Blanchot, the Obscure
A conference on the French critic and author Maurice Blanchot
Organized by the journal Colloquy
Under the auspices of the
Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University
School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies, Monash University
and
Alliance Française, Melbourne
19-20 August 2004
At the Alliance Française, 17 Robe St. St Kilda, Melbourne
Abstracts And Biographical Notes on the Speakers
Anthony Abiragi
“La Critique du Créateur”: Writing as Questioning in Maurice Blanchot
At a remarkable juncture in his Baudelaire article, Blanchot writes of la critique du créateur as the only form of critical appraisal suitable to the abyssal ground of speech – a phrase which recasts Baudelaire’s own ‘tout est abîme’. Blanchot, here, collapses the distinction between theory and practice and, more pointedly, makes of practice (writing) the mode in which theory (criticism) is actively conducted. It is the creator who, through art alone, makes sense of the possibilities of creation, as no aesthetic theory, no formal account of composition, will prove adequate to writing’s abyssal ground. In my presentation, I will argue that writing’s attempt at self-critique proceeds in the mode of questioning, a theme dear to Blanchot. The question of literature demands no external answer, but rather its very formulation – a necessarily precarious formulation that arises internally from the activity of writing itself (hence, la critique du créateur). My central contention: The essence of writing is revealed in the mode of questioning, as questioning is the attempt to “hear” the abyssal ground of speech; one must, with respect to this ground, write in order to hear it.
Anthony Abiragi is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of French at New York University. He has presented papers on Mallarmé, Paulhan, and Blanchot, and has recently completed an M.A. degree in philosophy from the New School for Social Research. The tentative title of his dissertation is “The Time of Writing: Maurice Blanchot and the Problem of Incompletion”.
Nadia Amara
Maurice Blanchot : l’obscur ou de “la chose à partir des mots”
My discussion will center on Blanchot’s contribution as a young critic who attempts to establish the foundations of new literary standards in order to promote a new literature. Through a few unkown essays written in the early thirties, I will take a closer look at some neo-classical themes and divisions, including culture/civilisation, germanophobia/nationalism, clarity/obscurity, universality/ modernity, and show how debates surrounding neoclassicism are pivotal to his reading. By exploring his affinities with several major figures of the Troisième République, notably Charles Maurras, Henri Massis, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, I will examine the notion of obscurity that is to be found and goes along with both the reaction against the academic standards imposed by the Sorbonne and the fascination of his generation for the irrational, namely in the wake of German romanticism. At first, I will examine his debt to an ongoing debate between the Action française and the Sorbonne in order to better understand what is at stake in neo-classicism for Blanchot and departing from there, how the notion of the “obscur” allows him to challenge the classical discourse in order to open up to a new literary experience. I will then show how Blanchot uses the “obscur” as a motive in response to the critical context to which he belongs, in order to capture and formulate collective concerns emerged from various philosophical currents such as personnalism, neothomism, bergsonism and phenomenology. I will especially focus on his discussion on Mallarmé (“Mallarmé est-il obscur ?”) and the use of language and phenomenology in poetry and literature in order to reflect on some of the foundations or moments of a major contemporary critical act.
I have been at Columbia for the past years (and Paris 7 Denis Diderot), after a masters obtained in Brussels. I am currently working on book manuscript on Blanchot’s criticism.
John Attridge
Blanchot and the end of literature: the case of Joseph Conrad
Blanchot ekes out a place for literature when, historically, its role has disappeared. Joseph Conrad suffered (oh, how he suffered!) such a period, writing at a time when the expanding mass market began to exert unprecedented pressure on novelists. Although Conrad, unlike Blanchot’s key writers, did not position himself in the avant-garde but rather wrote for a wide readership, he was tormented by the warring requirements of sales and literary reputation. This ambivalence determines, in part, the obscurities and experimentation in his writing, as he sought to reserve a place for the ineffable within commodity texts. In the final chapter of The Space of Literature, Blanchot makes lemonade from the lemons of history by suggesting that it is just when art is deprived of its every transcendent justification that it can begin to ask the fundamental question of its own possibility. This paper will argue that Conrad’s writing exemplifies such an art. I will briefly trace some Blanchotian tropes in his work, and present his habits of prevarication and deferment, both textual and actual, as detours into the possibility of the image itself, the image as possibility.
John Attridge is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. He is researching reticence and effusiveness in the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, with relation to modernist aesthetics, mass society and the English gentleman.
Andrew Benjamin
Chair of the plenary panel on Blanchot and Criticism
Blanchot lived a double life, a critic ‘by day’ and an author ‘by night’. However, this ‘duplicity’ does not imply a sharp distinction. Thus, his reviews and philosophical contemplations are not merely responses to the writings of others but also inform his own novels and récits. Or, is it perhaps the obverse: is his creative writing informing and influencing his critical endeavours? The tenability of both points of view makes it unnecessary to argue in favour of either. Instead, what matters is to present what necessitates writing as such. If this is a ‘law of writing’, it is a law only insofar distinctions and differences between critical and creative writing still persist. Yet it is not longer a law insofar as the exigency to write the All must of necessity persist only on the limits of the law.
Andrew Benjamin has taught philosophy and architectural theory in both Europe and the USA. He is currently Professor of Critical Theory at Monash University. His past books include The Plural Event (1993), Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997) and Philosophy’s Literature (2001). His forthcoming book is Disclosing Spaces: On Painting (Clinamen Books, 2004).
Christophe Bident
The Movements of the Neuter
This presentation will attempt to trace out several genealogies: the emergence of the neuter in the midst of the field of the obscure, the night, the ‘there is’; the perceptual and conceptual elaboration of a poetics of the neuter; the ethical movement of recognising the neuter. These genealogies graft upon one another, separate, overlap, composing a network with other lines of artistic thought and practice. It will therefore also be a matter of beginning to say – starting from the work of Blanchot – why the neuter will have been one of the major concerns of the 20th century.
Christophe Bident teaches at Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot. He is the author of numerous articles and three books: Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible, essai biographique (1998); Bernard-Marie Koltès, Généalogies (2000); and, Reconnaissances – Antelme, Blanchot, Deleuze (2003). He co-scripted the film Maurice Blanchot (1998), produced by Hugo Santiago.
Matthew Chrulew
Writing the Religious Obscure
‘“God is dead,” “Man is dead” are perhaps … only the symptom of a language still too powerful’. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, pp. 91-2.
Recent decades have seen much attention to the religious dimensions of French avant garde thought. It is particularly through the themes of absence and negativity that some thinkers trace the possibility of a postmodern “negative theology” of sorts. This paper will interrogate the relation of Blanchot’s writings to this “return of the sacred.” Particularly, it will engage with The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster, and relate these works to the compounded (but perhaps asymmetrical) absences of God, the subject, and the referent.
Matthew Chrulew is researching a PhD in the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology and Monash University. His published writings include speculative fiction short stories, as well as essays on animal studies and contemporary medievalism.
John Dalton
Man is the Indestructible: Blanchot’s Obscure Humanism
‘Man is the indestructible that can be destroyed’. This sentence from Antelme’s The Human Condition is cited by Blanchot in his The Infinite Conversation. This statement situates, in the most powerful and singular manner, the difficult movement of Blanchot’s writing, its elliptical turn of phrase and tone of thought, and requires us to ask—what is the place of humanism in Blanchot? Is it a nihilism enfolded in upon itself at the end of history, or the chance of the break, the possibility of the refusal that allows us to think the name ‘community’? How might we rethink humanism after Blanchot? Sarah Kofman writes in her Paroles suffoquées that Anteleme’s work founds without founding the possibility a new humanism. In the name of this new humanism, insists Kofman, in spite of everything that calls the word into question, “after the death of God and the end of man that is its correlate—I nonetheless want to conserve it, while giving it a completely different meaning, displacing and transforming it. I keep it because what other, new “word” could have as much hold on the old humanism?” It would not be enough to respond to the possibility of a new humanism purely from within Blanchot’s language. As a resolutely political question, it is necessary to confront political events: to recount what has taken place in the name of humanism, what has attempted to destroy it, to preserve for philosophy those events that, to paraphrase Blanchot, leave a ‘wound in thought’. One thinks most immediately of one of Blanchot’s essential terms—‘disappearance’. What if we are to think this word in rapport to that most terrifying political category—‘The Disappeared’? How might ‘we’ find ourselves and think this word anew, and so trace the possibility of a transformation in the political direction of humanistic thinking? And how far might Blanchot accompany us on this path?
John Dalton received his Ph.D from Macquarie University in 2003. He is currently a researcher in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, researching the issue of asylum seekers and mandatory detention in Australia.
Chris Danta
“The absolutely dark moment of the plot”: Blanchot’s Abraham
Blanchot locates obscurity in the archetypal story of Genesis 22. In the moment of Isaac’s reprieve, the nonhuman (ram) substitutes for the human (victim). The world outside the dialectic of the sacrifice rushes in to cover over the possibility of Isaac’s death. In this paper, I will argue that it is the after-effect of this obscurity that generates Blanchot’s notions of literature and the image. Blanchot thinks of narrative as being generated by an obscuring of death, which I will call here: “the absolutely dark moment of the plot”. The sacrifice of Isaac is archetypal to the extent that all narrative takes place as a reprieve of “the instant of my death” (I will discuss Blanchot’s récit). In the moment of representational substitution, the act that would annihilate the human – i.e. Abraham’s sacrifice – must be reinvested into a consideration of the nonhuman, the world. This is its objectivity
Chris Danta has just submitted a Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Andrew Benjamin, to the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. Presently, his work is concerned to show how a thinking of narrative – what might be called “the narrative Absolute” – persists in supposedly non-narrative thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Blanchot, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe.
Nikolai Duffy
The Curious Goings-On of the Night: Writing Maurice Blanchot Writing
There is something undeniably curious about the work of Maurice Blanchot: it refuses critical interpretation even as it suggests the possibility of a reflection on the practice of literary-philosophical reading. The writer writes, Blanchot argues, to the extent that the writer has always already been written by writing; writing is what the writer must abandon in order to write. As such, however, in order to hear the work of Blanchot it would be necessary not to hear it; in order to remain faithful to his conception of writing it would be necessary to remain passive before it. Through an inter-text of creative commentary this paper explores the central importance the terms passivity and fascination occupy in Blanchot in order to broach the challenge his notion of writing poses for both the study and the practice of literature and philosophy. It argues that Blanchot’s legacy is the foreshadowing of a critically reflexive register that, in its inauguration, responds to the work’s demand by soliciting its own exegetical collapse.
Nikolai Duffy is currently researching a doctoral thesis at Goldsmiths College, University of London, on the relation between literature, love and community in the writings of Heidegger, Blanchot, Levinas and Derrida. He teaches at Goldsmiths part-time.
Michael Fagenblat
Literature and Revelation: What’s there between Blanchot and Jean-Luc Marion?
Blanchot’s writing explores the experience of passing towards a space beyond the limits of knowledge. In phenomenological terms, the experience of literature, of the neutral, is an experience outside the constituting powers of the transcendental ego and beyond horizons of understanding. Blanchot’s most worked over concepts, the characters in his fiction and his literary criticism are united primarily through this fascination with human experience as a passage that consciousness cannot contain. Blanchot seems to have understood this account as a challenge both to institutional religion and to the very idea of God. Others, however, and foremost among them Jean-Luc Marion, have argued that revelation, God and theology are precisely the proper names for such experience. This paper will explore this debate at the limits of literature and religion in order to give us better critical sense of this experience itself as well as the respective projects of these two great writers and thinkers.
Michael Fagenblat received his PhD from the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. He then pursued advanced Jewish studies in Jerusalem for several years. He now lectures in Jewish philosophy and interpretive practice at Monash University and co-directs a community education project in Jewish studies. He has published articles in Philosophy and Social Criticism and the Harvard Theological Review as well as some poetry in Australia, UK and the US.
Hélène Frichot
Nathalie’s Rotunda: Breaching the Threshold of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Arrêt de Mort
Maurice Blanchot’s conceptual work on the space of literature lingers in an uncomfortable proximity to that space we conventionally call architectural. Nevertheless, for Blanchot, the space of literature is no space at all. Instead, it can be considered an exemplary non-place, or what Michel Foucault has described as belonging to “placeless places.” Nothing really happens in the hallways, rooms, and stairwells that are detailed in Blanchot’s récits, but I will argue that these settings are crucial to the writer’s sparse narratives and their intimate relationship with his philosophical work. I will suggest a two fold sense of the concept of space in Blanchot’s oeuvre, by way of a reading of L’Arrêt de Mort [Death Sentence]. This récit not only details the breaching of one threshold after another, as Blanchot’s characters venture through series of dimly lit rooms, but the astonishing appearance of a rotunda in the midst of one character, Nathalie’s apartment. Like a mirage, this focal space of fascination, milieu of the impersonal, appears only to sink again into obscurity.
Hélène Frichot teaches architectural theory, history, and design in the program of architecture at RMIT. She has recently submitted her PhD thesis in the department of philosophy at the University of Sydney and is currently awaiting responses from her examiners.
Peter Gunn
Woman as the Face of God: Blanchot, Lacan and the Feminine Impossible
In his essay ‘The Great Refusal’ Blanchot explores impossibility as a condition endemic to being human. This impossible is that which escapes us without there being any means of escaping it. It thus has an intimacy, but an intimacy which is on the side of the Other; impossibility is ‘the passion of the Outside itself’. Blanchot finds an instance of this in Marguerite Duras’ The Malady of Death. Here the woman presents impossibility for the man in the form of the ‘absolutely feminine’. In this paper I will consider the articulation of the impossible with the feminine in the work of Blanchot by reference to the work of Jacques Lacan and, in particular, his proposition, in the seminar Encore, of a jouissance which is both of the Other and expressly feminine.
Peter Gunn has come to Blanchot whilst pursuing a formation as a Lacanian psychoanalyst with The Freudian School of Melbourne. He is a psychotherapist and a writer, and has had a long-standing interest in the interplay of psychoanalysis and artistic creativity.
Charlotte Hallows
On writing and drawing
A paper which will consider phenomenologies of the ground through veils of the visible and the invisible in recent work of German artist, Heike Weber. The artist has completed a number of wall drawings and floor installations significant for their materiality, ambiguous rhythms and manual labour. She marks out a topographic terrain of the surface with residues of expressionism. Weber produces a dynamic topography of lines and points – the kind of ungrounded space or construction which might accommodate or release all sorts of movement, encounter and connection. The experience of art presents a relationship between the body and mysticism. The destruction of the body creates feelings of terror. The singularity of the body speaks to collective experience. The embodied subject recalls feelings of pain associated with homesickness (heimlich) homelessness and the unhomely (unheimlich). The body becomes an agent of memory and pain. The paper traverses a relationship between art and criticism.
Charlotte Hallows teaches Visual Culture at Monash University. In 2004 she curated Satellite Cities and Tabloid Life at Monash University Museum of Art. She has written for Like Art Magazine, PostWest, Subplot and Eyeline. She has exhibited at TCBinc, Platform, Span and Lupa. She is a committee member at Westspace.
Kevin Hart
The Profound Reserve
Maurice Blanchot affirms a link between art and the sacred. But what exactly is this link? This paper examines Blanchot and Levinas’s account of the image from an unusual perspective: debates between iconoclasts and anti-iconoclasts. It is concluded that Blanchot’s writings are traversed by both iconoclasm and anti-iconoclasm.
Kevin Hart is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he specializes in theology and literature. He is the author of The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (Cambridge UP), A. D. Hope (Oxford UP), Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property (Cambridge UP), Postmodernism (Oneworld) and The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago UP). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse, and the co-editor of The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot (Johns Hopkins UP) and Other Testaments: Derrida and Religion (Routledge). He is the author of seven volumes of poetry, the most recent being Flame Tree: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe).
Nick Heron
Abandonment, Désoeuvrement
The Blanchotian theme of désœuvrement appears at key moments in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Most significantly, at the close of the programmatic final section of the opening part of his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, where, corresponding to the figure of the fullness of man at the end of history, it is understood as a “generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted … in a transitus de potentia ad actum.” Following Agamben’s articulation of the ‘sovereign ban’ that directly precedes this passage (which, in an inverse yet complementary gesture, is identified as the “potentiality … of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying”), and his subsequent call – in the face of ‘unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe’ – for its immediate overturning, this paper will propose it is precisely Blanchot’s theme that poses the key to such an overturning.
Nick Heron is a postgraduate student at the University of Melbourne, currently researching the concept of life as it appears in the work of Giorgio Agamben. He also writes fiction, which has been published in various journals.
Mark Hewson
Blanchot and Hölderlin
The paper consists in the study of two texts of Blanchot’s on Hölderlin: “Hölderlin and the sacred word” (1946) and “Madness par excellence” (1950). In these texts, through a free commentary on Hölderlin’s poems, Blanchot works out a first version of the statement on language, poetry and writing presented in his major literary-theoretical work, L’espace littéraire. The examination of these works shows the extent of Blanchot’s appropriation of religious and mythical representations from the poetry of Hölderlin. Through this study, the paper will pose the question of the relation of Blanchot’s thought to the space of knowledge, occupied by literary history and criticism as disciplinary and research forms.
Mark Hewson has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from SUNY Buffalo. His dissertation was on Blanchot and literary criticism, mainly on L’espace litteraire. He has since held a post-doctoral position at the Viadrina University in Frankfurt Oder.
Leslie Hill
“An Outstretched Hand…”: A Fragment
The paper will examine the status and implications of fragmentary writing in Blanchot’s work in relation to Le Pas au-delà (The Step Not Beyond) of 1973, and more particularly in respect of the relationship between writing and the political in Blanchot’s writing in the wake of the events of May ’68 in Paris.
Leslie Hill is Professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Warwick, and the author of Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (CUP, 1990), Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (Routledge, 1993), Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (Routledge, 1997), and Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (OUP, 2001). He is currently working on a study of Blanchot’s literary criticism.
Mark Jackson
Radical Exteriority
We are aware from a range of works that have referenced Blanchot that an obscure and impassable engagement with exteriority circulates in his writings. Foucault’s accessible text, “Thought from the Outside” immediately nominates the spatiality of this circumscription. We think also of those moments of affinity expressed by Levinas in his Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Derrida’s engagement in “Living On-Borderlines” and elsewhere draws on and over the enigma of the arret and the untranslatability of its movements, the complexity of its spatial invaginations. This paper assays the locus of the implication nominated by this conference title, as a locus of exteriority to the some thing constitutive of “Blanchot,” a position that inscribes us to an outside with respect to a notion of “obscurity.” The paper attempts a Blanchotian engagement with the “obscurity” that is supposedly Blanchot’s.
Mark Jackson received his doctorate in architecture from the University of Sydney in 1994. In 1996 he was a Visiting Scholar at MIT, Boston, and has taught at the University of Sydney and Adelaide University. In 2003 he was a visiting professor at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He currently teaches at Auckland University of Technology. His research has a focus on ethics and architecture.