William S. Allen - Blanchot and the Outside of Literature

In a sense, and to express myself very simply, that which has made me write is the thought (and the anxiety) of impossible death, the silent clash of death as finitude, as power, and the infinity of dying, the eternity of that through which time risks abolishing itself.
Maurice Blanchot to Pierre Madaule, 2 March 1981

Some of these chapters have appeared elsewhere in earlier forms: Chapter 4 appeared as The Absolute Milieu: Blanchots Aesthetics of Melancholy, Research in Phenomenology 45.1 (2015): 5386; Chapter 5 appeared as Unmade in its Image: The Spacing of the Sentence and the Exposure of Thought in Blanchot, Textual Practice (2016); Chapter 6 appeared as White Noise, criture Blanche, Angelaki (2018), special issue on Sonic Encounters with Blanchot; and Chapter 7 appeared as To Articulate the Void by a Void: Aporetic Writing and Thinking in LAttente loubli, Word and Text 5 (2015): 5267, special issue on Blanchots Spaces. My thanks to Brill and the Taylor and Francis Group for permission to reprint them here. I must also express my profound gratitude to the staff at Bloomsbury, especially Haaris Naqvi and Katherine De Chant, for their exemplary work in bringing this book to print.

Where double page references have been used they refer to the French or German text, and then the English versions, as translations have been modified throughout.

Problem: with what means could one attain a severe form of highly contagious nihilism: one that teaches and practices voluntary death with scientific conscientiousness?

If Marxs eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is the starting point for any philosophy that would call itself materialist, insofar as it bears the minimal requirement to negotiate the relation between interpreting the world and changing it, then what does this mean for literature? To some degree, the question is less pertinent for literature since, in material terms, it is already part of the world and its changes, but this is only to register its basic unreflexive form. Otherwise, the imperative of the eleventh thesis remains as pressing for the writer as it does for the thinker. Thus, literature is not so much engaged in the task of demonstrating its materialism but rather of developing its ramifications through its exploration of the relation between interpretation and intervention.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it (Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kmmt darauf an, sie zu verndern). Marxist scholars have long struggled with the reading of this thesis as its form is ambiguous: is the point to drop interpretation in favour of change, or is it to ensure that interpretation should henceforth involve change, or, indeed, is it that interpretation is itself a form of change that needs to realize itself? There may be other readings, but all have to do with the dialectical relation between thought and the world, and, more precisely, with its role and status in the world, which is also a problem for literature. In looking at the ways that literature relates to the world it is reasonable to take account of whether the text seeks to operate directly or indirectly. This involves understanding the writers position, and whether they are seeking to develop a commentary or reflection, however slight, but either way the writer comes up against the question of how their writings exist in the world. This is not just to ask after the political or realistic status of a text but to enquire into its material-linguistic status as an interpretation that is also an intervention; what does this mean for the text, what is its situation in the world? The writer and their work are always already in the world, and in history, and whatever they do, however minimal, will be part of that world and its changes, so how does the writer proceed?