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Dr W Large Literature
and the right to Death 25 March
2007 12:34
It begins
in the same
way as the Origin of the Work of Art. Blanchot [B] begins with the
writer. But
does the writer ask why he or she writes, or does she just write? Literature
begins with
a question - or questions itself - this
is a reference to the Athenaeum fragments - right at the moment that it
is
born, literature already asks what is it (think of Don Quixote).
But
what is the question that Literature is asking of itself. It is a
question like
any other? Or we might ask ourselves what does it mean to ask a
question at
all. Is this a question about the essence of literature? This question
has
nothing at all to do with the doubts of the writer, and it does not
matter
whether he or she is conscious of it, but as soon as something is
written then
this question emerges - it is the question of language which is
addressed both
to the reader and to the writer - language becoming literature - langage
devenu littérature. How does
language become literature - what does it mean to
talk about language at all becoming literature? But why
bother with
this question - isn't literature about nothing at all - isn't it just
entertainment, a way of passing the time away and nothing else. Let us
grant the fact
that literature is deceitful, but perhaps it is right there that we
might find
the meaning of literature itself. The extraordinary power of literature
is that
it is nothing, or that nothingness is at the heart of what it does. La
littérature n'est pas seulement illégitime, mais nulle,
et cette nullité
constitue peut-être une force extraordinaire, merveilleuse, a la
condition
d'être isolée à l'état pur. This is
precisely what this essay is about, the
nothingness that is at the heart of literature, and how this
nothingness is
linked to an experience of language. It is this nothingness of language
which
is the secret of surrealism. As soon as
we try to reflect
upon what literature is, then it no longer appears to be a serious
question. As
soon as we let literature have its own power then it sees to take over
everything - it is more important than
anything else, even philosophy and religion. So reflection turns back
to it,
but in that very moment, all it discovers is the nothingness of
literature
again. But hadn't
Hegel
already seen the power of the negative - isn't is whole philosophy
concerned
with this power, and didn't he in the Phenomenology of Spirit
already
condemn the writer to an ultimate paradox - to write one has to have
talent,
but only in writing is one's talent discovered. Why Hegel
is so
important to B is that he addresses the nature of work - what does it
mean to
produce a work? One must have an idea, but only in the work is this
idea
realised. Without the work the idea is nothing. But is a literature an
idea in
this way. Does one have an idea of a novel or a story and then realise
it in a
work? True this is way that some people speak about writing, and even
some
novelists, but is this really how literature works. Think of the
example of
Kafka's writing The Judgement. That he did not know what he was
writing.
The writer can only exist if the work exists, but this means that is
some sense
that the writer is a 'function' of the work and not the other way
around. I
exist as a writer only because the work exists and not the other way
around,
but at the same time, if I did not have an intention to write this
work, then
it would not exist either. Everything
depends on
what we mean by 'intention' in this case and whether the work does or
does not
'realise' the individual who writes it. In other words, whether what we
are
speaking about here really is the same as any other work. The work
comes from
nothing every time, whether I begin a new work, or return to the same
work
again and again. Why can I say that it begins from nothing. It means
that I do
not have a conscious end in my mind when I write. If the work was fully
realised in my mind, why would I write it, but if the work requires
that I
write it in order to me, then when I begin writing it must be what it
is not;
that is to say nothing. We might
think here of Kant's definition of the work of art as 'purpose without
purposiveness' and also his distinction between natural and artificial
beauty.
Literature would be an artificial beauty for Kant, because it is
created by
someone who intends something through the work. Blanchot is questioning
whether
we can think of literature through intention. When I write do I have an
intention?
The
paradox what only
action realises the end of the action means that one has to throw
oneself into
the middle of it without out really knowing how it will end. The same
is the
case with writing - to write one has to throw oneself into writing as
though it
had already begun before you made the decision. Writing,
the activity
of writing, and the 'circumstances' of writing, become the same thing
as his or
her talent - the desk, the pen and the paper; the ritual of the day and
how one
writes. The writer must focus on these, rather than the idea about
which he or
she is supposed to be writing, and whether it will be ever realised in
the work
that they are doing. The work
then comes
from outside, by chance, and always come by chance. We think of this in
terms
of the external commission (write about this for such and such a time,
a
conference, a chapter in a book and so on), but in fact all work
happens like
this, from the outside. Every work then has its beginning, because
without it,
it would not exist. It would only be the 'impossibility of writing it'
- rien
de plus que l'impossibilité de l'écrire. The
beginning of writing should
always be seen against this background of impossibility, but this
impossibility
belongs as much to the work as its beginning. Each work has its own
impossibility, as it does its beginning. What is
important here is not think of literature as an intention, a plan and
project
that is fully formed in one's mind, and then realised perfectly in the
work - literature is against teleology. The work
is written,
and with that the author is born. I am now a writer, without me the
work does
not exist, but without it, I do not exist. The author and the book
become one
or merge as their mutual condition of possibility. B uses the example
of
Kafka's sentence - 'he was looking out the window'. Why does Kafka says
that
this sentence, as literature, is perfect? Is it not just the most
ordinary
sentence that exists? Not if we think about it in terms of value - is
it a good
or bad sentence. Rather at one moment there was nothing, and in the
next there
was something. In that moment we have an absolute act of creation, the
passage
from a pure possibility into a reality. This the certain and joy or
writing,
and the explains the attraction of automatic writing. But in
what way does
this sentence exist for the author? It does not exist just in relation
to him
or her, but to others. It only creates the author if others read it. It
becomes
B says, 'a universal sentence' - une phrase
universelle. Everything
now changes
for the writer, because others take interest in the work, and the
original
intimacy which was their mutual creation of one another is broken. The
interest
that they take in the work makes it something very different. The work
no only
has a value in the way that it relates to other books (this is the
books that
we read about in Sunday newspaper, which are ranked one against the
other, and
which win prizes). How does
the writes get
beyond this problem. The writer claims that the work that she has
created has
nothing at all to do with the public work. She might write then and not
publish. But then the question arises, why write at all if you are
going to
publish? Or the writer might say that what matters once the work has
been
published is no longer the writer, but the reader. It is he who creates
the
work, who is its real beginning, because if no one reads the book, then
in what
sense is it a book at all. But can
the book be the
possibility of the reader in the same way as the work is the
possibility of the
writer? In reading I am looking to actualise myself in the same way
that the
writer is in the book? In other words, am I looking for confirmation
for myself
in what I read? The answers to these questions must be no. I am not
looking for
myself in what I read, but is alien and strange to me. If a writer
writes for
the public, then he is not really writing (we might say that they have
a plan
or a project in mind). If the writer is not really writing, then he or
she is
not really producing a work, and if he or she is not producing a work,
then in
what way can we say that there are any readers, for there is nothing to
read at
all. To read is to read something that comes from another mind or
reality that
questions one's own reality or mind. It is not to find oneself. It is
true that
people do read these books (which cannot be really books but only
commodities),
but they do so only to pass the time away, to entertain themselves.
Entertaining oneself, and reading are the not the same at all.
I have to
write because
if I do not write, then I cannot become a writer, I can not just
withdraw into
myself. At the same time, the work is only possible through him, and
yet what
the work will become is only possible through the activity of writing
itself.
The realisation of writing is only possible through the work, but the
work is
only possible through the pure possibilities of the writer, which is
nothing.
And at the same time, what is further away from him, in terms of his
actual
existence, when it is written, is shared with others. So what makes him
what is
him, a writer, ceases to belong to him at all. How might
the writer
save himself from all this trouble. He might forget all about the end
of writing,
like Valéry and say
that all his is interested in is the pure
activity of writing itself. But if one is true to this activity, then
one
cannot separate it from its results, for the miraculous instant between
the
unwritten and the written still ends in product, the words on the page,
and
this cannot be controlled and determined by the writer - they have a
future
which is not his. We can
see, therefore,
that there are two moments. One, that the work arises out of nothing,
and two,
after it has been produced, it disappears as it is 'realised in
history'. What
matters now is not the 'ephemeral work', but its truth which resides
outside of
it, which allows it to becomes the work of an age, because it says
something
and reveals something about that age. Does
B mean
by the truth of the work, what Heidegger means by the 'happening of
truth' in
the 'Origin of the Work of Art'. The work
of art seeks
that which is higher or above itself - truth or the ideal. So what is
significant is not the writer, nor reader, and not even the work
itself, but
art as the revealing and disclosure of truth. The honest writer can
claim,
then, that what she is seeking to write is not the work that she has
produced
but the truth that it is aiming to reveal. But can we really say that
the
writer is honest. Isn't the writer the most dishonest consciousness?
The writer
says that he doesn't care the that the work fails, since failure
belongs to its
essence, or even if it doesn't appear, disappearance equally belongs
there. But
if the work is successful due to external circumstances that have
nothing at
all to do with the writer, then watch her claim all the success that
she thinks
was always really already due to he. Writers
are always
fooling themselves and thus others. He says that he only writes for
others, and
he might mean this, but it can't be absolutely true, for if he were
only
writing for others, then he would write nothing, because his primary
interest
must the work itself. One way that he might think that he is writing
for others
is by taking up a political cause (and here B's object is Sartre's What
is
Literature?). They think that the writer is one of their own, but
as soon
as they look more deeply into the matter, they realise that he can't
be. For
what interests him is writing about the Cause, and thus writing
itself
is the most important matter, and as B will try and demonstrate for the
rest of
the essay, literature is dissimulation par excellence:
'literature, by
its very activity, denies the substance of what is represents.' - la
littérature, par son mouvement, nie en fin de compte la
substance de ce qu'elle
représente. There is a
worse bad
faith that that which Sartre speaks of, which is the writer who thinks
that he
is really attached to a truth that lies outside of the work of art.
One, he
betrays reality, since literature is never a representation of reality,
and two
he betrays his vocation as a writer, which is not to ally himself to a
truth
outside of work of art, but to beginning which is intimate to them both. Does this
mean that the
writer should turn against the world. But this would just make the
rejection of
the world part of one's world. The world is reflected or is part of the
intimate and solitary relation of the writer and her work. The world
must enter
this work, but it does not do so as a representation. Everything
that we
might think is wrong about literature, that it is deceitful and tells
lies and
does engage in the world in a serious way, is also what is most
important about
literature, and what makes it what it is. For it is misunderstanding,
not
understanding which makes dialogue possible, and its is the emptiness
and void
which is the condition for meaning.
All this
has to do with
language. The writer might think and even assert that 'cat' means cat,
but he
is not telling the truth when he does so. When we
think about
what literature is we break it down into parts which follow in
succession. We
think of the writer, then the book, and then finally the reader. Or we
think of
writing, what is written, and the truth. Of finally, we think of the
writer of
no name, then the writer who writes, then the one who is the result of
the
work, then finally the one, who attempts to save the work against the
world
through its truth. When someone asks what literature is, then every
time one
answer is given, the response always refers to a different stages that
contradicts it. Thus someone says that the work is a failure, but the
author
replies that failure belongs to the essence of the work and so on. And
the same
is the case when someone addresses the writer directly. Does all
of this mean
that literature is nothing? Those who work, who wish to change the
world, we
say that literature is an idle past time (today students are told they
must get
a job, and why read literature since it does not give you a job). Real
work is
that activity which changes the world through an idea, like building a
bridge
or roads. Literature does not create anything. But if we think of work
as the
transformation of the world and thereby ourselves, and the world again,
literature is the highest form of work, and not the lowest. When I
work, I
produce an object, an object is the realisation of something that was
not there
before. Imagine that I want to get warm. To get warm I have to
transform
reality around me. But this means negating what is immediately there. I
have to
light a fire, and thus to keep warm I destroy the wood. The world is
transformed through negativity. This is what Hegel and Marx teach us. What else
is the writer
doing but transforming the world through negative, but at the 'highest
degree'
for he transforms the 'totality of language' that existed before he
changes the
world (think of Borges' essay about Kafka - that as soon as one has
read Kafka,
then one sees the 'Kafkaesque' every where. But as the same time as the
work
transforms the world, the reality of language, it also transforms me.
The work
is always an experiment, and always contains more in it then I could
have
foreseen in writing it: 'in the presence of something other, I become
other. The writer
not only
transforms things, as the man of action does, he transforms the whole
of the
reality of language. But just as between the desire for warmth and the
heat of
the stove, then there is a difference between the work and the author.
The
author does not find or recognise themselves in the work. The work is
'outside'
of them. This is why the work is always a surprise and an 'experience'.
I have
an idea and then I write, but the book is never exactly the same as the
idea
that began it. Because I cannot find myself in the work that I myself
have
produced, I become other to myself in this work. What then
is the
difference between the production of the stove and the book. The one
appears to
be part of history, whereas the other only appears on the margins. On
the one
hand we want to say that the creative power of writing is incomparable.
Who
would juxtapose writing with the making of stoves? Do we not believe
that one
work can change the whole way that we look at the world, and indeed
that once
we have read such great works that our understanding of the world
becomes
totally different after reading them - that we can no longer encounter
the
world in the same way? Who would say that about a stove? But the
influence of
the writer is great precisely because it has little at all to do with
reality.
It is true to say that writer can pick up a pen and write about a world
without
slavery, but does this make him any less a slave? The real conditions
of
slavery are as real as when he had not begun to write. What is real in
the work
is not the reality of negation which changes the world, but a
powerlessness
that has escaped time and the limits that time imposes on reality. The
nothingness of literature is only an empty ideal and utterly
inaccessible. So the
writer is master
of everything and nothing. The reality of the book, then, is the
opposite of
any real action in the world, since it accomplishes nothing, creating a
world
without any determinate limits. The world, and
the world of the book are not the same. The writer
ruins action
because he places everything at our disposal. What is unreal is the
whole. The
imaginary is not outside the world, but it is the world as a whole. We
do not
experience the world as a whole, rather we experience things in the
world. This
or that event, this or that object. But the world as a whole can only
ever be
imaginary and exists as such in the negation of every particular thing.
In
reality, the world is concealed behind the particular, in the novel,
the
particulars are concealed by the world. They disappear and are only
present in
their absence from reality, since literature creates the illusion that
it has
created each one from this absent world. Is
literature, then,
purely imaginary? Not quite, for it is not on the side of the imaginary
against
reality, but precisely the separation between them. It is this
distancing from
the real that creates the illusion that one could know it as a whole.
This is
the lie of all literature, but it less worse than the literature of
action,
which thinks that it is real, and the values of the world that it
expresses the
same as the world of action. Revolutionary literature is never the
language of
'command' but of the present - it always presents everything as already
accomplished precisely because it never has to accomplish anything. And
it
never presents anything as real, but already dissolved in the
nothingness that
is the imaginary world, where the there is no resistance and limit. The three
temptations
of the writer (and these are only the repetitions of Hegel's
description of
self-consciousness in Phenomenology of Spirit) stoicism,
scepticism and
unhappy consciousness. Stoic, because he exists only in writing, and
his
freedom is only the freedom of the written word. Nihilist, because he
does not
transform one thing into another in the patience of work, but he
annihilates
everything - this is his unhappy conscience. But there
is also
another temptation of writing and that is the revolution. The
revolution is a
negation that is no longer 'satisfied with the unreal' but wishes to
realise
itself and go only do so through negating the real itself, by replacing
the
reality with writing. Such moments are rare, when within history itself
history
comes to a stop, and what is, is the same as what is written and said.
There is
a perfect analogy between literature and revolution. For literature too
creates
a world out of words, negates everything for the sake of itself. It
isn't the
step of one action to next for the sake of end, but the annihilation of
the
whole world in an act, just as the writer changes the whole world in
adjusting
one or two words on the page. This is the ineluctable bond between
revolution
and terror, for the annihilation of the whole of reality, each
individual
person is also dead and has already become dead, for they have
sacrificed their
individuality to freedom. But such a death no longer has any personal
significance. Why is that? Because it is the abstract negation of an
ideal. It
might have a significance for the world, but personal death as
personal, no
longer has a meaning. That you or I die is of no importance, what is
important
is what death makes possible generally a free society. But why
can the writer
recognise himself in the revolution? One reason is that at such moments
it does
appear that literature has a place in history, and even seems to make
history.
Such a writer was Sade. Literature
is above all
language. Language is both reassuring and disquieting. Reassuring,
because it
is in speaking that we master and order the world. We know nothing of
objects
that do not have names. Not that names and object have an intimacy for
us any
more, as though names had a magical power over things, and were
dangerous and
unpredictable, but names have totally, as in mathematics, replaced the
reality
of objects. All poets
have known,
however, the disquieting side of language. The word gives me what it
signifies
but it only does so by negating the actual thing. - the real cat,
through the
power of the word, is negated to become the universal cat - the idea -
the idea
is the metaphorical annihilation of the real thing - I now no longer
need the
real thing in order to communicate to you. I just say the word cat, and
without
pointing to cats, you know what I mean. It is true
that in
language I do not really murder anyone, but already in the word their
death is
announced. The existence of words demonstrated by own insignificance,
for the
meaning of the word man is not dependent on my individual existence as
men; it
is totally indifferent to me. Indeed, if my death were not a
possibility, then
the negation of language would not be possible. Death and language are
intimately bound together. This is why, when I speak, death speaks in
me and without
death (the disappearance of the particular), there would be no meaning. The power
of speaking
is therefore linked to my absence of being. Even if I talk about
myself, I am
separated from myself. I have become a name which is no longer living -
William.
In speaking, I do not just negate the object about which I am speaking,
but I
also negate myself. Thus speaking can only arise out of the experience
of one's
own nothingness and this explains why literature is about nothing and
desires
to speak nothing. We should not confuse this with nihilism - it is only
by
saying nothing that we say everything. Of course
this is a
false hope, since one cannot say everything, and still confuse this
with the
real world of action. Everyday communication thinks that the word cat
just says
cat and that the noun is the same as the living cat that is wandering
around
the kitchen, and that is has nothing at all to do with the absence of
the cat.
It attempts to replace the absence of the real cat with another
presence - the
essence. Since to negate the real existence of the cat, is not to place
this
non-cat, with a non-dog. But this is the great difference between
literature
and ordinary communication - the one replaces the existence of the real
thing
with the existence of the idea, which in fact has more certainty than
the real
thing, ideas are eternal, whereas things change and decay. For
literature on
the contrary, when it comes to things, it is only interested in its
absence, in
the power of words to make things absent, not just that the word cat is
the
non-existence of the cat, but 'non-existence become word' - in others
what
concerns literature is the word as a word, and not just as a vehicle
for an
idea. It replaces the unreality of things with the reality of language.
But
such a reality always hides a nothingness at its heart, and its this
nothingness that allows each word to already have a relation to other
words
beyond any simply reference or representation. In this instability of
the
relations between words which no longer have a fixed relation to
external
reality, fixed meaning is replaced by the image. The image is what is
at the
heart of literature. But the
paradox of
literature is that it always trying to go back to the moment before it
has
negated the world in words. It seeks, through the very annihilation of
thing,
its truth, as though the more words that it places on the page, the
closer it
will get to the truth of the thing. As though the very materiality of
language
could reveal the dark obscurity of things. Though dismisses the
materiality of
the language for the sake of the idea, but in so doing also dismisses
the
reality of the thing. To reach back to the reality of the thing,
literature,
and all art, seeks the mysterious matter of language - the word itself
in alls
its strangeness and enigmatic presence. At it is at this moment that
language
has the power beyond the person who wrote it. It no belongs to the
negation of
reality intended by the writer. It does not belong to this world. It is
not
revelation or representation. Its is the brute reality of the words
without the
author. Literature
is divided
into two slopes. On the one side it is turned towards knowledge in
which the
reality of things is destroyed in the word so as to be transformed into
an idea.
But on the other side, literature cares passionately about the reality
of
things which cannot be known, which resists knowledge and concepts.
Everything
in the world that refuses to made visible in the world. One might
say that these two sides of literature are a repeat of H's world and
earth. And the
only way to
announce in the obscurity of things is through the materiality of
words. There
is an alliance here between the obscurity of things and the materiality
of
words. It is not that the words represent or signify this obscurity,
but they,
in there very opacity present the obscurity of things. This obscurity
is always
singular, and not itself a universal concept. It is that moment when
meaning is
detached from certainty and unambiguity. The first
slope is
meaningful prose, whose aim is to express things through meaning. Every
one
speaks like this whether in writing or in speech itself. But without
leaving
this side of language, art distrusts its dishonesty. For communication
attempts
to hide the peculiarity of language, which is the annihilation of
reality. Art
wants to hold onto the absence that separates the word from the thing,
and
which prevents any word from being the simple representation of the
thing that
it is meant to designate. What is
common to every
poet, to every writer, is that they are interested in the reality of
words, and
not just what they signify and through words the reality of things
prior to a
world (prior to intelligibility). All literature is between this two
slopes. I writer,
like Flaubert, might write in the most transparent prose about what
people that
appear to us to be real, but what is reveal is 'the horror of an
existence
deprived of a world'. This is no more apparent than in the work of the
French
poet Francis Ponge, who writes of ordinary things in the most ordinary
way, but
in so doing is on the side of things rather than ideas. What then
happen in a
work when the words are stronger than the meaning of the words, and
this
meaning itself becomes material? Each moment is expressed in a
beautiful clear
language, but the whole itself is opaque. It is on
the
nothingness of language that reality is founded and not the other way
around.
This nothingness belongs to action. It is because we can negate reality
that we
can create worlds. What is at the basis of an world is always an idea,
self
consciousness becoming objective in its own creations. It recognises
itself
there. But without the negativity of action, the destruction of one
thing to
create a nothing, there would be no world. If things were not
replaceable, if I
were not replaceable, then there would be no reality. From the side of
the
world, death is the possibility of reality, but from the side of the
one who
dies, death is the annihilation of possibility. Once I have died, death
is no
longer a possibility for me, nor the world that is makes possible.
Death has
become the strange paradox of the impossibility of dying. Once dead, I
can no
longer die. The
cunning of
literature is to be on both sides at once. On the one side, it part of
culture
and civilisation, the negation of brute nature for the sake of
humanity. In
this sense, it is the work of death, the negative and action. But it
also want
to reveal the whole in which each thing has its meaning. In so doing,
however,
if forgets the inconvenient truth that it too is a part of the history
which it
is attempting to describe from the outside. The world it explains, the
world as
a whole, rather than made of parts of experience, is purely fictive.
This is
why from the side of the real world, the world of work and production
of
history, literature is seen as an embarrassment and no one really takes
it
seriously. This is
the strange
reality of fiction that it is not human. Yes it seems to be part of
parts of
the world, and sometimes we think that we are reading about real
people, but in
truth these lives and not lives. They are after all fiction. But does
this mean
that literature itself is nothing. No it is the words are the page,
which
cannot be changed. And literature is not the comprehension of these
words in
the mind of the reader. It is these words themselves. This is why it
'expresses
without expressing'. The exists without the author or the reader, and
they
carry on existing without them. Literature
is language
that has become ambiguous, which is no longer just the communication of
an
idea, belief or judgement. It is the 'there is' of language itself,
which
continues to speak not speaking in our absence. The word is a monster
with two
faces, which literature exist in between, facing in both directions at
once. It
is the material of the word itself, and meaning which is the absence of
thing.
Communication attempts to limit the equivocation of language by limited
its
scope. Words only mean what they say, and nothing else. It is not just
that
words become ambiguous in literature, but the whole of language itself,
so we
are no longer sure what it represents, or if it only signifies itself. The
negativity of
language (death, nothingness, absence, unreality) is what makes
possible the
advent of truth in the world, but this truth can also sink back into
the
nothingness that makes it possible. Then the negativity of language is
no
longer useful, and rather than making the world possible, unseats it,
making
visible that our world stands on nothing, but the unreality of language. Words
creates worlds,
but they do so out of the nothing that lies at their heart. Literature
returns
us to nothing which is prior to everyone world. Not to a beyond, but to
the end
of the world which is at the centre of every world, that it has to push
to the
periphery in order to make itself certain of itself, not realising that
this
nothing is in fact is own possibility, otherwise, without the
disappearance of
every world, there would only have been one.
Lecture
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