Approaching Disappearance

Anne McConnell

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781564788085
• eBook ISBN: 9781564788412
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century French literature, produced a wide variety of essays and fictions that reflect on the complexities of literary work. His description of writing continually returns to a number of themes, such as solitude, passivity, indifference, anonymity, and absence—forces confronting the writer, but also the reader, the text itself, and the relations between the three. For Blanchot, literature involves a movement toward disappearance, where one risks the loss of self; but such a sacrifice, says Blanchot, is inherent in the act of writing. Approaching Disappearance explores the question of disappearance in Blanchot's critical work and then turns to five narratives that offer a unique reflection on the threat of disappearance and the demands of literature—work by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Louis-René Des Forêts, and Nathalie Sarraute.

Chapter 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 ob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Approaching Disappearance
• 2. Franz Kafka and the Disappearance of the Writer
• 3. Lost in the Labyrinth: Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”
• 4. The Disappearing Act of Louis-René des Forêts’s Bavard
• 5. Anonymity and the Neutral in Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms
• 6. Into the Night: Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Copyright