Very Little ... Almost Nothing

Death, Philosophy and Literature

Simon Critchley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134297740
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Very Little... Almost Nothing puts the question of the meaning of life back at the centre of intellectual debate. Its central concern is how we can find a meaning to human finitude without recourse to anything that transcends that finitude. A profound but secular meditation on the theme of death, Critchley traces the idea of nihilism through Blanchot, Levinas, Jena Romanticism and Cavell, culminating in a reading of Beckett, in many ways the hero of the book.
In this second edition, Simon Critchley has added a revealing and extended new preface, and a new chapter on Wallace Stevens which reflects on the idea of poetry as philosophy.

Lecture 1
Il y a

Just as the man who is hanging himself, after kicking away the stool on which he stood, the final shore, rather than feeling the leap which he is making into the void feels only the rope which holds him, held to the end, held more than ever, bound as he had never been before to the existence he would like to leave.

(Thomas the Obscure, revised version)

(a) Reading Blanchot

Reading Blanchot is, in a sense, the easiest of tasks. His French is limpid and clear, it is daylight itself; almost the French of the Discours de la méthode. And yet, as nearly everyone who writes on Blanchot points out, his work seems to defy any possible approach, it seems to evade being drawn into the circle of interpretation. The utter clarity of Blanchot’s prose would appear to be somehow premised upon a refusal of the moment of comprehension and the consequent labour of interpretation and judgement. Absolutely clear at the level of reading, yet fundamentally opaque at the level of comprehension; a vague fore-understanding that somehow resists being drawn up into an active comprehension.

Reading Blanchot, and this will be my only hypothesis in what follows, one is drawn from daylight into an experience of the night. An experience of the night which is not the sleep which blots out and masters the night, preparing the body for the next day’s activity–the sleep of Dasein, of heroes and warriors, that allows the night to disappear and transforms it into a reserve of possibility. The latter is what Blanchot calls the first night, the night in which one can go unto death, a death one dies each time sleep comes–sleep as mastery, as virility unto death.

Reading Blanchot one is led rather into an experience of the other or essential night, the night which does not permit the evasion of sleep, the night in which one cannot find a position, where the body refuses to lie still–this is the spectral night of dreams, of phantoms, of ghosts. In the other night, one can neither go to sleep nor unto death, for there is something stronger than death, namely the simple facticity of being riveted to existence without an exit, what Blanchot calls le mourir in opposition to la mort: the impossibility of death (ED 81). In the other night, one is not permitted the fantasy of suicide, that controlled and virile leap into the void that believes the moment of death is a possibility that can be mastered; a perverse version of the belief that one can die content, in one’s bed, with one’s boots on. In place of the mastered leap into the void, all the suicide feels is the rope tightening around his neck, binding him ever tighter to the existence he wanted to leave. This condition of being riveted to existence is also the experience of insomnia, a reluctant vigilance in the night, the night that slowly exhausts and sickens the body, thereby preventing sleep the following night and thus engaging insomnia’s vicious circle. This is the bodily recollection of the night that one carries around during the day like a thousand invisible aching scars–eyes quietly burning beneath closed lids. Blanchot’s original insight, obsessively reiterated in his work, is that the desire that governs writing has for its (impossible) origin this experience of the night, which is the experience of a dying stronger than death, what Levinas will call, and I will keep coming back to this, the il y a. Writing is not a desire for the beautiful artwork but for the origin of the artwork, its nocturnal source; which is why Blanchot defines the writer as ‘the insomniac of the day’ (ED 185).

Reading Blanchot in terms of a prose of daylight that is governed by nocturnal desire, an impossible and insatiable desire for that which is by definition denied to the movement of comprehension, it should be noted that reading Blanchot is not reading philosophy. If–with, after and against Hegel, or at least a certain Kojèvian Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the cartoon or comic Hegel of ‘Les trois Hs’, the Hegel who causes Bataille such mirth: the system as a comedy itself premised upon the Aufhebung of tragedy (and let it be noted that there are other, more interesting and more tragic readings of Hegel)–philosophy is fundamentally bound up with the movement of the Begriff, which is the movement of comprehension itself, a bipolar movement of negation whereby the Subject comes to Spirit and Spirit to the Subject, a dialectic that is always governed by the horizon of recognition, reconciliation, daylight and the production of the work, then Blanchot’s work is not philosophy. To paraphrase a passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit to be discussed below, if philosophy means that power of the Subject, that absolute and magical power of the negative that ensures its life by enduring death and maintaining itself unto death–that self-consciousness that constitutes itself through a right to death (which is also a right to sleep), and a right to experience itself, the production of Erfahrung in the dialectical movement from the in-itself to the for-itself–then the desire that governs Blanchot’s work has its source elsewhere.

Reading Blanchot’s work is, paradoxically, not the reading of a Work; that is, it does not have its horizon in the Subject’s constitution of a Work that will allow it a presentation (Darstellung) of the Absolute (which, incidentally, is always the desire for the presentation of community: Absolute Knowing as the presentation of Spirit in the form of community). Blanchot’s writing is the scattering of the work (and of community) in a movement of worklessness. To express this in historical figures anticipating the analyses of Lecture 2, Blanchot’s work perhaps retrieves a certain moment of worklessness that can be glimpsed in the fragmentary writing of the Jena romantics against the dialectical Aufhebung of the fragment: Schlegel contra Hegel. As a Blanchot-inspired reading of Jena Romanticism points out, there is an alteration or oscillation within romanticism, where the systematic intentions of the Work, the desire for the Gesamtkunstwerk– for Schlegel, the great novel of the modern world–are interrupted and disseminated in the Work itself, producing instead incomplete chains of fragments.¹ This is what Blanchot identifies as ‘the non-romantic essence of romanticism’ (EI 524/IC 357). Both Schlegel and Blanchot engage in the production of ‘a work of the absence of the work’ (EI 517/IC 353), namely literature, or, more precisely, writing outside philosophy. Writing interrupts the dialectical labour of the negative, introducing into the Subject a certain impotence and passivity that escapes the movement of comprehension, of philosophy’s obsession with meaning: the desire to master death and find a fulfilment for human finitude. Writing outside philosophy means ceasing to be fascinated with the circular figure of the Book, the en-cyclo-paedia of philosophical science, itself dominated by the figures of unity and totality, which would attempt to master death and complete meaning by letting nothing fall outside of its closure. In writing, one is no longer attracted by the Book, but rather by the energy of exteriority that cannot be reduced to either the exteriority of Law–even the written Torah–or to the Aufhebung of the exteriority of Law in Christianity or dialectics: neither the Book of God nor the Book of Man. Writing is the experience of language unworking itself in an irreducible ambiguity that points towards an exteriority that would scatter meaning–a dizzying absence, the space of dying itself. The question that I will persistently raise is whether such an exteriority can be tolerated by the human organism, or rather whether there must be a moment of bad faith in the experience of writing in order to protect us from its truth.

Reading Blanchot, one notes a quite determinate and progressive mirroring of what I will call, from force of habit, ‘form’ and ‘content’.² Within Blanchot’s critical writing, one could mark a ‘progression’ from the relatively stable subject position of the early essays and L’espace littéraire through the polylogue of L’attente, l’oubli and parts of L’entretien infini, to the complete formal fragmentation of L’écriture du désastre. A different progression would have to be noted for Blanchot’s fiction, noting the movement from roman to récit with the two versions of Thomas l’obscur to the refinement and eventual disappearance of the récit; what is called, in La folie du jour, the pas de récit (the one step more/no more of the tale), when Blanchot stops writing ‘fiction’ altogether (or so it seems). It is interesting to note how Blanchot’s fiction and criticism reach a point where both undergo fragmentation and pass into one another, something that can be seen particularly acutely in L’écriture du désastre. One way to read Blanchot’s work would be in terms of a movement towards a writing that would result in a certain Aufhebung of the distinction between fiction and criticism and the conceptions of form and content implicit in both genres. This allows us to avoid some of the rather tedious debates that can arise with questions like ‘is Blanchot’s fiction superior to his criticism?’ Whilst it is certainly true that at times Blanchot’s criticism is best read as a commentary on his fiction, and that Blanchot is perhaps the best, and possibly, with Kafka, the only example of a writer whose practice comes close to the views expressed in his criticism, it is once again perhaps helpful to place Blanchot’s work in the wake of Jena Romanticism, which would have as its central project the production of literature as its own theory, and whose genre of expression is the fragment. Form and content somehow conspire in Blanchot’s work to produce, beyond the criticism/fiction divide, a fragmentary writing, an Aufhebung of the Aufhebung of the fragment. As we will see in Lecture 2, writing produces itself ironically and wittily as a refusal of comprehension, an enactment of a field of fragmentation that produces an alterity irreducible to presentation or cognition, an alterity that can variously be named with the words absence, exteriority, the night, the neuter, the outside, dying, and, as we will see, the il y a.

Which brings me to my suggestion for a route through the labyrinth of Blanchot’s work (and when writing on Blanchot, I confess that I feel very much in the dark, fumbling here and there for a thread). My lecture will be in six parts: I will begin by trying to establish a framework for Blanchot’s work by looking at what he means by ‘literature’ in the early 1943 essay, ‘De l’angoisse au langage’. Extending the parameters of this framework, I will then give two close readings of ‘Le regard d’Orphée’ from L’espace littéraire (1955) and ‘L’absence du livre’ which closes the monumental L’entretien infini (1969). This will be followed by an extended commentary on ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, the crucially important essay that concludes Blanchot’s second collection of essays, La part du feu, in 1949. The discussion of the latter essay will allow me, first, to show how Levinas’s notion of the il y a can be understood as the origin of the artwork for Blanchot, and secondly to introduce the thesis of the impossibility of death, of the interminability of le mourir which is stronger than la mort. This will be followed by a consideration of Blanchot’s reading of Kafka in L’espace littéraire, which focuses on the theme of ‘the double death’ and brings out the relation of writing to the interminability of dying and criticizes a certain romanticization of suicide as the ecstasy of annihilation. The long, final section of the lecture draws together the insights we have gleaned from the reading of Blanchot into a more thematic discussion of death, which then provides the basis for a critical discussion of Levinas’s work. I attempt to show what I think can be defended in Levinas’s work–roughly and readily, his quasi-phenomenology of the relation between myself and the other–and what cannot be defended in his work–crudely stated, the words ‘God’ and ‘ethics’. I attempt to redescribe the human relation in terms of what might be called an atheistic ‘ethics’ of finitude. For me, what opens in the relation to the other is not, as Levinas would have it, the trace of the divine, but rather the trauma of the il y a, the night without stars, the scene of immemorial disaster, what I am tempted to call the experience of atheist transcendence.

(b) How is literature possible?

In ‘De l’angoisse au langage’, Blanchot is trying to tease out the ambiguities of the writer’s situation in order to address the question that heads his 1942 pamphlet on Jean Paulhan’s Les, fleurs de tarbes: ‘Comment la littérature est-elle possible?’ This strangely transcendental question–What are the conditions of possibility for literature?–can, at least in this essay, be equated with the question, ‘How is language possible?’, where language is understood as the more or less rule-governed production of meaningful sentences, the possibility of communication. At its simplest, and in a way whose tone will never change but only deepen in the entire destiny of Blanchot’s work, the response to the question of the possibility of literature is paradoxically that literature is only possible insofar as it is impossible. That is, the possibility of literature is found in the impossibility of what Blanchot here calls ‘aesthetic consciousness’ (FP 26/GO 19). Although left undefined by Blanchot, we might think of aesthetic consciousness as the total realization of meaning in an artwork, the comprehension of what Blanchot calls the work in a book, the sensuous presentation of the Absolute in Hegelian terms. For Blanchot, the possibility of literature is found in the radical impossibility of creating a complete work. That is to say, it is the impossibility of literature that preserves literature as possibility. Higher than actuality, echoing Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology in Sein und Zeit, literature is the preservation of possibility as possibility. Thus, in one sense, it is the radical incompletion of the artwork that preserves the possibility of literature as possibility, and it is this incompletion that prevents the writer or painter standing back from their work and saying ‘at last it is finished, at last there is nothing’ (FP 26/GO 20).

However, if the possibility of literature is conditioned by the impossibility of completing the work, then this is still only a superficial, and indeed rather circular, response to the question, ‘How is literature possible?’ (i.e. literature is the possibility of literature). The title of the essay is ‘De l’angoisse au langage’; what about angoisse or dread? Does not the title of the essay suggest a movement from dread to language, implying that dread renders both language and literature possible? To express this provisionally, one could say that literature is the non-literal and ever-incomplete ‘translation of dread into language, a ‘translation’ that does not provide a representation or intuitive fulfilment of dread, but rather that literature is dread at work in language. Blanchot writes (incidentally–and insistently–against a tendency in surrealism, if not against surrealism as such), ‘The opposite of automatic writing is a dread-filled desire (la volonté angoissé– my emphasis) to transform the gifts of chance into deliberate initiatives’ (FP 24/GO 18). A dread-filled desire, and we have yet to define these terms, is somehow the source of literature and literature is dread’s failed expression in language.

Blanchot begins his meditation on literature, as he will do in L’espace littéraire, with the theme of solitude (although, as we will see presently, solitude in Blanchot’s later work is the essential solitude of the work and not, as in this early essay, the solitude of the artist). Is there not a performative contradiction at the heart of literature insofar as its use of language is premised upon the generality of meaning and communication, but where what is expressed in language is the writer’s solitude? Blanchot takes as axiomatic for the experience of literature–and one might well want to criticize this silent substitution of a highly determinate conception of literature arising at a particular historical moment (i.e. aesthetic modernism) for literature as such–Rimbaud’s statement ‘je suis seul’; that is, the condition of the writer is solitude and the function of literature is the articulation of this solitude. But how can a person be alone, if he confides to us that he is alone? ‘Is the writer only half sincere’ (FP 9/GO 3)? No, Blanchot insists, the writer is caught in a double bind, where he ‘is not free to be alone without expressing the fact that he is alone’ (FP 10/GO 4). That is to say, solitude can only be expressed by means of that which precisely denies solitude: language. But solitude is only solitude with respect to its other, it only has meaning as a privation whose absence is the rule. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Abbreviations
• Preface to Second Edition As my father, I have already died
• Preamble Travels in Nihilon
• Lecture 1: Il y a
• Lecture 2: Unworking romanticism
• Lecture 3: Know happiness – on Beckett
• Lecture 4: The philosophical significance of a poem – on Wallace Stevens
• Notes
• Acknowledgements