Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism

Christopher Langlois

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501360961
• eBook ISBN: 9781501331381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Maurice Blanchot occupies a central though still-overlooked position in the Anglo-American reception of 20th-century continental philosophy and literary criticism. On the one hand, his rigorous yet always-playful exchanges with the most challenging figures of the philosophical and literary canons of modernity have led thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault to acknowledge Blanchot as a major influence on the development of literary and philosophical culture after World War II. On the other hand, Blanchot's reputation for frustrating readers with his difficult style of thought and writing has resulted in a missed opportunity for leveraging Blanchot in advancing the most essential discussions and debates going on today in the comparative study of literature, philosophy, politics, history, ethics, and art. Blanchot's voice is simply too profound, too erudite, and too illuminating of what is at stake at the intersections of these disciplines not to be exercising more of an influence than it has in only a minority of intellectual circles. Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism brings together an international cast of leading and emergent scholars in making the case for precisely what contemporary modernist studies stands to gain from close inspection of Blanchot's provocative post-war writings.

Part One

Conceptualizing Blanchot

1

Critical First Steps: On Faux Pas

Cosmin Toma

On leave in Nazi-occupied Paris after miraculously surviving the Battle of Stalingrad, Max Aue, the protagonist of Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones, picks up a copy of Maurice Blanchot’s Faux Pas while rummaging through the booksellers’ stalls along the Seine. Aue, a Franco-German SS officer, tellingly singles out the names of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle among the books on display, further observing that “they were openly selling Kafka, Proust, and even Thomas Mann; permissiveness seemed to be the rule.”¹ In keeping with The Kindly Ones’ transgressive aims, the remark is as provocative as it is thought-provoking. Indeed, where are we to situate Blanchot among this motley assortment of figures? When Aue describes him as “a critic from the Journal des débats, some of whose articles I had read with interest before the war,”² the latter clarification subtly recalls Blanchot’s questionable contributions to Maurrassian newspapers and magazines throughout the 1930s. Yet insofar as The Work of Fire, The Space of Literature, The Book to Come, and The Infinite Conversation contain penetrating commentaries of Kafka, Proust, and Mann, Littell’s vignette kindles a vague sense of malaise, one that Blanchot’s name still occasionally elicits to this day.

It is difficult, when retracing the beginnings of Blanchot’s oeuvre and its thorny relationship with politics,³ to avoid remarking that his first book of criticism bears a rather suggestive title. Read in this light, Faux Pas is a palinode, an avowal that mistakes have been made that will not be repeated. After all, a faux pas is a tactless blunder, an embarrassing gesture that sometimes leaves an indelible stain on one’s psyche—or one’s public image. In French, however, it is simultaneously more and less than that. Besides its figurative meaning, it denotes a literal misstep, conjuring up the Beckettian trope of someone aimlessly ambling along a purgatorial path, unable to secure a lasting foothold, yet stirring still. Its significance is thus (at least) twofold: as a gradus, Faux Pas implies that error is the inevitable price of self-awareness; as a deliberate reprise of said error, it attenuates the phrase’s sententious connotations, neutralizing them, as it were. On the face of it, however, the value judgment passed on these articles, all of which had previously appeared in Le Journal des débats (with the notable exception of “From Anxiety to Language,”⁴ conceived as a prelude), is frankly disconcerting: have they not been handpicked by the author himself? Were they merely the least unseemly of his lapses? And now that they have been gathered in book form, stamped with Gallimard’s seal of approval, can we credibly continue labelling them “missteps”?

Much like the later notion of “disaster,” which “ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact” (WD 1), that of “faux pas” is a pas de côté, a sidestep that forces us to reexamine our immediate understanding of its meaning. More specifically, it exemplifies Blanchot’s uncanny grasp of negation beyond its Hegelian-Kojèvian framework, foreshadowing the neuter. Etymologically speaking, faux pas presupposes the erasure of negation by negation, the transition from ne to pas as preferred negatory adverb in the French language, as though every “no” were also an “on”⁵—or perhaps neither. The pas of negation can therefore be construed as a false (faux) “not,” with the proviso that the quality of falseness is itself subverted by this para-dialectical mode of thinking. And the subterranean semantic network Faux Pas adumbrates becomes more abyssal still when we consider its homophony with faut pas, a colloquial elision of il ne faut pas (you/one must not), where the vanishing il mutely points toward Emmanuel Levinas’s il y a⁶ no less than toward the pivotal role of the il alongside the on in Blanchot’s writings on the neuter. As such, Faux Pas is both a solemn commandment and its parody, the harsh letter of the law and its more lenient spirit, an injunction and an infraction, bringing to mind Blanchot’s contemporaneous novels Aminadab and The Most High.

***

Although Faux Pas ostensibly doubles down on some of Blanchot’s missteps by turning them into a book—with all the architectonic unity, coherence, and staying power such an appellation entails, including when it is disavowed—it makes no secret of its journalistic origins. Even as they seek literature’s nocturnal core, these disparate texts remain beholden to the idiom of day, which at this point in Blanchot’s career refers not only to the demands of an ever-shifting present but also to industriousness and operativeness in general. A double bind is at work here: on the one hand, literary criticism must defer to the atemporal language of night⁷ if it is to do justice to literature’s singularity; on the other hand, no critical piece can shirk the task of shedding light on the work’s secret, of transposing art into the productive discourse of a given time and place. Faux Pas thus marks the onset of a tension that informs almost all of Blanchot’s writings, instantiating what Jacques Derrida would later call “the undecidable.”

Blurring the lines between literature as res (literaria)—the object of a public debate, be it aesthetic or political or other still—and literature as Ding an sich—the work of art in itself—Faux Pas recalls early German Romanticism’s willingness to collapse the distinction between poetical and critical language, prefiguring the fragmentary synthesis attempted in The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of Disaster. At times, Blanchot’s commentaries lead us to literature’s imagined center even more readily than the literary works they examine, undermining the very divide between night and day on which so much of his pre-1960s work operates (TO 3). Granted, it seems natural to think of Thomas the Obscure—whose extended, maze-like first version was published in 1941, two years before Faux Pas—as a creature of blackest night, utterly alien to a piece such as “The Criticism of Albert Thibaudet,” which seeks to elucidate the very act of elucidation. Yet despite their obvious differences, it is perhaps a mere question of degree (gradus), as if a few steps in either direction could tip the scale toward the “literary” or the “critical,” respectively. Faux Pas thus bears witness to a series of attempts at subverting these boundaries by writing literary literary criticism, so to speak, even if the literariness of literature may well turn out to be an eidolon, devoid of consistency or essence, leaving us in the throes of an unbearably ambiguous predicament.

“Do not separate the no from the yes,” advises “Speak, you too,” a poem by Paul Celan⁸ that Blanchot would later translate in A Voice from Elsewhere as “The Last to Speak.” Somewhat anachronistically, the poet’s suggestion can be said to govern Faux Pas as a whole, starting with “From Anxiety to Language,” one of Blanchot’s key meditations on ambiguity. A threshold of sorts, it shapes our reading of the membra disjecta that follow, all of which lie somewhere between affirmation and negation, arranged according to a half-orderly, half-chaotic compositional principle. In addition to “From Anxiety to Language,” which also lends its title to the volume’s opening section, we are offered “Digressions on Poetry,” “Digressions on the Novel,” and “A Miscellany of Digressions.” Roughly speaking, the sequence goes from philosophy to poetry to the novel before its ostensible telos fizzles out, as if the goal were to set up a semblance of systematicity the better to unravel it. After all, the original title of the fourth and final section is “Digressions sans suite,” a quasi-tautology that one could also translate as “Non sequiturs,” underscoring the book’s ultimately fragmentary provenance. Waltzing to and fro, from yes to no and the obverse, these steps and missteps also augur The Step Not Beyond’s more arduous rhythms, hinting at a writerly music that, although rarely identified as such, goes a long way toward explaining the fascination exerted by Blanchot’s anonymous, yet inimitable, sense of phrasing.

In writing, such musically oriented effects are often lauded, perhaps paradoxically, for their literariness—a trait that has remained inextricably tied to the author’s legacy in no small part due to the ubiquitous autobiographical sketch appended to his publications⁹—yet “From Anxiety to Language” almost never calls literature by its proper name, and when it does, its implied working definition is unusually broad, even porous. While it is true that Faux Pas primarily discusses works that are widely deemed to be literary, it also teases out the potential literariness of corpora that do not traditionally fall under this umbrella, such as those of Meister Eckhart, Leonardo da Vinci, or Alain. Indeed, if literature is to be literary at all, it must run the risk of dissolving into vaster waters, even as it resists its absorption by envisioning itself, to quote Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, as an absolute, that is, as that which cannot be subsumed into a greater whole—into relation as such.

Presaging The Space of Literature’s post-Rilkean exploration of the work of art’s solitude, Blanchot kicks off “From Anxiety to Language” by reflecting on what it means to write the words “I am alone,” noting that “it is comical to be aware of one’s solitude while addressing a reader, making use of means that keep one from being alone” (FP 1). There is thus a sense in which language radically precludes isolation, no doubt because it appears to be the most “correlationist” (as Quentin Meillassoux would have it) medium of all, a space where absence is continuously woven into presence and presence into absence.¹⁰ But if there is no denying language’s reticular sway, perhaps some degree of withdrawal is achievable within its mesh. Indeed, such a claim becomes defendable once we dispense with the expectation that language be a conveyor of unadulterated truth. Might one not suggest, instead, that speech’s essential mendacity—its literariness—gestures toward a different kind of truth, albeit one that is a mere shadow of itself?¹¹ Indeed, in this penumbra, the act of writing “I am alone” flutters between self-annulment (the writer is never alone) and apotheosis (no one is more alone than the writer), unable to settle on one or the other.

The solution to this dilemma is seemingly simple: “the writer could of course not write” (FP 5). Yet silence, whether forced or willed, solves nothing. On the contrary, Blanchot’s claim is that withdrawal requires a foil in order to fulfill its solitary essence (or lack thereof)—a split that is exemplarily brought about by the act of writing. Even the Latin absolutus—that is, that which has been freed from relation—is a pleonasm of sorts, since the three morphemes that constitute it—ab, se, and luo—all hinge on the selfsame loosening, as though absolute singularity could not express itself outside of what The Infinite Conversation calls “plural speech” (IC 80). And this radical ambiguity, which distantly echoes Blanchot’s childhood realization, retold in The Writing of the Disaster, that the sky’s superficiality and transparency secrete no more and no less than the nothingness of all there is, is in evidence as early as Faux Pas, giving his work its characteristically neutral heft. To put it differently, writing is spacing, in a post-Mallarméan and pre-Derridean sense.

To write “I am alone” is thus to self-reflexively refract the act of writing “I am alone,” to engender a Doppelgänger not only in the person of the writer, who is consequently dispossessed of his I, but also in the notion of aloneness itself, which now oscillates between word (a relation) and thing (the absolute). Much like Beckett, Blanchot argues that every entity conceals a pseudo-couple: “it is not the one who is alone who experiences the feeling of being alone; this monster of desolation needs another for his desolation to have meaning” (FP 2). And in the writer’s case, this partition isn’t merely incidental, since there appears to be a privileged connection between the act of writing, the anxiety of solitude, and their dédoublement. Indeed, as Heidegger had already intuited in “What Is Metaphysics?,” Angst is the state where nothing is likeliest to manifest itself as a thing, where the tension between affirmation and negation reaches its apex—a coming and going, “from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither,” that Blanchot believes to be characteristic of literary writing.¹² The fundamental distinction between rien (nothing) and the res (thing) from which it stems is thus abolished, anticipating Beckett’s Three Dialogues¹³: “the writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it” (3). Better yet: it is because the writer is tongue-tied that language can be fictively liberated as literature.

Unlike Heidegger before him, Blanchot does not ground his inquiry in language or thought, but in the groundlessness of writing as such. On the one hand, it goes without saying that anxiety can befall any Dasein, this unsettled being that we are insofar as our being is always in question. On the other hand, Blanchot claims that there is a fundamental difference between the way a cobbler and a writer experience anxiety, respectively. While the former would be hard-pressed to describe his anxiety “as the condition of a man who mends shoes,” the latter “sometimes seems strangely as if anguish [angoisse] were part of his occupation and, even more, as if the fact of writing so deepens anguish that it attaches itself to him rather than to any other sort of person” (3–4). In truth, the accursed privilege afforded to the writer by Blanchot is highly debatable, and not just in relation to other kinds of artisans or artists.¹⁴ Regardless, his insistence on anxiety, as well as on the ambiguity it begets, speaks volumes about the way he conceives the relationship between the writer and his work. Like anxiety, the work “is this very indifference to that which creates it, although it may seem at the same time to rivet its victim to the cause it has chosen” (4). Perhaps counterintuitively, the ambiguity of anxiety and the anxiety of ambiguity thus originate from the same apathy, that is, from the work of art’s neutral (no)thingness, somewhere between res and rien.

It is the very same indifference or neutrality that underlies art’s inhuman autonomy, the fact that it is in a world of its own, indifferent to its own (in)difference, and all the more moving for it. Blanchot begins by framing this question conventionally, in terms of usefulness versus uselessness.¹⁵ Indeed, if the literary work of art is indifferent to the aims imposed upon it by its author or reader, it cannot be redu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Against Praise of Maurice Blanchot
• Part 1: Conceptualizing Blanchot
• Part 2: Blanchot and Aesthetics
• Part 3: Glossary
• Index
• Imprint