CHAPTER 43
Although it was published in summer 1955, The Space of Literature was in fact almost entirely complete by June 1953.1
It benefitted from the years largely dedicated to narrative creation, from the more regular publication of critical texts in 1952 (five important articles in Critique and Les Temps Modernes), and in 1953 from the platform offered by the Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française beginning with its first issue in January. Blanchot’s involvement with this journal, on a monthly basis for more than six years, then more or less fortnightly, represented an important turning point in his career, fame, and—more fundamentally—his research.2
The period of scattered publication was over. This was only 1953, and yet the vast majority of Blanchot’s future critical articles would appear in the NNRF, this “pure site,” in Paulhan’s words, a “privileged place where words are permitted to retain their meaning.” Sharing the editorship with Arland, Paulhan had come back to his journal. After the purges, the climate had become less fractious, and the status of the former NRF, the folding of L’Arche, and the relative decline of Les Temps Modernes made Paulhan’s return almost natural. In accordance with the line pursued by the Cahiers de la Pléiade, and not content with distancing himself from Sartre, Paulhan aimed to open his journal to “writers with the most divergent tastes, opinions, and even party allegiances. It asks those it publishes neither to be engaged, nor not to be engaged. . . . French through its concern for universality, it will also be French because it will recall and defend the highest values of a civilization.”3
These points were vague enough for Blanchot to be able to see himself there, or not see himself there but nonetheless to agree to be part of an undertaking that gave his research the greatest freedom, guaranteeing a modest but regular salary, and bringing with it the fidelity of a choice readership. Blanchot’s column was supported by Paulhan, who saw him as the journal’s best writer, paradoxically “so admirable when he speaks of authors that he does not like, or does not much like.”4 Many readers—often major figures themselves—would feverishly await this column before each issue. This “Research” (which was the title of the column) would mark an entire generation of writers, philosophers, and artists.
At the time, Blanchot was publishing almost all of his books with Gallimard. Alongside Camus, Malraux, and Queneau, he belonged to the review panel, for which he was paid. Difficulties with Gaston Gallimard remained (in 1951 Blanchot almost exercised his right to buy himself out, in order to move his books to Minuit), but they seem to have smoothed themselves out. His move away from Critique was due to a variety of reasons involving money, health, and editorial freedom. And he was not sad to leave Les Temps Modernes, or entirely unstrategic in doing so. He was fairly close to Merleau-Ponty, who also left Les Temps Modernes the year that Blanchot joined the NNRF.
The 128 articles given to the NNRF would mostly be collected in Blanchot’s four main volumes of criticism: The Space of Literature, The Book to Come, and later The Infinite Conversation and Friendship, in 1969 and 1971. In following his thinking as it advances, we can track both his progress and the moments it becomes sidetracked; we see it developing original and essential ideas such as the “outside,” the “neuter,” the “other night” or “infinite distance.” The rhetoric of paradox merges into the poetics of dissimulation, and then into fragmentation and interruption. The attentiveness to the origin of the work, to the experience of writing, the patience required by the negative, Hegel and Heidegger’s critical legacy, a permanent dialogue with the thought of Levinas and Bataille, endless meditation on the works of Mallarmé and Kafka, renewed debates with Malraux, Sartre or Camus, an unshakeable conviction in the excessive nature of literature, an infinite approach to death by way of dying and to the work by way of the book, analytical praise for the new criticism, new philosophy or nouveau roman. All of these elements gave this anonymous enterprise an exceptional place in twentieth-century aesthetic thought, impressing the young readers who in the 1960s would become the most decisive figures of the new modernity: Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida, Faye, Kristeva, Lacan, Sollers, and others. This was the period when Foucault “dreamed of being Blanchot.”5 Each article was experienced as a new rupture in literary, philosophical, and political thought. Alongside Bataille, although differently from him, and often against Sartre, Blanchot opened literature up to philosophers and psychoanalysts, introduced them to Broch and Beckett, even to Jaspers and Artaud. He allowed them to hear this decisive and neutral, personal and shared speech, which within all language resounds with insanity, transgression, powerlessness, restlessness. What was most imposing was that this speech was his own speech, and it troubled the greatest minds all the more because it seemed to condemn them to silence.6 At this time, few were aware that Blanchot experienced this apparent ease in writing and this penetrative strength as a secret struggle, the repeated experience of thought wrested from ill health and weakness.
The Space of Literature is probably the most unified of Blanchot’s volumes of critical essays, thanks to its simultaneously progressive and cyclical movement. Described on its cover as a rich and rigorous meditation on “creative behaviors,” it stems from the personal experience of writing, which by this stage was drawing on twenty years of research and maturation, as well as from an empathetic attentiveness to the creative experiences of Malraux, Rilke, and Kafka, an attentiveness that was also—already—longstanding but had counted more than ever in the preceding years. Indeed, when, more than at the beginning of the 1950s, could Blanchot have identified with these sayings by Kafka: “I am nothing but literature,” or “my unique aspiration and my sole vocation . . . is literature . . . Everything I have done is a result of solitude alone”?7 Or with this one, by Mallarmé: “I am now impersonal”? The critic, he says, is an “author in reverse,” and therefore he is speaking about himself in the long, lyrical pages on the journals, letters, and autobiographical essays of these writers.8 Even allowing for the grace of chance, he tacitly recognizes fabulous coincidences, fierce complicities, between the eternal return of his own birth and the mystical night of Kafka’s decisive revelation about the form and rhythm of writing. Blanchot twice cites the night on which this ordeal took place, September 22, 1912; it is said to mark “the demand of the work.”9
The book takes its strength from highly personal meditations on these writers’ experiences. Blanchot listens to, reads, and analyzes the simplest of personal experiences, but also the most tragic and the most foundational: married life, solitude, death. Here “personal” can only be understood in terms of personality melting away, through a violent and often unpredictable rupture, into the impersonality of time: the other, “interminable and incessant” time of dying and writing. Struck by how the experiences of death and writing seem analogous when taken to their limits, Blanchot turns the screw even more tightly on his fiction, a turning that—here—he attempts to halt.10 But on each occasion the Other, whether Kafka, Mallarmé, or Rilke, offers violent resistance on behalf of the work, which always avoids being grasped. The moments when discourse falls down serve to relaunch the search. At such moments it confronts the opening-out of what is intimate to its own rupture, to the assimilating forces of myth and history. This is the subject of the pages on “the gaze of Orpheus,” which Blanchot saw as the center of the book, as well as the final chapters on communication and the future of art. “The eternal torments of dying” return each time, the exhausting and yet inexhaustible search for the work, which is never reached, which always withdraws into the depths of the night, of the other night; not the night that provides relief from the ordeals of the day, but the one that welcomes the artist’s insomnia, the artist who is henceforth open to the dissimulation of being, for what appears to him is the essence of disappearance, the absence of being as the ground of being, what is anterior to the beginning of time, the origin of the speech that is still nothing but a murmur, a rapid and incessant prose to which the essence of the poem will move ever closer. This is the artist to whom nothing appears, however, because he is open to this “rustling of the eternal outside,” because he is carried away by this neutral speech that ties together some of the obscure points where shared, anonymous understanding can emerge, because he is doubled in the dissolute, infinite space from which the gods have withdrawn and whose overwhelming horizon makes the body hallucinate and blinds all representation—starting with the artist’s own. This artist writes a poem that inscribes this invisible encounter only to efface itself immediately, effacing itself as a poem and effacing the artist as a poet, subsisting as an encounter of the untouched work with a reader who affirms it anew, via the light, transparent grace of a “yes” belonging only to him, a reader watched over by the possibility of writing, a faraway but still probable invitation, that of no longer escaping dying, a reader thus entering into the “joyous, free” dance with the tomb, into the dance with the invisible partner. Such is the vocabulary that returns, because returning is its essence, in the “essential solitude” that is Blanchot’s, that belongs to him alone because it also belongs to others, to Kafka, Mallarmé, or Rilke, which means mythically that it belongs to a single impersonal figure, Orpheus turning around to see Eurydice’s face because he can and wants to grasp her only in night. On the level of history, this means that any belonging is collective and is all the more communitarian because it is solitary, and that “the essential solitude” indeed finds that it has taken the path of shared thinking, by the very force of its original disengagement. We must all make up our own minds about whether this is a dream or utopia, but the force of this thought comes from not belonging to what such a mode of meaning could concede to it, but instead in affirming “the overabundance of refusal,” which has no other power or guarantee than that of passing via “the vain overabundance of worklessness [désoeuvrement],”11 and which would inscribe in history the marks—private and collective, present and future—of its insubordination.12
For The Space of Literature is indeed driven by a thinking of history, the movement of the book carrying it toward that confrontation. It is a book that was finished before it was written. “Literature and the Original Experience,” the final part of its development, was at once its future and—as its title recalls—its origin. Indeed, these pages had been published in the spring of 1952 (only the section on Kafka is older) in two consecutive issues of Les Temps Modernes, a choice of journal that underlines how political their theoretical commitment was.13 They would be continued a year later, for two consecutive issues of the NNRF, with an article entitled “Where Is Literature Going?” only a part of which is collected in The Book to Come (and with good reason: it repeats the reflections of the preceding article, provides the same commentaries on the same citations). Blanchot answers the question “Where is literature going?” by responding, following Heidegger: back where it came from, back toward what is originary. However, we must also recognize the political aspect of this return and admit that there is no better commentary on the work, on the movement that takes solitary space toward public space—a movement that can be seen in 1952–53 when Blanchot refers the genesis of texts back to the structure of thought, and more generally in the demand that the political never be forgotten, however far literature might carry us.
Thus literature returns to the political, but not to the same site nor via the same paths. The terms of this movement are still very vague: they are situated in and around communism, as the December 1953 article on Mascolo’s book indicates. However Blanchot, struck by the “remarkable coincidence” of the artistic demand and the communist demand, expresses regret that art and communism too often shy away from this coincidence.14 This is to admit how difficult the task of responding to these permanent demands is: for “the work is history; it is an event, the event of history itself, and this is because its most steadfast claim is to give all its force to the word beginning.”15 And more: “Nothing is more important than this sovereignty which is refusal and than this refusal which, through a change in sign, is also the most prodigious affirmation, the gift, the creative gift.”16
The ideas of beginning, refusal, affirmation, the creative gift still remain groundless. Prodigality remains in reserve, available, ready to be used in order that one day refusal should give “all its strength to the word beginning.” In 1952, at the height of the Cold War, the apogee of Stalinism, the middle of the Korean War, Blanchot writes from what seemed a faraway space:
The time of distress designates the time which, in all times, belongs to art, but which, when historically the gods are lacking and the world of truth is wavering, emerges in the work as the concern in which the work has its reserve, threatening it, making it present and visible.17
But this reserve for him carries the greatest risk, one that is always active even when it is not permitted, is defeated, or seems useless. This reserve is not concerned simply with the day, action, usefulness, necessity, value, but also with the night, with the other, the wholly other, the essence of mankind: with “its right to truth, and, even more, its right to death,” a death that is never individual, that has to be maintained even in anonymity, dignity, neutrality, collectivity (to put it brutally: for Blanchot, death is at the origin of community).18
Blanchot gives another name to this reserve of prodigality: prophecy. This is prophecy with no prophet except a poet who has disappeared behind his prophecy, with no authority except the distress left by the flight of the gods, without any message beyond its formulation for the future of an absolute beginning.19 This politics of disappearance might seem to be a mask for evasion, but in truth it demands that we think through the conditions of its appearance, its practical resurgence, its particular speech. Later, Blanchot would refer to the “freedom of speech,” the “everyday poetry” that would stimulate the communication, the “being-together” of 1968.20 Poetic speech is the reserve on which this political speech draws. Char’s authority is invoked here, the Char cited in the article in Les Temps Modernes: “At the center of this hurricane, the poet will complete the meaning of his message by renouncing himself, then will join the side of those who, having lifted from suffering its mask of legitimacy, assure the eternal return of the stubborn burden-bearer, the smuggler of justice.”21 This is the Char on whom Blanchot wrote a significant article in April 1953, which five years later became a book thanks to Guy Lévis Mano.
[Char the poet] binds, in the space that premonition reserves, speech firmly to an upward movement and, by virtue of this upward movement of speech, reserves the coming of a broader horizon, the affirmation of an inaugural day. 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.22
The advent of this speech is the future of thought. In this sense, The Space of Literature strongly critiques Heidegger’s thought. Blanchot’s aesthetic reflection is shot through with Heideggerian notions, but it turns them round in a historically aware way, and no one has been better able than Levinas to show the philosophical, ethical, and political implications of this, as he did in 1956. “Does Blanchot not give art the role of deracinating the Heideggerian universe?” he asks in conclusion to his essay.23 As is well known, Levinas always reproached Heidegger for his ontological dogma of the anteriority of Being in relation to beings, and his consequent indifference to the ethical position that Levinas judged indispensable. He recognized that “Blanchot, too, refuses ethical preoccupations” but only when they take on “explicit form.” Thus his reading consists, already, via unequalled complicity, via friendly and prophetic knowledge, in reconstituting the implicit, nascent form of ethical thought that would soon occupy center stage in Blanchot’s reflections. He returns to the sharing of the there is, which is still present. The pages in The Space of Literature on insomnia refer back to Existence and Existents, and Levinas is cited twice in the book, in footnotes; but in fact the whole work refers to this experience. Mallarmé’s it is and Kafka’s dying are made to chime with the there is. For Blanchot, the impersonal nature of rapture is a prior condition for the rapture of the community. It opens out onto the light of exile, is never a magnifying glass held over a fixed position. For art is not capable of installing truth in being, only the wandering of truth (Blanchot had been saying so since Death Sentence), the wandering that makes it authentic.24
Levinas recalled—this was 1956, and the terms were just barely veiled—that
the Heideggerian world is a world of lords who have transcended the condition of needy and poor men or a world of servants who think only of these lords. There, action is heroism, and dwellings, princely palaces, and divine temples sketch out the landscape before they serve as shelters. A life of mortals consoled by the visiting gods and their magnificence. A life of hard work on ancestral ground that no cataclysm could ever remove from under their feet. This calm possession, this pagan rootedness marks all Heidegger’s evocations of things, whether he speaks of a bridge, a pitcher of water, or a pair of shoes.25
Literary space as Blanchot sketches it out allows for no territory save that of exile, it allows for no pagan restoration in a world where the divine only occupies the empty space of the community’s needs, it allows for no sovereignty that does not accept its own annihilation. It accepts no ground that is not, and does not remain, shaken.
Still effacing any explicit response to the political nature of its eponymous question, the article “Where Is Literature Going?” concludes with a parable from Kafka. An old merchant is only able to get up by expending all his bodily strength. At night, he calls on the Devil to save him from the shadows—a strange move. There is a knocking at the door. Blanchot narrates and explains as follows:
The writer of today, this old merchant drained of all strength, was long ago a man of enterprise and exchange; to break free from the night, he can appeal only to the night. It is a wonderful thing indeed now that the outside, at his appeal, trembles; and that, in the innocence and jubilation of distress, the writer joyfully makes one last effort to open literature out to this shaking of the immense outside. What is the result for him and for literature, what happens to the old merchant? This is what the interrupted récit does not say, unless it does so by means of interruption.26
Literature is the interruption of weakness, the old merchant’s weakness, the community’s weakness. It is the interruption of community. It is written, found, and lost in this interruption that is Blanchot’s (and that he constantly began anew). The old merchant is also the “well-toned boxer,” this “mortal partner” who hits the mat only in order to spring back up again. He constantly confronts death, in his name and in the name of the other, every month and every night, in order to be able to write, as he has Kafka say (misquoting him, and recognizing that he was doing so, recognizing that this was the overabundant law of his commentary and his narration). He sometimes worries about the hurtful judgment of time (“our modern, Occidental world,” “our late Occident,” Blanchot writes with a hint of sarcasm).27 The times were now less concerned with literature. The day was ignorant and warned the partner that his indefatigable prose had no future. As for him, he immediately saw this as nothing more than the future of this ignorance. Burning with impatience, he was also infinitely patient.28 Any initiative from him would be suspect. And he had also aged, grown tired. He waited, but the parable was not over. There were a few more words to make the narrator say, as others might make children say something. It still needed to be said that the book, that the action was still to come, and that the outside (Godot, perhaps) still needed to be awaited (this was 1953, and Blanchot was commenting on Beckett). The work (refusal) still had to be brought to the light of day. Readers still had to be dispossessed of their history, their religion, their occupation. “Everything must become public. The secret must be broken.”29 For what is broken is already public.