Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing - the-eye.eu · in Maurice Blanchot, la singularité...

Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary

Writing

Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary

WritingA Change of Epoch

Leslie Hill

Continuum International Publishing GroupA Bloomsbury company

50 Bedford Square 80 Maiden Lane London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10038

www.continuumbooks.com

© Leslie Hill 2012

Extracts from Awaiting Oblivion reprinted from Awaiting Oblivion by Maurice Blanchot, translated by John Gregg, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1962

by Editions Gallimard. Translation copyright 1997 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Extracts from The Infinite Conversation reprinted by permission from The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Susan Hanson, The University of Minnesota Press, 1993. English translation copyright 1993 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Originally

published as L’Entretien infini, copyright 1969 by Editions Gallimard.

Extracts from The Step Not Beyond reprinted by permission from The Step Not Beyond by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Lycette Nelson, The State University of New York Press

©1992, State University of New York. All rights reserved.

Extracts from The Writing of the Disaster reprinted from The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Ann Smock, by permission of the University of Nebraska

Press. Copyright 1980 by Editions Gallimard. Translation copyright 1986, 1995 by the University of Nebraska Press.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataHill, Leslie, 1949–

Maurice Blanchot and fragmentary writing: a change of epoch/by Leslie Hill.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-2527-9 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4411-2527-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-6622-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4411-6622-X (pbk.: alk. paper)1. Blanchot, Maurice--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PQ2603.L3343Z684 2012843’.912--dc232012002893

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2527-9e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-8698-0PB: 978-1-4411-6622-7

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

ContEnts

Acknowledgements vi

1 A turning 1

2 The demand of the fragmentary 103

3 An interruption 171

4 Writing – disaster 279

5 A change of epoch 433

Index 437

ACKnoWLEDGEMEnts

I should like to thank the many friends, colleagues, and students who, sometimes without realising, have contributed to the writing of this book. I am particularly indebted to Andrew Benjamin, Christophe Bident, Christopher Fynsk, Seán Hand, Kevin Hart, and Joseph Kuzma for their encouragement, support, and insight, and am grateful to the University of Warwick for the provision of study leave that enabled me to complete what became a significantly longer book than first envisaged.

Earlier versions of portions of this book have appeared elsewhere and I am grateful for permission to use some of that material again. Parts of Chapter One and Chapter Two were first published as ‘A Fragmentary Demand’ in The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot, edited by Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H. Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 101–120, 205–209 © 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press; adapted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Some further remarks from Chapter One were borrowed for inclusion in an article in a Blanchot special issue of the journal Europe (August-September 2007) and an initial draft of the opening section of Chapter Three likewise first appeared in French in Maurice Blanchot, la singularité d’une écriture, edited by Arthur Cools, Nausicaa Dewez, Christophe Halsberghe, and Michel Lisse (Les Lettres romanes, hors série, 2005). A preliminary sketch of the first section of Chapter Four was published in Blanchot dans son siècle, edited by Monique Antelme and others (Lyon: éditions Parangon, 2009). All these texts have been substantially revised for the present book.

1

A turning

I

A spectre

All becomes suspense, a fragmentary arrangement of alternating and facing elements, contributing to the total rhythm, which may be deemed the silent poem, with its blanks; translated only, in singular manner, by each pendentive [Tout devient suspens, disposition fragmentaire avec alternance et visàvis, concourant au rythme total, lequel serait le poème tu, aux blancs; seulement traduit, en une manière, par chaque pendentif].

MALLArMé, ‘Crise de vers’1

For more than two hundred years, testifying at once to the weighty legacy of the past and the uncertain prospect of the future, a spectre has haunted literature. Its name is legion, its signature nevertheless unmistakeable: it is the spectre of fragmentary writing, of the text as fragment and the fragment as text. Time and again, whenever a fresh break in continuity is diagnosed or a new episode in cultural history declared, under such grandly vacuous names as romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, even Postpostmodernism, it is repeatedly to the literary fragment that critics have turned in search of an emblem of the seemingly unquenchable desire to make it new. Since the early nineteenth century, the list of literature’s fragmentary artists is at any event a long one: Schlegel, Hölderlin, Keats, Novalis, Coleridge, Büchner, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Pound, Eliot, Kafka, Valéry, Proust, Musil,

MAurICE BLAnChot AnD FrAGMEntAry WrItInG2

Artaud, Char, Bataille, Beckett, numerous others too, in whose work the fragment, whether calculated as such or merely abandoned to its fate, bears witness to the trials and tribulations, birthpangs as well as death-throes, of literary, historical, and cultural upheaval.

The time of the fragment, in other words, is never the fullness of the present. It is the time of between-times: between remembering and forgetting, continuity and discontinuity, obedience and objection; and what speaks most powerfully in the fragment is no doubt precisely this unreconciled tension between the artwork and its unravelling, between its gathering and its dispersion, between time past and time still to come. In that tension lies redoubtable energy, and this explains why, in critical discourse and artistic practice alike, the fragment today is little short of ubiquitous. Little has escaped its appeal: not fiction, not poetry, nor theatre; not autobiography, not memoir, nor essay; not philosophy, not theory, nor criticism. Notwithstanding its unassuming discretion, despite the intimations of apocalypse that sometimes follow in its wake, fragmentation seems now to have become almost synonymous with the possibility of writing itself. But the phenomenon is not limited to the printed word. Much the same goes for other artforms, too: for painting, music, sculpture, dance, film, photography, and the many other multimedia activities that, taking their lead from the fragment, tenaciously defy categorisation.

And yet there is something deeply ambiguous about this fidelity to the fragment that is such a remarkable feature of modern and contemporary experience. It is that even by its most enthusiastic exponents the fragment is rarely considered to evoke anything other than negativity. Whether seen to force itself on its audience with fractious, transgressive violence, or to withdraw into the melancholy disenchantment that comes from shattered dreams, the fragment is customarily described by critics not according to what it is or to what it might be, but to what it already is not: in terms, that is, of the continuity it interrupts, the unity it breaks apart, the authority it contests, the norms it breaches. reasons for this strange state of affairs are admittedly not hard to find. They follow in part from the concept of the fragment itself. As Adorno argues in his posthumous (and itself fragmentary) Aesthetic Theory, a literary fragment forcibly never stands alone. It is always preceded by a totalising past or future whole which, however unavailable or simply hypothetical, is what constitutes the fragment as a fragment.

A turnInG 3

Without this memory or promise of totalisation, writes Adorno (and Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, albeit to different ends, will argue the same), there can be no such thing as a fragment. Both it and the absent whole to which it silently gestures belong together. ‘The category of the fragmentary which here finds its place’, remarks Adorno, referring to the proliferation of fragmentary, finished-unfinished works characteristic of the early twentieth century, ‘is not that of contingent particularity: the fragment is that part of the totality of the work which resists totality.’2

This is not to say the fragment is a mere figment of the writer’s or critic’s imagination. On the contrary, as Adorno explains, it is a crucial reminder that the totalising artwork can never properly coincide with itself and achieve closure. According to Adorno, it is of course the very purpose of art not to reconcile opposing tendencies, but rather to articulate the impossibility of reconciliation. Within this dialectic the intervention of the fragment is therefore crucial. As Adorno comments:

The ideological, affirmative aspect of the concept of the successful artwork has a corrective in the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect work. If perfect works did exist, this would mean reconciliation was possible amidst the unreconcilable to which art owes its allegiance. It would then be a case of art annulling its own concept; the turn to the fragile and the fragmentary [die Wendung zum Brüchigen und Fragmentarischen] is in reality an attempt to salvage art by dismantling the claim that works are what they cannot be and to which they must nevertheless aspire; both moments are contained in the fragment.3

As these words suggest, modern literature’s turn to the fragment was for Adorno a function of a double philosophico-historical process. First, it was a token of broken promises, of defeat and failure: the failure of culture to preserve itself from barbarism, the failure of art to engage in progressive fashion with its own social and political destiny, from which it retreated, or was forced to retreat, in order to preserve its fragile, provisional, perhaps even sham autonomy. Fragmentary writing in this sense was nothing new, merely a symptom of a larger history that spoke of the impasse affecting modern art, its disengagement and decline. Not for nothing did Adorno cheerfully suggest then to his readers they might view as a


literal indictment of the last hundred and fifty years Hegel’s famous dictum, from the first of the Lectures on Aesthetics of the 1820s, that ‘art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]’.4 Was it not already clear by the second half of the nineteenth century, he adds, that art’s days were numbered, citing in support the example of rimbaud, abruptly abandoning at the age of eighteen his burgeoning career as a poet in order to take up a position elsewhere, says Adorno, as a junior clerk?5

rimbaud’s lapse into silence, though it showed the direction of things to come, did not however mean art was finished. rené Char in 1948 was not alone in proclaiming in a prose poem of the kind inaugurated by his illustrious precursor that ‘you were quite right to leave, Arthur rimbaud!’6 For from within the sequestered confines to which it was relegated, art nevertheless owed it to itself still to carry on, Adorno insisted, and to keep playing the game, not unlike Hamm in Beckett’s Fin de partie (Endgame), a play much admired by the German thinker, and whose tenuous ironic structures, disintegrating as the work progresses, were all that art in the philosopher’s view could truthfully muster in the wake of those events to which, like others to come, he elected to give the epochal name of Auschwitz. Failure to conclude, in other words, did not relieve the artwork of the possibility of persisting in failure. As Beckett’s protagonist had it, ‘[l]a fin est dans le commencement et cependant on continue’, ‘[t]he end is in the beginning and yet you go on’.7 Here stood the second moment in Adorno’s dialectic. For even as the fragment testifies to totalisation’s failure, it also makes a paradoxical and problematic last-ditch attempt to redeem art by recalling it to those very duties it cannot fulfil. The fragment here protests, resists, objects, challenging the totalising artwork as such, together with those social, political, and economic forces that have turned artistic expression into an alienated consumer product. But while doing so, it also strives to save the prospect of the work by insisting on what art nevertheless must undertake, in times of ideological and aesthetic distress, even if few illusions remain regarding the possibility of any effective or successful outcome. But art, Adorno points out, is not an activity that chooses to be ruled by effectivity or success.

So far, so good, it may be said; and there is little doubt that Adorno provides a critically probing, nuanced account of the

A turnInG 5

possibilities and impossibilities that the art of the fragment reveals. It is however apparent that in Adorno’s presentation of the dialectical relationship between protesting fragment and unreconciled work one of these two contradictory moments (necessarily) takes precedence over the other: that of the finished-unfinished, ironically reflexive modern or modernist artwork, whose incompletion is paradoxical – dialectical – testimony to its status as a work animated by a totalising if unsatisfied ambition to be what it must be, that is, an integrated artwork. For its part, though its testimony may be significant, the role of the fragment remains entirely secondary, its structure and status always already predetermined by the deferred, delayed, problematic possibility of the artwork to which, in spite of itself, it is held to aspire. As a result of the negative dialectic of which it is no more than a minor function, the fragment itself is at best a passing phase, so to speak, a mournful hiatus in the realisation or non-realisation of the futural totality of the work.

For Adorno it therefore follows that in an important sense the fragment as such does not exist. In order to be what it is, the fragment must be detachable from a possible past, present, or future whole. For Adorno, however, no sooner is the fragment detached from that whole than by dialectical recuperation it becomes an integral part of it. So long as it is a fragment, in other words, it is part of an absent whole; however once it is deemed to be part of that whole, it ceases properly to be a fragment. The totality that confers on the fragment the status of a fragment also denies it the status of a fragment. The fragment lives on, then, only as a kind of lingering, ghostly memory of itself, without specificity, singularity, or self-identity; and this arguably explains, despite Adorno’s own long-standing preference for fragmentary forms of writing, as witnessed for instance by the aphoristic structure of Minima Moralia, or by the self-consciously exploratory nature of the essays found in the four-volume Notes to Literature, why there is little explicit treatment of the fragmentary as such in the whole five hundred pages of the Aesthetic Theory. In the end, fragmentary writing for Adorno, it seems, is merely one of the ways in which compromised, damaged, or unachievable totality, in pessimistic if critical vein, speaks of its fraught, divided relation to itself.

But what if this concept of fragmentary writing were itself a deep expression of nostalgia, a melancholy symptom of unrequited


yearning for the totalising artwork of old? What if, rather than being subordinate to the dialectic of the work, fragmentary writing preceded and exceeded the very possibility of any work, leaving it always already undone, dispersed, and put asunder, its impossible pretensions to aesthetic totalisation merely an unsustainable, regressive hypothesis? What if, in the end, the fragment were therefore both more and less than a secondary, negative effect of the work, and what if the impossibility of defining it in itself and as such were its most prodigious resource? And what if the abiding indeterminacy of the fragment, rather than indicating a duty to labour in vain towards the completion of the work, suggested instead an entirely different conception of literature, one that was no longer subject to the logic of the work but, beyond presence, autonomy, or reflexive closure, affirmed itself instead as the futural promise of a radical multiplication of writing as a proliferating series of singular events?

These questions are not idle ones. From the 1950s onwards they emerged tenaciously and persistently as key concerns in the writing of the French novelist, critic, and thinker, Maurice Blanchot, serving to inform not only the writer’s account of literature, literary criticism, philosophy, and politics, but also his own work as an author of fiction and of many other, more and less than fictional, more and less than essayistic fragmentary texts. Blanchot was not however some latecomer, casting postmodern doubt on the achievements of his predecessors. On the contrary, he was Adorno’s virtual contemporary, born scarcely four years after his German counterpart, and sharing with him (aside from a vastly different appreciation of the importance of Heidegger) not only many of the same literary and philosophical points of reference, including Hölderlin, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Valéry, Proust, Kafka, Surrealism, and Beckett, but also some of the same historical experiences, albeit from a very different political, ideological, and geographical standpoint. In his engagement with literary modernity, however, Blanchot also came to significantly different conclusions concerning the possibility or impossibility of art in the time of distress it fell to both men to witness. For while similarly rethinking the legacy of traditional, i.e., Hegelian aesthetics, Blanchot attempted something arguably far more radical than Adorno, which was to resist, without compromise, the romantic or Modernist temptation, even though it might sometimes profess the opposite, to subordinate fragmentary

A turnInG 7

writing to a conception of the unified artwork and the dialectic of realisation or unrealisation it implied.8

Otherwise than Adorno, then, the challenge Blanchot sought to meet was to turn the fragment not towards the irretrievable past, nor even the recalcitrant present, but towards a future irreducible to any present and beyond the reach of any dialectic. This meant no longer treating the fragment as governed primarily by negativity, but affirming it instead as an always other promise of futurity, which in turn implied an entirely different relationship with writing, thinking, time, and politics. As the world threatens increasingly to move into a new and perhaps even final epoch, dominated by globalised exploitation, technological uniformity, and cynical nihilism, it has arguably become more urgent than ever to draw on the resources of Blanchot’s still neglected rethinking of the fragment. An important task faces readers here, which is to relinquish residual fascination with the fully achieved artwork, which in any case, as Adorno agrees, does not exist, and to explore further, outside of unity, outside of myth, outside of literature even, what is at stake in fragmentary writing and what therefore comes to be affirmed in Blanchot’s own late fragmentary texts.

As Blanchot was aware, the attempt to rethink the fragment is not without risks. There was always the danger, as Derrida was keen to emphasise, that ‘just like ellipsis, the fragment – the “I’ve said virtually nothing and take it back immediately” – might maximise [potentialise] the dominance [maîtrise] of the entire remaining discourse, hijacking [arraisonnant] all future continuities and supplements in advance’. Blanchot took the admonishment seriously. To signal his agreement, however, he chose to reproduce Derrida’s warning some sixteen or so pages before the end of L’Écriture du désastre – as a fragment of a fragment.9 This was to imply that the risk of dialectical recuperation, however real, was only one possibility among others, and that, whatever its subsequent complicities or compromises, fragmentary writing was also inseparable from a kind of sovereign disobedience which meant that it necessarily contested all forms of authority, including its own. What fragmentary writing put at risk, then, was not only the possibility of totality, including the negative totality envisioned by Adorno and suspected by Derrida; it was also the case that, once the fragment secured its divorce from any memory or prospect of totalisation, it ceased to be identifiable as a fragment at all, and was


therefore left to affirm itself anew, not as what it was, since it was plainly without proper definition, but as always other than what it pretended to be: as an irrepressible force of dispersion, proliferation, and multiplicity. Dangers such as these, according to Blanchot, were not only unavoidable; they were to be welcomed, for what they demonstrated above all else was the fragment’s resistance to all forms of identity or certainty. As Blanchot puts it in L’Écriture du désastre:

¨ Fragmentary writing might well be the greatest risk. It does not refer to any theory, and does not give rise to any practice definable by interruption. Even when it is interrupted, it carries on. Putting itself in question [s’interrogeant], it does not take control [ne s’arroge pas] of the question but suspends it (without maintaining it) as a non-response. If it claims that its time is when the whole – at least ideally – is supposedly realised, this is because that time is never certain [n’est jamais sûr], is absence of time, absence in a non-negative sense [en un sens non privatif], anterior to all present-past [antérieure à tout passéprésent] and seemingly posterior to all possibility of any presence to come [comme postérieure à toute possibilité d’une présence à venir].10

With these words, Blanchot puts forward a radically new agenda. For what is inscribed in fragmentary writing, in response to the demand of the fragment, is no codicil or belated homage to totality, no failed adjunct or piece of literary jetsam left floating after modernity’s collapse, but a different relation to time irreducible to the dialectical temporality of the work, a different temporality, in other words, that Blanchot elsewhere will describe as un changement d’époque, a change of epoch, which is not simply, or even at all, a new period in history but, more precisely and more importantly, features as a turning, a caesura, a step beyond, a moment of pure time, so to speak, in which what appears (without however appearing as such) is absolutely other. From which it follows, as Adorno perhaps suspected, that it can no longer be said with confidence what a fragment ‘is’, or even if it ‘is’ at all. This is one of Blanchot’s most incisive interventions. For in so far as it escapes any attribution of ontic or ontological identity, his writing suggests, the fragment is no longer an (aesthetic) object

A turnInG 9

nor a preamble to any (aesthetic) work at all. It is a demand, a requirement or an imperative, an exigency (from the Latin exagere, to force out or extract) that draws writing and thinking beyond the shelter of philosophy, culture, or art towards something still without name, in the direction of what, as early as 1952, in an essay on Kafka, Blanchot called the outside, ‘the streaming flow of the timeless outside’, ‘le ruissellement du dehors éternel’.11 Which is also to say that one of the implications of the fragment is to call upon readers, writers, and others, to begin to ‘sense [pressentir: i.e., to feel something before it is properly present] that nothing fragmentary yet exists [qu’il n’y a encore rien de fragmentaire], not properly speaking, but improperly speaking’.12

Fragmentary writing, then, corresponds to nothing that can be identified as such. It is a non-phenomenal, spectral event in both writing and thinking that it is possible – perhaps – only to affirm: as a radical futural trace irreducible to presence. And in the pages that follow, with Blanchot’s help, this will be the thought this book will endeavour to pursue and prolong.

II

Writing the future

‘– Would you agree: there is every certainty we are at a turning [un tournant]?’ ‘– If there is every certainty, it is hardly a turning. The fact that we may be witnessing a change of epoch [un changement d’époque] (if such exists [s’il y en a]) surely also affects the certainty with which we might define that change, making both certainty and uncertainty equally inappropriate.’

BLANCHOT, L’Entretien infini13

The mid- to late 1950s prompted a remarkable sea-change in Blanchot’s writing career. They coincided in particular with a crucial historical or historial moment that, with all due precautions, the author was soon to describe, in April 1960, as a change of epoch: a period of interruption, displacement, and undecidability. A certain history, he suggested, had reached an uncertain point of closure; something unprecedented and necessarily indeterminable was in the


offing, both on and yet beyond the horizon. As Blanchot was at pains to point out, the long-term consequences of that turning – ‘if such exists’, he insisted – were incalculable. The more immediate effects on his own intellectual project were however dramatic.

On at least three distinct, but closely related fronts.First, the relationship between Blanchot’s fictional texts and the

institution of literature underwent a remarkable shift. Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man), first published in 1957, bore its title like an ironic promise, and was indeed to be the last of Blanchot’s récits or shorter fictional narratives explicitly to designate or present itself as such. L’Attente L’Oubli (Awaiting Oblivion) from 1962, though legible in part as a narrative, declined from the outset to ascribe itself to any given or even recognisable genre. True enough, Blanchot’s fiction had long maintained an uneasy relationship with the expectations of literary form. From L’Arrêt de mort (Death Sentence) onwards, all the writer’s shorter narratives had offered themselves to reading as interrogative explorations whose exorbitant status is paradoxically confirmed by the modesty with which they fall short of narrative and exceed their own boundaries by withdrawing from them. If stories such as L’Arrêt de mort, Au moment voulu (When the Time Comes), and Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me) belong to the genre of narrative, then, it is only in so far as they give voice to the impossibility of narrative itself, the non-occurrence of the event or events they struggle to narrate, and their own infinite futurity as a witnessing of the finite.

Le Dernier Homme did this too, but went one step further. For it ends, not by bringing a residual narrative to a proper or even improper close, but by a vertiginous act or non-act of fragmentary and abyssal self-citation: ‘Later [Plus tard]’, we read, ‘he wondered how he had become so calm. He was unable to talk about it with himself. Only joy at feeling in relation with the words [en rapport avec les mots]: “Later, he. . . [Plus tard, il. . .]”’.14 In finishing or, better, in suspending the possibility of its finishing in this way, Blanchot’s récit detaches itself from itself in order to display a singular logic of duplicitous self-repetition, which twenty years later the text went on to reaffirm in an astonishing manifestation of simultaneous self-referral and self-displacement, when in 1977, without changing in any other respect bar this respect itself, the book suddenly began redescribing itself, to incontrovertible

A turnInG 11

but undecidable effect, as a new version of itself, as Le Dernier Homme: nouvelle version. (The two dozen actual, but largely insignificant changes to the 1977 version that differentiate it from the 1957 text were already in place in the printing immediately preceding, dated 24 March 1971, which, far from describing itself as a new version of the récit, did not even present itself as a récit at all!) This most perfect of repetitions, then, was also the purest of variations – and this most spectral of returns the most decisive of metamorphoses. In future, after Le Dernier Homme, as La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day) had already intimated, there would indeed be ‘no more récits’ as such. For each of the fictional, parafictional, or semi-fictional narratives that followed, including the reissue of L’Arrêt de mort in 1971 and of La Folie du jour in 1973, not to mention the 1971 printing of Le Dernier Homme, as well as all subsequent editions of these texts, including the very last, almost already posthumous text, L’Instant de ma mort (The Instant of My Death), was to be ironically voided of any explicit generic categorisation.15

This scepticism with regard to conventional generic markers should not be seen as a repudiation of narrative as such. It serves rather to emphasise the extent to which narrative in Blanchot was from the outset a mode or manner of writing whose contours and self-identity were constantly in question. ‘There is nothing self-evident about story-telling [Raconter ne va pas de soi]’, the author put it in 1964 apropos of Kafka.16 The notorious closing words of La Folie du jour, cited above, alongside numerous other possible examples, said the same: ‘A story? [Un récit?]’, the reader is told, ‘No, no story, ever again [Non, pas de récit, plus jamais]’.17 But who writes or speaks these words? Is it the narrator of Blanchot’s story, in which case he might simply be thought to be contradicting himself, declaring an end to storytelling at the very moment he is retelling the end of his story? Or is it some authorial figure, coming reluctantly to a disappointed or disappointing conclusion, or even making a sincere but unverifiable promise? Either way, it is clear that the text gives the lie to whoever may be thought to speak on its behalf, and the audience is left at the end moving uncertainly back and forth, in perpetual oscillation, between a story that is not a story and an absence of story that tells a story of some kind. The text, in the end, cannot be delimited, and the question remains forever in suspense. Was or is La Folie du jour a story at all? If


so, or not, what is it that happened or did not happen? And what might then be at stake in such a singularly indeterminable (non-)event?

Beginnings, middles, and endings, it is well known, are what give stories their definition, direction, and purpose, and La Folie du jour, by redoubling its apparent beginning and ending, and folding them into a middle that is itself dispatched to the edge, as Derrida has shown, repeatedly challenges its own narrative coherence and structure.18 La Folie du jour has no proper beginning nor ending, no development other than its own occurrence as a story that may be told only in so far as it resists or exceeds its telling, and is possible as an act of narration only in so far as it measures up to the impossibility of narration. Vertiginous though they are, these paradoxes are not however extraordinary or exceptional. running through La Folie du jour in common with all Blanchot’s narratives is the realisation that no narrative, without exception, can ever begin or end itself.19 No narrative can dominate its own borders; all storytelling relies on an outside to which it silently appeals but which it cannot name. This is what in the discussion of Kafka mentioned earlier Blanchot describes as ‘la voix narrative’, the narrating voice, referring to that possibility of narrative that is necessarily prior to the work and without which the work cannot be written, but has no existence outside the work and no possibility of appearing within the work, where it functions instead only as a kind of absent ground perpetually divorcing the work from itself. As Blanchot explains:

The narrating voice, which is inside only to the extent that it is outside, at a distance without distance, cannot embody itself: whether it takes on the voice of a judiciously chosen character, or even creates the hybrid function of a mediator (this voice that ruins all mediation), it is always different from whoever or whatever utters it: it is the indifferent-difference that disrupts the personal voice. Let us (for amusement) call it spectral, ghostlike [spectrale, fantomatique].20

Each and every narrative, then, in so far as it comes to be written at all, is exposed to the outside. Even when a narrative is complete, it is simultaneously necessarily incomplete. Any narrative, that is all there is, is always less and more than all there is. ‘Is’ it even at all, Blanchot (and, later, Derrida) will ask? Even in the absence of any

A turnInG 13

actual or hypothetical whole of which it may be considered to be a fragment, it is in any case always already a fragment – of that which cannot be integrated or incorporated within it, and which does not exist as such. This is what is most powerfully at stake in Blanchot’s threefold (re)writing of Le Dernier Homme: Le Dernier Homme, récit (1957); Le Dernier Homme (1971); and Le Dernier Homme, nouvelle version (1977). Le Dernier Homme is all there is; but each version, each turning, returning, or return of the text is only one of a multitude, each of which is the same as each of the others, without ever being identical with it.21 In its multiple, repetitive (re)writings, Le Dernier Homme is like a perpetual quotation of itself: repeatedly the same, but therefore different, constantly stepping aside from itself, stepping (not) beyond itself, without self-coincidence or self-identity. As its title suggests, Blanchot’s text is both final and finite, but it is also incomplete and infinite: a fragment. What marks it as a text traversed by the fragmentary is not its relative brevity, then, but its inability to end, whether properly or improperly. This does not mean it is necessarily continuous with itself. On the contrary, as it moves towards its suspended conclusion, Le Dernier Homme becomes increasingly discontinuous, intermittent, dispersed across a number of possible voices, styles, tenses, and typefaces. But nor does this imply Blanchot’s text is an exercise in negativity, a failed attempt to articulate the ineffable. Indeed one of the most powerful motifs in Le Dernier Homme, in its innumerable possible versions, is the motif of affirmation: ‘The happiness of saying yes, of affirming without end [Bonheur de dire oui, d’affirmer sans fin]’, says the narrator in Le Dernier Homme, repeating the phrase two more times in the book, each time varying it, as though to remind readers that repetition, as in the rewriting of the text itself, never guarantees identity, but is always creative of difference, dispersion, multiplicity.22

Le Dernier Homme was finally published in January 1957. Prior to that date, or coinciding with it, following common French publishing practice, various prepublication extracts from the text had already appeared in magazines, notably Botteghe Oscure, La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française, and Monde nouveau.23 Some years before, something similar had happened with selections from Au moment voulu and Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas.24 In the case of those earlier narratives, the passages published had been relatively autonomous sections of the text, and up to a point the


same is true of the extracts from Le Dernier Homme. But the final selection from the book in the January 1957 issue of Monde nouveau managed to piece together, as one continuous whole, no fewer than four separate passages from the book, bearing witness, as it were, to the increasing propensity of Blanchot’s prose to lend itself to fragmentary rearrangement.

It therefore came as little surprise to some readers, in August the following year, to be confronted, under the title ‘L’Attente [Waiting]’, with an extract from another forthcoming work which began in continuous prose, only quickly to transform itself into a series of free-standing paragraph-long fragments, each separated from the others by a five-pronged floral device standing at its head.25 A second extract, under the same title, and containing some of the same sentences, albeit in a different sequence and with other textual material, appeared a year later in a Festschrift for the philosopher Martin Heidegger, while in October 1961, some months before the publication of L’Attente L’Oubli, the future book to which both extracts seemed to be pointing, readers of an essay on Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie (History of Madness) in La Nouvelle Revue française were given to consider a three-page introduction, ‘Sur l’oubli [On forgetting]’, which in turn reiterated and refashioned many similar ideas and formulations.26 Literary narrative, philosophical tribute, critical essay: the same body of writing by Blanchot seemed to be traversing all these genres, applying itself purposefully to each and respecting their different responsibilities, while at the same time exposing them, together with itself, to the threat or promise of what escaped them. What this announced was that Blanchot’s fictional writing, assuming the expression may be maintained at all, had already entered into a new and challenging phase: that of the fragmentary.

It was not only Blanchot’s literary narratives that testified to this sense of epochal change. The future possibility of literary criticism was also crucially at issue. The publication of Blanchot’s Le Livre à venir (The Book to Come) in 1959 marked another important threshold. The book gathered together a selection of the writer’s monthly essays from the period between July 1953 and June 1958 for La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française (as the title of the journal remained until 1959, a consequence of its appropriation by the Nazis during the Occupation). One early article briskly sums up Blanchot’s thinking. ‘Où va la littérature?’,

A turnInG 15

‘Whither literature?’, it asked. The answer was disconcertingly straightforward. ‘Literature’, Blanchot answered, ‘is heading towards itself, towards its essence which is disappearance [la disparition].’27 The goal of literature, Blanchot explained, meaning both its purpose and its destination, could no longer be identified with some external source of value, whether cultural, human, or natural. But neither could it be located within the work itself, as a function of its aesthetic autonomy or its status as truthful or alethic disclosure. Literature’s end, Blanchot put it, was inseparable from its ending: its erasure and effacement.

Like Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory, and as Heidegger had also done some years earlier in the postface to ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Blanchot in his essay recalls Hegel’s celebrated remark of 1820–21 declaring art to be already ‘a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]’.28 Hegel’s position, put forward, paradoxically enough, as Blanchot was quick to emphasise, at a time of intense cultural, philosophical, and literary activity in Germany, was that art in the modern age had forfeited its ‘authentic truth and vitality [die echte Wahrheit und Lebendigkeit]’.29 It had lost, so to speak, its teleological mission. Art, in other words, had parted company with history, truth, reality; worldly action, science, philosophy had taken over. For the first time in its existence, according to Hegel, art was now merely an object of aesthetic, literary critical contemplation, which is also to say that for the first time it was now properly constituted as itself, as art. This end of art, then, was also its beginning, and its demise the promise of a rebirth: as other than it was.

In Le Livre à venir Blanchot in the first instance appears largely to endorse Hegel’s verdict, which is also the verdict of philosophy or history, as Heidegger and Adorno, in their vastly differing ways, seem to agree. But while Blanchot concurs that art and truth (in Hegel’s sense) have henceforth consummated their divorce, he diverges forcibly in his assessment of this development. He is not prompted to reinterpret the history and meaning of truth, nor does he endeavour to recast Hegel’s argument in the direction of a materialist or negative dialectic. Instead, Blanchot seizes a chance and takes a risk. The risk is that of art itself: this ‘arduous, tortuous search in the dark [recherche obscure, difficile et tourmentée]’, this ‘essentially risky experience in which art, the work, truth, and the essence of language are all put in jeopardy, are all part of what is at risk.’30 For Blanchot, the fall of art is not proof of its historical submission to philosophical or


metaphysical truth; it is the sign of a more essential, more radical lapse into the necessary possibility of its own endless self-questioning. And art that continually questions itself, Blanchot argues, which as art is inseparable from its self-questioning, paradoxically enough cannot exist as art, but only as a withdrawal or retreat from art. No sooner does literature appear to itself as possibility, then, than it disappears as impossibility; no sooner is the work of art constituted as such than it gives way to its own worklessness.

Blanchot in this way neither entirely confirms nor entirely contradicts Hegel. He follows Hegel’s thought part of the way, only then to displace it, sidestepping the numerous other implications, historical here, ontological there, which for their part Adorno and Heidegger draw from Hegel’s diagnosis. For it is soon apparent from Blanchot’s perspective that neither history nor ontology can provide a solution to art’s questioning. Not only is art irreducible to history, from whose progress it is excluded; it is also incapable of making any persuasive claims as to its own essence. It survives therefore only as a furtive, fleeting trace of its own erasure. History does not hold the truth of literature, nor does literature disclose the truth of being. Like language itself, literature is without inside or outside, beginning or end, archè or telos. As Blanchot goes on,

it is precisely the essence of literature to escape any determination of its essence, any assertion which might stabilise it or even turn it into a reality: literature is never given, but remains always to be rediscovered or reinvented. It is not even certain that the word ‘literature’, or ‘art’, corresponds to anything real, or possible, or important.

And he continues,

Whoever affirms literature in itself affirms nothing. Whoever seeks it seeks only that which slips away; whoever finds it finds only what falls short of literature or, even worse, what lies beyond it. This is why, in the end, it is non-literature that each book pursues as the essence of what it loves and yearns passionately to discover.31

But if the artwork by definition cannot coincide with itself, what then of the literary criticism that derives its coherence and rationale from

A turnInG 17

the presumed existence of the object called literature? The question is an urgent one, with far-reaching implications, for whoever like Blanchot writes on literature and endeavours to say something meaningful about it. For while on the one hand literature’s non-coincidence with itself is what makes literary criticism possible, since without it the critic would simply have nothing to say, so on the other, for the exact same reason, no criticism, by the power of its discourse, can ever overcome the incompletion of the work it seeks to make its own. The artwork cannot endorse or validate the words of the critic, and literary criticism is quickly brought to the uncomfortable realisation not only that it is entirely parasitical on the artwork, but also that its own discourse is necessarily superfluous to the existence of the work. Ironically, however, if this were not the case, criticism again would have little alternative but to fall silent. Paradoxically, then, it is the inability of literary criticism to guarantee the truth of what it says about the artwork that is the best, nay only, hope of its longevity. Its survival, in other words, is not a result of the discursive authority or rigour it prides itself on possessing, but a function of its founding, inescapable impotence.32 In this, of course, it shares more than might at first have appeared with the literature it adopts as its object. For just as the one is premised on its irresistible disappearance, so the other is ultimately reliant on its abiding failure. By a surprising twist, literature and criticism, which a moment ago seemed to exist in an inverse relationship, find themselves exposed to the same risks of interminability, irrelevance, and incompetence. Blanchot more than others, from the early 1960s onwards, proved particularly sensitive to this unexpected convergence. In his writing, the border between the two, without ever being abolished, became as a result increasingly permeable. As the literature being written and published at the time refused more and more to legitimise itself by appeals to truth or to established values, so criticism too found itself in much the same quandary, forced to devise for itself a new strategy and a new language.

Two examples of Blanchot’s changing critical idiom in response will suffice. In April 1960, the writer published a first, broadly philosophical dialogue, the ‘Entretien sur un changement d’époque [Conversation on a change of epoch]’ in La Nouvelle Revue française. This he followed up three months later with a second dialogue initially entitled ‘La Marche de l’écrevisse [Walking Sideways]’.33 A year after the ‘Entretien’, he also published a review of Beckett’s recently


published novel, Comment c’est (How It Is), which is made up of a continuous-discontinuous sequence of detached, unpunctuated, strophe-like blocks, like so many movements or motions of text, which slowly trace a narrative of sorts, involving a body or procession of bodies crawling through mud, interacting occasionally and violently with the help of a providential tin-opener: ‘in me that were without when the panting stops scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine’.34 Faced with so many fragmentary bribes, the majority of critics at the time saw it as their task to make Beckett’s novel more accessible to its readership, which they largely did by describing it as a further episode in that long sequence of solipsistic soliloquising on the part of an increasingly disembodied consciousnesss, begun, it was argued, in Molloy, Malone meurt, and L’Innommable some ten years earlier. But not so Blanchot, who responded instead to the unruly, disconcerting strangeness of Beckett’s writing by transforming his own critical commentary into a hesitant and inconclusive dialogue between two (or more) unnamed interlocutors, each grappling with the problematic challenge of passing judgement on Beckett’s fragmentary, fragmented, disorientating, and sometimes shocking text. ‘Truly [En vérité]’, says one of these voices, ‘what to say about a work?’ And it carries on:

Do we even dare say, in praising Beckett’s How It Is, that it will live on in posterity? Would we even want to praise it? Which is not to say it is beyond praise, rather that it discredits all praise, and that it would be paradoxical therefore to read it with admiration. There is a category of works that are more misunderstood by being praised than by being denigrated; to disparage them is to touch the power of refusal [la puissance de refus] that has made them what they are and to witness the distance that is their measure [l’éloignement qui les mesure].

Do some books – those of the Marquis de Sade, for instance – even want to be read?, asks a further, perhaps the same voice; to which another voice offers the following rejoinder:

Let us say perhaps that works like these, and Beckett’s in particular, bring closer together, far more than is customary, both the movement of writing and the movement of reading, seeking to integrate the two in an experience that, while not joint, is at

A turnInG 19

least barely differentiated; and here we come back to the idea of indifference, of a neutral affirmation, equal-unequal [d’une affirmation neutre, égaleinégale], beyond the grasp of anything that might valorise or even affirm it [la valoriser ou même l’affirmer].35

The lesson, then, was clear. Criticism, with its abiding appeal to values and truth, had no purchase on the ‘little blurts [petits paquets]’ and ‘midget grammar [grammaire d’oiseau]’36 of Comment c’est, which refuse to obey its normative assumptions. Faced with Beckett’s ‘novel’ (which is how the original 1961 Minuit text described itself), criticism was disabled, forced to carry on, if at all, only by enduring through its own interruption. It had no other option, in other words, than to affirm its own impossibility. True enough, the text to be read still required its reader, in the sense of both needing and obligating that reader; but reading itself was now bound to discretion: both reserve and discontinuity.

This is the strategy that informs many of Blanchot’s critical essays from the early 1960s. Alongside Beckett, another influential figure in the writer’s changing critical strategy was the poet rené Char, to whom he devoted two important essays, subsequently collected, with significant revisions, in L’Entretien infini: ‘rené Char et la pensée du neutre [rené Char and the Thought of the Neuter]’ (1963) and ‘Parole de fragment [Fragmentary Speaking]’ (1964).37 Char’s prominence for Blanchot was not insignificant, for the poet too was a writer of fragmentary texts, fiercely admiring of Heraclitus, a translation of whose fragments he briefly prefaced in 1948.38 responding to Char in the early 1960s, Blanchot adopted a range of shifting approaches. The 1963 essay, for instance, is in three distinct sections: the first consists of a series of expository, digressive remarks concerning Char’s use of impersonal, neuter expressions, like those found in Heraclitus, turning on the question of poetry’s relationship (its rapport) with the unknown (l’inconnu); next, as a kind of abyssal illustration of this relationship without relationship with the unknown, Blanchot provides a dialogue between unnamed interlocutors, before signing off on a modest, more personal note with a brief evocation of the current, beleaguered status of Char the poet (who at the time was much criticised in France for the fragmentary quality of his recent work), which concludes, in the version contained in L’Entretien infini, with


an unsourced fragment from Char’s Pauvreté et privilège, which is inscribed in Char’s original, to meaningful effect, with two politically resonant locations and dates: Algiers 1944, Paris 1967.39

Two sentences earlier, Blanchot had defended Char in the following terms: ‘What was written still at the margin [en marge] is no longer solely marginal [marginal]’.40 Underscoring the implications of this remark, passing so to speak from margin to interjection, immediately after the version of ‘rené Char et la pensée du neutre’ given in L’Entretien infini, and again immediately after the version of ‘Parole de fragment’ that follows it, Blanchot added two further fragmentary dialogues, printed in italics, each published for the first time in L’Entretien infini, which served to supplement the two original essays with two additional sequences of fragmentary remarks, each consisting of six or seven fragmentary subsections marked with a redoubled mathematical plus-minus neuter sign: , and each bearing the title: Parenthèses. This twofold, redoubled title was in itself, of course, already double: for these two Parenthèses not only inscribed a redoubled parenthesis within Blanchot’s book, the continuity of which they interrupted, suspended, and fragmented, they also offered a possible thematic or philosophical treatment – albeit one that fell short of being a full-blown thesis, i.e. not a thèse but only a parenthèse, not a positing but a putting between or alongside – of the phenomenon of parenthetical bracketing inseparable from language as such, and thus always already announcing the threat or promise of the fragment. Blanchot’s two fragmentary parentheses, then, in so far as they were fragments, were necessarily parenthetic; in so far as they were parenthetic, they were necessarily always already fragments.

The main conceptual or quasi-conceptual burden of Blanchot’s two parentheses was the thought of the neuter he had begun expounding in the first Char essay. In the opening paragraph of ‘Parole de fragment’, in a passage added in 1969, Blanchot turned to glossing the still implicit relationship between the neuter and the fragmentary announced some pages earlier in L’Entretien infini by way of the subtitle used for the third section of the book (‘L’Absence de livre: le neutre le fragmentaire’), borrowed, with its word order reversed, from the second piece on Char. Char’s recourse to fragmentary writing, Blanchot explained, ‘shows us how to hold together [tenir ensemble], like a repeated expression,

A turnInG 21

the fragmentary the neuter [le fragmentaire le neutre] even if the repetition only repeats this enigmatic relation’.41 In writing or rewriting le neutre le fragmentaire or le fragmentaire le neutre in this way, Blanchot sought to make at least two points. First, by simply juxtaposing the two expressions without punctuation, he indicated a relationship between them, but abstained from specifying that relationship, which was evoked as a kind of unknown relationship (or relationship with the unknown) that might always revert to an indeterminate relationship without relationship. Second, by carefully reversing the terms of the relationship, he refrained from imposing any hierarchical structure upon them, with the result that neither the neuter nor the fragmentary can be said to contain the truth of the other. What counts then, in Blanchot’s thinking of the neuter the fragmentary or the fragmentary the neuter, is not any of these terms in themselves, but the movement between them, by which each prolongs, displaces, replaces, suspends, brackets, or fragments the other.

Each term in Blanchot’s pairing, then, comes to be haunted by the other and no longer coincides with itself as a self-identical concept. Each moreover is only available in Blanchot’s text as a kind of third-person adjectival substantive or substantivised adjective, albeit a substantive without substance, so to speak, i.e. simultaneously as both noun and adjective, but by that token neither the one nor the other and irreducible to both. As he unfolds the expression ‘fragmentary speaking [parole de fragment]’, Blanchot goes on to insist that the fragment or fragmentary, like the neuter, is not merely the effect of some prior simple or dialectical unity. Admittedly, the temptation of seeing it in those terms cannot easily be dismissed. But what is crucial for Blanchot is that the disseminating force of writing necessarily precedes the possibility of any unified or totalising work. ‘Fragmentary speaking [Parole de fragment]’, he writes: ‘a term that is hard to approach. “Fragment”, a noun, but having the force of a verb which nevertheless does not exist: like a fracture [brisure: both break and join], a scattering without debris [brisées sans débris: brisée refers to a broken branch leaving a trace or trail], interruption as speech, when the halting [l’arrêt] of intermittence does not halt [n’arrête pas] the process but, on the contrary, provokes it in its very disjointedness [la rupture qui lui appartient]. To speak of a fragment is to refer not merely to the fragmentation of an already existing reality nor to some


future whole’. ‘[I]n the violence of the fragment’, Blanchot adds, ‘in particular, that violence to which rené Char gives us access, an entirely other relation [un tout autre rapport] is released, at least as a promise and a task.’42 Of this other relation, this relation with the other that the poem may be thought to enact, no doubt little can be presumed in advance, except that it exceeds any presumption of identity or dialectic of unity. ‘In this way, the fragmented poem’, Blanchot remarks, ‘is therefore a poem which is not incomplete [non pas inaccompli], but which makes available another manner of completion [accomplissement], that which is at stake in waiting [l’attente] and questioning [le questionnement] or in affirmation irreducible to unity’.43

These are cautious words. But if what is at issue in the fragmentary the neuter is another relation or relation with the other that cannot be determined or decided, such as Blanchot finds in waiting and questioning, this is not to imply that the neuter the fragmentary is a retreat from the necessity of decision or determination. On the contrary, argues Blanchot, the fragmentary the neuter in Char, as in Heraclitus, is not dedicated to quietistic sameness nor to contemplative passivity, but to Difference: ‘Difference that is secret because always deferring speaking and always differing from that which signifies it, but also such that everything makes a sign and becomes a sign because of it, which is sayable only indirectly, but not silent: at work in the detour of writing’.44 In following this turning, this turning aside or around, writing is not displaying a merely self-reflexive concern. On the contrary, albeit discreetly, Blanchot in both essays on Char in L’Entretien infini is keen to emphasise the political implications of this detour. In quoting the poet at the end of the first essay, as we have seen, in coded but patent manner, he was careful to remind readers of Char’s radical commitment to the resistance and his fierce opposition to the Gaullist regime. And in concluding ‘Parole de fragment’, Blanchot made a similar point, quoting back to Char, in acknowledgement and solidarity, the exact words Char had sent on rereading (in 1964) ‘La Perversion essentielle [Essential Perversion]’, that powerful diatribe with which Blanchot six years earlier had denounced de Gaulle’s return to power. ‘Politically’, Char had begun, ‘Maurice Blanchot can only go from disappointment to disappointment, that is to say, from courage to courage [ne peut aller que de déception en déception, c’estàdire de courage en courage], since he does not

A turnInG 23

have the amnesic fickleness of the majority of great contemporary writers’. ‘Thus, through fragmentary writing’, Blanchot concluded in reply, ‘the return of the hesperic accord is announced. It is the time of decline, but ascending decline [déclin d’ascendance], a pure detour in its strangeness: that which (rené Char somewhere says), making it possible to go from disappointment to disappointment, leads from courage to courage [permettant d’aller de déception en déception, conduit de courage en courage]. The gods? returning having never come.’45

What was at stake, then, for Blanchot in the turn to fragmentary writing during the late 1950s and early 1960s was not merely of literary, literary critical, or philosophical significance. There were political implications, too, which bore on the third important shift taking place in his thinking during that period, intimately related to these other changes, but with a specific exigency and urgency of its own: Blanchot’s return to active involvement in politics.

In 1958 Blanchot moved back to Paris from Èze, that village ‘in the South’ which features so mysteriously (and anonymously) in Au moment voulu, where despite frequent trips to Paris he had spent the bulk of the preceding decade. He quickly resumed the active interest in politics that had been such a powerful feature of his earlier career as a journalist working for a string of right-wing nationalist and conservative newspapers and magazines up until July or August 1940.46 But much had changed since then, and Blanchot’s main priority was now to exercise and defend what he described in 1984 as the right to unexpected speech, le droit à la parole inattendue, a right that for Blanchot the writer and intellectual was inseparable from the detour of the fragmentary.47 And as he renewed his passion for the political, Blanchot did so not as a dissident member of the nationalist right, as he had in the 1930s, but on the side of the radical non-communist left, notably in partnership with Dionys Mascolo, whom Blanchot joined in rejecting de Gaulle’s return to government as a so-called man of providence and in campaigning for an end to France’s undeclared colonial war in Algeria. As Mascolo recalled some years later, Blanchot’s first letter on receipt of the inaugural issue of Le 14 Juillet, the broadsheet Mascolo had founded with Jean Schuster to coordinate resistance to de Gaulle, was uncompromising in its simplicity and its commitment to the future: ‘I should like to express my agreement’, wrote Blanchot, ‘I accept neither the past nor the present.’48


Much of what happened next is relatively well known: Blanchot’s continuing support for the campaign against de Gaulle and, alongside Mascolo and others, his fierce opposition to the Algerian war, culminating in September 1960 in the ‘Manifeste des 121’, supporting French conscripts in refusing to take up arms in Algeria, which Blanchot was closely involved in drafting, though he always insisted that the ‘Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie’ (as it was more properly known) was a collective document, owned by all who signed it, and not attributable to any single author.49 It was this commitment to collective action, experienced in the resistance to the war, but pointing beyond Algerian independence itself, finally achieved at évian in April 1962, that led Blanchot and a number of friends and associates – Dionys Mascolo, robert Antelme, and Louis-rené des Forêts, together with Elio Vittorini, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and other collaborators from Italy, West Germany, and elsewhere – to form the project of an international journal which would bring together writers from France, Italy, and Germany, perhaps other countries too, and begin to challenge national and nationalist boundaries. But after extensive discussions, the project for the journal collapsed, a casualty of growing mistrust and disagreement between the French and German contingents.50

At least in conventional terms, the Revue internationale, as it has become known, was a failed enterprise, with merely a selection of essays, articles, and other interventions (including the first version of Blanchot’s ‘Parole de fragment’) appearing in Italian in 1964 in a solitary guest issue of the journal Il Menabò, edited by Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino. The demise of the project was keenly felt by Blanchot, but not before he had taken the opportunity, in preparatory discussion, to argue in favour of the necessary link between political intervention of the kind envisaged by him for the journal and the fragmentary writing he had been exploring since the late 1950s. For what was implicit in the turn to the fragmentary, among others, was the impossibility of attributing any text, explicitly fragmentary or not, to any single self-present origin. This meant not only that all texts were in a sense always already fragmentary, but that any fragmentary text already had an indeterminable, that is, always future relationship with the other or with others. This is what Blanchot had endeavoured to show in his reading of the poems of Char. By that logic, any fragmentary

A turnInG 25

text was always already a text with multiple authors; it was by definition a collective text that might be signed in a gesture of irreducible singularity by each and every indeterminable other. This is why for Blanchot it followed that the preferred manner of writing for the proposed journal would have to be fragmentary writing, carried out collectively and in common.

But how to tell the difference between that which may and that which may not be described as fragmentary, if indeed that difference exists? In a long paper bearing on the project at hand and not originally intended for publication, mindful too of the fact that the fragmentary was itself not one, but always already several, Blanchot set out in some detail the thought of the fragmentary that had come to dominate his relationship to literature, criticism, and philosophy and inflect his understanding of the political agenda as it presented itself in France and elsewhere in the early 1960s. Thinking aloud perhaps, as well as addressing his potential collaborators, Blanchot wrote as follows:

The journal will be made up of fragments, not articles (the essay searching for a form). Simplifying things, we can say that there are four types of fragments: (1) The fragment that is merely a dialectical moment within a much larger whole. (2) The elliptical, obscurely violent form of the aphorism which, as a fragment, is already complete in itself. Etymologically, aphorism means horizon, a horizon that limits and closes. (3) The fragment that is linked to questing mobility, and that nomadic thinking which occurs in affirmations that are separate from each other and demand to be separated (Nietzsche). (4) Finally, a literature of the fragment [une littérature de fragment] which stands outside the whole, either because it supposes the whole to have already been realised (all literature is a literature of the end of time), or because, alongside those forms of language in which the whole is articulated and expressed (i.e. knowledge, work, and salvation), literature senses an entirely other kind of speaking, releasing thought from simply being thought with a view to unity, in other words, demanding an essential discontinuity. In this sense, all literature is the fragment [toute littérature est le fragment], irrespective of whether it is short or infinitely long, provided it points to a space of language in which the sense and function of each and every moment is to render all others


indeterminate, or else (this is the other aspect) where what is at stake is some affirmation irreducible to any process of unification.51

The collapse of the Revue internationale was a painful disappoint-ment for Blanchot. But as Char had assured him, disappointment was only one part of the story, and in years to come, in publishing L’Attente L’Oubli in 1962, in composing during and after the événements of May 1968 various unsigned fragments that later appeared in the solitary October 1968 issue of the journal Comité, in reworking important sections of L’Entretien infini in 1969 (which also included a fragmentary narrative already entitled ‘L’Entretien infini’ from March 1966), and, most ambitiously of all, in refashioning a complex new, fragmentary idiom for himself in Le Pas audelà (The Step Not Beyond) and L’Écriture du désastre, Blanchot was to display extraordinary persistence and resourcefulness in keeping faith with the fragmentary. His aim, no doubt, was to affirm writing as a response to the threat and promise of the future. But before that he also had to reconsider the past history of the fragment, which he did by returning, more than once, to some influential predecessors: the Jena romantics, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, and, perhaps most importantly of all, Nietzsche.

III

From fragment to fragmentary

Many are the works of the ancients that have become fragments. Many are the works of the moderns that were fragments the moment they were produced [gleich bei der Entstehung].

FrIEDrICH SCHLEGEL, Athenaeum Fragments52

As Blanchot was aware, this was not the first time the fragment had been identified with literature’s future. Nor was it the first time the completion of philosophy had given way to the incompletion of writing; nor was it the first time the boundaries between fiction, theory, and criticism had been boldly redrawn; nor indeed was it the first time writing in fragments had been entrusted with a

A turnInG 27

new, challenging political purpose. To equate literature with the fragment, to rediscover the infinite within the finite, to reach a new understanding of poetry’s relationship with the unknown, these were already some of the most pressing concerns of those contemporaries of Hegel with whom the philosopher had grown quickly impatient: the Jena romantics, notably Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who in a brief period at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were among the first to explore the future possibilities and implications of fragmentary writing.

But there were, Blanchot pointed out, many different kinds of fragments. And on several occasions in the wake of his own turn to fragmentary writing, as already apropos of rené Char and Heraclitus, Blanchot was drawn to reconsider critically the past history of the poetic, literary, or philosophical fragment. An early contribution to that effort, from August 1964, sandwiched, appropriately enough, between texts dealing with interruption and the narrating voice, was an essay on the Athenaeum, that short-lived but hugely influential journal, edited by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel in Jena between 1798 and 1800, in which much of what is now commonly associated with the romantic artwork was first formulated.53

That there are several aspects of the Jena Frühromantik which find a ready echo in Blanchot’s writing has often been noted.54 Among these might be listed, for instance, the assertion that ‘where philosophy stops, so literature [Poesie] must begin’, as Fr. Schlegel puts it in fragment 45 of the Ideen of 1800, which Blanchot reworks in distinctive fashion; the recasting of the critical essay as semi-fictional dialogue, already attempted in Schlegel’s 1800 ‘Gespräch über Poesie [Dialogue on Poetry]’ and explored by Blanchot, as we have seen, in texts from the late 1950s and early 1960s; the recourse to authorial anonymity, which was a feature not only of the fragments published in the Athenaeum but of many of Blanchot’s own later political writings, notably in the samizdat broadsheet Comité; the appeal, too, to friendship, with both the familiar and the unknown, as being decisively linked to the plural space of literature; indeed the very notion that history itself might be subject to an upheaval whose character far exceeded what it was possible to think under the rubric of the political; not to mention the ironic self-reflexivity without which the critical thinking of the Frühromantik would not be what it was, and which, in its


own particular manner, is a signature characteristic of Blanchot’s récits too.

These convergences between Blanchot’s work and the Jena romantics are far from coincidental.55 What they emphasise is the extent to which the mutation traversing Blanchot’s fiction and critical and political thinking was more than simply a response to the anxieties of the postwar world, for it was fundamentally related to the constitution of (modern) art itself. As Blanchot was quick to realise, literature’s future as disappearance necessarily returned it, together with the literary criticism shadowing it, to the place where both had always already begun, which is to say, in philosophy. Yet as literature and criticism rediscovered this common origin, they did so with the enduring sense that there was something in literature, and therefore in philosophy too, that remained strangely inassimilable to philosophy. Hegel’s inaugural words, according to Blanchot, already implied as much. For if philosophy had supplied literature with a birth certificate, it had also handed it a death warrant. It had launched literature into the world as an autonomous possibility, subject to its own effectivity, freedom, and finality; but by the selfsame gesture it had dismissed it as that which was ineffectual, constrained, and without purpose, which survived itself interminably as worklessness, ineluctable demand, and boundless error. Which was why the ending of literature, for Blanchot, was anything but an end; it affirmed instead literature’s future as that which is still, and forever, yet to come.

This made a critical understanding of literature’s past, as both thing and concept, all the more pressing; and in rereading the texts of Schlegel and Novalis in 1964, Blanchot was particularly attentive to the competing strands present in the thinking and the legacy of the Athenaeum. Much depended on whether the critic privileged the movement’s beginnings or ending. In the case of Fr. Schlegel, the choice was particularly acute, for it meant deciding whether to place the emphasis on the youthful radical, atheistic, and individualist firebrand or to favour instead the mature diplomat, journalist, and Catholic convert, best known for his association with Metternich.56 So, while Blanchot was deeply sympathetic to what Schlegel and Novalis had attempted under the rubric of fragmentary writing, he remained sharply critical of Schlegel’s reluctance to affirm radically what was at stake in the fragment. Schlegel’s failing, in Blanchot’s eyes, was to

A turnInG 29

have persisted in thinking of the fragment solely on the model of the aphorism, ‘entirely separate from the surrounding world, like a miniature artwork, and complete in itself like a hedgehog [ein Igel]’, as Schlegel famously and memorably described it in 1798.57 Blanchot explained his objection as follows:

In truth, and particularly in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, the fragment often appears to be a means of facile self-indulgence [un moyen de s’abandonner complaisamment à soimême], rather than an attempt to elaborate a more rigorous mode of writing. If so, writing in fragments [fragmentairement] simply means accepting one’s own disorder, retreating into oneself in self-satisfied isolation, and thus refusing the opening represented by the demand of the fragment [l’exigence fragmentaire], which does not exclude, but exceeds totality. [. . .] [Schlegel] takes the fragment back to the aphorism, that is, to the closure of a perfect sentence. The shortfall [altération] is perhaps unavoidable; but it means (1) considering the fragment as a quintessential text [un texte concentré] having its centre in itself rather than in the field [le champ] set up by that fragment together with other fragments alongside; (2) neglecting the interval (suspension or pause) that separates the fragments from each other and turns that separation into the rhythmic principle of the work in its very structure; (3) forgetting that the tendency of this manner of writing is not to make a view of the whole more difficult or to loosen any bonds of unity, but to make possible new relations that are no longer part of any unity, in the same way that they exceed any whole.58

Two versions, two turnings, two understandings of the fragment come into focus here: the one, attributed to Schlegel, appeals to the interiority, wholeness, and solipsism of self; the other, articulated by Blanchot, affirms exteriority, dispersion, otherness. That on which they turn is the distinction between an art of the fragment that is nostalgic for the work and content to remain within established horizons, and one that reaches beyond the horizon and beckons to an unforeseeable future without present, between what in 1978, in an analysis much indebted to Blanchot, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, at least provisionally, proposed calling incompletion (inachèvement) and worklessness (désœuvrement).59


But how tenable, how reliable is the distinction? Neither Lacoue-Labarthe nor Nancy, nor indeed Blanchot, is entirely convinced.60 With good reason – for there is nothing about the fragment or the fragmentary that is ever completely decided. The fragmentary, Blanchot suggests, is a promise. To that extent, it is also an infinite task, to which the writer returns on numerous occasions, not to define the fragmentary as such, since it is precisely what resists appropriation ‘as such’, but rather to subtract the fragmentary from the fragment, and divide or separate it from itself. Consider for instance the following exploratory, restlessly questioning fragment on the question of the fragmentary in Le Pas audelà:

¨ The fragmentary: what does it offer us – a question, demand, or practical decision? No longer to be able to write except in relation to the fragmentary is not to write in fragments, except if the fragment is itself a sign for the fragmentary. To think the fragmentary, think it in relation to the neuter, the one and the other seemingly uttered together, yet without community of presence and each, so to speak, outside the other. The fragmentary: writing belongs to the fragmentary [relève du fragmentaire] when everything has been said. There would have to be an exhaustion of speech and by speech, the completion of all (of presence as all) qua logos, for it to be possible for fragmentary writing to let itself be remarked. Yet we cannot, in writing, free ourselves from a logic of totality by considering it as ideally completed in order to retain as a ‘pure remainder’ a possibility of writing, outside of everything, without use or without term, which a quite different, still elusive logic (of repetition, limits, and return) might be thought to make available to us to study. What is already clear is that writing of this kind will never be ‘pure’, but, on the contrary, will have already been adulterated, by dint of an adulteration that in no way might be defined (i.e., fixed) with reference to some norm, not only because it coexists, always, with all forms of existence, speech, thought, or temporality which alone may be thought to make it possible, but because it excludes any consideration of pure form, that is, any attempt to approach it as true or proper even in its disappropriation; even the inversions to which one has recourse by sheer convenience – rebeginning as beginning, disappropriation as authenticity, repetition as difference – leave us still within the logic of validity.

A turnInG 31

The fragment then concludes, without concluding, as follows:

The fragmentary expresses itself best perhaps in a language which does not acknowledge it. Fragmentary: meaning neither the fragment, as part of a whole, nor the fragmentary in itself. Aphorisms, sayings, maxims, quotations, proverbs, themes, set phrases, are perhaps all further removed from it than that infinitely continuous discourse whose only content is ‘its own continuity’, a continuity that is only sure of itself when it supposes itself to be circular and, in that circuit, accepts the precondition of a return whose law is outside [audehors] and where the outside is outside the law [horsloi].61

Not the fragment as closure, then, but the infinite continuity of the fragmentary; writing not as obedience to the law, but radical scepticism and exposure to the outside; the work not as self-coincident reflection, but the endless unworking of that which, dispersed, always already differs from itself. The fragmentary, in other words, is not an identifiable literary, critical, or philosophical genre; it is a spectral demand that does not exist as such, but which, beyond aesthetics or ontology, continues to inscribe itself, time on the edge of time, as a limit on the limit, never to be grasped as such but always already effacing itself as an impossible trace: a trace of the impossible. Which is why it requires Blanchot again and again to return, partly in response to the work of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, to the example of Schlegel, together with other key romantic figures such as Novalis, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Bettina von Arnim, and August Klingemann, the anonymous author of Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura,62 all of whom Blanchot reads and rereads in the course of L’Écriture du désastre, perpetually reiterating the point, ever the same, but ever different: that the romantic fragment is not yet the fragmentary, the fragmentary is still to come.

Such was already Blanchot’s conclusion in ‘L’Athenaeum’, an essay overshadowed by the collapse of the project for the Revue internationale towards which it silently gestured. In closing the essay, however, he also let slip another name, that of another fragmentary thinker and writer of the future: Nietzsche.

But who or what was Nietzsche?Nietzsche was of course a crucial reference point, albeit an

intensely contested one, for a host of writers and thinkers in France


and elsewhere during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, including of course Heidegger, Bataille, Jaspers, Jean Wahl, Karl Löwith, Eugen Fink, Deleuze, Klossowski, Foucault, Derrida, and Blanchot too.63 Having first written at any length about Nietzsche (with whose work he had no doubt long been familiar) shortly after the war, Blanchot began thinking in more detail about the contemporary figure of the thinker some twelve years later, in August 1958, in an essay entitled appropriately enough ‘Nietzsche, aujourd’hui [Nietzsche Today]’, mainly concerned with the history of the falsification of Nietzsche’s texts revealed by the recent editorial work of Karl Schlechta.64 In the essay Blanchot also took the opportunity to consider recent work by Jaspers, Lukács, and Heidegger, including notably, as far as the last was concerned, the material on Nietzsche contained in Holzwege (1950), Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954), and Was heißt Denken? (1954). retaining the same title eleven years later in L’Entretien infini, Blanchot was naturally obliged to make extensive revisions to his text in order to bring it up to date, which he did by nuancing his account of Schlechta’s editorial labours, in the knowledge that a new edition of Nietzsche’s work, undertaken by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, had at last begun to appear, and by adding a few passing references to Fink, Foucault, Deleuze, and Klossowski. More significantly, in this later version of the essay Blanchot also needed to take stock of Heidegger’s two volumes on Nietzsche, based on lectures originally delivered between 1936 and 1941, but not published till 1961, which prompted the second of the two lengthy footnotes added or extended in 1969.65

In the interim, Blanchot’s own views had also begun to change. Whereas in 1958, for instance, largely following Jaspers (for whom ‘the whole literary form of Nietzsche’s thinking remained aphoristic throughout’66), he was able to describe Nietzsche’s writing as ‘essentially aphoristic [essentiellement aphoristique]’, he now revised the comment to read ‘in principle fragmentary [en principe fragmentaire]’. Similarly, the proposition advanced in 1958, again after Jaspers, that Nietzsche may have suffered from ‘the aphoristic nature that was one of the essential sources of his originality’ was replaced eleven years later by the observation that the source of possible dismay on Nietzsche’s part was ‘the demand of the fragment [cette exigence fragmentaire]’. There were other minor adjustments too. In 1958, summarising the tasks facing any interpreter of Nietzsche, Blanchot, citing Jaspers, spoke of the need to ‘grasp the

A turnInG 33

“real dialectic” [ressaisir “la dialectique réelle”]’ at work in Nietzsche’s writing. But by 1969, this recommendation was no longer sufficient. If anything, it might be thought dangerously regressive, whence no doubt Blanchot’s decision to gloss, if not entirely displace the original meaning of the phrase, which in revised form now commended the reader to ‘grasp the “real dialectic”: thinking as the play of the world, the text as fragment [ressaisir “la dialectique réelle”: la pensée comme jeu du monde, le texte comme fragment]’.67

But even in August 1958 Blanchot’s original essay was already not enough and was followed a month later by a further essay on Nietzsche, mainly concerned with the question of nihilism, largely refracted through the work of Heidegger, notably the lecture course Was heißt Denken? and Heidegger’s sixtieth-birthday exchange with Ernst Jünger which in 1955 gave rise to the publication of Heidegger’s long letter to Jünger, Über die Linie, better known under its later title, Zur Seinsfrage.68 Here too, when Blanchot’s September 1958 essay was reprised in L’Entretien infini, adjustments were needed; and in the two closing paragraphs of his account of nihilism in Nietzsche (more essentially a debate with Heidegger) Blanchot departed almost completely from his eleven-year-old script to claim a very different status for Nietzsche’s writing than that conferred upon it by the thinker of Being. ‘Philosophy trembles in Nietzsche’, Blanchot now wrote. But was this because he was the last philosopher, the ultimate metaphysician, as Heidegger contended? Or was it not rather, Blanchot went on,

because, required [appelé] by an entirely other language, the disruptive writing [l’écriture d’effraction], which is destined to accept ‘words’ only in so far as they have been crossed out [barrés], spaced out [espacés], put under erasure [mis en croix] by the very movement that sets them apart, but in that distance holds them back as a place of difference, he had to contend with a fractious demand [une exigence de rupture] which constantly diverts them from what he has the power [pouvoir] to think?69

It was not however until the next essay in L’Entretien infini, ‘Nietzsche et l’écriture fragmentaire [Nietzsche and Fragmentary Writing]’, originally published in two parts in December 1966 and January 1967, and written in the margins of recent work by


Fink (Nietzsches Philosophie and Spiel als Weltsymbol), Foucault (Les Mots et les choses), Deleuze (Nietzsche et la philosophie), and Derrida (L’Écriture et la différence), that Blanchot began fully to measure the consequences of this radical shift in emphasis. As his title suggested, it was now time to turn aside from philosophy in order to attend to a very different exigency in Nietzsche’s thinking: that of writing itself in its relation with the fragmentary.70

Blanchot’s first move was once more to subtract: there were, he suggested, two ways of speaking in Nietzsche, two paroles, two voices, two tendencies, two modes of inscription. The

Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing - the-eye.eu · in Maurice Blanchot, la singularité...

Documents

Transcript of Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing - the-eye.eu · in Maurice Blanchot, la singularité...