Blanchot and the Outside of Literature

William S. Allen

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501345258
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria francesa

Maurice Blanchot's writings have played a critical role in the development of 20th-century French thought, but the implicit tension in this role has rarely been addressed directly. Reading Blanchot involves understanding how literature can have an effect on philosophy, to the extent of putting philosophy itself in question by exposing a different and literary mode of thought. However, as this mode is to be found most substantially in the peculiar density of his fictional writings, rather than in his theoretical or critical works, the demand on readers to grasp its implications for thought is rendered more difficult. Blanchot and the Outside of Literature provides a detailed and far-reaching explication of how Blanchot's works changed in the postwar period during which he arrived at this complex and distinctive form of writing.

PART ONE

Contingency and contagion

1

Black water

Thus, to take nihilism seriously is to kill oneself [ se suicider], to cease completely to act and – consequently – to live. But the radical Sceptic does not interest Hegel, because, by definition, he disappears by killing himself, he ceases to be, and, consequently, he ceases to be a human being, an agent of historical evolution. Only the Nihilist who remains alive is interesting.

KOJÈVE, 1937¹

About halfway through Le Très-Haut Sorge is beaten up by the police. His injuries exacerbate his already weak condition and for much of the rest of the novel he is confined to his room. Since his apartment is in a block that has been requisitioned as a clinic to deal with the epidemic coursing through the city, it is not difficult for him to find care. Eventually the nurse who has been looking after him, a large woman in drab shapeless clothes, comes to live in his apartment and the two develop a kind of relationship. This nurse, called Jeanne Galgat, seems to be suffering from her own problems, for although she is generally very reserved she has occasional outbursts that indicate that she has conceived an obsessive love for Sorge. While much of the novel has been concerned with Sorge’s relation to the revolutionary Bouxx, and the concomitant struggles between the law and the uprising, the last two chapters are focused on his relation to Jeanne. Central to this sequence is a black stain, which had earlier appeared on the wall of his apartment and on his sister’s dress, but now appears in much more dramatic forms. Although it would be too much to associate this stain with the black bile of melancholia, its liquid presence is so remarkable in these last two chapters that it has to be considered as its own form of material expression or resistance. Just as the activities of the revolutionaries formed a discourse around the law, so too does this stain become a kind of counterforce to the law and the State, precisely because of its anomalous appearance. As such, and rather than focusing on the fatal denouement to the novel, I will look at what occurs in the pages preceding it, and how the transformations of Sorge’s experience prefigure but also exceed this last moment:

I crouched in a corner, she was tearing herself apart, crying and screaming. And while I was looking at her, suddenly seeing her stiffen again, half naked, but also rigid and impassive as if she had only reprimanded me for I know not what fault from the heights of her authority as a registered nurse, I noticed that a thick black water was flowing drop by drop from her body, a water like that which had percolated through the walls once before. Perhaps more than water: a forerunner coming from a thing still intact and yet ready to liquefy, something seeping and hesitant, rising up to the light and corrupting it and, like an odour, spreading, drifting, stagnant, then rising up again like the spirit of a cold, thick, black water.

TH: 216/225

It is evident that the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning is being placed under pressure here, but this pressure itself arises as a symptom of the sickness in question. Indeed, sickness as such is that which occurs across the distinction between the physical and the symbolic, which is what gives rise to its strength and virulence. Nevertheless, it is difficult to know what to make of this scene and it is not explained subsequently in any way, quite the opposite, for just afterwards are found the lines: ‘This happened around noon. When the water withdrew, the room was visible again: the room, the splendour of noon, the shocked [scandalisé] silence of hovering and whirling flies. Then the days returned.’ The black water would appear to be a form of putrefaction, the medium through which the corruption and decay of a body is conveyed. And as black water it is emphatically opaque and material, thick, cold, and inhuman; not the rich intimacy of sweat or tears but something alienating and undefined. Sickness passes through a population by way of carriers, communicative media that may or may not demonstrate that they are carrying an infection. Sickness is then unfixed in its location or distribution as its passage is to a large extent hidden, and in making itself known it manifests its contamination. While its appearance is thus a bad sign, the lack of an appearance is not necessarily a good sign. The black water can then be understood as not only a symptom of sickness but as emblematic of the form of sickness as such. Indeed, it would seem that all sicknesses partake of this auto-metaphoricity insofar as they are signs of their own appearance (even if they do not appear) and in doing so indicate their relation to language as a structure to be communicated and interpreted. But sickness can only be read in the full sense of the word by means of a medium that can operate with an equivalent level of materiality and fluidity. It is as such that the notion of corruption becomes critical, since what occurs through infection and contamination can only be taken as corrupting from the point of view of the unity of the body. But when a structure is exposed to an element of contingency that estranges it, then the concomitant effects within the structure, the breakdown and adjustment of its parts that are its corruption, are the way that it comes to read and respond to the infection. Hence, while this corruption is illegible and damaging from the point of view of the system, it is also a form of alienation and resistance to the whole that expresses its own autonomous materialization.

Blanchot’s point in developing this understanding is to indicate that the possibility of corruption can never be eliminated from language, and nor can its presence be entirely determined. And as language is exposed to these contingent elements, it is not possible to know if the consequences of these changes will be legible, or if they will make themselves apparent otherwise. Thus, literature becomes an experiment with this receding edge of legibility where the difference between reading and responding becomes impossible to decide. While sickness clearly has political implications, given its anomalous status, it also draws out the way in which the contingent can never be excluded or included in any system but remains opaque and elusive. Whether in terms of language or thought the conditions of understanding are constantly vulnerable to these disturbances, which are not only empirical. This transformation thus has its effects on what is to be understood as sovereignty, as that which purports to be the legislative force of autonomy, as is made clear by Blanchot’s title for this novel. But it also has its effects on the manner in which the development of the system is understood, insofar as sickness does not operate cumulatively or teleologically as it recognizes no aim other than its own propagation and does so by way of its own schisms and mutations. The modes by which readers and writers can come to approach this counterforce will be developed in what follows but for the moment it can be said that something of the nature of this parallel corrupted mode of response can be found in literature and thinking, but that it necessarily reconfigures the form of critique and reflection in these modes. As Sorge is told earlier, ‘the sickness also has to live, you understand, the illness has to work in the depths, slowly, endlessly, to have the time to transform what it touches, to make of each a tomb and to keep this tomb open. It has to be! [Il le faut!] That’s how history gets infected’ [TH: 164/169].

I

Philosophy has long associated itself with a kind of therapy, with attempts to diagnose ailments and propose remedies, to alleviate ignorance and prejudice, and in doing so to offer advice on how to find and lead the ‘good life’. It is thus that it is linked to a medical approach that involves understanding pathologies in order to provide ways to relieve or prevent them. A pathology is not simply an absence of health but its own form of life, which can be directly illustrated by the diverse ways in which illness and disease form alternative modes of experience. It is not just that the body becomes obtrusive and painful, or that perception or mobility may be substantially altered, but that the experience of being in the world becomes strange and uncertain as if it were subjected to a bodily scepticism or alienation. There is a profound loss of familiarity, but also an exposure to a different kind of material existence, and a different awareness of space and time. While this state may be pathological in relation to the persistence of the organism as a whole, it is not abnormal as it is far from uncommon and constitutes a different norm of existence, as Georges Canguilhem points out, rather than the absence of norms. Disease is not a negative dimension of health but ‘a new dimension of life’ in which possibilities that were available in health are removed and replaced with different possibilities. But, as Canguilhem makes clear, the difference between the healthy and the pathological organism is that the former has a greater ability to adapt and to create new norms of behaviour, whereas the latter operates within a narrower field of existence and a more limited range of possibilities, although in stating this he is still taking the perspective of the organism.² The significance of pathology lies in this experience of alienation but also in the fact that it comes from an encounter with radical, material contingency. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, in discussing the case of Johann Schneider who was injured by a landmine in 1915, ‘Schneider’s trouble was not initially metaphysical, it was an exploding shell that wounded him in the occipital region’ [PP: 146/127]. The qualification of this statement is crucial, for the contingency of his injury leads to neurological change that can only be understood in metaphysical terms, as an alteration not just to the structures of perception but also to the conditions of understanding. If philosophy is to approach its task in therapeutic terms, then it must take account of this non-derivative status of the pathological, and Merleau-Ponty here reformulates a key thought from Canguilhem:

Illness, like childhood and like the ‘primitive’ state, is a complete form of existence, and the procedures that it employs in order to replace the destroyed normal functions are themselves also pathological phenomena. One cannot deduce the normal from the pathological, or deficiencies from their substitutions, through a simple change of sign. It is necessary to understand the substitutions as substitutions, as allusions to a fundamental function that they are attempting to replace and of which they do not give us a direct image.

PP: 125/110

This understanding of pathology is partly what Adorno means by an ontology of the false condition (falschen Zustandes), except that, in its radical contingency, it tilts the bearing of the ontological away from essential, transcendental grounds, and also that this false state bears its own intrinsic experience that is not reducible to being the inverse of the good life [ND: 22/11].

This approach echoes ideas developed by Catherine Malabou over a number of works in relation to her belief that the brain sciences have revealed an unavoidable imbrication of the empirical and the transcendental, which can release a new understanding of the significance of contingency and perhaps a new form of biopower: a resistance to power from within the structures of life.³ While this approach is very interesting it is important not to valorize neurological disorders as a form of transcendental resistance; even if they may be understood empirically as symptoms of the ‘false’ state of things, these disorders are also opaque modes of sense that are not necessarily comprehensible in human terms. This is the significance of radical contingency, which Merleau-Ponty described quite carefully:

When our initiatives get bogged down [s’enlisent] in the paste of the body, in language, or in this excessive [démesuré] world that is given to us to finish, it is not that a malin génie opposes his will to us: it is only a matter of a sort of inertia, of a passive resistance, of a weakness [défaillance] of meaning – an anonymous adversity.⁴

Merleau-Ponty articulates this thought in relation to politics and the possibility of distinguishing between a ‘good’ and an ‘evil’ contingency in terms of its effects on the aims of any action, which is, however, impossible since contingency is that which can always be otherwise. The relation of such intentional inertia to pathology, but also thought and literature, then becomes apparent, for just as learning other languages or playing the piano at an early age affects the way that neurological development occurs, so the material contingency inherent in writing exposes thought to previously unknown modes of experience. To take an extreme example, in studying Sade’s writings Blanchot found that his ‘thought is the work of madness and it had as a mould a depravity before which the world shrank [s’est derobé]. Additionally, it presents itself as the theory of this penchant, it is its tracing [décalque], it claims to transpose the most repugnant anomaly into a complete worldview. For the first time, philosophy conceived itself in broad daylight as the product of illness.’ Furthermore, in conducting his thinking by way of illness, Sade went further than others ‘to the point of being able to help the normal man understand himself, by helping him modify the conditions of all understanding’.⁵

Clearly, the issue at the heart of this argument is the relation between the empirical and the transcendental, which Kant had attempted to secure in order to provide a ground for thinking. Which is to say, that the distinction between the two states attempted to be a transcendental distinction in itself, an absolute separation in principle, but it cannot avoid the suspicion that it was developed empirically in order to secure Kant’s thought in contradistinction to the emergent physical sciences. The conditions of possibility of understanding in general cannot be detached from their historical and material bases, which cannot be secured from the effects of contingency. Just as critical theory has carefully pursued the Marxist injunction to look for the historico-material conditions of existence in the relations of class, technology, and economics, and phenomenology has analysed the modes by which the body operates as the condition of possibility of perception, it is also necessary to understand how literature concretizes the individual vicissitudes in the development of thought and language and in doing so explores the variety of its material pathologies and their transcendental implications [PP: 456/419]. This is not to suggest that literature is a form of psychoanalysis, as it does not operate with its normative and cognitive assumptions about pathological states, but instead operates as their expérience. It is just such a path that Blanchot pursues in Le Très-Haut and, perhaps more than in any other of his works, the effects of these pathologies are not only discussed but also conveyed by the text, and in a way that exposes both their existential and political ramifications.

The black water streaming down Jeanne’s body is not entirely literal, but nor is it merely symbolic, rather it is indicative of the fact that insofar as literature becomes a ‘science’ of material pathologies, as it were, it becomes an experience of the transformation of experience, with all the opacity and alienation that this implies. A science, therefore, of sovereignty insofar as the latter is, in the terms sketched out by Bataille and Blanchot, an experience of the loss of experience. The dislocation made apparent in illness gives rise to its own form of experience, so while Sorge experiences these transformations as illness they are also evidence of this dislocation. It is as such that they recede from being simple phenomena and become traces of the limits of experience, such that they can only appear as obscure and unstable forms. And it is precisely in terms of pathological states that Merleau-Ponty talks about the experience of encountering things in their contingency and the disorientation and anxiety that comes from their meaningless factical obtrusion [PP: 294/265]. Although Blanchot was not a phenomenologist he was familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work and his interest in the forms of experience, particularly unusual states of mind, was longstanding. At Strasbourg, alongside his...