CHAPTER 44

Always Already (The Poetic and Political Interruption of Thought): Toward The Book to Come (1953–1958)

These were years of plenty. From July 1953, with the first of the articles of what would become The Book to Come, to November 1958, with the last, Blanchot wrote one piece per month, all—with one exception—for his column at the NNRF. Thirty-three of these sixty-four articles would be collected in The Book to Come (1959).¹ The coherence of this book should not obscure the fact that today we can read thirty-one of these articles elsewhere (thirteen pieces in The Infinite Conversation and eight more in Friendship also belong to the same reflective movement, or temporality). Often, those included in the latter work could have featured in The Book to Come; the reasons for Blanchot’s choices seem random or unclear. The selections made for The Infinite Conversation can be explained more easily: these pieces generally address philosophical aspects of the books discussed (by Camus, Pascal, Freud, Weil, and Nietzsche). In any case, all of these articles—including the few not included in collected volumes—are deeply linked.

An unprecedented critical movement is underway in Blanchot’s oeuvre. Increasingly unable to limit its subjects to particular works, his thought is gaining autonomy and dictating what he publishes. It progressively abandons autobiographical references and begins to construct a political subjectivity.² And while his thought remains obsessed with “creative behaviors,” it moves away from the external productions of those behaviors, focusing on the point when one loses touch with overarching narratives, when “every-thing disappears.” His thinking forms a paradoxical consciousness in the way it moves away from the world and interrupts thought. This is to say that his thought focuses on the interruption of thought (as well as the thought of interruption). This shift from the vocabulary of dissimulation to that of interruption moves away from references to dialectics (“it is not the end of the affair when the word ‘dialectic’ is uttered”) and toward phenomenology (Heidegger is increasingly criticized).³ This aesthetic move already gestures toward fragmentary writing. In being repeated, insisted upon, and in creating a detachment, it brings literature closer to the world: closer to its historical essence and political consciousness. The Book to Come, despite the straightforward meaning of its structure, does not make this explicit. It is a publication that sets aside the most philosophical texts and keeps the most literary ones, and therefore downplays the untiring, endless work of exposing different discourses to one another: literature, politics, philosophy.

How is literature impossible? This could be the question at the origin of such thought. The ever more violent gesture of a world closed to literature makes Blanchot determined to open literature to the world, and to open up the world through literature. Following Lautréamont et Sade, he repeats that literature belongs to a region “where morals grow quiet.” This region does not exclude literature from the world: the writer’s irresponsibility does not shelter him from social judgment.

Whoever comes up against, when writing, a truth that writing could not address is perhaps irresponsible, but must answer all the more for this irresponsibility . . . : the innocence that saves him is not his own; it is that of the place that he occupies, and occupies by mistake, and with which he does not coincide. (28)

The world of moral, partisan, or religious judgment imprisons, denatures, and pacifies art, makes it into an imaginary museum, a cultural example, a protective sovereignty. Such worlds strip art of its ability to ask questions, to raise the stakes, to take absolute risks. They make it into the site of a sedentary truth that lessens the authenticity of its wanderings. They are based on values that Blanchot sees as nothing more than “the pretences of those who abide.”⁴ They attempt to impose bourgeois and arbitrary values, passing them off as natural: they attempt, as Roland Barthes showed at the same time with Mythologies, to “dress the conventional up as natural.” Resisting any discourse of values, Blanchot admires Barthes’s “formalist study of ideologies” which by studying “the relationship between the order of values and the proliferation of ‘signs’ ” shows how one discourse can surreptitiously enter into another, denouncing “this “consumption” of signs” and “the frightful pressure that values exert upon us.”⁵

The sense of refusal is a permanent one. “There is certainly a great price in trying to create humanity at all costs,” writes Blanchot on Max Brod’s staging of The Castle.⁶ “There is in Claudel a cruelty of thought that is perhaps responsible for his dramatic genius and to which one regrets that he did not give freer rein” (255), he writes in opposition to that writer’s faith, to his fear of the infinite and measureless.⁷ Hesse had confided that harmony and beauty were words that “made [him] laugh” (172), and Blanchot himself, apropos of Bataille’s Madame Edwarda, opens “beauty” to scandal (189). He recalls an idea that had been dear to him since the beginning of the 1940s: over and against the traditionalists’ view that all modernity was “futureless,” the idea that tradition cannot survive by being faithful to itself, by reproducing itself. Instead, rupture is what renews it and allows it to remain alive. In literature, the exception becomes the rule.⁸ Blanchot sees the writer becoming a value—a relative value—made and unmade by publicity.⁹ This publicity reveals the type of language that was now dominant, a language that founded its nihilistic power on a discourse of values. For the domination of values was nothing more than a trick played by nihilism. It was necessary to oppose “all speech of certainty that decides, all substantial truth, all traditional knowledge—and generally, all speech predicated on a relation of power.”¹⁰ It was this nihilist discourse that thought had to interrupt.

From the three articles on Camus, first published in spring 1954 and then collected in The Infinite Conversation, where they became “Reflections on Hell,” to the articles on Nietzsche that appeared in summer 1958 and featured in the same collection as “Reflections on Nihilism,” Blanchot pursued the same argument. Nietzsche had called for the transmutation of values, but his strategy was judged to be insufficient: even the word itself had to be eradicated. Value was always “the mask of nihilism itself,” its protective mask.

What we call nihilism [is] at work in this obscure constraint that turns us away from it; . . . it [is] the very thing that hides it, the movement of detour making us believe we have always already put nihilism aside.¹¹

It was necessary to repeat these condemnations. Blanchot probably had little choice. His care in discrediting nihilism rivaled what seems to have been others’ enthusiasm in accusing him of it.¹² He knew that the space of literature, its power to fascinate and to create vertigo, could lead hasty readings into confusion, depriving the critical movement of its strength and reducing it to a type of nihilist disengagement. Neutral speech is risky. It always risks giving the impression that the question of politics—not to mention the question of philosophy—is neutral or has been neutralized. This risk is even greater in that it cannot be defended by being made more moderate, more receptive to the discourse of commitment and of values. On the contrary, only fully accepting it enables its true strength of refusal. In July 1958, Blanchot made this question felt when writing on André Gorz’s book The Traitor. Gorz engaged with the movement of neutral speech without completely giving himself over to it. “Not having accepted it, nor even perhaps suffered it, he succeeds in saving himself from it, which leaves the experience inconclusive.” Blanchot’s commentary (and conclusion) is that “this, I think, is the problem of nihilism—we do not know whether its power comes from our retreat before it or whether its essence is to withdraw before us: that is to say, whether this essence is always posed, deposed by the very question of the detour.”¹³

Nihilism depends upon the false choice between a terrorizing domination of values and an agonizing threat of disappearance (of faithlessness), this complementary movement, this repeated detour. It infects literary ambiguity (that of an absolute confrontation with death through language) with its own ambiguity (that of a hidden will to power). Blanchot identifies nihilism as the malady of modern politics, philosophy, and literature.¹⁴ If this is the case, it is no longer enough to simply be close to communism, nor to phenomenological language.¹⁵ Blanchot creates a break in his own itinerary, in his own language, the better to interrupt any value-creating (nihilist) effect, the better to introduce his—broken—voice into the political break, whose agent, initiator, or militant he would declare himself to be. The book is to come not because it is the Book or the Oeuvre, but because it does not exist in absolute terms, because it denies itself the book’s quality of being-there, because the book can be only on the condition of putting into practice a political refusal, a rupture of and by the community.

Creating such a rupture within discourse also marks its continuity, persistence, insistence. The “wound of thought which had ceased to think itself” of Thomas the Obscure, the wound of “thought taken ironically as object by something other than thought” is precisely what is now being given or given back to thought.¹⁶ Thinking the wound, the interruption of thought, is the new object of a reflection that assumes a critique of the languages that previously authorized it. This is signaled by a “violent gap,” an “always already” being introduced as a breach in the logic of the origin, an interruption of thought from before the beginning.¹⁷

Blanchot finds “this nothing that divides thought” (65) at work in extremely different writers, in the most radical wagers they take. For instance, he sees it in Pascal, whose belief in God is dependent upon a probabilistic reasoning which also sets the latter forever apart, and which would have to be interrupted if he wished to truly believe.¹⁸ Interruption characterizes modern dialogue: dialogue with the hidden God, but also psychoanalytical dialogue (“the doctor does not claim to act upon the one who is ill. Power is situated in neither; it is between them, in the interval that separates them by bringing them together and in the fluctuating relations that found communication”).¹⁹ It also characterizes dialogue in novels (such as with the neutral speech which breaks down understanding for the characters in The Square by Marguerite Duras, leaving them with an impersonal, profoundly solitary, and exiled language).²⁰ Prophetic speech is “a momentary interruption of history” (81), poetic language is the power of dispersal (Mallarmé, but also Dupin, Du Bouchet),²¹ Brecht’s theater aesthetic opens an “interval” in the audience’s passive absorption by the stage.²² Artaud’s pain makes him touch the point at which thought is interrupted: Through it, he understands that he had not previously even begun thinking, and that he has to maintain this point—dig into it, as Mallarmé did with verse—and take it toward the most unbearable pain, the most unbearable thought.²³ Ultimately, these are the trial of what is originary as literary language is created, as time—the other time—“separate, tears, divides,” or as the unreality of imaginary space, given shape by the irrecoverable distance that exists between Achilles and the tortoise, between the land surveyor and the Castle (95–96), which puts this interruption of thought to work, turns it toward the book.²⁴

The examples mount up, article after article and month after month, interrupting the space of thought in such a way that no value can be forged, but neither can any nihilism take root or act as simple catharsis over and against the promising openings of thought. This demands constant vigilance and permanent movement. Continuing his commentary on the aesthetics of movement proper to Sade or Lautréamont, irreducible to the fixed categories of literary criticism, Blanchot now allies himself with Nietzsche’s demand, by which “the essential movement of . . . thought consists in self-contradiction.” This endless dialectic opens the text to the “fragment” and thought to “the play of the world.” Nietzsche names this thinking that of “the last philosopher” because it breaks, finishes, interrupts philosophy. Blanchot’s texts on Nietzsche at this time recall those that Bataille had written for Acéphale twenty years earlier. It is still a question of reclaiming this thinking from its perversion by the Nazis, from its alignment with “the will to power.” “The eternal return is not of the order of power.”²⁵ This philosophical thinking of interruption opens a world that does not seek “the all-powerfulness of the person or the subject,” but “makes us attain an order to which the notion of value no longer applies.”²⁶

Such considerations can seem somewhat removed from the space of politics. Blanchot’s efforts were directed entirely toward fracturing—via a double gesture of solidarity—his philosophical and literary thinking, and in preparing a political thinking. This was never more evident than in 1957. In the summer and fall of that year, Blanchot wrote two articles successively on Simone Weil, later collected in The Infinite Conversation, and then two on Mallarmé which would precede “The Power and the Glory,” the final essay of The Book to Come; the latter article was overtly political and was published in April 1958, a month before De Gaulle returned to power.

Blanchot’s attentiveness to Simone Weil stems from his interest in Jewish mysticism, which he discovered through Levinas, and from Gershom Scholem’s book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which henceforth he would cite regularly.²⁷ With these two articles, for the first time since the end of the 1930s—and from an altogether different perspective—Blanchot’s text contains an explicit interest in Jewishness. It is not insignificant that this return narrowly predates the return to politics: indeed, it prepares the way for it.

Blanchot approaches Simone Weil’s texts through a reading of Isaac Luria, a sixteenth-century Jewish mystic.²⁸ He is impressed by Luria’s “forceful idea” of Creation as an act of abandonment by God:

In creating the world, God does not set forth something more, but—first of all—something less. Infinite Being is necessarily everything. In order that the world be, this Being would have to cease being everything, make space for it via a movement of withdrawal, of retirement, and by “giving up something like a region within itself, a sort of mystical space.”²⁹

Blanchot finds the same idea in Simone Weil, in many passages presenting creation as a withdrawal, a renouncement, an abdication. But for him it is above all an opportunity to conceive a new relationship between thought and what is originary: thought as the withdrawal, abandonment, interruption of thought. The care with which he announces this analogy does not hide the decisive strength and historical necessity that it seems to lay out for him:

It may be (and is this experience not continually ours?) that the further thought goes toward expressing itself, the more it must maintain somewhere within itself a reserve, something like a place that would be a sort of uninhabited, uninhabitable non-thought, something like a thought that would not allow itself to be thought. . . . But it so happens, rightly or wrongly, that this sort of blind spot of thought—this impossibility of thinking that thought is for itself in its reserve—can appear to us to be not only present in all things, all speech and all action in a certain negligible way, but also, by this negligible presence, able to take up always more space, to be extended to the entirety of experience and little by little to entirely alter it.³⁰

We shall see as much: this small element of agitation means that experience is no longer limited to “inner” experience. It means that nothing should be named (whether God or a dictator) that would in any way illuminate this blind spot. Here, the thinking of absence and oblivion provides guarantees for the thinking of interruption.

And Blanchot recognizes the same thinking in Mallarmé (224–244, esp. 226–229). “I have created my work by elimination alone,” the poet wrote to his friend Lefébure.³¹ Thus the space of creation, poetry, or literature acts as a palpable representation of thought as it opens to the “pure movement of relations” via the rhythm of words and sounds, and via the interruption of language on the page and in the air (the interruption of everyday language, but also of poetic language, language as it is read, written or linear language: for Blanchot the Book to come is not the posthumous manuscript published by Scherer, but A Throw of the Dice). The theory of creation by elimination will come to found theories of the effacement of the author and of his individual prophesying, to which Blanchot was laying claim more than ever. His public engagement should of course be read in the light of this effacement, which existed in order to free up “the pure movement of relations.” The poet disappears into words, which themselves disappear into this movement. This model—which also applies to political discourse—sees Luria’s thinking meeting that of Georges Bataille, with his thinking of sacrifice (Bataille speaks of it in fairly similar terms in his Manet of 1955).

Blanchot defines Simone Weil’s thinking as one of misfortune and attentiveness. Having aligned it with Jewish mysticism, he links it to Robert Antelme’s thinking of misfortune:³² “To think through affliction is to lead thought toward this point at which force is no longer the measure of what must be said and thought; it is to make thought one with this impossibility of thinking that thought is for itself, and is like its center.”³³ This impossibility of thinking affliction, this impossibility of thinking the camps, is a large-scale interruption of thought. It also gives this interruption the possibility of sovereignty: a point at which it is so strongly affirmed that any nihilism becomes unthinkable (the nihilism that always hangs over the “Yes” of Nietzsche and Artaud). This is because this interruption, when accompanied by a thinking of attentiveness, allows political thought—the thought of controlling the other—to be interrupted, and replaced with friendship and community. Attentiveness is an “emptiness of thought oriented by a gentle strength,” terms that are used to describe Antelme: “the perfection of attentiveness which, by means of others’ gaze, opens a path toward the closure of affliction.”³⁴ For Blanchot, this attentiveness to the other is “always already” an attentiveness to language (to the other’s political language, to the political language of all). “Language is the site of attentiveness,” he concludes in the article on Simone Weil.³⁵ Poetic language is the advent of political language. According to Blanchot, this is also what Mallarmé’s poems teach us: In an “undefined tension in which a new time seems to develop, the pure time of expectation and attentiveness,” thought watches over “the brilliance of the poetic impulse” (234).

“This frail literature, barely existing, is not much to count on in the struggle against the great hoax.”³⁶ Blanchot expects this kind of objection, which he anticipates in his article on Mythologies. A month before the first text on Simone Weil, he set in opposition to the nihilist power of values “this frail literature,” this modern, frail literature of “the very last” (de toute extremité). In it he sees “the affirmation most staunchly opposed to myths” (and we must note that reading myths, for instance with Orpheus and the Odyssey, is a way of interrupting them). “True, it is not much,” he concedes. “But here weakness, and the language that models itself on what lies short of all force, impede the trickster more than strength, his inevitable accomplice.” Weakness bothers those who seek to deceive; it bothers the dictator who is denounced as early as March 1955 (“the man of dictare, of imperious repetition” (220), whom he did not yet distinguish from “the providential man” (221)); it bothers those who sought to impose “the cult of the individual” (248). Political vigilance, undeniably and cruelly supplemented by Blanchot’s experience, is another aspect of the interruption at the heart of his thinking of language. The political returns to the political through language. To be more specific: sometimes it would use the same words as before (the return, then the refusal), but without any submission to rhetoric and fully aware of the interruption of speech, of thought. And although weakness does not easily trouble power, this interruption needs still to be linked to collective practice, in order to do more than just trouble those who hate thought and who can say only that Voltaire must not be thrown in jail.³⁷

During these years, Blanchot also pursued this demanding, obliging line of thought by drafting The Last Man. “Language is the site of attentiveness.” In it, dialogue, conversation, speech, silence are the sites of attentiveness. They also provide its strength, its desire, its quality as an oeuvre, they create and continue to endlessly create the desire to be attentive: to be attentive to the other. The impossibility of any last word, the impossibility of death are theirs alone, they do not fear any return of nihilism. The last word, death, has already come and gone: the last philosopher has died. Perhaps there remains only the silence left by he whom in March 1955 Blanchot calls the “last writer.”

Blanchot would offer literature a new form of dialogue, a new form of conversation. They are not unconnected to the way in which, in the same period, he starts (again) to intervene politically. The limitations imposed by discourse and by genre were rejected, as Blanchot is well known for having called for. It is perhaps in this “triple metamorphosis”—political, philosophical, literary—where Blanchot sought to transcribe the new truth.

“When one is forced to give up oneself, one must either perish or begin again; perish in order to begin again.”³⁸ Such is the movement that Blanchot named “the leap of the future.”

Guy Lévis Mano published fewer than six hundred copies of the reprint of the NNRF article of April 1953 as The Beast of Lascaux, a discreet homage to René Char, in 1958. The Book to Come would appear in early summer 1959, and the critics were far from won over. Their disorientation led them to varying judgments, from accusations to defensiveness, from circumspection to occasional admiration.³⁹ They had already reacted similarly to the récits, The Space of Literature, and the nouveau roman, a label that they were making popular. The climate seemed even to approach exasperation. The 1960s were approaching, the decade that saw lightning bolts from the Sorbonne rain down upon Roland Barthes, as well as the agitations of Tel Quel, a journal whose first issue of March 1960 gave one of its highest “marks” to The Book to Come.

Between the major figures for whom Blanchot was a decisive influence and the bureaucrats of criticism whose obscene stupidity was often more tragic than farcical, perhaps Roger Judrin best expressed the gap that Blanchot’s books sought to create, in a piece on The Last Man: “This book makes me fearful as would a precious object that I cannot avoid breaking. . . . Ultimately, I admit that—to speak Blanchot—this récit is closer to me than I am to it.”⁴⁰