Blanchot and Literary Criticism

Mark Hewson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441115232
• eBook ISBN: 9781441192585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Blanchot's writings on literature have imposed themselves in the canon of modern literary theory and yet have remained a mysterious presence. This is in part due to their almost hypnotic literary style, in part due to their distinctive amalgam of a number of philosophical sources (Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Bataille), which, although hardly unknown in the Anglophone philosophical world, have not yet made themselves fully at home in literary theory. This book aims to make visible the coherence of Blanchot's critical project. To recognize the challenge that Blanchot represents for literary criticism, one has to see that he always has in view the self-interrogation that characterizes modern literature, both in its theory and its practice. Blanchot's essays study the forms and the paths of this research, its solutions and its impasses; and increasingly, they sketch out the philosophical and historical horizon within which its significance appears. The effect is to revise the terms in which we see the genesis of the modern literary concept, not least of the manifestations of which is literary criticism itself.

1 The Modern Age and
the ‘Work’ of Literature

The essays collected in Blanchot’s works of literary criticism must surely count as one of the most significant studies of literature in the Romantic and post-Romantic period. Few other works offer a comparative study of modern literature of such extent, able to bring together Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Kafka, Proust, Valéry, Mann, Musil, Artaud and many others. The emphasis on poetry and on works from the twentieth century, in particular, is exceptional – there is perhaps no other major work of comparative literature in which these textual areas provide the main frame of reference. This concentration reflects something more than an empirical area of specialization: the studies are guided and informed by a theoretical and historical reflection on what is distinctive about the situation and the characteristics of modern literature. Although it is not always emphasized, the historical theme is subtly present in many of the studies of individual writers, and it can serve as a means of approach to the properly critical dimension of Blanchot’s writings on literature.

The primary concern with modern writers is marked at all periods in Blanchot’s work, but it is only with a group of texts written in close proximity, in the period immediately after the publication of La Part du feu in 1949, that the historical dimension is directly addressed. In ‘The Museum, Art and Time’, a long essay in response to Malraux’s Les Voix du silence, first published in 1950–1951 (and collected in the later volume, L’Amitié), Blanchot reflects on the emancipation of modern art from religious and political imperatives and its devotion to purely plastic and formal values, and considers the link between this moment in the history of art and the emergence of the museum. Similar themes, developed now with reference to literature as well as art – above all with reference to modern poetry – reappear in ‘Literature and the Original Experience’, first published as an article in two parts in Les Temps modernes in 1952, and then placed as the conclusion of L’Espace littéraire (1955) Comparison of the two versions shows that the essay has been extensively revised for its republication in the context of the book (the revisions between the journal and the book publication of Blanchot’s essays are often quite significant, and can sometimes lend valuable assistance in interpreting difficult texts). Moreover, much of its argument is restated in an essay entitled ‘Where Is Literature Going?’, published in two parts the following year, during the period in which most of the essays that now make up L’Espace littéraire were being composed. The first part of this text, again somewhat revised, appeared as ‘The Disappearance of Literature’ in Le Livre à venir (1959). The second part of the essay was never collected in book form by Blanchot, although parts of it were re-distributed into several texts of L’Espace littéraire, including ‘Literature and the Original Experience’ in its final form.¹

The restatements, revisions and re-distributions of text that all these pieces go through in their definitive appearance reflect the working out of a historical dimension that was not present or at least not very marked in Blanchot’s work up to this point. Modern art and literature now appears as traversed and gathered together by a consistent intentional movement, visible through a multiplicity of its forms. This understanding becomes possible through an interpretation of the modern epoch more generally. In its language and its structures, this interpretation often recalls (explicitly or implicitly) the thought of Hegel. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes:

It is further not hard to see that our time is a time of birth and transition into a new era. Spirit has broken away from its former world of existence and imaging [vorstellen]; it is about to sink all that into the past, and is busy shaping itself anew.²

To a remarkable extent, Blanchot not only assumes Hegel’s affirmation that modernity represents a new and original historical situation, but also takes over much of his interpretation of the basic character of ‘our time’.³ Hegel’s thought, it is true, is mediated here by French commentators such as Kojève and Hyppolite whose interpretations, especially with regard to religion and politics, are closer to the left Hegelians and to Marx than to the later Hegel of The Philosophy of Right. But in this modified form, Hegelian thought serves to conceptualize the essential decisions that make the modern period what it is. In two of the texts, Blanchot refers to Hegel’s often discussed thesis that art is a ‘thing of the past’. It is worth citing both versions, since the slight variations help in understanding Blanchot’s construction of the modern (which is our only concern here). In ‘The Future and the Question of Art’ (EL VII.i), Blanchot, glossing Hegel’s thesis, writes:

from the moment that the absolute has consciously become identified with the work of history, art has no longer been able to satisfy the need for an absolute (àpartir du jour où l’absolu est devenu consciemment travail de l’histoire, l’art n’est plus capable de satisfaire le besoin d’absolu). Relegated to our interiority, it has lost its reality and its necessity; all that it had that was genuinely true and living now belongs to the world, and to real work in the world. (EL 284, 214)

And in ‘The Disappearance of Literature’:

Art is no longer capable of providing access to the absolute. (l’art n’est plus capable de porter le besoin d’absolu). What counts absolutely is henceforth the accomplishment of the world, the seriousness of action, and the task of real freedom. (LV 265, 195)

Hegel’s judgement on the fate of art is the expression of an historical evidence, of a new sense of ‘what counts absolutely’. The absolute, the unconditioned point from which the understanding of the self and the world proceeds, has shifted position. In the past, it was located in a transcendent principle such as God or the metaphysical principles of the cosmos; now it is identified with free human reason in its real and historically determined situation. The modern epoch is that in which the human takes possession of itself and responsibility for itself, recognizing its own rationality as the immanent truth of all reality. In his account of this process, Hegel emphasizes that human reason, unlike preceding absolute instances (the divine, the sovereign), is not given as absolute by its nature or essence. As it comes to know itself, it discovers also that it is conditioned and limited by natural, physical realities, by the diversity and the constraints of existing laws and institutions, by the contradictions it finds both within itself and between its representatives. Humanity – or free rationality (Spirit, Geist in Hegel) – is only in principle an absolute: its vocation is to make itself in reality into what it is already by its principle.

The mode of being whose emergence is described by Hegel is active, engaged in a process of becoming, transforming (or ‘negating’) itself in order to realize itself. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel writes: ‘Spirit (Geist) essentially acts: it makes itself into what it is at first only potentially (an sich), into its deed, its work; in this way it becomes an object for itself, and is present to itself’.⁴ One finds the same trait underlined in Blanchot: present-day man is ‘given over . . . to the decision to realize himself, to become free of nature and of being through work and through effective action’ (EL 311, 233). The threshold of modernity is attained at the moment that this decision has been assumed. The world has now to become the human world, a world submitted to the dictates of the free and rational human will. Henceforth, ‘what counts absolutely is the accomplishment of the world, the seriousness of action and the task of real freedom’ (LV 265, 195 cited above).

In ‘The Future and the Question of Art’ (EL VII.i), this understanding of the modern ethos provides the horizon for a critical assessment of modern aesthetics. The section is useful for a consideration of Blanchot’s work as criticism, since it indicates how his work would situate itself in relation to the conflicts that shape the critical field. The discussion begins with the alternative between those for whom the literary or artistic work is ‘an object of contemplation rather than usage, sufficient in itself, resting in itself’, and those for whom it only has its meaning when considered within the wider context of human action and history.⁵ The conflict is well known in literary criticism, where critical positions have often defined themselves in relation to the polarity between a view of the work as a self-contained aesthetic form, on the one hand, and a view of the work as a particular mode of historical and cultural discourse, on the other. For Blanchot, this debate takes for granted the terms of the modern self-understanding.

Both [positions] recognize in man the excellence of a power and in the artist the exercise of a form of this power, demanding work, discipline, study. (280, 211–212)

To the extent that interaction with art is primarily the production and the evaluation of ‘works’, it has its measure in accomplishment, it is suggested. The claim for the aesthetic is thus ultimately a claim for a distinct sphere of work, albeit one with its own conditions and procedures. Whatever distinctions and privileges this sphere may be allowed, it remains subject to the evidence and the criteria of work.⁶ Even if it moves according to its ‘own little laws’, the artistic domain – inasmuch as it is a kind of work – falls within and will contribute to ‘the total human work and the affirmation of the universal light’ (281, 213).

Once art and literature are produced within a horizon that is commanded by the criteria of work and historical action, however, artists and writers are compelled to recognize that their work is a relatively marginal and not very effective form of activity:

In the past, art was able to reconcile itself with other absolute demands: painting served the gods, poetry made them speak: but these powers were not of this world, and since their reign was outside of time, they did not measure the services that were performed for them in terms of their efficacity in real time. Art has also been in the service of politics, but politics then was not wholly in the service of action, and action had not become conscious of itself as the universal demand (l’exigence universelle). (283, 213)

In Blanchot’s writings, there is a consistent, if not always explicit sense that what is here called ‘the universal demand’ is one that is difficult to accept, as well as the decision that it should be accepted. This is present in the text we have been examining in the implication that the claim for aesthetic autonomy (the work with ‘its own little laws’) lacks something in transparency and even sincerity – that it seeks to gain recognition by the criteria of work and action, while at the same time withdrawing from their full implications.⁷ In contrast with the various accommodations through which nineteenth-century culture in fact maintains a very elevated conception of the value of art, Hegel’s thesis of the ‘end of art’ is credited for the stringency with which it draws the consequences for art of a free historical mode of existence

The same ethical–political tendency appears in the next section of the essay, dealing with the Romantic affirmation that links art to the inner sovereignty of the self, and thus frees it from the demand of effective realization.⁸ The treatment of this phenomenon is phased in two separate developments. In the first of these, it is suggested that, contrary to appearances, the revolt in the name of subjective passion against the criteria of work and effectivity does not express a fundamentally different motivation from the modern assertion of historical freedom, but that it constitutes rather an integral moment within its emergence. At the same time that modern humanity makes the external world into a field of objectivity, present for the subject and under its power, it also tends to intensify the uniqueness and the irreducibility of the subject as self. The two moments support and promote each other. The more the self gains in depth and autonomy, the more it reinforces the realizing will that has its foundation within the subject; likewise, the greater the mastery over the world, the greater the possibility for the human subject to develop its consciousness of its own inner freedom (cf. 287–288, 217). In a second development, Blanchot proceeds to assign this dialectic to a specific historical situation, that which Blanchot refers to as ‘humanism’. This claim depends upon a schema of the different historical meanings assigned to art, which Blanchot, acknowledging its ‘Hegelian’ style, terms ‘the dialectic of the work’ (EL 305, 229).⁹ Art and poetry, it is here suggested, first acquires their meaning from the function they serve in cult and religion: in its most original form, with the hymn and the temple, art makes present the divinity; later, in a slightly more secular age, it represents the gods, and gives them form (the reference is no doubt to Greek art). In the ‘humanist’ moment, which for Blanchot embraces the period between the Renaissance and Romanticism, the artistic possibility becomes one of the means by which the human subject discovers itself and claims its rights against the divine order announced in myth and religion. Art does not only then represent the human individual in its subject matter: the artistic activity understands (and sometimes represents) itself as the expression of human freedom and mastery. It is at this moment, then, that the artistic possibility is particularly identified with concepts and figures that underline the elevated power of the artist – the idea of genius, the figure of the artist as the great individual, the understanding of art as the medium of the subjective vision. The historical scheme serves to limit the validity of this set of concepts by assigning their legitimacy to a particular historical phase. For in the more recent modern period – in the ‘new era’ that Hegel announces – human rationality and autonomy no longer need to be discovered, but only to be accomplished; henceforth it is rather ‘in the development of technical forms of conquest that it finds the dialectical vitality which assure it of its goal’ (EL 288, 217). When art continues to be given its meaning by the reverence for the artist as the exceptional individual, what is actually taking place, Blanchot suggests, is a reaction against the demands of modernity. Art becomes the preserve of the individual subjectivity, and as such, it represents a point of resistance to the demands of modern science, politics and dialectical reason, which are essentially collective and impersonal. The notion of ‘creativity’ takes on its full meaning in relation to this historical tension; if this term has found such resonance, to the point that it is still co-terminous with the artistic sphere in the popular imagination, it is because it is able to effect a delicate conceptual negotiation between two antagonistic demands. On the one hand, the appeal of creativity reflects the value of power and realization. But at the same time, this creation does not fall under the jurisdiction of rational purpose and method; it remains bound to the spontaneity of the artist, thus ‘protecting him against the ano...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 The Modern Age and the ‘Work’ of Literature
• 2 Poetic Solitude: Two Essays on Hölderlin
• 3 Mallarmé and Modern Poetics
• 4 The Ambiguity of the Negative
• 5 Myth and Representation in Blanchot’s Literary Criticism
• Reprise: Blanchot and Literary Criticism
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright