Blanchot

Death cannot be reported by the one who remains.

Literature is the space where the writer is lost.

The disaster leaves the room intact.

Blanchot (1907–2003)

Message

Death is the impossibility of dying. The one who would report the end is always still there, and literature is the space produced by that failure. The writer does not use language. Language uses him, and in the work he is lost. The neuter replaces the sovereign subject: neither I nor you, a third that is no person. Friendship is the relation that does not fuse and does not master—the relation he lived with Bataille, and the relation the work demands. The disaster is not an event in history. It is what has always already withdrawn the subject from its own experience. Transgression’s ecstasy does not return as knowledge. It returns as the interminable outside.

Content

Thomas the Obscure (1941) is the fiction of a death that cannot be accomplished. The Space of Literature (1955) and The Book to Come are the criticism that is already philosophy. The Infinite Conversation (1969) places the neuter. The Writing of the Disaster (1980) is the fragment-book in which the claim no longer has a form that could complete it. The political writings of the 1960s are the same outside, turned toward the street.

Presentation

Essay, récit, fragment. The sentence circles and withdraws. He refuses the manifesto’s climax and the treatise’s result. What can be finished is not what he is writing.

Method

A reading of literature as ontology. Hölderlin, Kafka, Rilke, and Mallarmé are not examples. They are the place the subject fails. Heidegger is a proximity he will not join: Being is not what withdraws in his pages; the outside is. Bataille is the friend whose experience he will not convert into a sovereignty.

Summary

The last core station. He keeps the ruin of the subject and spends Bataille’s sacred intensity. After him the branch no longer has a peak.

What shaped him

People: Bataille, above all, in a friendship both called essential; Levinas, early; later the anonymous politics of the review. Place: Quain, Paris, and a late withdrawal at Èze. Formative experiences: a journalistic career on the nationalist right in the 1930s, which he spends the rest of his life answering; the Occupation, and the récit as a form that can hold what a report would falsify. Cultural events: Heidegger’s arrival in France, which he reads against the grain; May 1968, which confirms the outside as a political fact of anonymity.

Quotes

“Death is the impossibility of dying.”

“The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center.”

“My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world.”

The neuter: a relation “without relation,” neither fusion nor mastery.

“The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”

Friendship is the relation in which the other remains other, including after death.