LES CAHIERS MAURICE BLANCHOT

Agata Bielik-Robson

Faux pas, or The Error of Life :

Blanchot versus Levinas (and Bloom)

Parlant au lieu de mourir.

Maurice Blanchot, L’attente, l’oubli

Let us admit that the neuter does not belong to the language of the living…

Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 85.

For Blanchot, to be, to live, and to write, are not exactly activities: they are rather self-cancelling moves, faux pas, in which life recedes from life and writing recedes from writing – back into the abyssal matrix of death. Blanchot does not hide the sources of his thanatic inspiration: first Hegel, then Kojève, and finally Heidegger. These three powerful precursors indeed occupy the very centre of XXth century thought, obesessively focused on the issues of death, finitude, and mortality.¹

Since Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which begins with the emphatic praise of death as lending power to the rational operations of human mind and most of all language, the link between mortality and speech has formed one of the central topics of moder philosophy: this credit is duly reflected in Blanchot’s ingenious misreading of Hegel in “Literature and the Right to Death,” where Adam, the first man, by the very act of naming concrete beings, annihilates them in their sensual image-like existence. The notion of man as a ‘speaking death’ has been coined in the strongly thanatic reading of Phenomenology of Spirit undertaken by Alexandre Kojève, Blanchot’s most influential teacher, but also confirmed by HeideggerAgain, I think these journalistic qualifications have to go.

who had shifted death into the very center of his philosophical Denken.² Yet here, unlike originally in Hegel, man can no longer portray himself any longer as a ‘master of death.’ After Heidegger’s and Kojève’s interventions, it is rather death which gains ‘absolute mastery,’ commanding only one attitude of man: equally absolute Gelassenheit (releasement), a resignedly affirmative acceptance of death’s ‘truth-saying’ final ver-dict. The Kojèvian pupils, Blanchot among them, have only drawn final consequences from the fusion of these two visions of death - Hegel’s and Heidegger’s - into one, which proved to be a truly ‘lethal’ combination.

In late modernity, therefore, life awakens from the long dream of immortality to learn again about the reality of its own finitude - and finds itself paralyzed by this final verdict: precisely the way the mysterious hero of Blanchot’s story, L’Arrêt de mort, perceives himself as both ‘arrested’ and made absolutely passive by death’s highest ‘sentence,’ which simulatneously announces the end of existence and postpones its coming.³ Crushed by the truth of death, which is always already there, from the very beginning, ready to terminate life’s misguided effort to live, life begins to see itself as nothing but an unjustifiable delay in face of the pressing verdict. The late-modern deathbound thinking can be thus summed up by the ultimately pessimistic diagnosis of Arthur Schopenhauer, according to which “every individuality is only a special error, a false step, something that would be better had it never existed; indeed, it is the actual purpose of life for us to recede from it.”⁴

To Blanchot, however, even Heidegger, who invented the very genre of Todesdenken, was not radical enough. The Blanchotian paradox of false stepping results from the highly significant inversion of Heidegger’s concept of death; while Being and Time defines death as the ‘possibility of impossibility,’⁵ Blanchot refuses to think of death in terms of open potentialities and reverses the Heideggerian formula to produce the opposite sense of an incapacitating closure: death is the ‘impossibility of possibility.’ And while Heidegger sticks to the traditional memento mori, which he only reinterprets in a new, i.e. no longer vanitative but heroic fashion, Blanchot insists precisely on the forgetting as the only possible approach to the elusive and always ‘inauthentic’ event of dying:

To forget death is not to relate oneself in a rash, inauthentic, and evasive manner to this possibility that would be death; on the contrary, it is to enter into an event that is necessarily inauthentic, a presence without presence, an ordeal without possibility.⁶

Heidegger’s intention was to expose death as a positive factor of authenticity, which allows to conduct one’s life more fully and intensely precisely in the face of the final verdict: the ultimate possibility of non-existence. Death as the limit compresses life to a consciously finite moment in time, which, thanks to this act of compression, gains the unique intensity Heidegger calls die Eigentlichkeit. Death, the first and the last possibility, teaches life about possibilities as such. The very awareness of its finitude forces it to be resolute; to intesify its existence by the modality of the possible.

Blanchot, however, begs to differ precisely on this point. For him, death is not the limit which compresses life into a consciously finite moment; not a vehicle thanks to which finite existence trades the infinite extenses of ‘life eternal’ for the intensified sense of temporality, but a nunc-stans of ‘dying’: a hovering, spectral ‘presence without presence’ which can never be used, either in Hegelian or Heideggerian manner, for the sake of the living. Not death, which could still be utilized by life as a ‘frontier experience’ or finite telos, working for the purposes of life’s heroic intensification – but dying, an indefinite negativity of exhaustion and inacapacitation, is what characterizes Blanchot’s sceptical approach which senses in Heidegger’s heroization of death merely a thinly disguised philosophical substitute for revelation. In The Step Not Beyond he will say: “One must thus erase, withdraw the word death in dying, like speech in writing” (SNB, 90). Death turned into the dark telos of being-towards-death gives meaning – intensity and authenticity – to human finite life without any revelation, but also instead of revelation.⁷ And this precisely what Blanchot opposes: in his vision of ‘dying,’ death is as far removed from any possible revelatory context as possible.⁸

In Blanchot, death is not a substitute for God.⁹ It does not awaken us to any higher, more intense and willful form of life; it rather serves as an alternative mode of existence, in which life not only does not find an extra confirmation but dissolves as the Schopenhauerian error which is not worth maintaining in existence. This is why death for Blanchot is not a teleologically defined future, but the indefinite present continuous forming a paradoxical ‘presence without presence’:

It is the fact of dying that includes a radical reversal, through which the death that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what loosens my hold upon myself by casting me out of my power to begin and even to finish, but also becomes that which is without any relation to me, without power over me—that which is stripped of all possibility—the unreality of the indefinite. I cannot represent this reversal to myself, I cannot even conceive of it as definitive. It is not the irreversible step beyond which there would be no return, for it is that which is not accomplished, the interminable and the incessant [...] It is inevitable but inaccessible death; it is the abyss of the present, time without a present, with which I have no relationships; it is that toward which I cannot go forth for in it I do not die, I have fallen from the power to die. In it they die; they do not cease, and they do not finish dying.¹⁰

If God is the principle of creation and constitution (and death in Heidegger is still such a principle) – then the indefinite process of ‘dying’ in Blanchot becomes the very opposite: the principle of decreation and decomposition, a pure expropriation which delivers every being destined for a demise to a radical exteriority:

Death delivers from death […] Dying is this lightness within any liberty from which nothing can liberate […] The exteriority of being, whether it takes the name of death, of dying, of the relation to the other… does not allow any relation (either of identity or alterity) with itself (SNB, 132).

In his attempt to grasp the lethal negativity of a finite life as it is, without any ideological uses or adornements, Blanchot distances himself very strongly from what Leo Strauss, while reading Sein und Zeit, was prepared to call a new ‘religion of death,’ bestowing on death all the gravitas of traditional theology. Blanchot wishes no religious use made of the inevitable, interminable, incessant, but also infinitely, spectrally light (non)presence of ‘dying’: death, instead of mobilizing Dasein to activity of self-positing, reveals the irremovable Nichtigkeit that pervades and therefore nichtet, annihilates, its inner possibilities. The impossibility of possibility announces from the start that all projects undertaken by Dasein are by definition futile; the (non)presence of dying overrules every moment of decision in which Dasein resolves to be ‘something rather than nothing’ and establish itself as a separate unit of being. Death, being no-God (or perhaps even stronger: an anti-God), does not let beings be; the divine Seinlassen is not one of its prerogatives. In Writing of the Disaster, where ‘disaster’ – being “separated from the star”: without tragic fate, fatelessly light, falling away from anything absolute – becomes another synonym of ‘dying,’ Blanchot says:

The disaster, depriving us of that refuge which is the thought of death, dissuading us from the catastrophic or the tragic, dissolving our interest in will and in all internal movement… is related to forgetfulness – forgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated […] I will not say that the disaster is absolute; on the contrary, it disorients the absolute. It comes and goes, errant disarray […] A non-religious repetition, neither mournful nor nostalgic, a return not desired.¹¹

In Blanchot, death for the first time acquires this deep negativity which was only glimpsed by Hegel, Heidegger, also Bataille. All of them fell short of giving justice to the true profundity of the deadly negative, by trying to make use of it for the sake of life: Hegel, by utilizing death for the purpose of the constitition of the rational spirit, capable of operating with concepts detached from the living reality of images; Heidegger, by turning death into a mobilizing telos of genuine existence; and also Bataille, who despite his declaration of letting lethal negativity loose and sans emploi, nonetheless wanted to chain it to the process of transgression, leading to the ideal moment of sovereignty. It is only in Blanchot that death, conceived as a nunc-stans of dying, reaches the extreme of negativity truly incapacitating and invalidating all ‘positive’ projects of life that whould like to posit itself as rather something than nothing. Death, as an abyss of decreating anonymity, makes all acts of positing impossible: a life, overshadowed by its indefinite spectral presence, cannot even say ‘I’ in order to assume a singular non-anonymous existence. There is no escape from the verdict of anonymity: “‘I’ never die but ‘one dies,” says Blanchot (ibid., 241). “How can I, in my speech, recapture this prior presence that I must exclude in order to speak, in order to speak it?” - asks Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation (IC, 36). Surely, I cannot for “I dies before being born” (WD, 101). If there is language, in which this prior presence of negativity can come to the fore, it must remain subjectless:

When I speak, I deny the existence of what I am saying, but I also deny the existence of the person who is saying it […] Language can begin only with the void: no fullness, no certainty can ever speak; something essential is lacking in anyone who expresses himself. Negation is tied to language.¹²

But language not only begins, it also ends with the void: death can never be conquered, overcome, chained to something ‘useful.’ Once its absolute negativity is truly ‘let loose,’ it refutes all positive efforts at constitution; it is the unmasterable per se. In Blanchot’s ultimately negative vision, not only death but also language becomes radicaly desacralized; instead of offering a resurrected order of things (as it happens in Hegel, still very much in the grip of religious conceptual schemes of Christianity), language can only testify to its creative incapacity. Divested of all sacral power to posit the new ‘law of day,’ it must remain for ever in the nyx, the eternal ‘law of night,’ ruled by the paradoxical non-arche of death, a disintegrating element of universal entropy, disarray and dispersion. Just like no beings ever truly emerge from the Abgrund, the Heideggerian abyss of non-being, no words can ever separate themselves from the matrix of silence. Just like creation of singular beings is an illusion, so is the articulation, as the linguistic expression of the creaturely order of things.

The same aura of incapacitation emanates from Blanchot’s story, La folie du jour, where the Hegelian ‘day of reason,’ self-deluded by the false sense of autonomy, sinks into an ambivalent radiance of another light, dark light, coming from more primordial sources: as original and more primary, this dark light has a power to subvert the creational ambitions of reason and language and invalidate them.¹³ Creation, in fact, never takes place. When language tries to name things, it only weaves a deceptive veil thrown over the original nothingness. Yet, when language is used in a ‘literary’ way, that is, with a higher consciousness of the Hegelian, who knows that by the very act of naming, the language necessarily destroys what it names, it can begin to approach the truth: the truth of no-being. Language is thus indeed “tied to negation,” but in Blanchot this attribution harbours a paradoxical hope. When words turns into the funeral inscriptions of their designates, the whole falsity of the creaturely spectacle becomes fully exposed: the language which has the capacity to kill its designates, can also return to the original nothingness from which no beings every truly emerged. Once the ‘literary’ use of language manages to expose the illusion operative in the linguistic creation, this sobering discovery reflects back on the metaphysical creation itself:

There can be this point, at least, to writing: to wear out errors. Speaking propagates, disseminates them by fostering belief in some truth […] To write: to refuse to write – to write by way of this refusal […] May words cease to be arms: means of action, means of salvation. Let us count, rather, on disarray (WD, 10-11; my emphasis).¹⁴

Thus, although Blanchot initially uses Hegel’s theory of speech as arising from the destruction of the sensual das Diese, it does not follow Hegel’s ontological optimism. In Blanchot’s revision, language does not first destroy the given only to recreate it in the concreteness of the historical concept, but becomes aware that, in fact, there was nothing ‘to kill’ in the first place:

I say my name and it is as though I were chanting my own dirge: I separate myself from myself, I am no longer either my presence or my reality, but an objective, impersonal presence, the presence of my name, which goes beyond me and whose stonelike immobility performs exactly the same function for me as a tombstone weighing on the void (WF, 324).

And even stronger:

I say, ‘This woman…’ For me to be able to say ‘this woman,’ I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood- reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her […] The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being – the very fact that it does not exist (WF, 322; my emphasis).

The very fact that the thing named does not exist only reveals the higher truth of non-being: the fact that it never existed. For in the neutral and anonymous element of ‘dying,’ nothing ever gets constituted. In the shadow of every step, which knows that it is merely passing from one nothingness to another, death always lurks with its higher truth of the deconstructive Abbau. It is not even a question of what Rodolphe Gasché, refering to Heidegger’s later thought after die Kehre, calls “the disruptive Setzen”: a shaky positing which is always pulled back by the neantizing matrix of Sein, but nonetheless proceeds forward, though with unsure and hesitating steps.¹⁵

In Blanchot’s radical revision of the Heideggerian Todesdenken, all ‘theological’ functions of death-abyss-Being become neutralized. When creation itself is called into question, the very idea of an emancipated singular being turns into ontological illusion. And this illusion can ony be dispelled by the operation of language which inverts the false order of constitution; instead of confirming the separate status of things in the act of naming (theologically always perceived as the completion of God’s act of creation¹⁶), the language cancels this erroneous progression and regresses into the ‘post-mortal space,’ governed by the metaphysical neutrum.

The Blanchotian neutrum is the never-changing pleroma of nullity. ‘Pleroma’ is obviously a Gnostic concept and although Hans Jonas made the Gnostic affinity explicit only in the case of Heidegger and his notion of Geworfenheit and Verfallenheit (thrownness and fallenness), the same suspicion can be directed, a fortiori, to Maurice Blanchot.¹⁷ So far, I have focused on Blanchot’s efforts to neutralize the theological element which he still detected in Heidegger’s sublimation of death (both in its early version, as the telos of Sein-zum-Tode, and its later one, as Gelassenheit), now, however, I would like to propose an alternative theological reading of Blanchot himself, which falls along the lines of a fundamentally negative Gnostic Anti-Theology, which, precisely as anti-theology, is still a theology. There is not an easy way out of the theological universe. I will claim that Blanchot, by trying to escape from all “the lofty significations, all those that theology authorizes” (SNB, 48), no so much evades the theological sublime as rather gives in to the arch-old Gnostic pattern of reversio in which all the “silent prohibitions are transgressed by being turned into positive prescriptions” (SNB, 49).

From the Gnostic perspective - the way Jonas describes it in The Gnostic Religion - the error of life emerges through a cosmic mistake. It is a fake pretense of being which can be saved only by the act of reversio: the return of all miscreated reality into the primordial night which is the only legitimate mode of non/existence. And while life perpetuates the error of the illusive creation, by going on to posit fake ‘positivities’ – all those ‘necessary errors of life,’ as Nietzsche called them – negation works against this procession, by trying to subvert and inverse its seemingly natural flow. In Blanchot’s theory of the literary language, it is thus language which becomes the primary instrument of inversion or, as Agamben will later name it, a proper ‘place of negativity’: when speech becomes aware of its power of destruction, first taught by Hegel, it also learns how to use it in order to procur the Gnostic reversio.¹⁸ When Blanchot says in L’attente, l’oubli, that we should be parlant au lieu de mourir, he means precisely the same practice of undoing which can be executed by ‘dying’ and ‘writing’ – provided that the latter no longer betrays its vocation and instead of representing the interests of the living, puts itself in the place, au lieu, of death.

We can thus say, following Jonas, that Blanchot merely deepens the Gnostic spin put on Heidegger’s Todesdenken, by radicalizing its negative impact. The structure of temporality, in which being and time are nothing but the omission and oblivion of the more primordial, abyssal truth of the essential impossibility of being, is indeed the most characteristic feature of Heidegger’s late thinking; Blanchot merely purges it of the last remnants of any ‘positive’ theology. Here, the error of existence originates in Being’s self-withdrawal, which singular beings to enjoy the illusion of their separation only insofar as they forget where they came from. Beings come to being only when they forget Being as the impossibility of beings.

In Blanchot’s textual paraphrase of Heidegger’s ontology, this principle translates into the higher truth of the impossibility of writing: texts come to being only when they emerge from the oblivion of their unfeasibility. In Blanchot’s Le regarde d’Orphee, Orpheus is able to write a poem only in the instant of betrayal and carelessness dictated by his errant desire to see Eurydice. The writing, says Blanchot, comes always from the eternal nyx, but in order to come at all, it needs an incentive in the form of the forgetful and life-deluded desire. In the Inifinite Conversation, he adds: “From this perspective, desire is on the side of ‘error,’ the infinite movement that always begins again” (IC, 188).

The deferral of truth, blinded by desire, allows texts to be produced, but the act of reading, which is conducted simultaneously with the act of writing, immediately corrects their blind run and returns them to their original night. As Derrida rightly says about Blanchot’s Pas au delà in his “Living On: Borderlines”: every pas, ‘step’ suggesting a move forward, springing ‘beyond’ primordial nothingness, is immediately a pas, a ‘non’ of the negation that erases and reverses, thus ultimately leaving only a trace of the aborted will to being.¹⁹ Like all beings in Heidegger, all Blanchot’s writings cancel themselves in the moment of reading, which is also recollecting: the moment of a negative anamnesis. Being and writing are both errors of oblivion. Once the thruth-saying, veridictive verdict is reached, being and writing, these two activities of consitution: of a a singular subjectivity and of its singular idiom, disintegrate under the pressure of the dead-assured logic and dissolve into original indifference.

The Exodus from the Night

Therefore Error became fortified. It elaborated its own Matter in the Void.

Valentinus, The Gospel of Truth

But, is it possible to find a respite from this seemingly infallible logic? Perhaps, the error of life can indeed, as in the Gnostic gnome of Valentinus from his Gospel of Truth, become fortified and elaborate its own matter in the void? Perhaps, it can truly walk away from the night, get our from the condition of indeterminacy, establish itself as a new principle and form a new logic which will not be so susceptible to the undisputable arrêt de mort?

What Heiddegger says about the impossibility of being and Blanchot, after him, about the impossibility of writing, is, in fact, not the only thinkable final say on the matter of errors, despite its infallible logic. There exists also another way of approaching the error of life, which can be shown through a confrontation between Heidegger and Blanchot, on the one hand, and his Jewish disputants, on the other, most of all Emmanuel Lévinas and Harold Bloom: a confrontation framed as a ‘quarrel in the family of Gnostics.’²⁰ Both parties agree that the original matrix of life is indeed the eternal night in which living and dying interfere with one another on an indefinable ‘borderline.’ But while Blanchot remains intransigent in his verdict of futility of all efforts of life to emancipate itself from the chiasm of this original indeterminacy, Lévinas and Bloom strongly believe in the power of error which can strenghten itself, emancipate from its origins and then boldly abide in the aporia.

In Lévinas, it will be the power of the hypostasis, which allows the singular life to step out from the anonymity of the nocturnal il y a, although – logically speaking – it seems at first nothing but a logical error. And in case of Bloom, it will be the power of the clinamen, which allows for the first differentiation from the night of indifference, and which, just like the Lévinasian hypostasis, is – rhetorically speaking – a ‘false transgression’ or a perverse ‘turning in the wrong way.’²¹ Both these errors of life are indeed faux pas, but, unlike in Blanchot, not to be corrected by the veridictive, ‘truth-saying’ arrêt de mort. They do not step out only to immediately erase themselves, but decisevely move forward - out of the eternal night into the light of difference – thus creating a philosophico-phenomenological equivalent of the act of Exodus: the exit out of the house of the original bondage to Mother Night into the desert of self-constitution. This peculiarly strong misreading of the biblical yetziat mitzraim echoes in Bloom’s Jewish-Gnostic description, inspired by Ferenczi’s Thalassa, of the initial condition of thrownness-fallenness that he wishes to transcend in the radically anti-Heideggerian move of ‘getting out’:

The ephebe’s first realm is ocean or by the side of ocean, and he knows he reached the element of water through a fall. What is instinctual in him would hold him there, but the antithetical impulse will bring him out and send him inland, questing for fire of his own stance (Anxiety, p. 79; my emphasis).²²

Here, the antithetical impulse is just another trope for error, the living force that pushes away from the dark and ‘watery’ truth of origins. Just like the Lévinasian hypostasis, which establishes a singular subject with an illogical power of error, the Bloomian young poet raises himself above the waters of il y a in a Baron Münchhausen manner, pulling himself out of the matrix to which he originally belongs and to which he is bound in a ‘natural,’ self-evident fashion. This seemingly impossible maneuver, which draws all its insisting force from a sheer logical blunder, chimes very closely to the Lévinasian imperative to ‘walk away from the origins,’ that is, to forget, but this time in the fully positive sense of the term, as in giving up futile nostalgia—their impossible, archetypal, fundamental, universal, ever-binding truth. Or, even to forget the truth altogether, all this dubious lure of ‘originality,’ and accept life’s nomadic illegitimacy; begin to err, wander, explore the ‘vast open land’ of possibilities, for the first time truly opened by the power of error.²³ The same motif of erring and forgetting as crucial for the establishment of a singular life, emerges in Bloom’s vision of the revisionary agon with the original matrix of the ‘sea of tradition.’ The greatest and the most desirable error the ephebe, this singular being single-mindedly pursuing the goal of separation, can commit is precisely - the negation of origins. Says Bloom: “The largest Error we can hope to meet and make is every ephebe’s fantasia: quest antithetically enough, and live to beget itself” (Anxiety, p. 79). The fantasy of self-generated life may thus be a blatant falsehood, yet it is necessary for the singular being to ‘get inland,’ to find its own stance as opposed to abyss-like undifferentiation: the singular spark, pneuma, fire.

The significant affinity between Lévinas and Bloom, the two Jewish thinkers who almost never get compared with one another, lies in their similar point of departure: they both declare allegiance to the Hebraic mode of thinking, whose primary centre is constituted by the idea of the Exodus, and they both wish to distance themselves from the Heideggerian Todesdenken which they perceive as the very opposite of their exodic thought. Lévinas accuses Heidegger for an ‘ontologism,’ always giving an undisputed primacy to the rights and privileges of Being-Death. Bloom in turn accuses ‘Heidegger and his French flock’ for creating the most deadening type of deconstruction where the Hegelian privilege given to ‘death, the absolute master’ culminates and produces a particularly vicious thanatic trope: the trope of Truth, conceived now as general distrust in linguistic figurations that tend to be regarded as mere ‘fictions.’ Thus, while Lévinas opposes Heidegger’s thesis on the ‘impossibility of beings,’ Bloom already reacts against its consequence in the Blanchotian ‘impossibility of writing.’ In an agonistic thrust against deconstructionist thought, Bloom, convinced that we can only ‘perish of this truth,’²⁴ comes up with the strongest possible ‘defense of life’ – a concept of a willing error:

… a trope is a willing error – he says in A Map of Misreading - a turn from literal meaning in which a word or phrase is used in an improper sense, wandering from its rightful place… Put another way, a trope resembles those errors about life that Nietzsche says are necessary for life.²⁵

For Bloom, the authority in question of human finitude and mortality is not Heidegger but Freud: it can easily be surmised that everything Bloom has written himself or is still writing amounts to the stubborn and obsessive revision of Freud - most of all Freud’s seminal essay, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Bloom makes the point of honour to detach this most speculative of Freud’s texts, dealing with the eschatological issues of life and death, from its XXth century continental reception, which, via Heidegger and Kojeve, found its ultimate formulation in Jacques Lacan’s hyperapology of Thanatos. Bloom does everything to rescue Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” from its ‘pagan,’ thanatic-necrophilic, misreading and show that it contains all the elements of what we can called here tentatively, after Yerushalmi, a ‘Jewish Science.’²⁶

In Freud’s essay, which for the first time projects the new psychic realm – the transcendence of the ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ – the singular living being emerges as a psychic force craving for the act of Exodus: the one which remains trapped in the Egypt of immanence but desperately wants to get out and evade the inexorable rule of death. At the surface, it would seem that Freud simply repeats the teachings of Schopenhauer, and forms his notion of the psychic transcendence on the basis of his nirvanic non-being. But only seemingly so. In fact, the essay is devoted to life, considered as a singular life, das Lebendige, which skillfully defends its meandric ways against two overwhelming general powers of nature: Thanatos and Eros (which, as all pagan wisdom attests, are in fact one power appearing under the Eleusian name ‘Eros-Thanatos’). In Freud’s narrative, the singular life, which wants to separate itself from the general nature of the erotico-thanatic drives and establish itself as an independent finite unit, makes a cunning use of both of them by playing one against the other. The singular life thus uses the ‘transcending’ power of the death drive to turn it into a principle of separation and individuation: the famous Freudian ‘dying in one’s own fashion,’ concluding the life’s process, becomes a ruse of life wishing to realize its own ‘drive of the proper’ and end its existence as a singular living being, leaving its own irrepeatable signature. By projecting a death of one’s own, the singular life does not give in to the death drive. Quite to the contrary, it rather confirms its separate singular status in which it differentiates itself from two general drives: Thanatos (which wants destruction for its own sake) and Eros (which binds and makes new wholes, always above the head of the individual life).

Despite the official dualism of Eros and Thanatos, therefore, there is in Freud a promise of a third power: a more specific drive for separation which singles out particular life and sets it in opposition to all general, merely natural forces. In his critical response to Jacques Lacan, who reduced Freud’s dualism to the monism of the death drive in the vein of the Heideggerian Sein-zum-Tode, The Postcard, Jacques Derrida postulated the existence of a third party which he calls pulsion du propre, the “drive of one’s own” – with whom, as Derrida claims, Freud secretly sympathizes. We can also call this drive narcissistic – the love of one’s own – provided we transcend the narrow definition of narcissism and invest this self-love with higher and more fundamental prerogatives than just self-preservation or just a secondary type of defense. Derrida says: “The drive of the proper would be stronger than life and death... the most driven drive is the drive of the proper, in other words the one that tends to reappropriate itself. The movement of reappropriation is the most driven drive...”²⁷

In his essay, Freud offers two versions of human finitude. One, more straightforwardly Schopenhauerian, focuses on life as an error which eventually dissolves in the infinity of death (that would also be Jung’s version). The other, obliquely Jewish (obliquely, because Freud, as Bloom rightly observes, was notoriously hiding his Hebrew inspirations), focuses on life as a finite anomaly in the universe of infinity and indifference, which manages to imbue its own finite way of being with meaning through the investment of self-love: the narcissistic love, drive of one’s own, coming from the Hebrew reservoir of “love for everything finite,” “love strong as death,” or, as Erich Fromm calls it, biophilia.²⁸ This special kind of love – not to be confused with Eros, but also not to be conflated with Agape – rightly called biophilic, loves finite living things precisely for their being finite; for having an end, and hence an identity, in the endless universe of indifferent and undifferentiated being. Thus, while finitude in the Greek thought is with no exception thanatic - from Heraclitus to Heidegger, from Socrates to Lacan - and bestows finite life with either ‘melancholy’ (Kierkegaard) or ‘healthy pessimism’ (Nietzsche), the finitude of the passionate living creature, as we know it from the Song of Songs, becomes an opportunity for a loving self-investment which aims at establishing a new way of existing: consciously finite, yet at the same time, as strong as death itself. It is this biophilic love which has no natural justification that is capable of turning the error of life into a new principle of existence. Perhaps, it is after all the greatest discovery of Hebrew religiosity: life without self-love is doomed from the start, indistinguishable from the shadows of Sheol. Only with the religious act of loving self-investment, then projected into the image of Elohim hayim, The Living God and Lord Protector of All Things Finite, life can hope to become fully a life, something more than just a passing mere existence, tied to the apathetic Wheel of Nature.

The very scheme of the Bloomian agon – as presented in The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading – is, in a way, nothing else but a kabbalistically systematized trajectory that life takes in order to evade and then, eventually, meet its own death, as described in Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Each of the six ratios in Bloom’s account of poetic struggles with anteriority represents a specific defensive ‘meander’ – evasion or a willing error - which singular life, emblematized by a poet-ephebe, assumes against the threat of poetic death, i.e. the traumatizing influence of tradition, summed up in the figure of a precursor. Clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and finally apophrades – mark the dialectical points in a labyrinth of misreading in which the ephebe both recognizes the necessity of dying and rebels against the finality of this verdict; or, in terms of Bloom’s theory of poetic revision, both recognizes the necessity of participation in literary tradition and rebels against joining it without leaving a trace of one’s own. Bloom’s ‘poetic’ defense of the finite life, as capable of self-constitution despite the necessity of dying, shows how life can once again become an argument and assert itself against the overwhelming power of the death drive. The struggle of the singular being, as depicted in Bloom’s revisionary agon, is not in vain: it demonstrates how life can insinuate its erring quality into the dead-sure logic of the Schopenhauerian quasi-mathematical equation, which constantly hovers over Blanchot’s neutral ‘postmortal space of literarure’: natus est denatus (to be born is to be dead).

An analogical evasion of Heidegger (though not necessarily in favour of Freud) occurs in the middle, post-war, period of Lévinas’s thought which makes its priority in distancing itself from the amphibology of the Heideggerian flow between Being and beings. What Bloom calls the watery, oceanic matrix of undifferentiation, finds its Lévinasian equally aquatic equivalent in his critical vision of the ontological flux where every singular being remains in the grips of the nihilising medium of Being and hence can never reach a properly distinct status. Driven by what he will later, in Totality and Infinity, call an essentially Jewish logic of separation, Lévinas opposes the ‘amphibology of Being and beings,’ or their fluid interchangeability, by creating an error of hypostasis: a willing error, as Bloom could have said, of setting a singular being against the totality of il y a.

In De’l éxistence a l’éxistant, Lévinas says: “Consciousness appeared to stand up against the there is by its ability to forget and interrupt it…”²⁹ L’hypostase, therefore, is nothing but an error – forgetting and suspension - since it is an unjustified break in the continuity of the flux. It is a lapsus which blocks the flow of the Heideggerian stream – yet, at the same time, it is a felix error, a fortunate blunder which soon gives rise to a new logic of singularity. Positioning itself can take place only via the error of a hypostasis: of making a substantive noun out of an abstract act, which, in Lévinas’ highly ingenious interpretation, indicates making a solid l’éxistant out of the neutral and anonymous process of l’éxistence:

Hypostasis, the apparition of a substantative, is not only an apparition of a new grammatical category; it signifies the suspension of the anonymous there is, the apparition of a private domain, of a noun. On the ground of there is a being arises. The ontological significance of an entity in the general economy of Being, which Heidegger simply posits alongside of Being by a distinction, will thus be deduced. By hypostasis anonymous being loses its there is character. An entity – that which is – is a subject of the verb to be, and thus exercises a mastery over the fatality of Being, which has become its attribute. Someone exists who assumes Being, which henceforth is his being […] The subject takes on things. The contents of consciousness are states. A subject’s immobility, its steadiness, is not a result of an invariable reference to some coordinates of ideal space, but of its stance, the event of its position, which rerefs only to itself and is the origin of fixity in general – the beginning of the very notion of beginning (EE, 83; 71).

Thus, despite the fact that Being appears always nauseatingly full of itself and as such unsurmountable, like a perfectly round ontological pleroma without an exit -

“This circle is the world… In this sense being has no outlets” (EE., 44; 64) – the hypostatic error allows for a seemingly impossible Exodus: an escape, l’évasion, from the ontological snares, which Lévinas, in one of his earliest works calls: ‘getting out of being by a new path.’³⁰ This new path, which at the early stage of Lévinas’s thought, takes the form of a phenomenologically revisioned act of Exodus, committed on the individual basis – l’évasion - soon, just two decades later, will appear under the name of the willing error of l’hypostase. Essentialy the same act of an anti-ontological rebellion/evasion Harold Bloom will later on call a necessary ruse of life against the truth of being, able to trope a singular idiomatic human subjectivity out of the universal-anonymous Egypt of indifference.

A Deep Non-Affinity

To write is ultimately to refuse to cross the threshold, to refuse to ‘write.’

Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Pursuit of the Zero Point.’

Pairing Lévinas with Bloom rather than with his life-long friend Blanchot and thus regrouping the alliances, may seem counter-intuitive, yet it has its deep theoretical reasons: despite many open discussions and mutual borrowings, constantly occuring between Lévinas and Blanchot, they appear to have much less in common than it is usually assumed.³¹

In many places, Blanchot, clearly influenced by Lévinas, indeed praises Jewish concept of Exodus. Yet, the manner in which he conducts this apology is, in fact, incompatible with the exodic message itself. Blanchot’s approach is filtered through Heidegger and Nietzsche, especially trough the latter’s reflections on the Eternal Return of the Same. In his revision of this Nietzschean concept, Blanchot contests Nietzsche’s belief in the recurrence of events that repeat themselves in the eternal ever-presence as still too naively theological, and proposes instead to see the return as a “rupture or interruption substuting an infinite absence for present eternity” (SNB, 23). The result of this revision is the very opposite of Nietzsche’s hopes to gain, however unorthodox, an alternative access to the infinite life; the Blanchotian rupture thwarts these religious expectations and “makes us live as in a state of perpetual death” (SNB, 12) where “the event that we have thought we had lived was itself never in a relation of presence to us nor to anything whatsoever” (SNB, 15). It is precisely this rupture, which breaks the illusion of any presence and allows only for the eternal perpetuation of nothing, that Blanchot associates with his understanding of the Exodus:

The ‘re’ of the return inscribes like the ‘ex,’ opening of every exteriority: as if the return, far from putting an end to it, markes the exile, the beginning in its rebeginning of the exodus. To come again would be to com to ex-center onself anew, to wander. Only the nomadic affirmation remains (SNB, 33).

It is in this context that we should read Blanchot’s praise of the Exodus as the essential ‘Jewish idea’:

‘What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?’[...] It exists so the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through the exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak […] To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation as the origin of all ‘positive value.’³²

Only prima facie, the above fragment sounds in tune with the Lévinasian teaching of the exodus as the hypostasis of a singular being and the evasion of Being itself. But having in mind the Nietzschean-Heideggerian context of the Eternal Return of the Same Abyssal Absence of Anything, we also know that, in Blanchot, the faux pas of existence, life, and writing can never acquire a strength of a new principle - a truly legitimate movement of a strangeness that makes a new world for itself - for it is still only a negation of the higher truth of the un-truth, the abyssal primary arche of the amphibolic living-dying, for ever joined in the aporetic and expropriating (ex!) figure of the chiasm. In Blanchot’s thought, governed by the Gnostic reversio, we do not learn to speak – we learn to unstep, unspeak, unwrite, and thus never cross the threshold of Exodus. “This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes” (WD, 7). Lévinas’ commentary on Blanchot, “The Regard of the Poet,” clearly driven by the most sincere exigencies of friendship, makes all the effort to synchronize the Hebrew ‘error of existence’ with the Heideggerian-Blanchotian ‘ultimate un-truth.’³³ This, however, cannot be done. For, while the Hebrew ‘error of life’ stumbles forward, away from the origins, the Heideggerian ‘un-truth’ is regressive and abbauend in its constant effort to return beings to the matrix of Seyn. In all those analogies, the unique meaning of Exodus, which is most of all walking away from the universe of death, is irretrievably lost. What remains is the expropriating prefix ex of “utter uprootedness, exile, the impossibility of presence, dispersion (separation)” (WD, 18).

It is only on the surface, therefore, that Blanchot and Lévinas speak similar language, mirroring one another’s conceptual inventions in the subsequent couplings of neutrum and il y a, pas au dela and l’hypostase, or chiasm and aporia.³⁴ Yet, the vector of their thought remains firmly opposite: while Blanchot always favours the neutral matrix of the eternal night from which there is no exit, no ‘step beyond’ – Lévinas always insists on the real possibility of escape, transcendence, self-constitution of a separated logic of singularity.

If anything, Blanchot’s influence on Lévinas is only detrimental. The latter’s Otherwise than Being, when we can detect a decreasing belief in the powers of the subjective hypostasis and an increasing fascination with the infinite element of il y a as a structural analog of the divine transcendence (strictly unthinkable in his earlier works), can be said to be written directly under Blanchotian auspices.³⁵ Blanchot immediately spotted this equivalence between transcendence and il y a, equally ‘nocturnal,’ undifferentiated and full of vertiginous violence, and praised it as a right move: by saying that these two concepts are “ready to veer off to the point of possible confusion,” he meant to affirm the sacralisation of the elemental nyx, thus turning Lévinas into his ‘clandestine companion’ who also can “write at the level of the incessant murmur” (SNB, 50).³⁶ But such secret companionship or allegiance would, in fact, indicate a complete ruin of Lévinas’s project which from the very beginning consisted in an ethical disambiguation of the idea of the transcendence he wanted to clear once for all from all ‘demonic’ aspects.³⁷ In De’l éxistence a l’éxistant, il y a, deprived of any mysterious or sacred meaning, is still nothing but a source of sheer horror and disgust:

The rustling of the there is … is horror […] The impersonality of the sacred in primitive religions, which for Durkheim is the ‘still’ impersonal God from which will issue one day the God of advanced religions, on the contrary describes a world where nothing prepares for the apparition of a God. Rather than to a God, the notion of the there is leads us to the absence of God, the absence of any being (EE, 60;61; my emphasis).

The last equation – the absence of God, the absence of all beings – is particularly important here, for it implies that the Revelation, which Lévinas reconstructs according to the Jewish tradition, amounts to a holy sanction of the hypostasis thanks to which a singular being can emerge dans la anonymat de la nuit (EE-French, 98). The Lévinasian God, therefore, is a transcendent legitimation of the bold error which occurrs in the false fullness of il y a, walks out of it into a void and, thanks to the light of the Revelation, becomes ultimately ‘fortified.’ Whereas in Blanchot, even Jacob, the Bloomian paradigmatic ‘wrestler,’ fighting with the anonymous Angel of Death for the right to a proper name, is turned into a worshipper of the Night:

The Hebrew himself will not remain Hebrew

. The relation, through migration and march, with the Unknown that one can know only by way of distance, becomes, with the filing our of Jabbok and in the night of Penuel, enigmatic contact: the struggle about which one knows nothing since what is at stake is the truth of the night, that which is not to be retained when day breaks (IC, 126; my emphasis).

What fascinates Blanchot – repels Lévinas. What for the former is the only possible ‘sign of transcendence’ – is for the latter merely the source of blind terror. What for the former is the identification with the ever-recurring rhythm of the ultimate truth of the non-being – for the latter amounts only to ‘depersonalisation,’ loss of the ‘stance,’ fall into anonymity. Indeed the following paragraph - “It is participation in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has ‘no exits.’ It is, if we may say so, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation” (EE, 61) – could have been written both by Lévinas and Blanchot. But with the exactly opposite valuation.

Error and evasion, forming a unique defense of life as latecomer and survivor, fuel the exodic act of errance through the desert, which struggles to acquire a right of its own, and to turn what initially appeared as an improbable lapsus into a new principle of existence, a new logic of singular and separated beings (les étants). In The Trace of the Other, Lévinas famously differentiates between two types of journey, which can serve us here as metaphors for these two opposite ontological models. He contrasts Odysseus’s striving to reach home with Abraham’s impulse to leave the place where he was born and start to wander ‘away from his origins.’ Heidegger’s vision of beings, forever tied by the umbilical cord of Nichtigkeit to the abyss of Seyn, keeps them close to their source; merely half-constituted, half-existent, ontologically ‘weak,’ they never properly leave the home of die Erde, and if they do, it is only because of their deplorable ‘forgetfulness of Being,’ which then has to be corrected by vigilant poets and philosophers, as Maurice Blanchot himself. The Bloomian-Lévinasian beings, on the other hand, are ‘posited’ by the initial hypostasis-evasion on their circuitous path of life, which sends them ‘away from their origins’ into the desert of errant wandering. Heidegger’s beings are always already ‘dying’ in their Andenken, the nostalgic, mournful remembrance of their true abode, whereas these other error-generated beings at least try to ‘get out’ from their paralyzing house of bondage, in a hopeful attempt to gain freedom and life.

1 The following essay derives from my previous book, The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction, where I dealt with the thanatic syndrome of the XXth century philosophy in toto and where I presented Maurice Blanchot as an important precursor of the death-bound type of deconstruction, anticipating most of all the work of Paul de Man. Here I would like to revise my position on Blanchot by enriching it with a theological context which will become particularly significant in the comparison between Blanchot and Lévinas. See Agata Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction, Evanston, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2011; particularly the chapter “Life and Death in Deconstruction.”

2 See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ Assembled by Raymond Queneau, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., ed. Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books, 1969.

3 See Maurice Blanchot, L‘arrêt de mort, Paris: Gallimard, 1948.

4 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E F. J. Payne, New York: Dover, 1958, pp. 491-92.

5 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, p. 307.

6 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1993, p. 196. Later in the text as IC.

7 The suggestion that revelation and death-experience can be treated as “existential substitutes” figures very strongly in Karl Jaspers’ Philosophical Faith and Revelation which indeed can be also be attributed to Heidegger: “How does reality, which exists before the world and beyond the world, manifest itself in the forms and speech of this world? Does it say anything at all? Does it say it without revelation? Does it speak only through revelation? In this world, we experience frontier-experiences like death, struggle, guilt, and accident which awake us. All this happens without revelation.” Without revelation – but also instead of revelation, for this ‘awakening’ is nothing but the awakening to life: life more intense, self-focused and conscious of itself. See Karl Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, trans. E. B. Ashton, London: Collins, 1967, p. 70.

8 As Lycette Nelson writes in the translator preface to the English version of Pas au dela, The Step No Beyond, very rightly spotting the anti-theological and desublimising thrust of Blanchot’s revision of the concept death: “Dying is a transgression against and out of time, because there is no time for dying. Dying can never be completed because it lacks the solidity of an event. It does not occur through any decisiveness or action, but only through the most passive passivity. Dying, like writing, cannot take place in the oresent because the milt that dying represents cannot be situated […] It is only when dying is understood as the limit that is effaced ‘at the moment in which it is it that effaces,’ that there can be appeal to an ethics that is not weighty, that does not give death a gravity it does not have, that does not pose death as the ultimate prohibition”: in Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson, Albany: SUNY Press, 1992, pp. xviii; xx. From this time on in the text as SNB.

9 The affinity between Death and the Divine in Heidegger has been observed for the first time by Leo Strauss who remarked on the margin of his copy of Sein und Zeit that here, unlike in Nietzsche, it is not that God is dead, but Death herself becomes God. We know about this thanks to Heinrich Meier and his instructive essay on Strauss’ reading of Sein und Zeit, “Death as God. A Note on Martin Heidegger,” which is devoted to the elucidation of this single, highly esoteric sentence left by Strauss in pencil: “Heidegger: God is death” (Heidegger: Gott ist Tod). The play with Nietzsche’s verdict God is dead (Gott ist tot) suggests that, pace Nietzsche, the divine shadow not only did not leave us in late modernity, inaugurated by Heidegger’s thought, but only strengthened its dark presence in the form of Death herself. See Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 45.

10 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln & London: Nebraska University Press, 1982, pp. 106; 154-5, my emphasis.

11 Maurice Blanchot, Writing of the Distaster, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, pp. 3-5. From this time on in the text as WD.

12 Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 324; my emphasis. Later on in the text as WF.

13 The subversion of the ‘law of day’ by the spectral non/presence of the ‘law of night’ is also the theme Blanchot touches in The Step Not Beyond where he continues to experiment with the neuter, i.e. the subjectless style of writing only passing through a medium in the form of “it/he”: “I will try in vain to represent him to myself, he who I was not and who, without wanting to, began to write, writing (and knowing it then) in such a way that the pure product of doing nothing was introduced into the world and into his world. That happened ‘at night.’ During the day there the daytime acts, the day to day words, the day to day writing, affirmations, values, habits, nothing that counted and yet something that one had confusedly to call life” (SNB, 2). The motif of the night as the element of writing under the ‘starless’ auspices of désastre appears in The Writing of the Disaster: “Night; white, sleepless night – such is the disaster: the night lacking darkness, but birightened by no light” (WD, 2).

14 Earlier, in the essay from the Faux Pas collection, “How is Literature Possibile?,” Blanchot asks: “How, in these conditions, can literature exist? How can the writer, the one who distinguishes himself from other men by the single fact that he questions the validity of language, the one whose work ahould be to prevent the formation of a written work, end up creating a literary work?”: Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford: Stanfor University Press, 2001, p. 81. The answer to this question will eventually come when Blanchot realizes that it is precisely language which “questions the validity,” not only of itself as language but also of anything else, and that this force of erasure can become a vehicle of writing as ‘de-scribing’ and ‘de-creating.’

15Eee Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading. On Paul de Man, Cambridge, Mass.& London: Harvard University Press, 1998.

16 As, for instance, in Walter Benjamin’s famous essay: “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” in Angelus novus. Ausgewählte Schriften, Band II, Frankfurt an Main: Suhrkamp, 1966.

17 See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

18 The idea that the operation of language is based on inversion (of being into-non-being, good into bad, beautiful into ugly, and vice versa) and because of that can be used as an instrument of the Gnostic reversio figures very strongly in the writings of Paul de Man’s most accomplished pupil, Werner Hamacher who can also be regarded as Blanchot’s intellectual grandson. See most of all, Werner Hamacher, Premises. Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

19 See Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Continuum, 1979.

20 Emmanuel Lévinas and Harold Bloom are rarely juxtaposed with one another; the exception here is R. Clifton Spargo, who in his contribution to The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, “Toward an Ethics of Literary Revisionism,” draws a parallel between Bloom and Lévinas, insisting on their essentially identical attitude towards alterity: R. Clifton Spargo, “Toward an Ethics of Literary Revisionism,” in The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, ed. Graham Allen and Roy Sellars, Cambridge: Salt, 2007.

21 Bloom writes: “Strong poets necessarily are perverse, ‘necessarily’ meaning here as if obsessed, as if manifesting repetition compulsion. ‘Perverse’ literally means ‘to be turned the wrong way’; but to be turned the right way in regard to the precursor means not to swerve at all, so any bias or inclination per force must be perverse in relation to the precursor... To swerve (Anglo-Saxon sweorfan) has a root meaning of ‘to wipe off, file down, or polish,’ and, in usage, ‘to deviate, to leave the straight line, to turn aside (from law, duty, custom)”: Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (With a New Preface on Shakespeare), New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997, p. 85.

22 Indeed, Ferenczi is an understandable choice here for he indeed very strongly emphasizes the revolutionary psychotheological aspect of the Jewish Exodus as counter-acting the more pervasive and natural, regressive tendency in all living beings to undo the trauma of birth and return to the eponymous thalassa, the primordial abyssal sea where inroganic and organic matter form a fluid unity. Antigone:

ceasura, the pure word, the counter-rhytmic interruption, necessary, in order to meet the rush of ideas, at its height, so that not merely the change in ideas appears but the idea itself” (quot. by Benjamin

Ferenczi famously explains coitus in terms of a secret regressive wish to return to the night of the maternal womb, but he also makes room for another, quite opposite, desire to progress, leave the dark matrix for good and celebrate the birth as the exodic moment of emancipation: “We too consider coitus as such a partial discharge of that still unassimilated shock which is the legacy of the birth trauma; at the same time it appears to be like a game, or, more exactly expressed, a commemoration celebrating a happy liberation from the bondage…”: Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, London: Karnack Books, 1994, p. 40.

23 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Trace of the Other,” where Lévinas contrasts two types of journey, turning them into two opposite philosophical models of approaching the question of otherness. The one type of journey is called ‘movement without return’ and is characteristic of Abraham, who ‘leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land’ – while the other is based on the ‘movement of return to the same’ and is characteristic of Ulysses returning to Ithaca: Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 347-348.

24 In Fallen Angels, Bloom speculates on Hamlet as a literary figure anticipating the aporetic style of philosophical deconstruction: “Hamlet thinks too well, and thus perishes of the truth, pragmatically becoming a version of the angel of death. Hamlet is death’s ambassador or messenger to us…”: Harold Bloom, Fallen Angels. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 56.

25 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 93.

26 See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses. Judaism Terminable and Interminable, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991: the book opens with the question “Is psychoanalysis a Jewish Science?”

27 See Jacques Derrida, The Postcard. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 356.

28 We could tentatively call this attitude biophilic – as opposed to thanatophilic – but only provided we take this term from its creator, Erich Fromm, and turn it for our purposes which are not necessarily in harmony with Fromm’s intentions. Erich Fromm indeed thought Hebrew ethics biophilic, yet he refused to find it in Freud, who remained for him a severe moralist, in agreement with the sadistic tendencies of death-driven superego. In The Heart of Man he instead praises Spinoza as the only truly biophilic thinker who saw ethics as a continuation and development of a ‘pleasurable life’: “Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverance for life, all the enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces. Joy is virtuous and sadness is sinful. Thus it is from the standpoint of biophilic ethics that the Bible mentions as the central sin of the Hebrews: ‘Because thou didst not serve Thy Lord with joy and gladness of heart in the abundance of all things’ (Deut. 28:47). The conscience of the biophilous person is not one of forcing oneself to refrain from evil and to do good. It is not the superego described by Freud, which is a strict taskmaster, employing sadism against oneself for the sake of virtue… Spinoza’s Ethics is a striking example of biophilic morality. ‘Pleasure, he says, in itself is not bad but good; contrariwise, pain in itself is bad.’”: Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man. Its Genius for Good and Evil, Harper & Row: New York and London 1964, p. 47.

29Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988, p. 67. Later on in the text as EE. See also Emmanuel Lévinas, De’l éxistence a l’éxistant, J.Vrin: Paris 1998, p. 115.

30 Emmanuel Lévinas, De l’évasion, Jacques Rolland: Paris 1982; On Escape. De l’Evasion, trans. Bettina Bergo, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 73.

31 The good example of pushing Blanchot closer to the ‘Jewish side’ is the collection of essays: The Power of Contestation. Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot, eds. Kevin Hart and Goeffrey H. Hartman, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, where Geoffrey Hartman, Vivian Liska and Leslie Hill develop the interpretation of Blanchot’s negativity-in-writing as a characteristic syndrome affecting a post-Holocaust writing. Without denying this diagnosis, I want nonetheless to point to some fundamental differences in approaching the ‘error of life,’ which I elucidate along the Athens-Jerusalem axis, in this case taking the form of the stark opposition between Heidegger on the one hand and Lévinas/Bloom on the other. Although Blanchot openly and sincerely distanced himself from Heidegger’s implications in Nazi crimes and condemned his ‘unforgivable silence’ (see most of all ‘N’oubliez pas,’ a letter to Salomon Malka, in L’Arche, May 1988), his own thought remained throughout essentially bound by the Heideggerian deathbound mode of proto-deconstruction. Which, on my side, is not an objection or an accusation: just a simple constation of what Bloom could call a ‘case of an unsurmountable influence.’

32 Maurice Blanchot, “The Indestructible. Being Jewisch,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. 125; 128, my emphasis.

33 Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Regard of the Poet,” in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith. London: Athlone Press 1996.

34 On the use of chiasm in Lévinas’ rhetoric see especially the late, Blanchot inspired essay of Lévinas, “Wholly Otherwise,” in Re-Reading Lévinas, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 6. The other deceptive affinities occur in Blanchot’s and Lévinas’s understanding of the ‘trace’ a something that comes to being only to immediately erase itself: while in Blanchot this erasure belongs to the very nature of the trace as a ‘mark of writing’ which self-dissolves into nothingness, for Lévinas it is always the ‘trace of the other’ that must be effaced in the confrontation with the element of sameness, making no room for the radical otherness. The same can be said of the radical passivity, ‘more passive than passivity itself,’ which in Blanchot refers to the impossible identification with the non/presence of dying, while in Lévinas is synonymous with the ultimate receptivity to the otherness of the other. And finally, the motif of the “death of the other as the only death that concerns me,” as Blanchot calls it in Unavowed Community, takes very different form in both authors: in Blanchot, it is ‘dying of the other for me,’ so ‘I’ can be “placed outside myself” and join “the Open of the community,” whereas in Lévinas it is always ‘dying of me for the other’ in the ethically crucial experience of the substitution. In the end, it seems that all those deceptive affinities draw from the one general tendency: wherever Lévinas thinks of the other, Blanchot immediately thinks – death. Comp. Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983, p. 21.

35 On the recurring ambivalence or oscillation between the il y a and transcendence see most of all Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981, p.164.

36 Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion,” in Face to Face with Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. Richard Cohen, Albany: SUNY Press, 1986, p. 49. Also in Writing of the Distaster, where Blanchot discusses Lévinas’s idea of the substitution, the transcendence awakens in the ‘disarray’ of the self, when it falls to the anonymous and exproproated level of il y a: “it is henceforth in me – a me without selfhood – that the signs of transcendence (of a transcendence) appear” (WD, 19).

37 In his recent book on Lévinas, Michael Fagenblat argues that we should see the whole Lévinasian corpus as one integral work, but give priority to his earlier writings which he sees as a philosophical translation of the Jewish notion of creation (and I tend to agree). While defending Lévinas against the all too hasty accusation of Manicheism, Fagenblat says: “Lévinas does not oppose the goodness of God to the evil of the world but opposes the goodness of the world, as created morally, to the evil of merely existing uncreatedly and amorally”: Michael Fagenblat, The Covenant of Creatures. Lévinas’s Philosophy of Judaism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 48.

LES CAHIERS MAURICE BLANCHOT

Libellés

dimanche 18 janvier 2015

L'Archive introuvable

mercredi 20 août 2014

mardi 4 février 2014

Faux pas, or The Error of Life : Blanchot versus Levinas (and Bloom) par Agata Bielik-Robson

Archives du blog