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.

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