photography, and the many other multimedia activities that, taking their lead from the fragment, tenaciously defy categorisation.

And yet there is something deeply ambiguous about this fidelity to the fragment that is such a remarkable feature of modern and contemporary experience. It is that even by its most enthusiastic exponents the fragment is rarely considered to evoke anything other than negativity. Whether seen to force itself on its audience with fractious, transgressive violence, or to withdraw into the melancholy disenchantment that comes from shattered dreams, the fragment is customarily described by critics not according to what it is or to what it might be, but to what it already is not: in terms, that is, of the continuity it interrupts, the unity it breaks apart, the authority it contests, the norms it breaches. Reasons for this strange state of affairs are admittedly not hard to find. They follow in part from the concept of the fragment itself. As Adorno argues in his posthumous (and itself fragmentary) Aesthetic Theory, a literary fragment forcibly never stands alone. It is always preceded by a totalising past or future whole which, however unavailable or simply hypothetical, is what constitutes the fragment as a fragment. Without this memory or promise of totalisation, writes Adorno (and Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, albeit to different ends, will argue the same), there can be no such thing as a fragment. Both it and the absent whole to which it silently gestures belong together. ‘The category of the fragmentary which here finds its place’, remarks Adorno, referring to the proliferation of fragmentary, finished-unfinished works characteristic of the early twentieth century, ‘is not that of contingent particularity: the fragment is that part of the totality of the work which resists totality.’²

This is not to say the fragment is a mere figment of the writer’s or critic’s imagination. On the contrary, as Adorno explains, it is a crucial reminder that the totalising artwork can never properly coincide with itself and achieve closure. According to Adorno, it is of course the very purpose of art not to reconcile opposing tendencies, but rather to articulate the impossibility of reconciliation. Within this dialectic the intervention of the fragment is therefore crucial. As Adorno comments:

The ideological, affirmative aspect of the concept of the successful artwork has a corrective in the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect work. If perfect works did exist, this would mean reconciliation was possible amidst the unreconcilable to which art owes its allegiance. It would then be a case of art annulling its own concept; the turn to the fragile and the fragmentary [die Wendung zum Brüchigen und Fragmentarischen] is in reality an attempt to salvage art by dismantling the claim that works are what they cannot be and to which they must nevertheless aspire; both moments are contained in the fragment.³

As these words suggest, modern literature’s turn to the fragment was for Adorno a function of a double philosophico-historical process. First, it was a token of broken promises, of defeat and failure: the failure of culture to preserve itself from barbarism, the failure of art to engage in progressive fashion with its own social and political destiny, from which it retreated, or was forced to retreat, in order to preserve its fragile, provisional, perhaps even sham autonomy. Fragmentary writing in this sense was nothing new, merely a symptom of a larger history that spoke of the impasse affecting modern art, its disengagement and decline. Not for nothing did Adorno cheerfully suggest then to his readers they might view as a literal indictment of the last hundred and fifty years Hegel’s famous dictum, from the first of the Lectures on Aesthetics of the 1820s, that ‘art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]’.⁴ Was it not already clear by the second half of the nineteenth century, he adds, that art’s days were numbered, citing in support the example of Rimbaud, abruptly abandoning at the age of eighteen his burgeoning career as a poet in order to take up a position elsewhere, says Adorno, as a junior clerk? ⁵

Rimbaud’s lapse into silence, though it showed the direction of things to come, did not however mean art was finished. RenéChar in 1948 was not alone in proclaiming in a prose poem of the kind inaugurated by his illustrious precursor that ‘you were quite right to leave, Arthur Rimbaud!’⁶ For from within the sequestered confines to which it was relegated, art nevertheless owed it to itself still to carry on, Adorno insisted, and to keep playing the game, not unlike Hamm in Beckett’s Fin de partie (Endgame), a play much admired by the German thinker, and whose tenuous ironic structures, disintegrating as the work progresses, were all that art in the philosopher’s view could truthfully muster in the wake of those events to which, like others to come, he elected to give the epochal name of Auschwitz. Failure to conclude, in other words, did not relieve the artwork of the possibility of persisting in failure. As Beckett’s protagonist had it, ‘[l]a fin est dans le commencement et cependant on continue’, ‘[t]he end is in the beginning and yet you go on’.⁷ Here stood the second moment in Adorno’s dialectic. For even as the fragment testifies to totalisation’s failure, it also makes a paradoxical and problematic last-ditch attempt to redeem art by recalling it to those very duties it cannot fulfil. The fragment here protests, resists, objects, challenging the totalising artwork as such, together with those social, political, and economic forces that have turned artistic expression into an alienated consumer product. But while doing so, it also strives to save the prospect of the work by insisting on what art nevertheless must undertake, in times of ideological and aesthetic distress, even if few illusions remain regarding the possibility of any effective or successful outcome. But art, Adorno points out, is not an activity that chooses to be ruled by effectivity or success.

So far, so good, it may be said; and there is little doubt that Adorno provides a critically probing, nuanced account of the possibilities and impossibilities that the art of the fragment reveals. It is however apparent that in Adorno’s presentation of the dialectical relationship between protesting fragment and unreconciled work one of these two contradictory moments (necessarily) takes precedence over the other: that of the finished-unfinished, ironically reflexive modern or modernist artwork, whose incompletion is paradoxical – dialectical – testimony to its status as a work animated by a totalising if unsatisfied ambition to be what it must be, that is, an integrated artwork. For its part, though its testimony may be significant, the role of the fragment remains entirely secondary, its structure and status always already predetermined by the deferred, delayed, problematic possibility of the artwork to which, in spite of itself, it is held to aspire. As a result of the negative dialectic of which it is no more than a minor function, the fragment itself is at best a passing phase, so to speak, a mournful hiatus in the realisation or non-realisation of the futural totality of the work.

For Adorno it therefore follows that in an important sense the fragment as such does not exist. In order to be what it is, the fragment must be detachable from a possible past, present, or future whole. For Adorno, however, no sooner is the fragment detached from that whole than by dialectical recuperation it becomes an integral part of it. So long as it is a fragment, in other words, it is part of an absent whole; however once it is deemed to be part of that whole, it ceases properly to be a fragment. The totality that confers on the fragment the status of a fragment also denies it the status of a fragment. The fragment lives on, then, only as a kind of lingering, ghostly memory of itself, without specificity, singularity, or self-identity; and this arguably explains, despite Adorno’s own long-standing preference for fragmentary forms of writing, as witnessed for instance by the aphoristic structure of Minima Moralia, or by the self-consciously exploratory nature of the essays found in the four-volume Notes to Literature, why there is little explicit treatment of the fragmentary as such in the whole five hundred pages of the Aesthetic Theory. In the end, fragmentary writing for Adorno, it seems, is merely one of the ways in which compromised, damaged, or unachievable totality, in pessimistic if critical vein, speaks of its fraught, divided relation to itself.

But what if this concept of fragmentary writing were itself a deep expression of nostalgia, a melancholy symptom of unrequited yearning for the totalising artwork of old? What if, rather than being subordinate to the dialectic of the work, fragmentary writing preceded and exceeded the very possibility of any work, leaving it always already undone, dispersed, and put asunder, its impossible pretensions to aesthetic totalisation merely an unsustainable, regressive hypothesis? What if, in the end, the fragment were therefore both more and less than a secondary, negative effect of the work, and what if the impossibility of defining it in itself and as such were its most prodigious resource? And what if the abiding indeterminacy of the fragment, rather than indicating a duty to labour in vain towards the completion of the work, suggested instead an entirely different conception of literature, one that was no longer subject to the logic of the work but, beyond presence, autonomy, or reflexive closure, affirmed itself instead as the futural promise of a radical multiplication of writing as a proliferating series of singular events?

These questions are not idle ones. From the 1950s onwards they emerged tenaciously and persistently as key concerns in the writing of the French novelist, critic, and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A turning
• 2 The demand of the fragmentary
• 3 An interruption
• 4 Writing – disaster
• 5 A change of epoch
• Index
• eCopyright