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2, 111

Blanchot, Philosophy, Literature, Politics

William Large

Some years ago now I was asked, with my friend and colleague Ullrich Haase, to write an introduction to the work of Blanchot for a series called Routledge Critical Thinkers edited by Robert Eaglestone.1 It is customary in this series to write a short chapter, at the end of the book, on the influence or impact of the author. Although this chapter was very brief, I found it particularly difficult to write perhaps because I thought at the time that I was betraying Blanchot, because it was as if I was transforming his work into a commodity (not, I think, the intention of the editor of this series). Why read Blanchot, or even an introduction to Blanchot, unless he was significant and important? Those who have already read Blanchot, or even know a little about him, know there is something rather peculiar about writing a short piece about how fashionable and trendy he is for here is a writer who prized anonymity and silence more than any other (though all writers demand this to some degree). It is refreshing, in this day and age, to recognize a writer who does not wish to be in the papers and television, who does not publicize him or herself at any opportunity, at a time when many others (those who call themselves writers, but who are not) sell themselves as though they were a product like anything else (and havent publishers always wanted it thus?). Yet it was not just that Blanchot desired solitude above all, and that being influential would have probably repulsed him, which worried me, but also that those who read Blanchot were like a secret community, and that writing about him, as though he were part of a mainstream (contemporary, for sure) tradition which everyone needed to read in order to be up with the times, would be to betray this community also. One of the editors at Routledge (not the academic editor of the series, but one of those who were meant to sell it) had a dream that one day every students shelves (do they have these anymore?) in the world would be filled with a long line of these books on Freud, Derrida, Deleuze, and so on. I imagined, though she did not say it, that she thought they could replace the originals, which would never have to be read, except by the people who were producing the introductions (and they must introduce God forbid that you have an original thought!) We live in a time when we consume theory. Theory, we believe, can be absorbed directly with as little effort as possible. Perhaps this is the reason for the success of such series like Critical Thinkers. So I find out what Blanchot thinks (hopefully his thought can be encapsulated into a short slogan and there is some truth in this, because every thought is reducible to a concept), and then I apply it to what ever I am doing (art, literature, music, etc.). Our consumption of theory is precisely the opposite of thinking.
parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online # 2006 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13534640600624903

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Thinking, like Simon Critchleys description of friendship in this issue, in Forgetfulness Must Politics and Filiation in Blanchot and Derrida, takes time. One has to spend some time with a thinker. Spending time means reading, and reading and consuming are very different activities. So first of all you have to read Blanchot and this is the first pleasure. Most of us who initially come to Blanchot, and this at least was true for me, did so through an obsession with literature. I first read him as an undergraduate philosophy student at the University of Essex. I cannot remember whether I was told to read him, or whether I came across him by accident. All I do know is at that time I used to wander the university library pulling books off the shelves at random. I always hoped that this is how I first encountered Blanchot for there is something purer about an encounter with a writer by accident rather than by design (yours or anyone elses). I picked one of the earliest collections of Blanchots writings which was edited by the English writer and academic Gabriel Josipovici, and which I believe is no longer in print. I was immediately struck by the clarity and force of his writing even in English.2 How different this was from some of the turgid and obscure prose that I was forced to read. But more than the style (which is even more beautiful in the French, clear, transparent and limpid like the stillest pond), what struck me that day reading this book, almost in one sitting, at one of the desks in the library, was how these essays on literature expressed my own disappointment, which had nothing to do with my teachers, with the teaching of literature at university. For I had gone to university to do (if one can do this) English and European literature and had changed to philosophy after one year. In English we applied theory to texts, but Blanchot did not have a theory of literature at all in fact quite the opposite. What he taught you was to read literature. And yet, it is this not having a theory which explains Blanchots influence on those French writers we might know more about (such as Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault to name the most well known), and it might be worthwhile quickly here to explain what I believed at that time this anti-theory was. All this is described with much more patience and finesse in Paul Daviess contribution, Kafkas Lesson, as the perennial paradox of the critics commentary both bearing witness to, and betraying the singularity of the work. I want to express the uniqueness of the work, why it moved me in the first place, and why I cannot stop thinking of it, but in so doing, in the very moment of communication itself, the work ceases to be what it is, which is what moved me originally. I have reduced it to an idea that can be circulated from one head to the other, like a coin, to use Mallarmes example in Crise de vers, passed from hand to hand until the relief on its surfaces finally wears out.3 At the heart of Blanchots understanding of literature is language.4 Perhaps we normally think of writing as a kind of communication. In writing this introduction, I am attempting (very badly I am sure) to impart some information to you, which you might or might not, depending on the circumstances, understand. Many people who read literature still think of language in this way. They are aware that literature places more emphasis on the form rather than the content of a message, but still something is being said. Our theories of literature are many different attempts to discover what this meaning is. For Blanchot, however, literature does not say anything in this sense of
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imparting information, or if we want to get to the heart of it, we have to go beyond or get rid of what it just says. We can break language down very simply (and this is basic) into three separate components: thing, word and idea. There is something outside in the world. Let us say a tree. I want to communicate the existence of this thing to you. So I transform this thing into a word tree. This word communicates to you the idea of the tree which stands for or represents the original tree. This is an elementary explanation of the referential function of language, but what focuses Blanchots attention in this model of language is something that we might have missed because we are so used to it, which is the negativity of the word. The word negates the thing in order to express it. In ordinary communication we quite forget this negation because the word is almost immediately replaced by the idea (in fact the aim of communication is to rid us of language altogether, an impossible ideal for sure, but one which should make us hesitate to think that it could be a model of language). Literature, however, is nothing but the negativity of the word, and it is against this wall that criticism always collides the resistance of the word to the idea. So here we have a theory of literature that says that there can be no theory of literature (reader-response, psychoanalysis, sociological, historical, and all the other innumerable theories), because there is no information in a book. This does not stop us transforming the book into a parcel of information, but in so doing we have stopped reading, or, at least reading literature and the book is no longer a book but something quite different: data or quantity of knowledge. One can go from here and see how this anti-theory of literature found its way into Derridas notion of deconstruction, and the impersonality of discourse in Foucault and Deleuze, which takes Blanchots description of literary language and applies it to language as a whole (if language is not referential then it cannot be tied to a conscious utterance, since this again is to place the idea above the word it is the word that make the idea possible, and not the word the idea such is the linguistic materialism of some French thought). So it seems I can prove to everyone the importance of Blanchots work. But I am not interested in convincing you of that. In fact, I have become less absorbed recently in Blanchots reading of literature, and more interested in his political writing. Literature and politics, however, are not really separate in Blanchots work, as Allan Stoekl makes clear in his cool and diagnostic analysis of Philip Watts misunderstanding of Blanchots politics in his contribution Blanchot: Death, Language, Community and Politics. I sometimes wonder why this is. Reading Ann Smocks wonderful and perfectly written piece in this issue, Distant Language in Blanchot, I think it is because unlike her I have never been a writer nor a great translator, and therefore literature was always something distant from me. This essay also contains wonderful phenomenological sketches of waiting and delay which moved me when I read them. Not distant in the way that she tries to explain it, as the separation at the heart of writing, but the unmoved distance of a philosophical gaze, which remains untroubled by what it surveys precisely because it remains at a distance the distance of an image Blanchot would have said, as Ann Smock reminds us. The same care and attention to the reading of literature is given by Deborah Hesss meticulous analysis of Blanchots The Step Not Beyond in her Narrative Indeterminacy and Logical Inconsistency in The Step Not Beyond . She allows us to understand how perhaps Blanchots dissatisfaction with literary theory might have arisen from his own
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experience of writing and also makes the startling and fascinating observation that modern fuzzy logic might help us appreciate the twists and turns of his prose. If we were going to follow, however, a different tack, how might one characterize Blanchots politics? It is certainly not what one would expect. Even if one is willing to say that Blanchot is a communist, and in places it is clear that he is committed to this tradition, even when it has become completely and utterly unfashionable to be so, then it is not a politics that one would normally expect. It offers no program, solution or plan of action. It certainly does not tell us what we ought to do, and even if we did know, how we might get there. It gives us no detailed analysis of power, foreign policy or current events (though occasionally there are allusions to things that might have happened). Rather, it strives to get to the root of what we think the political might be, and it does so through two sources, one a proper name, and the other an idea. No one should underestimate the importance of Emmanuel Levinas to Blanchot. Biographically speaking, no one other than Bataille had a direct influence on the course of his life (at least in the testimony that Blanchot gives us). But more importantly for us, two of his most important works, Infinite Conversation and The Writing of Disaster, contain detailed, patient and brilliantly original readings of Levinass work. Even if we were to lose all of the commentaries on Levinass work, and we were left with these two books by Blanchot, it would be enough. Moreover, I would insist, if you have read Levinas, and have not read Blanchot, then you cannot really understand Levinas. For Blanchot really makes us see the importance, strangeness and power of Levinass Other, which has, in recent years, unfortunately lapsed into cliche and the commonplace. We all think that we know what Levinas means by the respect for the Other, opening the door for the Other, even finding ourselves, though we dont really know why, always capitalizing the word other, but Blanchot makes us think about Levinas again, and the first hundred pages of The Infinite Conversation are some of the most extraordinary pages of one writer and friend on another. It is itself a gift. There Blanchot concentrates on the small phrase relation without relation that appears in Totality and Infinity and which expresses the non-totalizing relationship with the Other. Political theory, on the contrary, normally begins with the assumption of community and reciprocity. Either we have lost it and must find it again, or we already have it and must prevent ourselves from losing it. The first political word is we. The personal pronoun we suggests that there is already an identity between us. Perhaps this identity is cultural or natural, founded on language, species or race. It does not matter. What is important is that we have something in common between us. For Levinas, as the opening pages of Totality and Infinity suggest, this community is inseparable from war. We think the first word of this community is we, but in fact it is them. The binding power of the community is first of all the hatred of the enemy, and the more our community is under threat of dissolution, the more we have to find enemies to secure and fortify it. The idea of a universal community of peace and tranquillity is an illusion. Every community which is founded upon a we must begin with a them from which it distinguishes itself.
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What would it mean to define community in a different way? It would be to begin with the ethical relation as Levinas describes it. Not with the subject who decides or chooses, who is a bearer of human rights, not with the subject who struggles for recognition and seeks to be a full member of the international community, but with the subject that is already usurped by the Other, whose very identity, self-presence and sense of self, is already entwined with that of the Other, who before he or she says I already says to the Other. Entwined with the Other; not because they have a common fate, but because the self-identity of the subject is already lost, and if we have constructed a resolute identity, through a culture or nature, then this identity is always a repression of a much older and ancient time which knows no such culture or nature, a subjectivity before identity. As Blanchot writes in The Unavowable Community, what really makes me question myself, is not my relation to death or history (Blanchot is obviously alluding to Heidegger here), but the others death.5 This is because in death the other absents themselves from me, whereas in my own death, if I grasp it authentically, I finally discover who I am. It is only the death of the other which can open a community for me which does not have a beginning in my identity. For if I relate to the other in death, as missing and absent, it is an absence where I cannot find myself: Quest-ce donc qui me met le plus radicalement en cause? Non pas mon rapport a moi-meme comme fini ou comme conscience detre a la mort ` ` ou pour la mort, mais ma presence a autrui en tant que celui-ci ` sabsente en mourant. Me maintenir present dans la proximite dautrui qui seloigne definitivement en mourant, prendre sur moi la mort dautrui comme la seule mort qui me concerne, voila ce qui me met ` hors de moi et est la seule separation qui puisse mouvrir, dans sa impossibilite, a lOuvert dune communaute.6 ` [What puts me radically in question? Not my relation to myself as finite or as conscious of being towards or for death, but my presence to the Other as the one who absents themselves in dying. Maintaining myself present in the proximity of the Other who distances themselves definitively in dying, taking upon myself the death of the Other as the only death which concerns me, this is what places me outside of myself and it is the only separation which can open me, in its impossibility, to the Opening of a community.] It might be that every other notion of community is founded upon the idea of something that is common between the elements or members that make it up, whether what is common is merely an idea or even a fantasy, or is something real and visible (the division between these two is not always so sharp, since what is real can sometimes be a fantasy). But in this case what is common, the experience of the death of the other, the experience of the substitution of my own death by the death of the other, as though their death were always more important and significant than my own, is not the same as my identity, whether this identity is asserted from the very beginning or as the result of a process of recognition via an other, who in the end is the same as me. It is exactly the opposite of the community whose members convince themselves that they will survive forever, because there is common culture, race or blood which runs between them all, and which is immortal even though they are mortal. Such is the
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lie which has always led to the sacrifice of millions of lives in countless wars, genocides and acts of terrorism, and still does. It is the logic of death. For in truth there is no life of the community beyond the death of the individuals who make it up. Their madness is to believe that there is so.7 One way to think of community differently is through friendship. This link between friendship and community is not something new in the history of Western philosophy, as Derrida makes clear in The Politics of Friendship, the issues which Simon Critchley again describes with so much care and finesse in his paper Forgetfulness Must: Politics and Filiation in Blanchot and Derrida, but it is given a decisive twist and importance in Blanchots work. In the friend I do not find the mirror of myself, rather between myself and the friend something unknown and unspoken remains. This means that friendship is not part of the logic of recognition through which I construct my identity, but on the contrary places me outside of myself. Thus, friendship, properly speaking, is not a stage on the way to a community founded on the we. At the end of one of his books which bears the title Friendship, Blanchot writes of his friendship with Georges Bataille.8 We read these pages perhaps hoping to find some gossip about these two friends. Where did they meet? What did they say to each other? Maybe we will find some secret and confidential matter which we did not know before. Blanchot, however, tells us absolutely nothing. He is more interested in bearing witness to something else, which is more important precisely because it could never be a fact. It is only those who we do not know whose lives are reduced to facts, those thousands of deaths that we see and hear everyday, and in every place on the globe. Rather than leading me to what I already know, and might confirm in our relationship, the friend opens me to what is unknown between us. This is because what is at the heart of every life is something deeply impersonal which cannot be expressed by any name which responds to the question who are you? There is a life one leads and there is ones life. The first is personal and the second impersonal. The first is the life one talks about when others ask what you are doing, the police question, a life which corresponds to the name on ones credit card, in ones passport the name of the state. Then there is the other life which does not have any name at all, and holds the other life in its secret embrace. It is like a great river flowing in the subterranean depths of ones personal life, bearing it along in its wake. It is ones life which sometimes others see, and which one also occasionally glimpses in a glance or a grimace in between those points when ones attention is directed to whole objects or persons. Anything that is singular, interesting or remarkable about ourselves only comes from this impersonal life and not the other. All creativity is anonymous: all conformity is personal. So we are only really ourselves when we are not ourselves. Is it the absence of this absence in the language of the burikko that so fascinates and horrifies Thomas Wall in his remarkable contribution to this collection, Larvae? As though the little note under his office door with its cartoon angel (on which is written the words I miss you Dr Wall) were exactly the opposite of Blanchots description of his conversations with Bataille (and Thomas Wall, too, offers Bataille as an alternative to the fantasized childishness of the burikko and kawaii). What is this absence? Deleuze, in one of his last writings, Immanence: A Life, reminds us of that strange and disturbing episode in Dickenss Our Mutual Friend, when the villain of the piece, Rogue Riderhood, is found dying.9 For no compassion is shown to him when he lived, but between life and death, when he no longer bears his name, when it is the outer husk and shell of
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Riderhood and no other, and when he has becomes a dank carcass, then all are extremely concerned and affected. But what they care for is not Rogue Riderhood at all, not this man, who they all hate and fear, but the impersonal life which lives within him, and which lives within them all: No one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it is life, and they are living and must die.10 When finally his life returns, then the same animosity and dislike fills the onlookers, even though moments before they were struggling and weeping over his apparently dying body. What do they hate about him? That the virtual possibilities of this singular life have been crushed by what Rogue Riderhood had become? Such is the life that is in us all; singular but not individual, which bears no name, Deleuze writes, but cannot be mistaken for any other, beyond subject and object, the internal and the external un sourire, un geste, une grimace [a smile, a gesture, a funny face].11 Perhaps this impersonal life is what Blanchot means by the neuter, the most difficult of all of his concepts, and which Lars Iyer, in his eloquent piece in this volume, There is Language: Speech and Writing in Blanchot, contrasts so sharply and vividly with the heroic individualism of Heideggers Dasein who resolutely holds onto its uniqueness against the facelessness of death. But it is not death which is faceless, but life. Faceless, if we imagine the face to mean someone or somebody. For what is other to me or you cannot be a personal property, but the certain quality of a relation between us which lies beneath or beyond our selfhood. It is not the personal, so banal and commonplace, which is ethical, but the impersonal. I become other through it and not against it. Such is the connection between us when we are no longer held prisoner by the subjectivities we have assumed or have been forced to assume, as though on the other side of this attribution there were always the possibility of having no name and no identity. This may be the greatest difference between Levinas and Blanchot, at least the Levinas of Totality and Infinity. For he celebrates the living presence of the Other in the vitality of their speech, but in so doing he might betray the very alterity he meant to proclaim by making it indistinguishable from the subject. For, as Blanchot remarks in The Infinite Conversation, speaking in the first person would make the self and the other identical.12 The other is neither one nor the other neither the subject, nor the other, if the other is thought of as simply the opposite of the I. Rather, as neither one nor the other, it inhabits the subject as other to itself in itself, the Other-in-me as Levinas will later call it in the formulations of alterity in Otherwise than Being, which are closer to Blanchots expressions, than Totality and Infinity. This movement from the subject to the impersonality of the other, which is immanent to the subject, is also, as Paul Davies reminds us, the condition of literature for Blanchot. But how is this same impersonality present in literature? This seems to be the question of Eleanor Kaufmans paper Midnight, or the Inertia of Being, who too sees the relation between Blanchot and Deleuze to be paramount (and perhaps for this reason the separation between literature and politics is a false one). It is, as she writes, a
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different experience of being and time, but it is also an experience of language. There are three levels of language, which mirror our earlier distinction between thing, word and idea. There is a relation between words and things which we speak everyday, which we believe is the unique creation of our consciousness. But underneath this stratum is the unconscious ordering of discourse, which already links words and things before I have entered the scene, and which creates the illusion of the speaking subject. But this is not the final level of language; beneath this level, neither conscious nor unconscious, is the pure experience of language; the there is of language before the relation between the word and thing which expresses the idea, and the discourse which makes this link possible. It is the brute fact of language that is announced in poetry and literature, film and art. What is spoken before any one speaks, and the discourse through them. This is why, to go back to our earlier discussion, every work of art resists interpretation, for the act of interpretation is the desire, perhaps unavoidable, of reinserting the there is of language within the order of discourse, and the link between words and things which is the basis of our common understanding of the world. The impersonality of the work of art, and the impersonality of life are one and the same thing. Both rest on the impersonality of language. Beneath the order and structure of our world, where things and words have their rightful and just place, flows the torrent of language which has no beginning or end, and which no one speaks. As Deleuze writes in his book on Foucault, who he reads through Blanchot, the subject is a variable and not the origin of language.13 There are as many subjects as there are linguistic forms. What is first is the one speaks, the anonymous murmur, in which any subject is situated, even the author of a narrative, which is already there before they have uttered or written a word. We should not confuse this impersonality with structuralism. The impersonality of language is not the same as the impersonality of objectivity. Discourse is impersonal, but it is so only in the way that it expresses the impersonality of thought through the primacy of the idea over the subject of enunciation the truths of propositions are not dependent on who says them. Both Foucault and Blanchot, however, not only refuse the priority of the subject, but also the structure. The there is of language is not a structure. It is not the operation of the signifier over the signified, which had become popular in Paris at a certain time. The word speaks both before the subject and the structure. Rather, it is what the structure operates against, what it must organize, and at the same time what must always resist its organization and thus render it visible in its worklessness. This is why we must distinguish between exteriority and the outside in Blanchot.14 Exteriority still belongs to the structure. Think of Kants famous distinction between the realm of phenomena and the Thing-in-itself. The Thing-in-itself is not a lack or mystery in Kants system; rather it is what completes it. Every system requires the idea of exteriority, for only in this way is it closed, since the limit is produced from within and not from outside. But the outside is quite different. It is not a block that remains opposed to what stands within, but is an atmosphere or influence that menaces every element without distance or separation, as though each item were shadowed by its own ultimate destruction. Thus, as Deleuze writes elsewhere in Foucault, it is both what is most distant, since it cannot be internalized within the system as the idea of its limit, and what is closest, since it does not stand in opposition to the system as its necessary beyond.15 The outside, rather than being on the other side of what is inside, is what is most within an interiority deeper and more profound than the interiority of the
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subject, and thus more exterior than any exteriority. Such explains the peculiar quality of Blanchots fiction, where the inner life of the character and the external world of events and happenings become increasingly blurred and chaotic and one no longer knows what is inside or outside. Take for example (and the instances are numerous in Blanchots work; one could almost open any novel or narrative randomly to find them), the second chapter in Thomas lobscur where Thomas enters the wood and descends into a cellar [une cave].16 Trapped, he experiences a night more terrible than any other [plus terrible que nimporte quelle nuit]. This other night was the night of thought itself, on the hither side of thought within thought, as though in the deepest interiority of the soul there was another outside which should not be confused with the exteriority of the world or reality. This other night one cannot see, but in not being able to see, his eye is penetrated by the darkness and sees the day within it. In this sight, the power of seeing and the object of sight are not held apart, but become one. In this co-mingling, his eye saw what was preventing it from seeing. It saw what cannot ordinarily be seen. Its seeing became an object for itself, its glance an image of when it saw nothing. No he was not alone, and his solitude not complete. It could have been just like something knocking against him in the dark and trying to get inside of him. It was as though a foreign body, a speck of dust perhaps, or something worse, had lodged itself against his pupil. His eye, rather than something looking outwards and internalizing this outside in a mind, was being invading by something outside that was trying to assault him. This sensation was made all the worse for it was not a speck of dust at all, but the whole world, the trees and the small wood that he had been walking through only a moment before he descended into this cellar. The sensation undid him. He was no longer certain of himself. Had someone else entered by the same route as he did, was there someone else in the darkness with him? The waves from the outside, waves of darkness, like the sea that invaded him at the opening of the novel, came crashing inside of him, and this inside was no longer a mind, or a consciousness, but an abyss [un abme]. It is not his eye that connects with the outside world, but his hands, and these hands do not recognize whole things, but only parts. From these parts whole cities and civilisations are created, but at whose centre were only emptiness, blood and violence. These parts of animals and things, Thomas, had once called ideas and passions [les idees et les passions]. He is seized by a fear, which is indistinguishable from his own corpse, and by desire, which crawled back into his mouth like a dead thing. Rather than feeling his feelings, they felt him, they took him over. His feelings, like the corpse, had become him, and it is they who kept watch instead of him. He could feel all of this against his lips, but not pressing on them from the outside, but coming against them from within like vomit. All vanished, the cities, the trees, and all the other things. All that it left is Thomas, his body, like a corpse, and this other thought, a thought that entered him, rather than he thinking it, enters him again, and touches the void [le vide]. What fascinates us, Blanchot tells us, takes away our power of giving meaning [Ce qui nous fascine, nous enleve notre pouvoir de donner un sens].17 When we look at the world we ` separate ourselves from the world we see, we take it into our power, organize and label it. But the gaze can also be drawn by what it sees, taken outside of its own power, drawn outside of itself by the power of what it sees. This is the difference between the image and the object. The object is the seen as it is interiorized by the subject, the
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image is the subject as it is exteriorized by the object. It is as if I am caught in the headlights of the gaze, rather than what I am looking at is caught by me. It is as though I am caught in the thing looking at me, as when Lacan recalls in his summer holidays, whilst fishing, looking at the can on the water looking back at him, fascinated by the object, caught in its gaze rather than his own, his gaze becoming its.18 Nothing in this scene means anything. It is not as if the can has an intention, a secret to tell Lacan, but fascination begins at the moment that I am seized by the object, rather than the object is taken hold of by me. I am placed outside of myself, but in a region in which there is no meaning at all, only the pure shimmering surface of the image.

Notes Ulrich Haase and William Large, Maurice Blanchot (London, Routledge, 2001). 2 The book was Maurice Blanchot, The Sirens Song, Selected Essays, ed. by G. Josipovici, trans. S. Rabinovitch (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982). 3 Stephane Mallarme, Igitur Divaginations Un coup de des, preface dYves Bonnefoy (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p.251. 4 For those of you who are reading this issue because you want to read more Blanchot, then you might want to have a look at his essay Literature and the Right to Death as a starting point, in Maurice Blanchot, La Part de Feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) pp.291331. Allan Stoekl gives us intelligent and accurate explanation in this issue. 5 Maurice Blanchot, La communaute inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983) pp.215. 6 Maurice Blanchot, La communaute, p.21. 7 The lesson of the recent German film Downfall [Oliver Hirschbiegel, Downfall. (Momentum Pictures, 2004, DVD)] is to show that the Nazi regime was obsessed with death from the start, and it could only have ended with death. Hitler could contemplate the complete and utter destruction of the German people as the only proper sacrifice. Such a community does not continue after our deaths. Quite the contrary, it sacrifices us all to death. 8 Maurice Blanchot, LAmitie (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp.32630. 9 Gilles Deleuze, Limmanence: une vie in Deux regimes de fous. Textes et entretiens 1975 1995, edition preparee par D. Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2003), pp.35963. 10 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Penguin Books, 1998) p.503. 11 Gilles Deleuze, Limmanence, p.362. 12 Or at least one of the speakers says, Pourquoi donc le discours oral semble-t-il a celui-ci ` [Socrates] (et a Levinas) une manifestation hors ` Large 10
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pair? Parce que lhomme parlant peut porter secours a sa parole, toujours pret a repondre delle, ` ` a la justifier et a leclaircir, contrairement a ce quil ` ` ` arrive avec lecrit. Admettons-le un instant, quoi que je ne le croire guere. Nous voyons en tout cas ` que ce privilege du langage parle appartient ` galement. [Blanchots emphasis] a Autrui et a Moi e ` ` et les rend ainsi e gaux. Maurice Blanchot, LEntretien infini (Paris, Gallimard, 1969) p.81. [Why, therefore, does oral discourse seem to the latter (and to Levinas) to be a manifestation without comparison? Because the speaking person can bear assistance to his speech, always ready to respond for it, justify and clarify it, contrary to what happens in writing. Let us admit that for a moment, though I scarcely believe it. We see in any case that this privilege of spoken language belongs equally to the Other and to me, and thereby makes us equal.] 13 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp.625. 14 And perhaps the most famous essay on Blanchot is Foucaults The Thought of the Outside. Michel Foucault, La pensee du dehors, Critique, 22:229 (June 1966), pp.52346. 15 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, p.92. Capitalism functions as such an outside, for example, in Anti-Oedipus. It is what has haunted every society from the very beginning, as it dissolution and destruction. The death that seems to come from without always comes from within, because all discourses are merely islands of stability in a sea of turbulence and turmoil: Le capitalisme a hante toutes les formes de societe, mais il les hante comme leur cauchemar terrifiant, la peur panique quelles ont dun flux qui se deroberait a leurs codes. Gilles Deleuze et Felix ` Guattari, LAnti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p.164. [Capitalism has haunted all the forms of society, but haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, the pure panic of a flux which overflows all their codes.]

16 Maurice Blanchot, Thomas lobscur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), pp.1420. 17 Maurice Blanchot, Lespace litte raire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p.25.

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Jacques Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, texte etablie par Jacques-Alain Miller, Le Seminaire, Livre XI (Paris: Seuil, 1973), pp. 109 11.

William Large teaches philosophy at the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth and political theory at the University of Exeter. He has written Maurice Blanchot (Routledge, 2001) [with Ulrich Haase] and Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing (Clinamen Press, 2005).

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