Maurice Blanchot

SP_MAC_ch01_017-032 1/17/01 1:54 PM Page 17 chapter one Immemorial silence: Maurice Blanchot beginning to speak Blanchot shows that all commentary is necessarily unfaithful. It’s one of the things that distinguishes him from Heidegger. —Leslie Hill Writing of a writer like Maurice Blanchot, notable for his gracefully elliptical economy of expression, is virtually guaranteed to make one’s own prose clumsy and inept. I must confess that I feel in trying to write of Blanchot what he may have felt in writing, in 1990, “I shall begin to write again, not on Derrida, (how pretentious!) but with his help, and convinced that I shall betray him immediately.”1 This inept betrayal may be particularly apparent here, since the issues I would engage are, Blanchot says, found in “neither reading nor writing, nor speaking. .”2 Here I shall address the questions of time and silence by writing both with and about his work, about a particularly seductive and disturbing cluster of issues in his work, aware that addressing directly the elliptical openness of these texts risks chattering over their silences. To write with the help of—or, more honestly, under the influence of— other thinkers is to write with those whose work opens spaces of possibility for one’s own thought, and few can do this so astonishingly well as Blanchot. In fact, it is precisely this ability of Blanchot’s to open spaces that is so sur- prising in his work, and so disturbing, which is why before writing further of Blanchot it may be advisable to say something of reading him. I began my own reading of Blanchot under the influence of others (chiefly Bataille and 17 SP_MAC_ch01_017-032 1/17/01 1:54 PM Page 18 18 immemorial silence Foucault) with the collections of literary essays, eventually making my way to one of his “fragmentary” (or, more properly, unclassifiable) works, The Step Not Beyond.3 In this text passages ranging in length from sentence fragments to a few pages are set apart from one another, each given space to resonate, each opening up space around itself. This formula is followed as well in The Writing of the Disaster and The Infinite Conversation, and it is on this trio that I shall focus here. The thought to which these texts expose us is as unfamiliar as Blanchot says, in the second sentence of The Step Not Beyond, death is—the sentence reads in English, “To death we are not accustomed.”4 And I found, after reading that sentence, that I had to put the book down for sev- eral hours, simply to make room for what was indeed unaccustomed thought. More exactly, Blanchot opens spaces in language, in reading, and in thinking that are terrifying for being at once of the nature of things we should have known, or are sure that we once knew, and utterly unfamiliar. These are the spaces that were always just outside what we know, spaces before which we find ourselves utterly insecure. And because it is where we are most insecure and the matters before us are most unfamiliar that thinking is at its most exciting, I have decided, whether perversely or just foolishly, to try to explore, just a little bit, those very spaces, those openings in the intertwin- ings of language and time. In the space of the unfamiliar and already known, we find the memory of a shattered present, an immemorial silence. I have tried to write here of what was and is every time again so astonishing to read: of silence and its remarkable temporality. One senses in Blanchot a longing for silence (“Silence is impossible. That is why we desire it.”5) which cannot be kept and will not allow itself to be said, which eludes us and yet places on us the demands of language itself. It is silence that gives to Blanchot’s work its paradoxical rigor, a silence that is at once the space into which he writes (that which calls for his writing; that which calls to his thinking) and that which he cannot preserve in his writing. Cannot, because silence, as he tells us, cannot be kept; because writing shares with speaking the attribute of breaking the very silence that calls to it. Silence calls to language, and to keep silent would no more preserve silence than would speaking or writing of it. The call of silence reverberates, in a muffled way, within language itself.6 One ground of the unkeepability of silence is in fact its curious relation to the temporal. In Blanchot’s work the slipping and shifting of time will link silence to both madness and death, to time gone mad in the thought of eternal recurrence and to time gone missing in an unthinkable absence. I would suggest, too, that we find here the slightest edge of joy: “Perhaps,” as Blan- chot suggests, “we know the disaster by other, perhaps joyful names....”7 SP_MAC_ch01_017-032 1/17/01 1:54 PM Page 19 immemorial silence 19 Yet this madness is disaster still. Silence in Blanchot is a gentle violence, a quiet devastation. It works its violence by fragmentation, a fragmentation not only of language but also of time, caught up for us in language—not only in its tenses, but in the passage of our speaking and writing and reading, in the effort to gather up meaning across the passage of a sentence, in our wait for the time at the end of the sentence in which we shall expect to remember its meaning. The fear which silence evokes, the ancient fear, is the fear of time and the absence of time, time which is never more than the coming of an absence, time which is not gathered into memory but fragmented in the return. But this silence, this absence, is also an opening. The infinite spaces which terrify are still the joyous openings which invite. We can see in Blanchot’s use of silence a temporality of past, present, and future. In his thought, under the Nietzschean influence, silence is implicated in the eternal recurrence. I have found that it is easiest to speak of silence first in its future aspect, as the call; then in its present aspect, as that which emp- ties presence; then in its past aspect, as that which we find ourselves unable to remember or forget—from which we shall see that it has returned, before and after, already. Or, more precisely, we find that the temporality of silence is that of forgetting and returning, a temporal evocation of absence within every mode of time. the opening onto the future: silence as invitation and waiting You were my death: you I could hold when all fell away from me. —Paul Celan At one level anticipatory or future-oriented silence is fairly straightforward, though it opens immediately onto complexity. Silence makes conversation possible. Simply, there must be silence to call forth speaking, or even writing. Silence is in this sense an invitation into a future, a space that draws us forth. Often we fail to find or make such silence: we speak over and across one another, interrupt, drown out, ignore one another. But aside from the fact that few of us consider such discursive situations ideal, we realize that such speaking-over fails to be a response; it is ir-responsible; it is, we might even say, uncalled-for. To speak over, to write without regard for the space into SP_MAC_ch01_017-032 1/17/01 1:54 PM Page 20 20 immemorial silence which one writes, to think while keeping one’s mind closed to the outside, is to evade the infinite conversation invited by the pause, the opening, the silence that waits before us. It is to speak as if one owned language, rather than being dispossessed by it, by its refusal of any possession.8 Simply, ideally, we are called by such silence, which is neither awkward nor angry. The easy, gracious silence is what Blanchot calls “the legitimate pause, the one permitting the give and take of conversation, the benevolent, intelligent pause” or “that beautifully poised waiting with which two inter- locutors, from one shore to another, measure their right to communicate.”9 Such silence draws forth response; it is conversational. In fact, we begin to speak only by anticipating this silence—we speak, that is, toward the possibility of response. “Every beginning speech begins by responding; a response to what is not yet heard, an attentive response in which impatient waiting for the unknown and the desiring hope for presence are affirmed.”10 We speak, then, not only in order to be heard but to open up the space in which we might hear something new. From outside ourselves, new words enter and open new questions in turn. Neither the wait nor the pause, though, is ever simple or wholly legitimate. In speaking toward the possibility of response, even in writing to be read, we await an interruption or disruption. More precisely, we open a space of interrogation. All speech is questioning in its anticipation of response; every response is another question. The conversation is infinite; there is always another opening. “As soon as there is a question, there is no reply that could exhaust that question,”11 Blanchot writes, a sentiment that Jabès (whose work Blanchot admires) will extend to the infinite question that humanity, for him, poses to God. And interrogation is the mode of speech proper not only to the future which we await but to that which we try, in awaiting, to avoid; or that for which we await an end, thinking that then it can never come again: that is, to madness.12 “Strictly,” Blanchot writes of madness, “we maintain this word in the interrogative position: Hölderlin was mad, but was he?” and then: “Madness would thus be a word in perpetual incongruance with itself and interrogative throughout, such that it would put into question its possibility and, through it, the possibility of language that would admit it, thus would put interrogation itself into question....”13 Silence is as proper to madness, which interrogates language, for Blan- chot as for Foucault, who saw in madness the silence imposed by the discourse of rationality.14 Blanchot writes, “.

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