Introduction to Maurice Blanchot: “Literature and the Right to Death”
Although a prolific writer of 25 or more books of literary, political, and philosophical criticism as well as novels, little is known of Blanchot personally. Excessively private, there exists but two photographs of him. (Raymond Queneau caught sight of Blanchot at a student rally in May ’68 and said that he looked ridiculously out of place.) He was tall, was married, and was buried next to his wife in a grave marked by a tombstone that reads only ‘l’amour’. In his youth he was an extreme right wing monarchist and anti-semite; in his mature years, beginning with “Literature and the Right to Death” he became an extreme left wing thinker (but in a unique way). He had two close lifelong friends: Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Lèvinas. During WWII he helped save the wife of Lèvinas from the Nazis during the occupation of France. A member of the Resistance, he himself was (similarly to Dostoyevsky) put before an aborted SS firing squad. (This incident is recounted in his final work The Instant of My Death). The fullest account of his life and works exist in Leslie Hill’s Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary [Routledge, 1997]. Today I will explicate the first of Blanchot’s mature essays written as a response to the prestige that Alexandre Kojève acquired with his lectures on Hegel.
“Literature and the Right to Death”
(The essay both parallels, parodies, and is a simulacrum of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.)
I
The question of literature is Blanchot’s starting point. Literature reveals itself as literature when and only when it is put into question. That is to say: Is there anything legitimate about literature? Did Homer and Sophocles put literature into question? No. Blanchot is thinking of literature after German Romanticism, after Cartesianism; when everything is placed in question, and when, after Hegel, Art (after marvelously succeeding religion) was no longer Spiritual expression. Blanchot asks the critical question par excellence: What is literature? What is the essence of literature? When this question is asked of literature, literature then and only then becomes its own essence.
Does literature have a right to exist? (Indeed, does anything have a right to exist?) Is literature legitimate? Is it real? These questions immediately depreciate literature. Literature has no right to exist; it is not legitimate, and its existence is always in jeopardy. This is Blanchot’s immediate and quite sensible answer. Literature is a fraud; it is fiction, it is not and hence has no claim on existence whatsoever. Surrealism supremely revealed literature’s illegitimacy, it’s “nullity”. Blanchot is borrowing from Hegel here, from the dialectic of the thing-itself, die sache selbst. This dialectic is the dialectic of Reason and pure intellectualism (Kant) from the Phenomenology. For Hegel, Reason is a synthesis of consciousness and self-consciousness. Consciousness situates Truth in the object, the thing-in-itself: this is theoretical knowing which contemplates something without changing anything. Self-consciousness situates Truth in the subject, the thinker, in desire: in the for-itself. Reason then reconciles this contradiction because Reason knows that the object has already been informed by thought; and the object, which appears as exterior, is actually for-the-Subject. The real has always already been changed, altered, penetrated by thought. Reason informs the real and Reason likewise objectifies the Subject; Reason knows that the Subject passes into the object and objectivity into the Subject: “the real is rational and the rational is real.” But, this is merely abstract Truth—it merely knows; it does not make concrete this power to change the real. The power to change the real requires work, struggle, History. Thus, Reason must give way to Spirit after passing through three essential moments:
1. Observing Reason (Isaac Newton) is content to discover laws of the real without transforming it.
2. Active Reason (as in Kant’s 2nd Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason) asserts the formally universal character of freedom in action.
3. Intellectual Reason says the real is rational and vice versa and is at first content with saying it alone.
The intellectual (or, for Blanchot in this essay, the “writer”) does not feel the need to struggle; he is the Enlightenment Thinker who is at one with the world. He knows that the world is for-him and he contributes to the world with literary and intellectual work. He feels that his work is the perfect identity of Subject and Object; it is Worldly par excellence. At first he is happy with this situation, this perfect expression of his subjectivity. In his works “the work is the passing of the night of possibility into the daylight of presence,” Blanchot says. The writer is himself the manifestation of the negative, the night, death, because prior to the appearance of the work, the writer is sheer negativity (i.e. a writer is not (a writer) until there is a work.)
The writer is at first happy but then becomes uneasy. The happy situation was deceitful because it (the work) does not really, concretely manifest the intimacy of interior negativity, the negativity that was at work before the work was produced. The writer thought it would; but alas, what was produced was only a book (and not a negativity, not a power!) The writer could have imagined a thousand books but he produced only one book. However perfect the book (á la Flaubert) it is only a book, it is lifeless, powerless, a dead thing! The creative negativity has been lost; creation as such has vanished. Hence the writer’s disappointment: the book is not The Book, the Thing-itself, his Truth in the world. The writer is tempted to write the Book, but ends up with a book. (Only one philosopher, Hegel, could write the Book, and he could do so only at the end of History: The Book called Phenomenology of Spirit as the Truth of History.)
So, the writer (the intellectual) is disappointed. He adopts strategies to avoid disappointment. He rejects work and vows to remain silent (like Rimbaud). But, then he is no longer a writer; he is the negative (as power to negate all that is) who has been reduced to nothing. But negativity must manifest itself; it is an ontological imperative. The writer must write in order to be a writer. The second temptation is to think the Work beyond the book: the book is only a book, yes, but it is a step toward the Work, the Thing-itself. This may be impossible, but it is noble; it justifies writing. The writer writes not for this or that specific audience but for Mankind. But then this fails because then he is no longer a manifestation of his own Subjectivity, he is the manifestation of Humanity at work. And, concretely, he after all, is the writer. Mankind is merely an Idea.
Either the writer is silent; or the writer sacrifices his Subjectivity to the benefit of the Work. Either way, the writer loses himself. It comes down to this: the writer cannot withdraw and he cannot not withdraw. Writing is this contradiction.
For Hegel, the contradiction is manifested in unease, boredom, and imminent change via some kind of Aufhebung. At the level of consciousness the writer remains an isolated subjectivity saying ‘the real is rational and the rational is real’ (like Descartes’ isolation). Hegel criticizes this attitude. There must be work. It is not sufficient to be intellectual. It is the slave who is actively changing the world, not the writer. Reason must give way to Spirit (in the form of the slave). The true work is not art nor theory, but the ongoing work of the slave, the proletariat. Writing is always disappointing; its positivity is an arrested positivity and an arrested negativity.
Blanchot asks: is literature nothing? Yes and no. Is literature negligible (a ‘nullity’ as the surrealists presumed)? Yes and no. Contrary to Hegel, literature is a form of work—it changes the writer as well as the reader. The writer, like the slave, does indeed change reality by negating it: The writer transforms language and thus transforms culture thus transforming the slave as well. The world is not the same after Homer, after Shakespeare, after Chaucer, after Descartes, after Newton... The writer thus transforms himself; he becomes his own work by living in the culture that he himself has transformed.
This is merely Blanchot showing that within the Hegelian dialectic there is after all room for art, literature, etc. But this is not his goal in the essay; he seeks to escape the dialectical progress toward Spirit. He is just showing Hegel that, ‘see I can do this too! I understand you!’
II
At the same time literature is nothing. The writer creates nothing. (There are no white whales; Hamlet never existed.) The book is the manifestation of nothing. Literature is the becoming nothing of work; work’s unrealization. However, literature is nothing manifesting itself and thus it is superior to the work of the slave because it does not hide its negativity whereas the work of the slave appears to be a concrete positivity like a building, Taipei 101, e.g.. Literature is not a positivity; it is nothing made manifest. It is sovereign. The writer’s work is not a concrete negativity—it does not maintain what it destroys. The writer’s work is immediate and radical negativity. Imagination can “do” anything. The writer’s negation is global. When the writer writes he negates the whole world immediately. This is the experience of Absolute freedom in the form of the sovereign expenditure of work.
The writer wants to manifest his own Subjectivity in the light of day. But he will be disappointed because the book can never manifest the infinite negativity that creates it. He can withdraw, but then he ceases to be a writer and he doesn’t manifest anything (Rimbaud after his writing career became an unscrupulous, boring, selfish man: read his letters). Or he can sacrifice his creativity to a noble cause, but then he loses his own Subjectivity. This situation cannot be sublated. The writer remains on the level of abstract negativity; literature cannot manifest the writer’s Subjectivity and it cannot manifest concrete negativity. But literature can manifest another nothing: global negativity, which is NOT Hegelian negativity. This is now Blanchot’s departure from Hegelian dialectic.
The writer is absolutely free and absolutely impotent. He can do whatever he wants but cannot change anything concretely (including his own impossible, contradictory situation as a writer within the Hegelian dialectical scheme. This allows Hegel to dispense with writing, and neglect literature as ultimately inessential to Spirit; Spirit is not a writer. But Blanchot at this point in the essay is thinking now of Sade, not Hegel.) Blanchot will say that the nothing that literature is is a radical manifestation of negativity and is superior to Aufhebung. The ontological stakes are high: literature manifests radical finitude, global negation, and death. The writer performs the incomprehensible task: writing—accomplishing—nothing immediately transforms nothing into an otherwise than something or nothing. The writer can neutralize the dialectical contradictions he is faced with.
First. Creation ex-nihilo is for Blanchot also the creation of the nihil, of the nothing. The writer is the creator of (the) nothing. What is imagined is not a product of a writer working, the writer does not work (is not a slave) and does not consume (is not a master). What is imagined is what appears when the world is globally negated. This Blanchot at his most original. What is imagined is what remains when there is nothing. It is what is sub-structed at the cessation of the world. When there is death, what remains is the corpse. When there is death what appears is the cadaver of the departed which persistently resembles the departed (and is not the Spirit of the departed). The imaginary is what remains. An “other” imaginary that does not represent anything. The corpse is not a representation of the departed person. It is a resemblance, an unmade presence, an image of the absence—or of the nothing—of the departed. This presence is not here and now but no longer belongs anywhere or to any time. (The writer accomplishes nothing, yes, but only the better to make nothing appear. Literature, if you like, is what happens when disappearance appears.)
Second. Literature is superior to action. It is not concerned with reality but with what remains of reality. Literature is not a work but an unworking (idleness made real, des-œuvre-ment). Literature is the manifestation of the absence of work. But writers are not indifferent to politics; they want to realize their empty project in the real political world of struggle. This is Blanchot’s strange new politics. Revolution and Terror interest the writer. In fact, literature is the writing of Terror. In Revolution, the slave liberates himself by confronting death for no reason. This is the reign of Terror which spreads fear of death throughout every fiber of the social just as much as the slave once felt fear in every fiber of his being when he confronted the Master and capitulated to him. These fearless slaves are the true Masters : They desire Absolute—and not just their own recognized—Freedom or Death. Blanchot is thinking of Robespierre and St. Just. The Terrorist negates every social reality in order to make appear what remains of the social. The Terrorist is the concrete social Truth of the writer. It is the god-like power to do away with all reality and begin anew with what remains.
Writers are literary Terrorists. This is one of the temptations for the writer: to wish to become for the Terrorist their Truth. This is what Sade attempted because terrorists like Robespierre and St. Just are doomed to fail; they erase themselves in erasing the whole of the social; they simply disappear pure and simple. They necessarily fail. The writer like Sade however makes appear the remainder of Revolutionary, Terrorists negation in the work of literature. Sade survives the Revolution and the Terror in prison, impotent to do anything, change anything, or destroy anything. Sade survives in order to write in order merely to survive in order to write…
Sade is the writer par excellence. He accomplishes his crimes in the imagination, out of an absence of work. He makes an unworked work. This is the “space of literature” which will preoccupy Blanchot for the remainder of his life. Literature is an image. Only in literature does the reign of terror truly take place, not in the world. Only in literature does the subject have the right to death.
Third. Literature is bound to language. Language is the life of death, not servile labor as in Hegel. In language I abolish the real and retain only a sign. The sign is purely arbitrary, purely gratuitous (and not a postivity (Blanchot is thinking here of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic “revolution”)). I say ‘cat’ and I kill the cat in its specific reality while I retain a gratuitous sign. Also, very importantly for Blanchot, I likewise abolish myself and retain only an empty, gratuitous sign: ‘I’. In this way, in literature, language becomes the gratuitous life of death, not the Spiritual life of death. In literature, language doesn’t say anything, doesn’t represent anything. To say ‘I’ is always to say ‘I am dead’ (just as the cat is assassinated in its particular, specific presence). But this is impossible for anyone to say. No one can say this. Therefore, the writer becomes precisely No One, becomes anonymous. The writer ‘does’ what no one can do, says what no one can say. This is a manifestation of neither potentiality nor actuality. It is outside the philosophical, it is the Outside of metaphysics.
This impossibility does not appear in ordinary life. Ordinary minds assume that the cat survives its being named, that I survive my saying ‘I [am dead]’. Literary language will try to speak the cat’s death, the writer’s death itself. Literature tries to speak nihilation or that which remains when all has been abolished—or, that movement prior to created creation, the nothing that precedes words and makes them necessary. Prior to creation is that resemblance that resembles nothing. In literature language begins to resemble itself and becomes an imaginary language.
Literature is the silent murder. But still, literature does produce words in books. There is still a concrete manifestation. How can words say silence/ say “nothing” without fatally transforming the nothing into a sign of nothing and not the pure presentation of the nothing? For Blanchot it is impossible; but the writer is this impossibility; if not, he is no writer; if he does not betray his project, then he is no writer. Death cannot appear in words because words are the “null”, void, arbitrary, gratuitous life of that death.
That which precedes words is radical negativity and death; and words cannot manifest this, but in attempting (and failing) to do so, words become literary, imaginary, or neuter (another key term in Blanchot). So, in fact, any word will do. Any word is always gratuitous. The writer cannot get beyond this—writing will always neutralize the writer’s ambition (think of Kafka’s lifelong sense that everything he ever wrote was a failure, was flawed, and should be burned after his death).
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