Blanchot Review

Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community: A Review At first glance, The Unavowable Community could strike us as no more than one man’s retrospective look at his own political life. Beginning with his inception into the world of political awareness through his friendship with Bataille, continuing through his relationship to the neo-Heideggerian Jean-Luc Nancy, and perhaps by implication the always present question of Blanchot’s earlier far-right political beliefs, then the crowning moment of intervention, May 1968, and all the events that this entails, only to end eventually in the more private world of love, though a kind of love that in many ways eludes and upsets the private realm radically. And in this sort of ‘retrospective style’ the text strikes a number of gestures, ranging from the elegiac to the nostalgic, the critical to the adoring. For this reason, it could be taken to be far from philosophical writing, dismantling as it does all those boundaries which are set up around ‘the philosophical’ to make clear what to expect of it. And yet, were we to bring this up against Blanchot as some sort of criticism, we would already have misapprehended the position from which he was speaking. The role of form, rather than content alone, as an adequate expression of thought, is of central importance to any understanding of Blanchot’s writings. In the wake of a sort of Nietzschean critical response to the pretensions of philosophical language to appear dry, drained of affect and for that reason somehow to reach toward the ‘objective’, Blanchot allows his texts to become blurred at their boundaries, infected with all that which hitherto philosophy has tried to maintain distance from. Something in this also informs another fundamental concept within Blanchot’s text: the principle that incompleteness is what defines the subject, the fact that it is always already implicated in a relationship to the other, that this relationship, in fact, precedes it, is its ground. In other words, philosophy’s relationship to its other, poetry, is part of philosophy, no matter how much it might hope to exile it. The founding gesture of Plato’s Republic, of course, being the exile of the poets. It is impossible to understand any of Blanchot’s writings outside of the Heideggerian and Nietzschean turn in French philosophy. But this text in particular must be taken as part of a cluster of writings. These texts were first of all inaugurated by Derrida’s Ends of Man, then, continued around the Centre de recherches philosophiques sure la politique of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, opened at Derrida’s suggestion, and then, finally, the text to which Maurice Blanchot is directly responding, Nancy’s La Communaute affrontee. I. James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2006; much of the discussion of twentieth century French philosophy and its indebtedness to Nietzsche and Heidegger was taken from this book. Each of these areas of research, whilst nominally discussing issues of politics, wanted to delve beneath the categories and assumptions which ‘political science’ or ‘political philosophy’ had constructed since post-Socratic philosophy in general, but also in new ways since the Enlightenment. These categories, so the argument runs, had obscured a more fundamental ‘ground’ of political Being. Therefore, texts such as Nancy’s Inoperative Community aim to penetrate behind the classic formulations of political thought in order to rethink the political in general, and perhaps by doing so produce new concepts, which were out of access to a ‘metaphysical’ tradition. With this in mind, it becomes easier to see what is of special interest to Blanchot’s book. Written in 1983, The Unawowable Community marks an array of both breaks and continuities. First of all, perhaps a central theme around which the text is constructed is the break of May 1968, the event which marked the end of a traditional sort of left wing agitation. Then there is the break in Blanchot’s own career which ’68 marks, when he emerged from his self-imposed seclusion , once again entering public life. There are also the theoretical breaks, unearthed in both Bataille and Duras, the absences which characterise their works (particularly, of course, in Bataille, in whom we find, ironically, no single text dealing with the question of community: all of his comments upon it are to be found throughout a scattering of fragments). And yet, there are filiations. First of all, of course, to Bataille himself and to his reflection on community which was ‘never in fact interrupted although surfacing only at long intervals’. M. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris, Station Hill Press, New York, 1988, p.1 There is the commitment to the question of community itself, despite how fraught with problems of a personal, political and theoretical nature. ‘Why this call from or for "community"? Let me enumerate haphazardly the elements of what was our history. The groups (of which the surrealist group is the loved or hated prototype); the manifold assemblings around ideas that do not yet exist and around domineering persons that exist all too much; above all, the memory of the Soviets, the premonition of what is already fascism but the meaning of which, as well as its becoming, eludes the concepts then in use, forcing thought to reduce it to what is common and miserable in it, or, on the contrary, pointing out what is important and surprising in it, which, not having been well thought out, risks being poorly combatted – and finally (though this could have come at the beginning) the research in sociology which so fascinated Bataille, giving him from the start a certain knowledge as well as a (quickly repressed) nostalgia for modes of being in community, the impossibility of whose implementation in the very temptation they offer us may not be neglected.’ Although this is quite a long passage, it seems to sum up the political direction the rest of the text is heading in pretty clearly. And there is also the continuity with Blanchot’s own work, as we have already hinted. This dialectic of interruption and continuity, of various affiliations and overlapping of discourses as well as sudden absences and insufficiencies is the fundamental experience of The Unavowable Community, and constitutes much of its explicit content too. This theme, of an insufficiency which constitutes the most substantial of experiences, becomes the theme of most of the first half of the book. This is examined through Bataille, for whom subjectivity becomes based on insufficiency. This sort of insufficiency, however, is not a lack which seeks completion, it is not a lack which at some point will be satisfied; ‘Insufficiency cannot be derived from a model of sufficiency. It is not looking for what may put an end to it, but for the excess of a lack that grows ever deeper even as it fills itself up.’ Ibid., p.8 This is the principle at the heart of the human being. It resists a sort of ‘fusional’ account of communication, where I and an other find ourselves confirmed in each other and therefore ‘whole’. The insufficient being goes out towards the other not in order to be consumed or verified but in order to be ‘contested’, Blanchot emphasises. Ibid., p.8 Contestation ‘is always exposure to some other (or to the other) who is alone able – because of his very position – to bring me into play.’ Ibid., p.8 It is for this reason community comes to be aligned with Blanchot’s older concept of désoeuvrement, which can be roughly translated as unworking. This aspect of unworking is what Blanchot identifies as the core of any written work: but, paradoxically, it is what in the work refuses identification, is always dismantling its own limits. It is both the principle of its genesis and its eternally deferred completion. It was Nancy who was first to conceive of community through the concept of unworking. It is, as he puts its, ‘that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do with either production or completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension. Community is made… of the suspension that singular beings are.’ J-L., Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and Oxford, p. 31 We see here again an example of the overlapping of theoretical texts, Nancy putting to work Blanchot’s concept of unworking and Blanchot attempting to map through reference to Bataille the suspension which constitutes the singular beings Nancy sees as community’s dramatis personae. Such overlapping is the practical enactment of the concept of exposure – or ex-position, as Nancy later coins in Being Singular-Plural – Blanchot makes mention of. The second half of the book centres around a reading of The Lover, the hugely successful and shocking novel by one of Blanchot’s friends, Marguerite Duras, but also the events of May ’68. These are not deviations from the concept of community, however. They are perhaps its extreme limit. As with much of the text, these themes can be discovered first in Nancy: ‘Lovers form the extreme though not external limit of community,’ Ibid., p.38 he claims, and it seems Blanchot is willing to agree, presenting the absence at the centre of Duras’ novel as the acute expression of the absence around which any authentic community will form itself. It is probably of importance that the second half of the book, entitled ‘The Community of Lovers’, begins with a section to do with May ’68. Without doubt Blanchot is drawing parallels between the sort of experience reserved for lovers and the unique event of those rapturous days in Paris. As he puts it, the atmosphere was such at that time that it seemed one could ‘mix with the first comer as if with an already loved being’, because, he goes on to qualify, ‘he [sic] was the unknown-familiar.’ Op. Cit., Unavowable, p.30 Again this theme of incompletion (the unknown) at the heart of, even constituting, the most intimate. In fact, as we continue through the text we find, quite contrary to any liberal idea of social solidarity, what constitutes the coming-to-presence of ‘the people’ is the principle of anonymity at its heart. Each individual appears ‘not as a person or subject, but as the demonstrators of a movement fraternally anonymous and impersonal.’ Ibid., p.32 This theme of anonymity forms one of the continuities with Blanchot’s own work: as he had already written in 1962, in a short essay entitled Everyday Speech, itself a response to a work of Henri Lefebvre’s, ‘[i]n the everyday we have no name, little personal reality, scarcely a face… the everyday breaks down structures and undoes forms’. M. Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, trans. Susan Hanson, in French Yale Studies, No. 73, pp. 12-20 This essay was attempting to stress the potentially subversive nature of everyday life, precisely because of its shared, impersonal aspect. It is possible Blanchot came to see May ‘68 as the manifestation of this thesis. There are many virtues to Blanchot’s slight volume, not least, as with all of his writings, its beautifully written if cryptic style. For one, it chronicles the passage in French political engagement away from traditional Marxism and towards the philosophies of the Other which were to become so influential. Throughout the text there is the re-evaluation of subjectivity with reference to the determining category of otherness. Also, whilst its inconclusiveness, its lack of prescription, may be perceived as a limitation by some, it does mean it can serve as a faithful rather than polemical account of the experience of ‘68 (of course, one might object that the weighty theoretical structure through which the event is viewed may obscure any clear account of it). But ultimately, and most importantly, what The Unavowable Community succeeds in doing is presenting the emerging theory of communality approached by Bataille and Nancy, and which was to be picked up later by Derrida. Of course, the activist coming to the text for instruction on how to achieve such community will be disappointed, the text avowedly non-programmatic in character. And yet, it is perhaps precisely for such a reader, the activist, this text may be of the most use. Such disappointment, or such a sense of loss which precedes all action, Blanchot would claim, paradoxically, constitutes the very ground through which such community can emerge. Perhaps such a check to our most firmly held beliefs and methods of practical intervention, always undermined and put to the test in a text like this, will emerge renewed and better improved, particularly perhaps, the relationships we develop in activist communities. In other words, is there a form of action we can take (beyond the lack of reaction Blanchot claims characterised May ’68) Op. Cit., Unavowable, p.31 which at the same time avoids the forms of identity Blanchot sees as so dangerous. BIBLIOGRAPHY Blanchot, M., The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris, Station Hill Press, New York Blanchot, M., ‘Everyday Speech’, trans. Susan Hanson, in French Yale Studies, No. 73 James, I., The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2006 Nancy, J-L, ‘The Inoperative Community’, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and Oxford