Appelbaum David - In his voice: Maurice Blanchots affair with the neuter

In His Voice

In His Voice

M AURICE B LANCHOTS
A FFAIR WITH THE N EUTER

DAVID APPELBAUM

Published by

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Albany

2016 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Appelbaum, David.

In his voice : Maurice Blanchots affair with the neuter / David Appelbaum.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-5979-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4384-5981-3 (e-book)

1. Whole and parts (Philosophy) 2. Perspective (Philosophy) 3. Nothing (Philosophy) 4. Blanchot, Maurice. I. Title.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Kate Stroud Hamilton

Ah this blind voice, and these moments of held breath when all listen wildly, and the voice that begins to fumble again, without knowing what its looking for and again the tiny silence and the listening again, for what, no one knows, a sign of life perhaps, that must be it, a sign of life escaping someone, and bound to be denied if it came, thats it surely, if only all that could stop, thered be peace, no, too good to be believed, the listening would go on, for the voice to begin again, for a sign of life, for some one to betray himself, or for something else, anything, what else can there be but signs of life

Beckett, The Unnamable

Contents

Preface

In His Voice: Maurice Blanchots Affair with the Neuter has a twofold aim. The first is to deepen a post-phenomenological investigation of authorial voice, the voice that appears on the scene of writing. The second is to utilize as frame and resource Maurice Blanchots discoveries vis--vis voice. They represent crossings or chiasma between his thinking and my own. His prolonged fascination reveals, in its principal insight, that the writers voice in a literary work lacks a direct presentation and has one given in response to a second voicethe others voice or the otherwise than voice. Only with this responsiveness does the singularity of authorial voice make its appearance.

Blanchot conceives of the alterity as a murmurous null point of vocalization. It is the sirens song, with allusion to Homer, or the cacophonous resonance of unadorned being, the il y a of Levinas, a motile chaos that precedes subjectivity, consciousness, and the properly human. Normally suppressed in the name of linguistical efficacy and worldly reality, its irrepressibility is the quilting point of literature since Romanticism. Writers such as Hlderlin, Rilke, Kafka, Mallarm, Ren Char, and Beckett lead Blanchot to speak of the authorial voice that embodies otherness as the neuter . The neuter voice, avoiding the repressive tendencies both of everyday language and philosophical discourse, reveals a menace to our appropriation of being and the order of things. Confronting it as reader, one falls under an exigency quite different from that of worldly comportment.

In accordance with current views, voice itself also has a twofold nature. It declares, yielding statements about the world, and it performs, presenting enactments of what it has power to do. To secure its signature, authorial voice is faced with a paradoxical task in relation to the alterity that speaks through and constitutes it. Since no statement of what lies beyond meaning is possible, it relies on performance to do the trick. Thus, the logic of how to present a performance of inscription is never far from my concern. By the same token, naked criticism, analysis, and explication of Blanchots texts are less useful and more peripheral facets of the current study. Instead, it would debut an exemplary performance of the scene of writing, who, where, and what takes placewith Maurice Blanchot as designated writer.

Abbreviations

Maurice Blanchot

The Station Hill Blanchot Reader . Ed. George Quasha, Tr. Paul Auster, Lydia Davis, and Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, NY, Station Hill Press, 1998): This anthology includes translations of Thomas the Obscure (TO), Death Sentence (DS), The Madness of the Day (MD), When the Time Comes (WTC), and The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me (TOW).

Jacques Derrida