January Reading: Notes on ‘Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography’
Some notes made while reading.
The appearance of Bident’s biography of Maurice Blanchot in English (translated by John McKeane) is an event indeed and the book has not been anything but a pleasure to read. Bident’s biographical method is one which gives the work room to breathe and the elements of biographical detail he draws out tend to be those that bear correlation with concepts at work in Blanchot’s oeuvre. In particular, the book focuses on: friendship (several notable examples including Jean Paulhan, Levinas, Derrida, Duras, Denise Rollin, Robert Antelme and most importantly Bataille); withdrawal and isolation (such as Blanchot’s time in Èze), notions always in tension with the author’s public profile and frequent interventions and productivity; illness, which featured throughout Blanchot’s life; and (of course) death.
The book plots Blanchot’s theoretical development from his time writing for a number of far right publications, through his encounters with Levinas and Bataille, his readings of Heidegger and critique of his positions, the subsequent movement towards communism and political involvement, the influence of Nietzsche and the shift, in the later works, towards ever-increasing fragmentation and the effacement of the border between the critical work and the récit.
The critique of Heidegger’s ‘rootedness’ Blanchot partially inherits from Levinas articulates a nomadic understanding of truth that recalls Celan’s comments about poetry outlined in the Meridian: the root finds its counter-word close to home, in its homophone route the poem is always already on its way. This proves vital for Blanchot’s conception of writing and his turn towards fragmentary form.
‘The “fragment” is linked to the necessity of giving expression to numerous different reflections, that is to say, to connecting the plural multiplicity of objects and possibilities of the world through this diverse plurality, without threatening the review with formlessness, which would happen if the diversity of these multiple texts could not be composed and articulated into an overall project. p.331
Writing as the question of writing, a question that bears writing that bears the question, no longer allows you this relation to being — understood first as tradition, order, certainty, truth, all forms of rootedness — which one day you received from worlds past p.394
The “step (not) beyond’ therefore refers both to a movement of rewriting and of publication, a way of leaving behind a situation in which one can be trapped by the struggle for the possible, even when it is carried out in the name of the impossible […] the text attempts to free itself of any rootedness in the sedentary nature of books (“only the nomadic affirmation remains”). It appears against a backdrop of silence, it is torn away from — or a fragment of — forbidding absence. pp.391–2
Bident shows how this forms part of the developing the thought of the neuter, writing:
Remaining faithful to the thought of the Neuter, that impossible object of knowledge is only ever present through withdrawal, and thus is alone in escaping nihilism’s traps. This demands that one radically extricate oneself from the “completion of metaphysics” which, like all philosophy, remains a way of domesticating and refusing the neuter. p.354
The neuter remains on the margins of philosophy, refusing any conceptual stabilisation. This withdrawal bears a close resemblance to apophasis and Blanchot’s readings of mysticism, such as Scholem and Luria, bear this out:
In creating the world, God does not set forth something more, but — first of all — something less. Infinite Being is necessarily everything. In order that the world be, this Being would have to cease being everything, make space for it via a movement of withdrawal, of retirement, and by “giving up something like a region within itself, a sort of mystical space.” p.285
The function of Judaism in Blanchot’s thought (and its relation to both Levinas’ work and the critique of Heidegger) is shown by Bident to be of vital importance in how we read Blanchot:
A short autobiographical narrative confirms how long Judaism had been present in Blanchot’s mind and emphasizes what his thinking owed to Buber and to Levinas. His desire to think Judaism philosophically, in relation to his meditations on anti- Semitism, is present everywhere. For instance, the responsibility for others (autrui), who in Levinas’s terms are closer to God than I am, justifies the condemnation of Heidegger p.454
[See also ‘Do Not Forget’ in Political Writings pp. 124–129]:
In a certain way, Judaism is so close to me that I do not feel myself worthy to speak about it, except in order to make this proximity known…We believe we respect the other by parsimoniously leaving him his place, but the other demands (without demanding it) the entire place. Just as the other is always higher than me, closer to God (that unpronounceable name) than I am, so the dissymmetrical relation from him to me is what founds ethics and obliges me, through an extraordinary obligation that weighs upon me.
Judaism resists mythical thought. It is a thinking of errancy.
From this point of view, Judaism for Blanchot represents a culture of resistance capable of envisaging, beyond the dialectical oeuvre of death, infinity without anguish — or more precisely, an infinity able to hold on to anguish given the lack of any site, of any end. p.414
Overall the book provides a fascinating (no pun intended) insight into Blanchot’s creative development, elaborating how one of the most singular visions of literature in the last century was — at the same time — one that was continually fuelled by the presence of others. One of the most revealing sections of the book in this regard recounts the efforts of Blanchot and his friends to set up an international review with writers from Germany and Italy. The long protracted debates and continual problems and disagreements finally lead to its collapse but what is most interesting is Blanchot’s desire for a neutral space where the authorial signature disappears, an anonymous collective writing.
Collective writing did not mean seeking out equally shared solutions. The “communism of thought” was also the interruption — the fragmentation — of such a communism of writing. On the contrary, by bringing together problems belonging to each language, to each nation, to each political situation, to each culture with its differing view of literary endeavours, the idea was to seek out the literature that was “more than literature.” p.327
Just as the voices of others found their way into Blanchot’s work and correspondence, here was the desire to break free of the individual voice altogether. In that spirit, here the notes will break off, and allow the voices of the book to speak.
We do not speak to one another, because we know one another too well: we are silent with one another, we laugh at our knowledge. p.404
‘Anything that resembles, even vaguely, what we saw there literally destroys us’ p.318
‘At night, dreams of death in which one does not know who is dying: all, all those who are threatened by death — and oneself, into the bargain’ p.400
“But there is, in my view, no grandeur except in gentleness” (Weil), I will say rather: nothing extreme except through gentleness. Madness through excess of gentleness, gentle madness. [from Writing of the Disaster]
The last man is therefore also he who is capable of opening a space of gentleness within himself, a gentleness held out over and against the worst violence, sometimes even encouraging the illusion that he might be able to think everything. p.295
“Know what happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know.” p.454
The future is rare, and not every day that arrives is a day of beginning. Rarer still is the speaking that, in its silence, is the reserve of a speaking still to come, and that turns us, even though we may be on the brink of our own end, toward the force of the beginning. p.277
What remains after these fragmentary notes but to listen to the eulogy given by Derrida:
Blanchot did not have what is called influence, and he did not have disciples. Something entirely different is in play. The legacy he leaves will have reserved a more internal and more serious trace: a non- appropriable one. He will have left us alone, he has left us more alone than ever with our endless responsibilities. p.466
