Never Wakeful Enough Dream, Literature and Subjectivity in the Work of Maurice Blanchot

Never Wakeful Enough Dream, literature and subjectivity in the work of Maurice Blanchot

Marieke Hofland 9936793 Master Thesis Philosophy Universiteit van Amsterdam December 2016 Supervisor: Dr. Aukje van Rooden Second reader: Dr. Trijsje Franssen

Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter one: Who dreams of writing? 1.1 From es gibt to il y a 3 1.2 Day-to-day language and the language of literature 4 1.3 Limit-experience: insomnia and dream 6 1.4 ‘An exactness of relation’: dream and literature 8

Chapter two: ‘The experience of non-experience’ 2.1 Questions on subjectivity, intentionality and experience 11 2.2 ‘Narrative voice’ and dispersal of self 12 2.3 Loss of self and loss of world 13 2.4 Existential mood 16

Chapter three: The Sleepwalker as child, Posthuman and Orpheus 3.1 Nightmare or tragedy averted? 17 3.2 The child-as-Sleepwalker 19 3.3 Prometheus and the Posthuman 21 3.4 ‘Writing begins with Orpheus’s gaze’ 24

Conclusion 26

Literature 28

Introduction Modern philosophy begins in disappointment, states Simon Critchley. The “great metaphysical dream of the soul moving frictionless towards knowledge of itself, things-in-themselves and God is just that,” Critchley continues in his book Infinitely Demanding, “a dream. Absolute knowledge or a direct ontology of things as they are is decisively beyond the ken of fallible, finite creatures like us.”1 Critchley observes that “[o]ur culture is endlessly beset with Promethean myths of the overcoming of the human condition […]. We seem to have enormous difficulty in accepting our limitedness, our finiteness, and this failure is a cause of much tragedy.”2 Humans are not the Promethean hero-like figures who can steal the fire of ultimate truth and knowledge from the gods. Humans are more like the Prometheus who was punished for this, forever trapped in the same cycle, forced to have the same excruciating experience repeat over and over again. Forever the philosopher tries to grasp the totality of things, find solace in static systems of thought. And forever these grand theoretic systems collapse. What Critchley seem seems to suggest is that when we accept our limitations, we can escape from this Promethean rat-race. Intrigued by this statement, I will develop and where possible answer the following questions: what is the alternative to the Promethean subject? What kind of subject wakes from the ‘great metaphysical dream’ – if it wakes up at all – and in what kind of world does this subject find itself? If ‘absolute knowledge’ is ‘beyond the ken of fallible, finite creatures like us,’ is there anything that we can know of self and things? And, not an unimportant question in our current culture where happiness seems to be both a duty and a right, can ‘tragedy’ be averted when we realise we are limited beings? Critchley identifies Immanuel Kant’s Copernican turn as the start of this philosophical disappointment.3 Since Kant various philosophical currents have been involved with humankind’s limited knowledge concerning self and things. Existentialism, which deals with human existence without metaphysical claims, is one of these currents. Phenomenology, which deals with the human experience of self and things without resorting to metaphysics, is another method. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) are notable examples. In these books, Heidegger and Sartre use the phenomenological method to come to their existential philosophy. Both these philosophers find in an essentially meaningless world a self- affirming subject which projects itself in a self-made world of meaning, in theory limited only by contingent external circumstances. The relationship between the subject, object and the outside world is one of personal relations, without resorting to eternal truths. This subject has woken from the metaphysical dream, stands in the daylight and knowingly sees its shadow cast on all the objects around. Ontologically speaking, this subject only sees itself reflected back when addressing the outside. Although post-metaphysical, Sartre’s and Heidegger’s subject can be seen as an extension of Prometheus. Actively moulding itself and shaping the world around, this subject still believes in a dream, a dream of ontological and intentional freedom of a self-affirming human being. This Promethean subject does not put its trust in eternal metaphysical truths, but in another source of almost unlimited power: the self. Woken up from the metaphysical slumber, a post-Promethean subject can be found in the work of Maurice Blanchot. The subject found in Blanchot’s work serves as an antidote to the Heideggerian and Sartrean subject, and with it the potential arises to step outside the tiresome Promethean rat-race of the self. The post-Promethean subject found in the work of Blanchot, is however not a creature of the day, but of the night. It no longer dreams of absolute metaphysical knowledge and absolute self-

1 Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 1 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

1 affirmation. However, this subject finds itself in another dream. In this dream-like limit-experience – an experience that can be triggered by the language of poetry and literature as well – Blanchot, like Heidegger and Sartre, also finds that the divide between inner and outer, between subject and object, is not clear-cut. But Blanchot wants to take these finding to another level. Where Heidegger and Sartre insist that for a subject to be authentic, it must endow itself with existential projects, Blanchot wants to do fully justice to the unfixed self. Without a fixed self that projects meaning in the world, the potential arises for an experience of existence itself; of seeing more than just the shadow of self and of letting the outside speak for itself. To be fascinated by the outside can result in the subject resting from the endless meaning-making ego. However, just as this experience takes place, the subject is thrown back to his or her reflective consciousness again. The experience of the limitless outside world cannot be maintained by a limited and finite creature. Blanchot’s subject is not exactly sleeping, but it is not fully awake either. This subject is typified by a restlessness linked to sleep, characterised by insomnia or somnambulism. Even dreaming is part of this restlessness, as the dream interrupts sound, restful sleep. To Blanchot, the dream is “an allusion to a refusal to sleep within sleep – an allusion to the impossibility of sleeping” and thus closely related to insomnia.4 To incorporate in one figure these states on the borderline of sleep, I will refer to this Blanchotian, post-Promethean, post-metaphysical subject as the Sleepwalker. It is in the liminal stages of sleep that the Sleepwalker finds a world where some sort of an experience of the outside can take place. In these half-asleep half-awake stages, the rational, meaning-making ego or self we encounter the world with during daytime has been replaced by a neutral being. Instead of leading, actively moulding and forcing the ego on the outside, the Sleepwalker is being led by something external to the self, rendered passive and has a chance of encountering things “as they exist.”5 The Sleepwalker’s experience is to Blanchot equivalent to the experience of poetry and writing or reading literature. Blanchot quotes Franz Kafka, who would say to his friend Gustav Janouch, "If it weren't for these terrible nights of insomnia, in general I wouldn't write."6 Elsewhere he quotes the poet René Char: “Poetry lives on perpetual insomnia.”7 What happens to the self in the half-asleep half-awake stages is analogous to what happens to the self in literature. The ‘I’ in poetry and writing or reading literature also disintegrates, as in literature the ‘I’ glides into the neutral ‘he’ or ‘it.’8 “Fatigue, insomnia, experience of art” – it is these experiences that “existence without existents, a pure exteriority of being without appearance, and thus a phenomenology without phenomena,” or simply il y a, ‘there is,’ might be found.9 In the first chapter of this thesis I will unravel the concept of il y a, the things ‘as they exist’ without human intent, and how and to what extent il y a can be experienced. I will clarify why poetry, literature, insomnia and dreaming are found at the heart of this experience. Why is the language of literature crucial? I will explain how poetry, literature, insomnia and dreaming are intertwined. In other words: what is there and how can it be experienced, if it can be experienced at all? The second chapter deals with the subject that experiences, and what experience might mean in the given context. As mentioned in the introduction, the subjectivity of the Sleepwalker gets undone. What typifies the post-Promethean subject and how can we speak of an experience of ‘my consciousness without me?’10 Can we still identify a self within the Sleepwalker? To elucidate this

4 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 184 5 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 327 6 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 183; Blanchot, Friendship, 147 7 Blanchot, Friendship, 147 8 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 21 9 Bruns, On the Anarchy of Philosophy and Poetry, 179 10 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 328

2 problem, I will look at several positions current Blanchot scholars have taken up. Findings by William Large, Kris Sealey, Arthur Cools and Gerald L. Bruns will be discussed. In the third chapter I will look at what Blanchot could mean for us today. Are we freed from the Promethean rat-race when we wake up from the metaphysical dream? What kind of subject is the Sleepwalker? Here I will look at how this subject can be incorporated into our day-to-day life. I will return to Critchley’s words: can tragedy be averted? If so, at what cost? Besides theoretical works, Blanchot has also written fictional récits, the last one written and published in 1994. In this thesis, I will mainly base my argument on four philosophical works, mostly written in the beginning of his career: The Work of Fire (1949), The Space of Literature (1955), The Infinite Conversation (1969) and The Writing of the Disaster (1980). These will in part be supplemented with references to his story ‘The Last Word’ (1948).

Chapter one: Who dreams of writing? 1.1 From es gibt to il y a Il y a is a term Blanchot had borrowed from his friend and fellow philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.11 Simply translated, il y a means ‘there is’ and the concept refers to existence itself. To Blanchot, il y a is the “anonymous and impersonal flow of being that precedes all being.”12 As il y a is reformulation of Heidegger’s es gibt, I will briefly turn to Levinas and Heidegger, and roughly sketch the relationship between a few terms Heidegger uses to help explain what Blanchot means. In Being and Time, Heidegger explains that an essential characteristic of a human being, or Dasein, is its being-in-the-world. Dasein is always involved with the world, may it be intentionally or non-intentionally. As a subject, I am not a self-contained ego and always in a web of relations with the objects around me. In effect, Dasein and being-in-the-world cannot be separated. At a most fundamental level, Being-in-the-world entails a ‘mood.’ Normally we are completely immersed in the world, the mood on the background as way of how we are attuned to everything. We feel at home in the world. But anxiety as a mood strips away the familiar relations we have with things. The world emerges as something distinct, something that would go on whether we are around or not. Dasein is still involved in the world, but it no longer experiences the world as inherently meaningful. Anxiety reveals that there would be being regardless of the existence of Dasein. In ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Heidegger writes that “in their very receding, things turn toward us”, disclosing the indifferent existence of the world.13 The world just ‘is there,’ es gibt. Keeping this in mind and turning to Blanchot’s phrase above, il y a as the “flow of being that precedes all being” would mean ‘there is’ being before the being of things and caught up in the web of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. The indifference of the es gibt, however, is still something, there is being. Moreover, Heidegger explains in his ‘Letter on “Humanism”,’ that es gibt should be translated as ‘it gives,’ and not as ‘there is’ which is usually the case in English translations.14 The phrasing of ‘it gives’ implies a generosity, and this marks the divergence between Heidegger and Levinas. Levinas did not intend this generosity in his own reformulation of the il y a, as he would later clarify.15 Es gibt gives itself in abundance. To Levinas, this notion of generosity obscures the terror one feels coming face to face with the impersonal aspect of existence. In contrast to Heidegger, Levinas, understands ‘there is’ as horrible in its meaninglessness, whereas Heidegger emphasises that es gibt is a potential giver of

11 Id., 332 12 Ibid. 13 Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, 88 14 Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, 254 15 Levinas, ‘Interview with François Poirié’, 45

3 meaning. Turning back to es gibt, the ‘it’ in ‘it gives’ signifies being, and what it gives, is itself. To Heidegger, however impersonal and indifferent es gibt may be, it does entail a personal aspect. Heidegger writes, “being […] is dependent upon the understanding by being.”16 It means that es gibt being only as long as there is Dasein and its possibility to comprehend being. Being gives itself only as long as there is Dasein. Heidegger’s es gibt is therefore not concerned with how things are without us, since being only lights up in human context. Anxiety reveals that the world would go on without Dasein, but the fact that there is mood at all entails that Dasein is actually involved. It is exactly this personal aspect in Heidegger which is at stake in Levinas and Blanchot. As mentioned above, Levinas describes the horror when faced ‘being in genera.’ Levinas links il y a with the night, where nothing lights up at all. This night is not full of being giving itself, but rather “full of nothingness of everything […] the impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable ‘consummation’ of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself.”17 Upon questioning, instead of intelligible being, silence returns, or at best an indistinguishable ‘murmur.’ Things are reduced to a swarming of points, unsituated and unconnected.18 The personal aspect implied in es gibt disappears as the ego has nothing to latch onto. Without any footing, the ego is engulfed by this ‘being in general.’ Seen like this, using powerful descriptive terms like ‘horror’ and ‘menace,’ it is not a surprise that Levinas wants to turn away from il y a.19 Ethics would serve as a way to overcome this meaninglessness of the il y a, and gives the subject the opportunity to dwell in a more warm and relatively stable intersubjective world – at least temporarily. Blanchot ascribes to Levinas’s concept of the il y a, in so far that existence itself stands outside human categorisation, is indeterminate and does not generously give itself to be filled in by a creating consciousness. However, rather than to recoil with horror, Blanchot’s subject is drawn to this ‘night’ of existence, which throughout his writings he will call ‘existence without being,’ ‘the outside,’ ‘the neuter,’ ‘the murmur’ and ‘the other night.’ Blanchot wants to do justice to the il y a, horrible as it may be. It is the source of his fascination and he wants to be engulfed by it. Blanchot is attracted to il y a as it is the only existence that is truly authentic. Authentic for Heidegger and Sartre entails existential projects, so that the ego can show its true form through action in the world. As a result, everything the Heideggerian or Sartrean subject encounters, is coloured through the lens of the meaning-making ego. For Blanchot, precisely because the il y a does not answer to human intelligibility and is not formed and shaped by the human ego, can its existence can be considered authentic. What Blanchot wants, in short, is some sort of experience with il y a.

1.2 Day-to-day language and language of literature A direct experience of il y a is impossible. What makes humans especially unequipped for a direct experience of existence? The answer can be found in language. In normal, day-to-day life we make sense of the world and all the objects therein, by language. There are names for all the objects. We use language to point out and name the things, to make objects workable. The swirl of singular objects is made understandable by assigning generalized words to these objects. Order is created out of the chaos of ‘swarming of points,’ the singular, separate things.20 An intimate connection between word, concept and object emerges. In language, it is the word that carries the concept, and the concept refers back to the object. Consequentially, language deals with the concepts, not with the objects themselves.

16 Heidegger, Being and Time, 204 17 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 57 18 Id., 59 19 Ibid. 20 Van der Sijde, ‘De postmoderne ervaring van het onuitspreekbare’, 105

4 The previous idea concerning language, concepts and objects, can be found in Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the reading of Hegel. Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in the 1930’s were followed by a group of prominent French thinkers. His interpretation of Hegel became influential in the French intellectual milieu. Blanchot formed no exception. Kojève’s influence can be particularly seen in Blanchot’s essay ‘Literature and the Right to Death.’ In this essay Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s notion of negation can be found. Negation is the movement where the word takes the place of the object. In other words, the concept negates the reality of the object.21 It is the negation of all the particular real objects for the sake of the general idea of the object.22 In this movement the destructive aspect of language is made into something positive. The word restores to the object “all the certainty it had on the level of existence” and the word has more permanence than the objects as ‘things can change’ and alter.23 Critchley describes the movement as “a form of murder that kills things qua things-in- themselves and translates them back into things-for-consciousness.”24 With language, we have traded the independence of things for our mastery over them. So in effect, one does not find oneself in a world of objects, but in a world of language. This language that supresses reality always stands in between oneself and the thing. This is a very important notion in the work of Blanchot: human experience of the world is practically always mediated by language. However, there is still something that remains not named, the “pre-conceptual singularity of things the way they were before their deconstruction by words.”25 It is the il y a existence that escapes. In day-to-day life, the horrible fascination that the il y a holds over us seems far away and an experience thereof almost impossible, but there are certain modes of being where there is a possibility of an experience of the il y a. Some of them are actually quite common. George Bataille’s list of what can bring on an inner-, or interior-experience, include “torment […], tickling, laughter, poetry, erotic transport, varieties of religious ecstasy – and moments of sweet felicity.”26 These are described by Bataille as certain excessive cognitive and physical modes of being. These modes of being cannot be grasped in language and therefore may allow for some sort of non-conceptual, non- cognitive experience. Borrowing from Bataille, Blanchot calls such an experience a ‘limit-experience’ and defines it as “the response that man encounters when he has decided to put himself radically in question.”27 As will be explained later, the limit-experience is not always so consciously induced and one would rather describe it as an experience where one has been put radically in question. The limit that is experienced is the limit of the self always trying to make meaning in and of the world, the self always mediated by language, the self that can ordinarily never know anything but language. In the limit-experience this constant chatter is somehow altered and a possibility of a glimpse of the ‘inaccessible, the unknown’ is promised.28 Also, in the limit-experience one stretches the idea of experience itself as the ‘I’ who experiences is compromised. The question of what happens to the self, and what happens to the concept of experience will be touched upon in the following section, and pursued more thoroughly in the second chapter. For now we will turn to insomnia and dreaming as limit-experiences.

21 Haase and Large, Maurice Blanchot, 30 22 Id., 31 23 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 325 24 Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing, 53 25 Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, 112 26 Bataille, quoted in: Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 137 27 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 203 28 Id., 205

5 1.3 Limit-experience: insomnia and dream Levinas identifies insomnia as a limit-experience that brings one in contact with il y a. In his 1947 From Existence to Existents, Levinas invites his readers to think of an event in which all personal involvement with the world around us – and consequently all meaning – dissolves.29 He links this thought-experiment to the seemingly more mundane experience of insomnia. Most people have had the experience of lying in bed, in the dark of the night, utterly and exasperatingly awake, the prospect of restful sleep seemingly far away. Consciousness is exhausted. It can happen that in such an instance perception shifts, and all the things in the room that should be familiar take on an obscure aspect. They are no longer appear your familiar things, where you can do with them whatever you please. Intentionality seems to be inverted and it occurs that the things are looking back at you. Here Levinas is clearly inspired by Heidegger’s account of anxiety, but as already called attention to above, for the former the limit-experience is something horrific. Rather than the potential for Dasein that arises when faced with the es gibt, in Levinas’s insomnia it seems that ‘you’ along with all things dissolve into an anonymous presence.30 Here we are “no longer related to this or that thing or to this or that possibility, but to existence itself. It is the disclosure of our existence unencumbered by our attachment of things. In the ‘there is’ we come face to face with our being, which is literally ‘no-thing’ at all.”31 Taken by this thought-experiment, Blanchot reworks Levinas’s account of the limit- experience of insomnia, and the figure of the Sleepwalker emerges. Blanchot positions dreaming next to insomnia. To Blanchot, these states of being are akin in so far that in dreaming someone – or something – wakes up. And this someone – or something – like the insomniac, cannot find rest in sleep. This entity waking up as the body of the dreamer sleeps, is identified as the Sleepwalker, and can be regarded as quite suspicious. Blanchot writes: “Nocturnal wandering, the tendency to stray when the world is attenuated and grows distant, and even the honest professions which are necessarily practiced at night attract suspicions. To sleep with open eyes is an anomaly symbolically indication something which the general consciousness does not approve of. People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. […] The sleepwalker is suspect, for he is the man who does not find repose in sleep.”32 Good, decent folks do not rummage around at night amongst the deep shadows. In the soothing night of sleep they rest their body and mind. To Blanchot, this kind of sleep belongs to do the day, where body and mind are prepared for the daytime of activities.33 But for the Sleepwalker, the dreaming that happens at the heart of night, is not a peaceful state. To Blanchot, the “[n]ight, the essence of night, does not let us sleep. In the night no refuge is to be found in sleep.”34 The dreaming of the Sleepwalker, as is the case with insomnia, is marked by “the impossibility of making sleep a free zone.”35 What takes place in this night of dreams? And why is the Sleepwalker ‘suspect’? First of all, it is important to note that when Blanchot writes about ‘night,’ he distinguishes between two nights. When we ordinarily speak about night, we usually mean the soothing night of sleep. This is the night that belongs to the day, and is in a sense the opposite of the day. Where everything appears in the day, everything – self, other, the whole difference between self and other

29 Levinas, From Existence to Existents, 57 30 Haase and Large, Maurice Blanchot, 72-73 31 Id., 73 32 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 265 33 Id., 264 34 Id., 266 35 Id., 267

6 – disappears in the first night. “But,” as Blanchot puts it, “when everything has disappeared in the night, ‘everything has disappeared’ appears.”36 This is the night of dreaming, which Blanchot calls ‘the other night.’37 It is the impossibility of the second night which holds the fascination of Blanchot. Since the experience of total nothingness is unattainable, as this would be death, it is in the ‘other night’ that dreaming counts as a limit-experience where il y a is approached. It is in the dreaming in the heart of the other night that the Sleepwalker wakes up. The Sleepwalker is not quite the same as the body who sleeps. This entity is suspect, because “who or what dreams cannot be dragged into the light of day and stopped for identification.”38 The Sleepwalker who wakes up in the dream is not the ‘I’ of the daytime. As Blanchot formulates it, “[h]e who dreams sleeps, but already he who dreams is he who sleeps no longer.”39 “Of course,” Blanchot reflects elsewhere, “it is not truly another, another person, but what is it?”40 To Blanchot, the Sleepwalker who wakes up in the dream, is reduced to an indeterminate ‘il,’ a ‘he’ or ‘it.’ The dream-event follows the logic of insomnia. ‘I’ no longer put forth my intentions on the outside, it is rather the outside that seems to gaze back at something which no longer can be identified as ‘me.’ In the dream, there is no self to maintain any personal relations. The daytime ego holds no control over objects in the dream-world. Without any personal relations, boundaries between the self and the outside blur into an experience of the ‘impersonal existence’ of the il y a. In the dream there are no categories of space and time, there is no identity, no difference, no subject, no object. There is neither this, nor that (at the same time, there is not not this and not not that either). It is the realm of what Blanchot calls ‘le neuter,’ the neutral.41 Le neutre is not only the French grammatical term for the for ‘the neuter,’ but also a contraction of the Latin words ne/uter – neither/nor. As previously mentioned, in day-to-day life language is used to distinguish between subjects and objects to make sense of the world. The loss of identification and loss of mastery over objects in the dream-state implies that the Sleepwalker’s experience is neither linguistic nor conceptual, in the sense of language ordinarily used as tool to signify external objects. The Sleepwalker, not in possession of an ‘I,’ stripped of instrumental language, projects and intentionality, is on the verge of being reduced to its singular being amid the chaotic swirl of all other singular beings, which Levinas has called the swarming of points, the being in general. Without an ‘I’ who can linguistically differentiate between all these points, the self would get engulfed by the il y a existence. Instead of an ego actively moulding the world around, the Sleepwalker is taken by the images in the dream- world, and made passive. This passivity is another than the dichotomy of passive and active, where passivity can be a conscious choice of the subject. Blanchot means something more radical than a personal stance. “Passivity neither consents nor refuses: neither yes nor no, without preference, it alone suits the limitlessness of the neutral […]. The passive condition is no condition: it is an unconditional which no protection shelters […].”42 With passivity Blanchot indicates a relentless, unstoppable dispossession of self by a constant flow of images. Images and words are both ways of making sense of the world. In day-to-day life, images and words function in the same way as the image precedes the object and takes its place. Images in the realm of dream, however, do not refer back to anything we encounter in the daytime, they only resemble themselves.43 The images do not signify. Blanchot writes:

36 Id., 63 37 Id., 163 38 Farbman, The Other Night, 60 39 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 267 40 Blanchot, Friendship, 141 41 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 299 42 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 29 43 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 258

7 “The dream is that which cannot ‘really’ be. Everything there is similar; each figure is another one, is similar to another and to yet another, and this last to still another. One seeks the original model, wanting to be referred to a point of departure, an initial revelation, but there is none. The dream is the likeness that refers eternally to likeness.”44 This constant flow of images takes over the ego of the Sleepwalker. The ego gets displaced, it is always being moved, ‘interminable,’ and ‘incessant.’ The Sleepwalker has “an intimacy with the outside” – that is, the outside of the meaning-making ego – “which has no location and affords no rest.”45 Desubjectivized, the Sleepwalker is reduced to an impersonal ‘vigilant’ existence, always on the brink of losing itself. Think about dream-logic: everything can and does morph into another thing, and images constantly blend into each other. The self is not excluded in this constant transforming and the ‘I’ can take on the shape of anything or anyone. To a certain extent, that is, as the body that sleeps remains a reality that cannot be overcome.46 Although made passive, there is no soothing nothingness. In sleep, the dream keeps on interrupting, keeping the Sleepwalker awake, keeping it from total unconsciousness and from fusing with ‘the outside, the night.’47 The Sleepwalker is propelled into the ‘other’ night, the ream of dream.48 There is no total unconsciousness, there is no escape from self nor from the body, and one can never fuse with the night. Its and experience Blanchot equates to a never-ending dying, without the final repose of death.

1.4 ‘An exactness of relation’: dream and literature Blanchot identifies the writer as ‘daytime insomniac.’49 Comparing the realm of dreams and the space of literature, he even goes as far as saying that “[n]aturally, there is an exactness of relation between the dream state and the written state.”50 To Blanchot, the dream state is important because it opens up a space where il y a can be approached. Literature holds the same primary status for a possible experience of the outside. How are dreams, sleep, il y a and literature or poetry connected? What is this ‘exactness of relation’? At first glance the answer might be surprising, as the solution can be found in language, earlier identified as the culprit depriving us from a direct experience of things. But Blanchot points not in the direction of the instrumental language day-today activities, but to the language of literature or poetry. Blanchot calls the language of literature his ‘only chance’ for some sort of an experience with il y a.51 The first relationship between the dream state and the space of literature can be found when the analogy of night and day is used. As there is day and night, Blanchot sees language working on two slopes.52 The first slope is ordinary language, the language of day-to-day communication and conversation. It is the realm of ‘pure daylight.’53 As before mentioned, language is used here as a tool and it gives meaning by negating the reality of the object.54 The second slope is concerned with the negation itself, with the ‘void’ or ‘gap’ that is left by the object when language is used – the appearance of the disappearance of the object. If the object is everything but the word, then the

44 Id., 268 45 Id., 31 46 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 62 47 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 163 48 Farbman, The Other Night, 53 49 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 121 50 Blanchot, Friendship, 142 51 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 327 52 Id., 332-333 53 Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing, 62 54 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 332

8 object must reside in the darkness where the searchlight of the word does not reach. The writer-as- Sleepwalker wants to capture “not the man in general, but this man and, in this man, what man rejects in order to speak of him.”55 The Sleepwalker wants not the generalities of instrumental language, but the singularity of the object. Writing is used to experience the existence of the void left in the wake of the word.56 To obtain this experience, language as tool must be abandoned. The second slope is therefore not concerned with the mundane activity of speech, with signification, but rather with “silence, repose, the cessation of tasks.”57 This way the language of literature approaches il y a existence. To come back to the day/night analogy, the second slope of literature can be compared to the night of ‘pure sleep.’58 In the night of ‘pure sleep’ the subject would “fuse with the reality and materiality of things.”59 The writer is fascinated by the ‘reality and materiality of things’ as found in the night of pure sleep, and wants to bring them back to daylight. Here the writer-as-Sleepwalker faces an impossibility. As seen, a total unconsciousness can never be achieved in sleep. Total unconsciousness would be akin to death. Even as the daytime self is abandoned in sleep, consciousness as the Sleepwalker wakes in the dream. An ultimate experience of existence can never be brought about and can never be written. With the language of literature or poetry, the writer faces a continuous oscillation. The literary language can never solely work on one slope or the other. As soon as the writer-as- Sleepwalker touches upon the pre-linguistic existence of the thing – the void left in the wake of the word – it is immediately covered, or ‘killed’ again. Literature or poetry is the impossibility of the writer-as-Sleepwalker to find rest in ultimate knowledge. Similarly the dream is the impossibility of the Sleepwalker finding repose in sleep. Literature’s ambiguity, always moving between the two slopes of clarifying signification and the opaque nature of the object, leaves the writer-as- Sleepwalker as restless as the dreaming Sleepwalker. Another component of the ‘exactness of relation’ involves the same sort of ‘grammatical formula’ that exists between dreaming and writing. In both these states, there is a movement from an ‘I’ to a ‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘it.’60 When I sleep, a neutral ‘it.’ the Sleepwalker, awakes. Much in the same way the poet or the writer of literature “loses the power to say ‘I.’”61 This transformation is most evident in the case of automatic writing. Putting a pen on paper and write without conscious intent, decisions or thought, “[a]utomatic writing tended to suppress constraints, suspend intermediaries, reject all mediation. It put the hand that writes in contact with something original; it made of this active hand a sovereign passivity […].”62 This movement happens whenever a poem is written or when a writer enters the literary space. The consciousness of the author-as-Sleepwalker gets by the words. The writer does not command language, it is the words themselves that take over in an intentional reversal. The words ‘gaze back at you.’ “’I’ never speak.”63 To Blanchot, language is an ‘impersonal power.’64 It comes from nowhere in particular and it belongs to no one.65 One may use the words, but one can never own them. They were there before the person existed, and will continue to be there after the person has perished, without original

55 Id., 327 56 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 55 57 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 119 58 Id., 264 59 Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing, 62 60 Blanchot, Friendship, 146 61 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 27 62 Id., 179 63 Ibid. 64 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 340 65 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 26

9 author or origin. To Blanchot, literature is self-generating, it “dispenses with the writer.”66 This is what Blanchot means by saying that literature is “my consciousness without me.”67 The writer-as- Sleepwalker is made passive in the same way the Sleepwalker is made passive by the images in the realm of dream, as the incessant flow of words displace the subject. It is becoming clear why the language of literature holds a primary status for a potential experience with the il y a. As is the case with the images in dreams, the self holds no control over literary language. With all personal relations suspended, a neutral relation is established, which in turn lets the neutrality of the il y a come into play. The neutrality of being shines through literary language and dream-images. Blanchot calls language ‘his only hope’ because to him language possesses a ‘materiality,’ the fact that “words are things too, a kind of nature.”68 Loosened from the grip of a directing self, literary words and dream-images become ambiguous, and thus neutral. Literary ambiguity or neutrality holds that words cannot be infused with the writer’s intent, as the words are not used as a signifying tool but become things in their own right. In their neutrality literary words emulate the condition of pre-conceptual objects. The meaning of language becomes the being of language in the space of literature. What happens to the thing-like words in literature is the same thing that happens to the images in the dream-space, as in literature words become the image of language.69 In the literary or poetic space, words act like dream-images because only refer to themselves, and do not signify objects but become objects. As any other material object, their existence is opaque. They are irreducible to categories and concepts. “Literature says, ‘I no longer represent, I am; I do not signify, I present.’”70 As presence instead of representation, the images of the dream-state and the words-as-images of the literary space side with il y a in their singularity. However, even though literary language in its ambiguity acts like being in general, the simple fact remains that it is still made up of words. Unlike undetermined singular objects, literary ambiguity points towards the possible signifying meaning that still can be extracted. In their neutrality literary words and dream-images join pre-linguistic objects, but their ambiguity prevents them from becoming the exact same status as the objects. Il y a ambiguity means that everything can be anything else, as there is no distinction in being in general. What the writer-as-Sleepwalker is ultimately fascinated by, the night-time ‘silence’ of the words, can never quite be achieved. Even in the most ambiguous poetry, where language takes the writer to realms not cognitively understood, the words still cling to some sort of signification of the daytime reality, they can never be totally silent or neutral. Neither truly awake in the daytime nor totally sleeping in the night-time, but like the insomniac stupefied with the lack of sleep in the daytime and awake in the night, the writer-as- Sleepwalker wakes up in the world of the ‘last word.’ In his 1948 fiction which bears the same name, Blanchot tries to capture the experience of the world of the last word. “Instead of filling the night with their barking, the dogs silently let me pass, as though they had not seen me. It was only after I had walked some distance they began to howl again: trembling, mulled howls, which at hour of the day resounded like the echo of the words there is. ‘Those are probably the last words,’ I thought, listening to them. But the words there is were still able to reveal the things that were this remote neighborhood.”71

66 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 328 67 Ibid. 68 Id., 327 69 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 34 70 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 328 71 Blanchot, ‘The Last Word’, 42

10 The last word might hint to the silence and darkness of the il y a, but “the last word cannot be a word, nor the absence of words, nor anything else but word.”72 The howl of the dogs might not exactly resemble language, but in the absence of language the promise of thereof is there. With the promise of language the objects are lit up, lifted out of their environment and lose their singularity. In the rest of Blanchot’s ‘The Last Word,’ we see that this world follows the dream-logic insofar things morph into other things, object constantly appear and disappear as the subject approaches them. Nocturnal silence and daytime noise alternate. ‘The Last Word’ is an example of how Blanchot wants the capture the restless experience of writing, as the movement in the dream- state is the same as the restless movement of writing. The promise of il y a is there, but one can never quite experience it. This is the feeling Blanchot wants to evoke in his literary pieces. Also exemplary is his first récit ‘Thomas the Obscure,’ which reads like a fever dream. “Thomas is not deranged or disordered; he is astonishingly lucid. It is just that he is no longer a logical subject, self- identical, exercising rational control.”73 The dream-logic can further be found in the style of writing Blanchot uses in his theoretical work, where fragments, paradoxes and récits break apart the conventional way of writing philosophical theory.

Chapter 2: ‘The experience of non-experience’ 2.1 Questions on subjectivity, intentionality and experience What happens to the self, the daytime ego, when it gets displaced by the Sleepwalker? As already mentioned, to Blanchot the ego gets ‘undone’ in in the space of literature and in the dream-state, the power to say ‘I’ is no longer there as it transforms into a ‘neutral existence.’ But even though the ego is undone, there must be someone who – or something that – has an experience. Blanchot uses the term ‘experience’ often and it is a key concept in his work (e.g. ‘limit-experience,’ ‘original experience,’ etc.). What does experience mean? Taken from the ‘Phenomenology’ entry the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, “[t]he central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.”74 As the blinded self as centre is unseated by the dumbfounded Sleepwalker, can we still speak of an experience if there is no intentionality? Can we speak of a consciousness without directedness? How can the impersonal aspect of the Sleepwalker be explained, and how can the Sleepwalker’s experience be understood? For this I will first take a closer look at what Blanchot writes on the neutral, impersonal aspect of self, which he in The Infinite Conversation calls the ‘narrative voice.’ To develop the questions concerning (non-)subjectivity and experience further, I will turn to several contemporary Blanchot scholars, who each have taken former questions in consideration, each with their own understanding. A closer look is taken to articles by William Large (2002), Kris Sealey (2013) and Arthur Cools (2005). These viewpoints will be complemented by observations from Gerald Bruns (1997). Before the investigation, two extremes can be eliminated – namely, the self as stable centre and the complete disintegration of the self. The subject-as-Prometheus can be placed on one end of the spectrum. Prometheus believes in the autonomous, unitary and individualized ego as director, perfectly well equipped to discover absolute truths. Blanchot shows that words and dream-images

72 Id., 48 73 Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 37 74 Smith, ‘Phenomenology’, [no page number given]

11 unsettle the self, as the self loses command over them. Calling attention to the neutrality and passivity of the Sleepwalker in the space of literature and in the realm of dream Blanchot has exposed Prometheus truly as myth. On the other end of the extreme lies the possibility of the total shattering of self. In this case the ego fuses with the environment, so that no discernible separation between the two exists. Although this unity may be craved by the Sleepwalker, and is in fact the source of inspiration for the Sleepwalker-as-writer, it can never be quite achieved. Blanchot does not see this oceanic feeling, the mystical experience where the subject is fully merged with the outside, ever brought to completion in waking life of the Sleepwalker – although, as I will come back to in chapter three, the oceanic feeling is the experience of the infant. But for the Sleepwalker, the ego “never melds with the il y a.”75 Unity is neither is found within the self, nor between self and outside, as self never fully joins being in general. In the limit-experience the boundaries between interiority and exteriority are blurred, but not destroyed. “There cannot be an immediate grasp of the immediate… The immediate excludes everything immediate: this means all direct relation, all mystical fusion, and all sensible contact, just as it excludes itself – renounces its own immediacy – each time it must submit to the mediation of an intermediary in order to offer access.”76 The force of language, despite stretched to the conceptual limit, prohibits this fusion. Total unity would total be total unconsciousness, would be death.

2.2 ‘Narrative voice’ and dispersal of self In one of his much later works, Blanchot would assert that “[t]he subject does not disappear; rather its excessively determined unity is put in question.”77 No fixed self, no grand unity – what does happen to the self in the limit-experience of dream and writing? To write, according to Blanchot in The Space of Literature, “is to pass from the first to the third person, so that what happens to me happens to no one, is anonymous insofar as it concerns me, repeats itself in an infinite dispersal.”78 Dispersed, dispossessed, displaced, undone, unseated, unsettled – these are all terms Blanchot has used through the years to indicate the ‘narrative voice,’ the neutral, impersonal voice that shows itself the realm of literature – and in the realm dream likewise. After all, in the dream the Sleepwalker recounts the events while the daytime self sleeps. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot explores the notion of dispersal in more depth. Blanchot explains that for impersonal Sleepwalker- as-writer, “the ‘he’ has split in two.”79 The first il refers to the narrator through which the whole of the story is told, as the movement of the words flow through the Sleepwalker-as-writer, over which it has no mastery. The whole of the story comes ultimately from the outside, the unattached nature of language. This way, the il does not replace the writer as subject as such, but rather becomes a way to indicate language as presence. It is not the writer who speaks, but it is the neutral, the il y a, that murmurs through the words. In additions, the whole of the story is divided into many subjectivities. “The novelist is one who forgoes saying ‘I’” – by now this is a familiar expression, but in The Infinite Conversation Blanchot continues to explain in more detail that the novelist “delegates his powers to others; the novel is peopled with little ‘egos’ […].”80 These are the characters of the story, each with their own

75 Sealey, ‘The “face” of the il y a’, 438 76 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 38 77 Blanchot, ‘Michel Foucault as I imagine him’, 76 78 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 33 79 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 381 80 Ibid.

12 particularities. But again, this does entail that the many different subject-positions can be taken up by the writer or the reader. Blanchot points out that all subject-positions are suspended as the characters and their thoughts, feelings and ideas are also governed by the neutral. Their stories are being told in the closed-off world of the book, written down by anonymous language, stripped from the power to recount their own lives.81 So the il of the narrative voice cannot be understood as another subject or subject-position, taken the place “usually occupied by the subject.”82 The third person of the narrative voice is neutral true to its grammatical form. Personal relations are suspended for the Sleepwalker. It does not mean there is no relation to life whatsoever, but for the Sleepwalker the “relation to life would be a neutral one.”83 Meaning and lack of meaning are neutralized. The il is just in service of the story, of the words themselves unfolding, and in narrative voice cannot be understood as the conveyer of a personal goal. Also, the neutral shows that in writing as limit-experience, the unity traditionally associated with the subject is challenged. That does not mean the subject altogether disappears. With the use of ‘dispersal’ and its synonyms, Blanchot indicates that a self must still be there, although it might not be recognized as such as the self we ordinarily identify with on a day-to-day basis. In a reversal, the narrative voice proves the daytime ego the made-up story. Prometheus is not kicked of the throne and destroyed, there never was a fixed Promethean self in the first place. To Blanchot, the Sleepwalker finds itself in a privileged position because it experiences the loss of unity first-hand. The subject as always mediated by words becomes very clear. But at the heart of the matter lies the fact that the ‘I’ is a daytime mirage, a fiction, a myth. In the movement from the ‘I’ to ‘il,’ the presence of the author becomes the presence of his or her absence. The disappearance of the author itself appears. Blanchot has presented this sort of movement before in The Work of Fire and The Space of Literature. A similar motion can be found when Blanchot describes the relationship between objects and words on the second slope of language. Here the word functions as the “revelation of what revelation destroys.”84 The object as disappearance, appears. It is also is comparable to what happens in the ‘other night,’ ‘when everything has disappeared in the night, “everything has disappeared” appears.’ The limit- experience indicates that something else exists beyond or beneath the entity that is presented: the word holds the promise that their exists something other than the fixed word; the ‘other night’ too promises there is being in general other than the individual beings perceived; the narrative voice holds the promise that there is more to the stable Promethean ego. The Sleepwalker is found in the dark void left in the wake of the blinded daytime ego. This way, the narrative voice is devoted to the ‘pure passivity of being.’85

2.3 Loss of self and loss of world To make sense of the feeling of loss of self in the limit-experience, William Large begins his inquiry by asking a relevant question regarding Levinas’s thought experiment. Levinas asked his readers to imagine an event where all beings, things and persons would vanish, where il y a becomes the appearance of this disappearance. Large wonders “[i]f the meaning of the ‘there is’ is taken to be the disappearance of the world and myself, then this disappearance is interpreted categorically as the actual disappearance of the world and myself, which is quite absurd, since who would be having this

81 Id., 385 82 Ibid. 83 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 379 84 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 328 85 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 27

13 experience?”86 There must always be someone who experiences something, Large reasons. In his analysis, the something that the subject experiences is the il y a interpreted as an ‘existential mood.’87 Where in Heidegger fundamental moods like anxiety are personal, Large argues that to Blanchot a mood must be deeply impersonal.88 It is this mood that completely takes over the self, to such a degree that a loss of self is experienced. Where anxiety for Heidegger serves as a way to come back to an authentic self, the mood for Blanchot only deepens the feeling of loss.89 The self no longer experiences relations with other things, as it sees that these relations are projections from the self to begin with. Objects and ego do not disappear, but all meaning vanishes from them. When a personal involvement between me and the outside disappears, and when inside and outside become indistinguishable as such, we can no longer call our existence personal. It just is. In the limit- experience, the subject “hovers on the edge of becoming a senseless thing.”90 Large’s subject does not actually completely lose itself, as that would be ‘absurd,’ but it experiences feelings of dispersal and disruption. In Large’s interpretation, the il y a as existential mood takes over the self. The self remains in place, but its peaceful slumber of feeling at home in the world is shook up.91 The loss of intentionality, and thus loss of meaning is interpreted by the subject as a loss of self, “for there is no object to hold onto that would enable me to distinguish myself from it […].”92 To Large, the il y a is not exactly the outside, but it is “an existential mood that reveals the totality of being.”93 Kris Sealey hints at an existential mood as well, although she does not use il y a and the mood interchangeably. For her, the experience of il y a existence is an experience of something exterior to self. She too highlights the feeling of loss of directedness, meaning and self. The key to Sealey’s argument can be found in the passivity of the Sleepwalker, as it is taken by anonymous and meaningless word- and dream-images: the ego no longer possess any power that allows it any kind of agency. Rendered passive, there is no-one present to hold on to anything as boundaries between in and out blur. The encounter with the il y a “undermines this very divide between the interiority of the self and exteriority.”94 There is, however, the remainder of the self to be found. To Sealey, “there remains the existent, depersonalized, desubjectivized, and yet very much a unique self, to encounter the il y a. […] [S]omething remains (that is no longer ‘I’) to be privy to my being ‘swept away.’ I am aware of myself as depersonalized and passive under the gaze of the anonymous night.”95 The il y a unsettles and disrupts the subject, but it ultimately leaves its ‘place’ and ‘self’ intact in order to experience this disruption.96 Moreover, there is no escape from this self. As the ego gets dispossessed by the il y a, and empties it of intentional content, it “ends not with negation, but with the impossibility of negation.”97 The ambiguity of language prevents the ego from losing complete consciousness. Where for Large the subject experiences an overwhelming fundamental mood, Sealey’s subject experiences itself as neutral, depersonalized, not making any choices and decisions: ‘my consciousness without me.’ Intentionality, stated in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy as the

86 Large, ‘Impersonal Existence’, 131 87 Id., 137 88 Id., 131 89 Large, ‘Impersonal Existence’, 137 90 Id., 138 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Large, ‘Impersonal Existence’, 137 94 Sealey, ‘The “face” of the il y a’, 437 95 Id., 438 96 Ibid. 97 Id., 445

14 central structure of an experience, is perhaps faulty as the subject experiences a loss of agency, but it is not broken. In Sealey’s interpretation, there is some sort of self-reflexive consciousness in the limit-experience to direct its attention to itself. The self is aware of the powerless self, who is not yet an “established and positioned subject.”98 There is an ebbing away of consciousness, never the total loss of subjectivity.99 For Sealey the disruptive element of the il y a leads to an experience of a loss of agency, and thus a feeling of loss of self. Arthur Cools underscores Large’s notion of somehow linking the il y a with an impersonal existential mood.100 Like Sealey, he also does not equate il y a with mood, but to Cools it seems that Blanchot “fully agrees with Heidegger with regard to the fundamental function of anxiety,” where Dasein discovers that its being is rooted in an inherently meaningless world.101 Moreover, the loss of agency experienced when exposed to the il y a, reveals to the subject its own equally meaningless singular being, the ‘unique self’ as described by Sealey. However, Sealey’s subject is ‘aware of itself as depersonalized.’ To Cools, the limit-experience prohibits such a self-reflectiveness. It “does not effect a return to the self, does not concern his/her self-relatedness. In this regard, Blanchot describes the activity of writing as an experience that goes beyond the author’s subjectivity.”102 For Sealey, the fact that in the limit-experience the outside interrupts the subject, entails that some sort of ethics can be distilled. After all, she reasons, it shows that the other is always “part of the ‘how’ of human identity.”103 To Cools this idea of human identity is quite problematic. Large already indicated that anxiety for Blanchot does not enable the subject to discover its authentic being as a potential source to act upon. Rather, the mood increases the feeling of loss. Cools sides with Large on this: there is no return to an authentic self, as is proposed by Heidegger. The subject thinking itself authentic and autonomous, able to reaffirm its subjectivity in existential projects, lives in fiction. The Sleepwalker is as evasive as the il y a itself. As soon as the pre-linguistic self is approached, it is immediately covered or ‘killed’ again by the linguistic ego. The force of the language of literature shows that “one’s understanding of oneself is unbearable and irreducibly connected to something opaque, anonymous and indifferent that singularizes self.”104 The interruption of the il y a demonstrates not only that the exterior is part of the self, but that the exterior, the ‘impersonal outside,’ actually lies at the heart of subjectivity. And not only is there no return to the self, but with the indifferent and inaccessible language, “the very possibility of a transcendental subjectivity is undermined.”105 At its root, the subject is not subjective. It just is. The singular self is impossible to describe, and impossible to have it in its singularity take part in an existential project or human ethics. Dragged into the daylight, the opaque, singular self is lost to language. Cools elucidates the looming impasse. The subject appears be nothing more than “an anxious being attached to language,”106 at its core stripped of intentionality. Again, the question concerning subjectivity, intentionality and experience must be posed. If the Sleepwalker is stripped of agency, and stripped of both outer and inner directedness, how can we speak of experience if there appears to be nobody who can have an experience of anything?

98 Ibid. 99 Id., 438 100 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 54 101 Id., 58 102 Id., 59 103 Sealey, ‘The “face” of the il y a, 442 104 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 60 105 Ibid. 106 Id., 59

15 2.4 Existential mood To Gerald Bruns it is also clear that intentionality has no part in the limit-experience, as there is no longer an acting and directing consciousness. “[A]ll subjectivity and objectivity has drained away; only existence remains.”107 Bruns explains that experience does not necessarily need to be understood in the phenomenological interpretation. Experience does not automatically require intentionality. In the philosophical Romantic tradition, experience has to do with feeling, something that the subject undergoes.108 Taking this in consideration, Large’s interpretation of a mood comes to mind again. Here the subject experiences a feeling without a particular intentional object. The self is consumed by feeling, to such an extent that self and mood become indistinguishable. However, there are two immediate problems with Large’s claim that the il y a ‘is an existential mood.’ First of all, to Blanchot, the Sleepwalker is rendered passive and neutral. The Sleepwalkers passivity points towards the ‘passivity of being,’ the il y a existence outside the categories of action and repose.109 In the passivity of being all concepts and categories vanish. Feelings have a dialectic: to feel something, even if that feeling is all-consuming, entails the opposite of that feeling. The il y a neutrality rejects these sort of binaries: it is neither this, nor that. Therefore, the il y a cannot be reduced to a ‘mood’ as such. To illustrate the second problem, it is worth quoting Blanchot at length. Blanchot writes: “The self has never been the subject of this experience. The ‘I’ will never arrive at it, nor will the individual, this particle of dust that I am, nor even the self of us all that is supposed to represent absolute self-consciousness. Only the ignorance that the I-who-dies would incarnate by acceding to the space where in dying it never dies in the first person as an ‘I’ will reach it. Thus it is necessary to indicate one last time the strangest and most weighty trait of this situation. We speak as though this were an experience, and yet we can never say we have undergone it. An experience that is not lived, even less a state of our self; at most a limit-experience at which, perhaps, the limits fall but that reaches us only at the limit: when the entire future has become present and, through resolution of the decisive Yes, there is affirmed the ascendency over which there is no longer any hold. The experience of non-experience. Detour from everything visible and invisible.”110 ‘An experience not lived, even less a state of our self,’ ‘the experience of non-experience’: the other problem with Large’s description is the fact that he uses the word ‘existential’ to indicate the Sleepwalker’s experience, which is not apparent in Blanchot’s phrasing. Existentialism deals with how the subject finds itself existing in the world. As Cools has indicated, the Sleepwalker is not only stripped from object-related intentionality, it is also stripped of self-reflectiveness. The subject finding itself in an ‘existential mood’ might be completely the wrong way to describe the Sleepwalker’s experience. There is no personal self to be self-conscious, let alone a subject being aware of finding itself in a certain way. Recalling Sealey’s interpretation, there remains a ‘unique self’ that undergoes the experience of the il y a, but only insofar that all beings are equal in their singularity and thus ‘unique.’ Stripped of instrumental language and singularized, the self would not even be distinguished as such in the il y a. To Blanchot, the Sleepwalker is "not another, some other person, but the premonition of the other, of that which cannot say ‘I’ any more, which recognizes itself neither in itself nor in others.”111

107 Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 57 108 Id., 137 109 Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 57 110 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 209/210

16 The Sleepwalker is dispossessed, “occupied not by a subject or a substantive, but by an impersonal streaming.”112 There is nothing that is ‘lived’ through, I have not ‘undergone’ it, there is nobody to recognize itself. Bruns explains that to Blanchot, “my relation to this situation, my experience of it, is no longer mine: it is, so to speak, no longer existential. No more ownmost.”113 The limit-experience is as if it is another’s, no longer an experience of the meaning-making ego, as the meaning-making ego no longer exists in this experience. As the experience is no longer linked back to the day-time ego, “I am having this experience” cannot be said, thought, felt, or expressed in another way. The Sleepwalker belongs to the impersonal images and the words which have taken over the ego, and does no longer belong to itself. The experience itself cannot be called existential. There is no knowledge, no comprehending, no choosing or any other cognitive function for the Sleepwalker. In the limit-experience of writing, the language of literature refers only to itself, and does not signify objects and states encountered in ordinary life. The Sleepwalker-as-writer “does not move toward a surer world, a finer or better justified world, where everything would be ordered according to the clarity of the impartial light of day.”114 Literature is groundless, not ruled by mundane laws, and ultimately as meaningless as existence itself. This is why the literature is a shortcut to experience this existence in general. The limit-experience itself cannot be translated to the experience of ordinary, day-to-day life. The temporal and spatial ways of understanding the world vanish into merely il y a. When the Sleepwalker tries to make sense of its experience, the il y a vanishes likewise, an event Blanchot compares to Eurydice’s withdrawal and decent after Orpheus’s gaze. Nevertheless, the repercussions of the limit-experience, can be transposed to the mundane. In waking life, the figure of Orpheus proves to be an important modulation of the Sleepwalker, as well as the child and the Posthuman. This I will explain more in the next chapter.

Chapter 3: The Sleepwalker as child, Posthuman and Orpheus 3.1 Nightmare or tragedy averted? A desubjectivized, anonymous, dispersed, passive and singular someone – or something – stripped of intentionality, is all that remains of the meaning-making ego in the limit-experience. The Sleepwalker and its experience cannot be grasped and they stand outside our day-to-day reality. But, like a dream one vaguely remembers after waking up, the Sleepwalker might bring some sort of memory back to its waking life. It might realize that its subjectivity is based on anonymous, indifferent language and that language will always be a barrier between it and the outside. Returning to Critchley’s formulation, can ‘tragedy’ be averted with a realization of ourselves as ‘fallible, finite creatures’? Can we make the Sleepwalker’s experience into something productive, or is its existence more like a nightmare? At first glance, it does seem that the latter is the case. Blanchot calls the passivity of being when gripped by writing a ‘disaster.’ All the Sleepwalker wants is to sleep and rest, and get rid of the meaning-making ego of the daytime. Instead it finds itself unable to sleep, awake in the dream that keeps on interrupting.115 The Sleepwalker-as-writer wants to capture being detached from subjectivity, but cannot shake the meaning-making potential of instrumental language. The disaster is the “mockery thrown on all humankind’s great subterfuges, night, nothingness, silence. There is

111 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 267 112 Iyer, Blanchot’s Vigilance, 68 113 Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 129 114 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 28 115 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 50

17 no end, there is no possibility of being done with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope […].”116 Before Blanchot, Levinas had called the approaching il y a ultimately ‘horrific.’ Blanchot has equally negative connotations when referring to the il y a experience. Besides writing and dreaming, Blanchot includes experiences as fatigue, sickness, “suffering, sacrifice, torture, tragedy […] as the expenditure of subjectivity” that can bring the subject closer to the il y a.117 Sacrificing meaning- making consciousness, “[t]he disaster does not put me into question, but annuls the question, makes it disappear […].”118 Il y a existence is not something that in itself can be experienced, “because there is no I to undergo the experience […].”119 Blanchot continues: “The disaster impoverishes all experience and withdraws from experience all authenticity.”120 My experience cannot be called authentic, because I, the acting and directing subject, have been displaced by language. Rather, the Sleepwalker is fascinated by an experience of something else that can be called authentic, the il y a, and has sacrificed its own identity for it. Only the actual experience of things ‘as they exist’ proves to be impossible too: “The disaster: sign of its approach without approximation.”121 In the previous chapter I hope to have demonstrated that existential moods have no part in the proximity of an experience with the il y a. In an existential mood the subject finds itself in the world in a certain way. The limit-experience that brings on a promise of an experience with the il y a, loses this subjectivity. However, the two concepts are intertwined in a different manner that adds to the Sleepwalker’s nightmarish existence. An existential mood, existentialist thoughts and contemplations can arise in the afterimage of a limit-experience when the Sleepwalker wakes. In writing or dreaming the Sleepwalker is taken into a limitless literary or dream realm where it remains restless. There is no repose. Anxiety arises after when the Sleepwalker, stumbling back in the light of day, realizes that silence, rest and stillness of absolute truth are not attainable. The Sleepwalker realizes that it nevertheless cannot stop trying to search for a point of arrest, but “that this refuge might be taken from us, that nothingness might not be there, that nothingness might just be more existence.”122 Completely losing oneself is not only ‘absurd,’ it is also quite impossible. What makes this nightmare excruciating, is that is just never seems to end. And to make matters worse, the existence that holds the fascination of the Sleepwalker does not answer to the laws of the meaning-making ego. Precisely because il y a existence is not existential, it can be the cause of dread, anguish and fear. In the next paragraphs I would like to introduce three modulations of the Sleepwalker: the child, the Posthuman and Orpheus. Through these figures a space is opened to think about the Sleepwalker’s existence in day-to-day reality. Reformulating the Sleepwalker through these variations, it can be placed in current social sciences and the humanities. Furthermore, it proves also possible to investigate more positive connotations – even though these positive connotations are paradoxical. Happiness and freedom can be associated with the Sleepwalker’s limit-experience, but they come at a cost: the sacrifice of self and ultimately the sacrifice of the object of fascination. Moreover, happiness and freedom can only be undergone by an ego-less someone or something. As with the approaching il y a in the limit-experience, happiness and freedom are not consciously experienced, when actively reflected upon they disappear and they and cannot be made workable in day-time reality. For a brief moment, the Sleepwalker might be elated, but its tragedy is that this jouissance has already happened and that it never happens to the self.

116 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 7-8 117 Blanchot, cited in Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 137 118 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 28 119 Ibid. 120 Id., 51 121 Ibid. 122 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 8

18 3.2 The child-as-Sleepwalker One modulation of the Sleepwalker to be considered is the figure of the child. In ‘(A Primal Scene?)’ Blanchot describes the limit-experience of a child, facing its own finitude. The ‘scene’ reveals to the child the il y a as “such an absence that all has since always and forever more been lost therein – so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond.”123 Other than perhaps the average adult where the limit-experience results in feelings of anxiety of even anguish, the encounter has left the Sleepwalker-as-child with ‘happiness’ and ‘ravishing joy.’ Why is there such a difference between the child and adult? More receptive than, and not yet as ridged as the fully socialized and cultured adult, the figure of the child can be linked to the figure of the Sleepwalker. As the Sleepwalker is not the same ‘I’ as the rational, daytime Prometheus, so is the child not same figure as the rational adult. Blanchot explains that the pre-linguistic child “exists neither as an organized, self-contained body or as a world. For the infant, everything is exterior, and he himself is scarcely anything but this exterior: the outside, a radical exteriority without unity, a dispersion without anything dispersing.”124 The boundaries of the child’s ego – which are scarcely in place as a new-born – are more blurry and more susceptible to be permeated and stretched than those of the average adult. Not yet fully formed, it does not exist as a self and the undoing of the child’s ego is much easier. Borrowing a term from Sigmund Freud, for the child the dispersion of self results in a joyous ‘oceanic feeling.’ For the child the experience is not as traumatic, or not traumatic whatsoever, as for the adult. The adult might regard the limit-experience as a terrible crisis as she or he wants to protect the carefully created identity. But even a more mature child of ‘seven, or eight perhaps’ in ‘(A Primal Scene?)’ responds with joy, and intuits or knows that she or he must ‘say nothing’ about the experience, as not to spoil it. The child-as-Sleepwalker does not exist as an ‘organized, self-contained body’ and so is able to experience the outside, as the outside and self are not linguistically distinguished as something separate. In Freud’s description of the oceanic feeling, the infant cannot make a clear-cut distinction where its own body ends, and where its mother’s body begins. Returning to Bataille’s and Blanchot’s list of ‘excessive modes of being’ that can bring on the limit-experience, it appears that to lose the ego the body as boundary must – almost literally in some instances – be broken. The body must be sacrificed and taken to an extreme. The self is compromised through an excess of body: either by suffering (such as torture, sickness and insomnia) or ecstasy (brought on by laughter, tickling and eroticism for example). This extreme physicality dissolves the daytime ego, and with it the categories of space and time, subject and object, self and other. Identity is undone in the realm of the neutral, as it is the body that experiences and overrides cognitive reasoning. Likewise, the self is compromised when there is a lack of body, or when the notion of a solid body is expanded and where it can easily take on many shapes. This is for instance the case in the realm of dream and in the space of poetry and literature. For children the blurring of the body- boundary is easier and the cause of pleasure. In a game, the child can effortlessly be anyone. In the essay ‘Who?’, where Blanchot answers to the question ‘Who comes after the subject?’, he imagines a children’s dialogue during a game. “‘Who is me today?’ – ‘Who is taking my place?’ And the happy infinite answer: him, him, him.”125 Blanchot suggests that the child-like openness and receptiveness is something the adult needs to restore. But, Blanchot continues ‘Who?’, “[o]nly children can create a counting rhyme (comptine) that opens up to impossibility and only children can sing of it happily.

123 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 72 124 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 232 125 Morali, quoted in Blanchot, ‘Who?’, 60

19 So let us be, even in the anguish and the heaviness of uncertainty, from time to time, these children.”126 Can ‘we’ fully be like ‘these children’? Is it possible for the day-time self to meet il y a uncertainty and ambiguity with happiness? It appears that Blanchot would answer this last question with “no.” Blanchot writes the last sentence as a fantasy. To Blanchot, the ‘ever suspended question’ following the experience of the child-as-Sleepwalker is this: “[D]id he survive – or rather, what does to survive mean then, if not to be sustained by an assent to refusal, by the exhaustion of feeling, and to live withdrawn from any interest in oneself, disinterested, thinned out to a state of utter calmness, expecting nothing? – Consequently, waiting and watching, for suddenly wakened and, knowing this full well henceforth, never wakeful enough.”127 The child-as-Sleepwalker (or, metaphorically speaking, the ‘child within the adult’) ‘surviving’ the limit-experience and being able to retain some of the realizations the experience has given her or him, is not promised a happy life. In ‘(A Primal Scene?)’ the child of ‘seven, or eight’ experiences the il y a otherness as interrupting, which means that it has already lost its infant-like lack of conceptual boundaries. The limit-experience shows her or him that the oceanic feeling is not a natural occurrence anymore – the more mature child has already acquired a sense of self and a sense of language that prohibits this sensation. Maybe it now ‘knows full well’ that it can never get this feeling back. The only thing the child-as-Sleepwalker can do to ‘survive’ and do justice to the non- conceptual il y a, is to live in ‘the neutral.’ The relationship with itself and between self and others must then be what Blanchot calls a ‘relation of the third kind’: neither cognitive nor ethical, but neutral.128 This roughly means that otherness should be left alone in its complete otherness, without the ego trying to get a grip on it. The surviving child-as-Sleepwalker should cease to analyze, scrutinize and comprehend the other. It will have to be passive, and let the outside interrupt the self. Ceasing to interpret and evaluate the other in day-to-day life is a desperate feat, as the child has lost its natural easiness with the world and has grown more cognitively aware of itself and of others. To Blanchot the child ‘survivor’ becomes a ‘tragic man,’ “deriving from the incomprehensible union of contraries a power of understanding that is always neither sure nor doubtful, must therefore learn to ‘live’ in the world ‘without taking part in it and without acquiring a taste for it’; he must also learn to know the world by his very refusal – a refusal that is not general and abstract but constant and determined, and that serves knowledge better than any rationalist optimism insofar as this reason frees him from the mystifications of a false knowledge. Thus man, comprehending the world and comprehending himself on the basis of what is incomprehensible, is on the way toward a comprehension more reasonable, more exigent, and more far-reaching that can be called tragic […].”129 It is tragic because the state of the surviving child-as-Sleepwalker is highly paradoxical. To obtain the same receptiveness as the infant, to come to the ‘comprehension more reasonable,’ it has to sacrifice the ego. But, ‘comprehension’ requires a comprehending ego. The surviving child-as- Sleepwalker, like the writer moving between the two slopes of language, faces a constant oscillation. When it knows, it does not know; when it does not know, it knows. Moreover, as life continues, and the limit-experience itself is lost to words, the realization dawns on the grown-up Sleepwalker that

126 Ibid. 127 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 116 128 Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 111 129 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 101

20 completely living in the neutral is not fully possible. The Sleepwalker in the daytime is never, and can never be, ‘wakeful enough.’ To Blanchot, the dispossession of self which happens with images in the realm of dream and with words in the space of literature, should be emulated in in day-to-day reality. When using instrumental language, we can never do justice to the other whereas in the limit-experience the images and words speak for themselves. But as Blanchot indicates with the emergence of the ‘tragic man,’ the child’s receptiveness and pre-linguistic innocence can never be fully recaptured. The child’s experience does, however, give us something to consider. In our culture, and what is taught in anthropology, social sciences and the humanities, it is custom to actively try to comprehend the other. We try to find out why the other behaves the way she or he does, try to give reasons for what and how. Of course this is not everywhere and always the case, but the danger lies herein that sometimes it is assumed one can think for the other since we share the same basic human nature, yet in this way the relationship with the other tends to say more ourselves than about her or him. In contrast, the neutral relation “would free thought of the fascination with unity (whether the latter be logical, dialectical, intuitive, mystical) […] It turns us not toward what assembles but equally toward what disperses, not toward what joins but perhaps disjoins […]. ”130 The child-as-Sleepwalker reveals to us we have to vigilant to the other as other. To do justice to alterity we should not set comprehension as our goal.

3.3 Prometheus and the Posthuman To price to pay for the limit-experience is the sacrifice of the meaning-making ego, and just like that, Prometheus dies. Moreover, Prometheus has proven to be a fiction, albeit a very persistent one who will more than likely take over control again from the Sleepwalker in waking life, and – which is probably the case for most people – kill the Sleepwalker in return. Nevertheless, with Prometheus exposed and sacrificed in the limit-experience, and with the emergence of the Sleepwalker, the whole project of humanism is at stake. Prometheus can be seen as an extension of the project of Renaissance humanism. Having stolen the fire from the gods, there is the attempt to enhance the limited human condition through rational thought, agency, a firm belief in the autonomy of a meaning-making ego and the capacity for scientific and technological progress. Following Heidegger’s critique concerning reversed metaphysics in Sartre’s thought, it can be said that Prometheus is gripped by a metaphysical dream: he is not looking for absolute truths outside the self, but he is taking some sort of human essence as the starting point for making the human more human, “albeit with a number of new toys to play with.”131 Such is the tragedy of Promethean subject: blinded by the fire, it does not even see the consequence of its self-induced frantic rat-race. By adding more and more knowledge to a chimerical identity and taking this identity as the locus for existential projects thinking that these will affirm the Promethean subject as an authentic being, it ends up deceiving itself. Self-identity, autonomy – clothing the illusive self with these concepts will ultimately not conceal its powerless body and inessential existence. We do not really know ourselves, there is not much to be known in the first place, and we do not know much about the world as it is. In current cultural debate, Prometheus can be considered a product of celebratory-, ultra- or transhumanism, finding ways to enhance the human condition and move it beyond finitude.132 In this thesis, I have contrasted the Sleepwalker with Prometheus, as a post-metaphysical, post- subjective and post-embodied subject. Within the humanities and social sciences, posthumanism is

130 Blanchot, Friendship, 221 131 Dow and Wright, ‘Towards a Psychoanalytic Reading of the Posthuman’, 300 132 Ibid.

21 part of the critical discourse which theorizes such a subject beyond (or before, or within) Renaissance humanism, rethinking the “integrities and identities of the human.”133 Critical posthumanism formulates a subject which comes after the subject of humanism, but, in contrast to transhumanism, goes beyond the claims of self-improvement, and faces the human biases. Posthumanism’s roots lie in the branch of French antihumanism and poststructuralist theory emerging in the 1940’s where Blanchot can be placed as well.134 Regarding the genealogy, can the Sleepwalker be placed within the posthumanism debate? Can the Sleepwalker be seen as a Posthuman? Taking generalizations in consideration and swooping over differences within the posthumanism debate for brevity’s sake (and being completely aware there is no such thing as ‘the’ Posthuman as much as there is no such thing as ‘the’ human), there are important overlapping aspects between the Sleepwalker and the Posthuman. First of all it must be made more clear what kind of subject the Posthuman is, and how it differs from the humanist subject. “The human subject can only conceive of itself in opposition to the random, just as it seeks to control the body, dominate the material world and narrativize history. On the other hand, any notion of the posthuman that is to be more than merely an extension of the human, that is to move beyond the dialectic of control and lack of control, superhuman an inhuman, must be premised upon a mutation that is ongoing and immanent. From this perspective, there can never be a posthumanist subject – at least, not like the traditional sense of an autonomous, unitary and individualized subject.”135 ‘There can never be a posthumanist subject’ – I will come back to this sentence later, but for now it already appears from the onset that the Posthuman and the Sleepwalker have much in common. The Posthuman moves beyond artificially installed categorisations, the lack of which the Sleepwalker experiences in the neutral limit-experience. Both figures challenge the idea of an essential human nature and the resulting metaphysical dualism between the subject and object, between subject and other. For both the Posthuman and the Sleepwalker, the self is not the starting point for finding absolute knowledge, nor the locus of an autonomous acting agent. Just as the dispossession by language makes clear for the Sleepwalker the Promethean subject is a mirage, so the Posthuman exposes the individualized and unitary humanist subject as a fiction. For posthumanism, the human has always been a “heterogenous, unbounded, extroverted subject that is mediated by its technologies and is in constant interaction with its environment.”136 There are, however, important differences between the Sleepwalker and the subject of posthumanism. This is due predominantly because most scholars in the field of posthumanism envision a subject coming after or going beyond (or, hidden within) human-ism.137 Their Posthuman is fully aware that its being is rooted in human dichotomies, but instead of turning away from these, it acknowledges them and tries to move on from there. It is “aware of the fact that hierarchical humanistic presumptions cannot be easily dismissed or erased.”138 To them, the Posthuman is invested in finding out how it finds itself in relation to the world, how it impacts social, cultural and ethical life – and not just from an anthropocentric vantage point. Blurring boundaries, this Posthuman tries to move away from anthropocentrism, towards “exploring animal subjectivity, object ontology, actor-network theory, new forms of materiality and materialism, the distinction between the living and the non-living and so on.”139

133 Callus and Herbrechter, ‘Posthumanist subjectivities’, 241 134 Id., 250 135 Rutsky, ‘Mutation, History and Fantasy in the Posthuman’, 111 136 Sharon, Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology, 159 137 Callus, Herbrechter and Rossini, ‘Dis/locating Posthumanism’, 112 138 Ferrando, ‘Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms’, 32 139 Callus and Herbrechter, ‘Posthuman subjectivities’, 249

22 Going beyond theory, the envisioned Posthuman can also experience different ways of living with others, or find out how much the other is already part of the self. It can play with its own subjectivity, actively stretching its conceptual boundaries.140 This is not unlike Blanchot’s joyful Sleepwalker-as-child fantasy, but which Blanchot sees as unattainable for the adult: the Sleepwalker’s relation to others in waking life should be neutral as their ‘otherness’ is unsurmountable. The other can be approached, but never grasped, nor does the Sleepwalker want to understand the other. “To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognize him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference.”141 Resisting any theorizing, beyond language and concepts, the Sleepwalker and the Sleepwalker’s experience cannot be captured in an existential project that fully does justice to it. Waking up, the Sleepwalker’s life seems rather impoverished, to ‘live withdrawn from any interest, expecting nothing.’ Attempting to live in a neutral relation with self and others seems for Blanchot to live more or less like a reject or recluse, which is also apparent in his admiration for the despairing troubled Kafka and in his own reclusive life. Cools reminds his readers that writing for Blanchot means a sort of “bracketing of the world. […] [B]y writing fiction one enters a literary space that neutralizes the relations of the world one lives in […].”142 ‘Living’ for Blanchot means rather ‘just being’ – an impossibility because for the ‘self’ this point of arrest will never arrive. Scholar of posthumanism- and literary theory Ivan Callus makes an apt point concerning the Posthuman and the recluse. In the limit-experience the Sleepwalker is deprived of subjective content, the ego dispossessed by the outside, occupied by an ‘impersonal streaming.’ Waking up, displaying an ‘extra-human self-rejection,’ trying to live in the neutral, the reclusive Sleepwalker is ‘standing apart from humanity.’ In a way, while the subject conceived by posthumanism is concerned with its environment and exploring its own subjectivity (or subjectivities) therein, the Sleepwalker ‘out-posthumans’ this Posthuman in the emptying of all subjective content.143 In the limit-experience and in the daytime neutral, the Sleepwalker, ceases to be, strictly speaking, human. A case could be made for the Sleepwalker’s anti-anthropocentric stance, which would bring it close to the subject of posthumanism. After all, Blanchot writes in Literature and the Right to Death that literature wants “the pebble taking the side of things,”144 or in another formulation a few pages later, literature is “a concern for the reality of things, for their unknown, free, and silent existence.”145 In Blanchot’s description, the insomniac experiences an intentional reversal between the human subject and life-less objects and object ontology seems nearby. But while the il y a holds the fascination for the Sleepwalker, Blanchot is nevertheless very much focussed on the consequences of the undoing of the ego for the subject. In the end it boils down to the experience of the Sleepwalker and not so much the outside. The Sleepwalker is rather stuck, not able to drag itself out of its never-ending existence, and seeing its never-ending existence as a drag, not able to move away from itself. The outside interrupts the ego, but the outside can never fully be known, and not much can be said about it (only its unsayable nature). The Sleepwalker descents more and more into the underworld, and wants to shroud itself more and more in darkness, hopelessly trying to get away from it all. Its experience is “about death, time and the impossibility of escaping them.”146 Questioning the so-called human essence, Blanchot is not a humanist, and his critical potential is found in his antihumanism. His question concerns if it is even possible ‘live’ on after

140 Id., 258 141 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 128 142 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 56 143 Callus and Herbrechter, ‘Posthuman subjectivities’, 256 144 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 327 145 Id., 330 146 Callus, Herbrechter and Rossini, ‘Dis/Locating Posthumanism’, 117

23 ‘dying’ as a self in the limit-experience, after ‘language dispenses with the writer.’ Posthumanism acknowledges the death of the ego, but other than Blanchot it wants its notions to be productive in day-to-day reality. In contrast, the waking Sleepwalker finds that nothing productive can be done with the non-conceptual limit-experience, that it is ‘inert.’147 What the Sleepwalker shows, is that the Posthuman conceptualized by most contemporary scholars, might in fact still be too human. Their Posthuman, in all its considerations and carefulness, might think it is wakeful enough to move beyond its humanistic tendencies. Putting Blanchot in an imaginary conversation with posthumanist scholars, one can suspect he will see a danger in this assumption, as their posthumanist stance is still structured around theory, described in language infused with concepts and meanings which one does not own and does not control. Animals, life-less objects, the self, others – there is always a vantage point or a multitude of vantage points where one theorizes from, even as they are not set as stable or absolute. The subject is still in place. ‘There can never be a posthumanist subject’ as the ‘post-’prefix cancels out the ‘human’ in a way. To be truly ‘post,’ one cannot speak of a human anymore.

3.4 ‘Writing begins with Orpheus’s gaze’ To explore one last modulation of the Sleepwalker, I will turn to Orpheus. After all it is Orpheus that is marked by Blanchot as the first writer, as “writing begins with Orpheus’s gaze.”148 And it is in literature as limit-experience where the Sleepwalker might approach il y a existence. Orpheus is used by Blanchot to mark the condition of the post-Promethean subject. In a way, Orpheus wants the same thing as Prometheus: he wants to experience ‘how things are’ in the form of Eurydice. Unlike Prometheus, he knows ‘full well’ that he as the day-time Orpheus day cannot reach Eurydice, and that his ego needs to be sacrificed in the underworld. In the myth, Orpheus descends into the underworld to recapture Eurydice. In order to bring her back, Orpheus must not turn around and look at her. His own desire to have her immediately must be sacrificed, he must be patient, and passively wait until they both reach daylight again. But Orpheus does look back at Eurydice, and so he loses her again to the dark. In Blanchot’s interpretation of the myth, Orpheus turns around to look at Eurydice as he, the poet, wants to capture her ‘shadowy absence,’ her existence as she is in the underworld.149 For Blanchot Eurydice stands for the ‘gap’ the object leaves when language is used. This ‘void,’ Eurydice’s ‘nocturnal obscurity,’ or elsewhere, ‘the sacred,’ is the writer’s inspiration to write in the first place and it is for which the writer-as-Sleepwalker sacrifices its ego. “[E]ven the desire for a happy life in the lovely, clear light of day are sacrificed to this sole aim: to look in the night at what night hides, the other night, the dissimulation that appears.”150 Orpheus’s tragedy is that he seems to lose everything. If he would not look back, he could bring Eurydice back to daylight, but then he loses her opaque existence. When he does look back, she disappears. But through his poetry and song this predicament is momentarily suspended and he might be able to glance at her in her nightly existence. As Orpheus has completely devoted his life to Eurydice, he can, paradoxically, only be true to himself when he loses his autonomy. “He is Orpheus only in the song: he cannot have any relation to Eurydice except within the hymn.”151 Orpheus is void of all desires and interests, apart from his desire for the part of Eurydice which he cannot grasp. The desire is his inspiration and what enables him to write his poetry in the first place. Yet it is this desire he must let go of in order to see her. Only when he has given up everything (or rather,

147 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 46 148 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 176 149 Id., 172 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid.

24 dispossessed, when he has been made to give up everything), the impatient Orpheus, transgressing his passivity and breaching his agreement not to turn around to look at Eurydice, might be in a position for the impossible: to catch a glimpse of her before she inevitably descents into darkness. Orpheus loses Eurydice as well as himself. However, as a result of losing himself, Orpheus opens up a space for freedom. “His gaze,” according to Blanchot, is “the extreme moment of liberty, the moment when he frees himself from himself and, still more important, frees the work from his concern, frees the sacred contained in the work, gives the sacred to itself, to the freedom of its essence, to its essence which is freedom.”152 In the undoing of his ego in the limit-experience, Orpheus is freed from all mundane restrictions. Without an ego, there is nothing to be ruled or governed, one does not even have a rule over the self. Orpheus-as-Sleepwalker has a freedom from “the logical (not to say social and cultural) order of concepts and rules, categories and distinctions, schemes and types – freedom above all from the polarities of sameness and difference or the one and many.”153 There is a “[l]oss of self; loss of all sovereignty but also of all subordination […].”154 Orpheus-as-Sleepwalker is freed from forms of categorisation of and from others, and freed from itself too. Whoever – or whatever – it is in the daytime, does not have to coincide with whoever – or whatever – it is in the night. Literature enjoys a primary status in bringing on such an understanding because of the ambiguous nature of language, at the same time being ‘obstacle’ and ‘only chance.’ In Cools’s words, “[w]riting liberates the writer from turning around his/her own self and from talking his/her selfhood as the foundation for writing. In a way, the enchainment of language frees the writer from being obsessed by the self.”155 In the limit-experience, Orpheus-as-Sleepwalker is not endlessly exploring its own subjectivity, and has opened up for something external to itself, “close to the sincerity of things.”156 Note that this ‘sincerity of things’ has nothing to do with some sort of claim of truth, as truth does not exist in the il y a passivity of being. The limit-experience opens up a space of freedom for objects and others as Orpheus-the-Sleepwalker cannot do anything else but leave them in their strangeness and obscurity. Likewise, ‘absolute knowledge’ is indeed ‘beyond the ken of fallible, finite creatures like us,’ but in literature this is not even an issue anymore. Functioning as a cognitive concept, knowledge has no part in the limit-experience. It is, however, a paradoxical freedom. Blanchot makes his readers aware that the writer “does not feel free of the world, but, rather, deprived of it […].”157 The writer lives in exile from “regular occupations and limited obligations, from everything connected to results, substantive reality, power.”158 The writer is “lost to himself, outside, far from home; he belongs to the foreign, to the outside which knows no intimacy or limit, […] deprived of a true abode.”159 However, fascinated as Orpheus is with Eurydice, and only able to realize himself through this fascination and the resulting ego-loss, he is not able to cease writing, although he can only express his desire through inadequate words. Writing brings the subject in what Critchley calls a ‘tragic-comic’ situation.160 The predicament of the writer rings true for the waking subject: “[t]he writer finds himself in this more and more comical condition of having nothing to write, of having no means of writing it, and of being forced by an extreme necessity to keep writing it.”161 When replacing ‘writing’ with the concept of

152 Id., 175 153 Bruns, On Ceasing to be Human, 1 154 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 18 155 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 59 156 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 150 157 Id., 53 158 Id., 237 159 Ibid. 160 Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing, 43 161 Blanchot, ‘From Dread to Language’, 345

25 ‘living’ in this sentence, one comes close the condition of the waking Sleepwalker, stuck in its never- ending existence without repose. The scholar in general, or the philosopher in particular, can be placed opposite to the figure of Orpheus. While the Sleepwalker-as-writer desires to do justice to other night, the philosopher wants to shed light on what hides in the shadows. Nevertheless, in the first moment Orpheus and the philosopher (or Prometheus) are not that different. They both descent into the underworld in order to bring Eurydice back. What separates them is their disposition: Orpheus is a creature of the night, and the philosopher a creature of the day. Before Orpheus can bring Eurydice back to the daylight – the realm of logic and dialectics – he betrays Eurydice in order to get a glimpse of her complete foreignness, whereas the scholar manages to bring Eurydice back. Driven to capture alterity, the philosopher ‘covers’ or ‘kills’ the object of her or his fascination with instrumental language. Orpheus wants to experience otherness, he does not want to know or understand Eurydice, as cognitive concepts would undo alterity. Blanchot, borrowing from Bataille, describes the philosopher as “someone who is afraid.”162 The philosopher, not wanting to lose the ego, is afraid of an experience of what is ‘entirely other than us,’ of the fear itself.163 This is why she or he appropriates the il y a with language. The neutral relation is Blanchot’s impossible ideal, to let complete otherness interrupt the ego without resorting to conceptual dialectics. But it is telling that Blanchot’s writer, Orpheus, breaks the neutral relation too by his impatience. He cannot do anything else, as he is always caught between the two slopes of language, between meaning-making and non-cognitive experience. Consumed by desire, Orpheus the writer cannot help but to look back at Eurydice. Such is the predicament of Orpheus-as- Sleepwalker and the philosopher alike: they both break the neutral relation, and end up losing what they sought. Orpheus by wanting too much dark, and the scholar by wanting too much light. However, Orpheus has got something over the philosopher. He is not afraid, and transgressing his passivity he has made a ‘leap,’ impatiently wanting to experience Eurydice.164 Orpheus’s failure to bring Eurydice back gains the understanding of her unsayable nature, which would have gotten lost in the light of the day. As the philosopher cannot contain her or his curiosity for the outside, the figure of Orpheus shows that it is more valuable to be impatient in this sense. Vigilant to the fact that a complete neutral relation might not be possible, Orpheus discloses to the scholar that she or he has to give up fear of self-loss, in order to attempt to experience the unknown, as to at least reveal the unknown in its absence.

Conclusion The search for ultimate metaphysical truths might be over, for the Prometheus and the Sleepwalker likewise. For an ‘utterly restless’ Prometheus it means it has woken up from a “thousand metaphysical slumbers,” no longer finding “repose of knowledge sought in ‘totalizing’ systematic thinking.”165 Still, Prometheus is stuck in a vicious circle. Instead of finding ‘absolute knowledge of things as they are,’ it has taken itself as the source of limitless projects, actively finding ways to make meaning in a meaningless world. However, Prometheus is blinded by the light of the own ego, the reflection of which it sees all around. It has sacrificed the outside in favour of the ego. In the limit-experience, the Sleepwalker has also woken from the metaphysical dream. It has sacrificed the ego in favour of the outside. The force of language exposed the Sleepwalker as an

162 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 49 163 Id., 50 164 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 176 165 Farbman, The Other Night, 51

26 impersonal vigilant existence, ‘disinterested’ and ‘thinned out.’ Without an individualized meaning- making ego, the Sleepwalker is now in a position for an ontological experience. However, the experience of il y a existence is admittedly an impossibility because language is a force to be reckoned with, always lodged between subject (even as a desubjectivized self) and outside. After being wakened in the limit-experience – for example in the realm of dream or in the space of literature and poetry – the Sleepwalker has somehow managed to fall asleep again, only to wake up in the daytime with a vague memory of the whole experience. The daytime Sleepwalker knows that it is not the meaning-making ego, but how to live further? Not as cognitively aware as the adult of ‘living’ and of its ego- and corporeal boundaries, the receptiveness of the Sleepwalker-as-child is desired, but a wishful dream, and the Sleepwalker’s waking life results rather in tragedy. Emulating the non-cognitive stance of the child and attempting to live in a neutral relation with self and other requires the loss of ego, the loss of the subjective self. However, the Sleepwalker cannot seem to get rid of the ‘I’ completely and has to endure an endless dying of the ego, “trying to reach a certain point in life that is as close as possible to the ‘unlivable,’ to that which can't be lived through.”166 Having lost the child-like easiness with the world, the Sleepwalker lives in exile from daytime reality, without ‘abode.’ In current cultural criticism, it appears the Sleepwalker might have found a place within posthumanism. However, careful as the considerations of posthumanism may be, they might be still too human for Blanchot. Blanchot is an antihumanist not only in the sense that he questions the existence of a rational autonomous humanist subject, but also in the way he abhors the consequences of a belief in such a subject. Aware of the devastating brightness of the atom bomb, of the atrocities of war, of Auschwitz, Blanchot has seen what the human is capable of. What if it errs again? The philosopher, or the academic in general, can never stand still, trapped in a Promethean rat-race. She or he is restricted by the own ego, of which the end cannot be seen. Orpheus-as- Sleepwalker is also restless, but taken over by a force beyond its control, and thus momentarily liberated from the ever meaning-making self. In literature and dream we are “exiled from the world of valuable achievements” but also “exempted from the world's demands.”167 We are limited creatures in a meaning-less world. Critchley suggests this acceptance, by giving up the quest for meaning and ultimate truth, will give us some sort of peace. But peace will never arrive. Not only can ‘night, nothingness, silence’ never be attained in life (only in death), Orpheus-as-Sleepwalker proves that desire for ‘the outside, the unknown’ cannot be extinguished. Following Orpheus, it shows that the night-time silence of the il y a can never be experienced in its presence and is only approachable as its absence. Understanding this, Blanchot’s subject still knows it best to attempt to live as close to the neutral as possible, as a ‘watchfulness without hope.’168

166 Foucault, ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’, 241 167 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 11 168 Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 264

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