CHAPTER 51

Characters in Thought: How Is Friendship Possible? (1958–1971)

After the friendships of the 1930s and the exceptional encounters with Emmanuel Levinas and Georges Bataille, Blanchot’s life progressed into a new mode of relation and thought as his work became structured by the temporality of the oeuvre and by political urgency. It was punctuated—in the absence of the collective writing proposed by the Review—by a book published in 1971, Friendship.

Maurice Blanchot’s correspondence reveals that friendship, for him, always appears against a backdrop of loss; it is promised in advance to death and also beyond it, a way of responding to death or of preparing oneself for moments of weakness or exhaustion, of picturing death as a shameful, terrible, untamed accomplice in order to maintain the singular demand to remain attentive to all those whom it surrounds and strikes. On multiple occasions this correspondence demonstrates feelings of joy and of privilege, with small cards sent intermittently, as if as a form of embrace, or in epilogues to letters that suddenly change their tone, like melancholy smiles in which fatigue produces dependable, pitiless compassion.1 Blanchot was a letter writer who became more prolific even as he met his correspondents more frequently, but who in this period was forced to deal with destiny’s relentless campaign against those close to him: Georges Bataille died in 1962, Elio Vittorini in 1966, Paul Celan in 1970, the daughter of Louis-René des Forêts in 1965 (she “returns in the night to shatter his heart”), the child niece and adolescent nephew of Dionys Mascolo.2 Some friends went through endless mourning; others became ill. At a greater remove there were the deaths of those he had had dealings with—Camus in 1960, Breton in 1966, Paulhan in 1969. Such recurrence of death gives some justification to the choices and the structure of a book such as Friendship, which is at once a homage and a tomb, mixing in equal number the dead and the living in a collective memorial for Georges Bataille, with whom the book opens, and who allows it to open out at its end. This book draws on Bataille even for its title, which was originally considered for what became Guilty, as if friendship once again were nourished by a friendly borrowing of authority.3 The book’s title, its two epigraphs, and the way its closing text—first published in a journal shortly following Bataille’s death—functions as an epitaph all discreetly demonstrate how present the friend in question was. “Friendship: here I remember that Georges wrote this word and that he gave it to us.”4

Friendship is always, always-afterwards or always-already, given by a friend moving away, in the process of moving away, who before one’s defeated eyes is in the process of moving their speech, body, and thought away. It is also the gift of a body, one that is dying or being carried off, still strangely and irreducibly similar. Blanchot wrote as much to Bataille, nearly a year before the latter’s death:

It has long seemed to me that the nervous difficulties you suffer from—to speak in terms of medical objectivity—are only your way of living this truth authentically, of remaining at the level required by this impersonal misfortune which the world ultimately is. And doubtless this movement has acquired some complicity of its own, but how could things have been otherwise, if our bodies are also our pitiless truth, a truth that admittedly is sometimes sordid, not always however—and here “sordid” is just as significant as “glorious.” If here I speak indiscreetly of things that are your concern, it seems to me that I too belong to them, through friendship but not through it alone: here, silently, we share something.5

There is no doubt that Bataille and Blanchot’s bodies went through long declines, and that they saw this as their way of showing that disaster was unbearable, as well as—whether this was their crowning glory or an act of complacency—their way of rising to the level required by death. They even found here, in compatible but distinct forms of eroticism and the eroticization of language, a beginning for literature, a literary authority. The death of one, in suddenly revealing the other’s secret, sickly indiscretion, reduced that other’s style to nothing more than an imitative rhetoric, mixed together their art of formulation (“here ‘sordid’ is as significant as ‘glorious’ ”). This, however, belonged to the breathless and almost passionate movement of friendship by which each was dispropriated of his body and language and used this abandonment to accompany the other’s suffering (we know how much time and effort were expended by Bataille in writing his last book, The Tears of Eros, in the face of death). A groveling shame, a vigilance in the face of silence: Here speech bears the weakness of thought and the strength of commitment that confirm friendship.6

Was that what made friendship possible? “An ecce homo without subject”? Theirs were dying, despairing bodies abandoned to the thought of community, neutral bodies so naked as to be anonymous, bodies so strong that they felt the gentleness of difference and of equality, that they were the final traces of “impersonal misfortune” which bore in their own absence, in their hollows and folds, the essence of the world and the silence it imposed. They were walking Thomases, walking forward in a restaurant (Anne was there, as all of us who will die were there), a Thomas who was now truly the twin of a Lord without divinity, made absent and effaced but who through his effacement brought community together, created friendship. The friendship that took this form always arose in the name of the other, invisible, last man, suffering alone in his room, without speaking, no longer or not yet speaking, suffering from exhaustion, remaining discreet in order to listen. Maurice Blanchot crossed paths with such figures of friendship in his life; they took form thanks to the “complicity of the organic” with Robert Antelme, who had died through his book before Blanchot met him, as well as Georges Bataille as he died among the flames, deeply submerged by the tears of Eros. Thus it seems that Blanchot always needed a third, absent body, an empty and invisible body placed at a distance by death, illness, and discretion. It seems that it was always necessary for a body to be offered to community, abandoned without being sacrificed, an absence of sacrifice that responds to the absence of myth that gives a true idea of the action necessary. This was a political body, an escapee from Numantia, responding to collective thought, to the closeness, listening, and equality of thought.7 Robert Antelme had given his silence, his intransigence regarding humankind, his immediately nocturnal attention, and had continued to make them available. He could—he wanted to—be all the more effaced for it.8 Each of these friends—Bataille dying, Des Forêts mourning, Blanchot in exile—would in turn occupy this empty, formidable place, this “way of sharing death, of sharing questions.” Each of them, in an infinitely reversible movement, forced the others to retain their hope even in shame, their awaiting even in oblivion, to both elevate and ground their love by endlessly confronting death. “Without your presence,” Mascolo concluded in a magnificent letter to Blanchot, who was away from society at the time, “we would not be able to love each other very much.”9 The “Forgiveness” with which he closed another of these letters of friendship speaks volumes about how he was almost ashamed of the meeting of indiscretion and the joy of affirming how much grace touched the path they trod together, which always emerged from the desert.10

In turn, each withdrew from the world and created it, and with this distancing created a new community, at the same time claiming themselves back from death and thus creating themselves (“an infinite responsibility,” Mascolo would say), returning to the edge of silence only through words aimed at a small—albeit open—circle of friends.11 Each occupied the place left empty by the divine, even in their radical atheism, each suffered because the world was possible on its own terms but impossible to write, confronting politics and poetry, losing hope of opening up personal politics through collective poetics.

Their letters responded to books and explained them. After Blanchot had sent him The Infinite Conversation, Mascolo responded as follows:

I feel that I must tell you, lacking the propriety that you are so able to apply to everything you touch, and despite the crassness of all the words that I can think of, how often I have felt extraordinarily lucky to be your friend and how, due to that alone, I can have no cause for complaint; and it would not be enough to say that you have constantly helped us to live. The marvelous thing, what’s more, is that you have never helped by way of reassurance, on the contrary. I was saying this to Robert the other day. Sharing distress with you is a happy thing. To walk toward failure, if it is with you, is not to fail. I have sometimes thought that being in step with you would make it not difficult to die.12

This was a subjectless act of faith, a sublimation of the marvelous in the face of death, a drunkenness of connection that gave unmatched strength precisely because it refused any consolation, finality, salvation, or abdication. It was an absolute affirmation of the present and a trusting in the return, an innocence that did not make predictions. Blanchot then responded, mocking religion so as to make his own this face of friendship in the name of a “present God.” This meant that it was no longer Blanchot who was writing, but friendship within him, the equal speech of community. “I welcome your letter by thinking that I might have sent it to you, to you both, to Robert” was how he began, recalling that friendship, this word “friendship” had been given to them by Georges Bataille. The friend always allowed the other friend to be evoked, even if he could no longer be reached, in a movement that would be taken up in the book For Friendship.13

Friendly presence was an extraordinary presence; the friend was the invisible partner of creation, of dance, of innocence, of affirmation. He would appear as the pure invisible presence of a dream, as Mascolo recounts at length, or as a type of vision, as Blanchot wrote to him from a trip to Greece where Vittorini had been shortly before his death;14 he imagined him by his side beneath the Delphi sky as an “almost presence” that resembled that of the récits’ companion or last man. The friend was becoming the character of the fiction, he was becoming the character of thought.

He had always been that. Always: since Bataille had shown them the way toward this figure. Blanchot and Mascolo often spoke of the dramatic, silent, terrifying, anonymous way that Bataille had cited Blanchot’s authority in Inner Experience. Whether it is the open heart of inner experience or in relation to mourning or death, the friend provides more than a body, a speech, an empty site: he is the very possibility of thought. The friend is not only the subject of philosophical searching; he becomes effaced as a subject in order to lend authority to thought. Blanchot allows this very movement to be thought: friendship, the possibility of thought, becomes the object of that thought. Friendship comes to stop the breach opened by thought’s interruption, without ever entirely filling it: it retains “the interruption of being which means that I have never have the authority to do with [my friend] as I please.” Friendship lies in renouncing the feeling of shame concerning the friend’s “complicity of the organic” in relation to his other friend, or concerning their agreement in the face of death (“the blinding marvel,” in Bataille’s words). It is the reverse side of the indiscretion to which correspondence bears witness, that organic or metaphysical dive into form forced upon one by the happy illusion of knowing about one’s friend. “We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this, I mean we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us as well, in our estrangement.”15

This time, it is the other way around: the movement of narration returns to the movement of thought. The récit with its inexhaustible search for its own beginnings, with its narration of itself and of what made it possible, had arrived at the figure of the “last man” or the figure of friendship. Thought, nourished by the collective practice of politics and sickened that the writing of community had failed, now espoused the movement that would try to lead it back to the origin of its own thinking. What figures were encountered along the way? Two friends, two friends who conversed in near-exhaustion, exhausting all the possibilities of friendship, all the possibilities of thought. Two friends on the edge of the indiscretion that held them facing one another, exhausted by the need to maintain this indiscretion. Friendship itself was then effaced and gave shape (the shape of a dialogue) to the exhaustion and indiscretion from which friendship arises. As if indiscretion about who or what has been exhausted were the origin of thought. As if trying to glimpse the invisible partner of dialogue (of writing) were at once what elevated and what broke thought—except if one oneself enters, insubordinate, into the gravity of the scandalous, the innocence of dance, the exhaustion of silence and discretion.

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