Write about Blanchot, I am asked \u2013 or with him, or alongside him, or against him, it doesn\u2019t matter. A difficult task, he himself would have said. All the more so since the problem immediately arises: how to write in the wake of this thinking without being carried away by its language? No one, to my knowledge, has managed it (except perhaps Foucault, Levinas: frightening predecessors). Well, let us try, even if it means taking that risk.<\/p>\n
So what is this reading that Maurice Blanchot invites us to enact here, at once light and serious, a \u201cjoyful, wild dance,\u201d fundamental (founding the work) in its very insouciance? The first thing one could say about it is that it seems to us inseparable from his conception of writing as experience. \u201cThe story [le r\u00e9cit<\/em>] is not the relation of the event, but that event itself,\u201d he wrote around the same time (in \u201cThe Song of the Sirens,\u201d reprinted in The Book to Come<\/em>). Writing does not describe, does not relate, does not signify, it does not represent a thing, existing in the world of men or even only in the world of the imagination; it is neither more nor less than \u201cthe test of its own experience\u201d (Blanchot again, I forget where, unless it\u2019s Bataille \u2013 so indistinguishable is their thinking on this point), the faithful account of what happened at that<\/em> moment, the moment when the one who, seized by the desire to write, sat down in front of a blank piece of paper and began putting language onto it. It\u2019s not that the text that results from this experience \u2013 poem, story, novel \u2013 is deprived of meaning, is not shot through with elements referring to the reality of life; rather it\u2019s that these elements function (to use a comparison that Blanchot would no doubt have discreetly avoided) like what Freud called the manifest content of dreams: the rags of reality they cloak themselves with so as both to manifest and veil their truth, their very reality. Thus, if writing is related to truth \u2013 and it certainly is, it has to be, or else not be at all, or in any case fall outside of the realm we designate by that mysterious word, literature<\/em> \u2013 it is not by way of knowledge. Literary writing does not explain, does not teach: it simply offers the presence of its own mystery, its own experience, in its absence of explanation, thus inviting not some illusory \u201cunderstanding\u201d (\u201cReading either falls short of understanding or overshoots it,\u201d writes Blanchot), but precisely a reading<\/em>. \u201cReading is freedom,\u201d Blanchot tells us, \u201ca freedom that can only say yes.\u201d Yes to what? To experience; to the experience, usually born in anguish, of the one who writes, which is answered by the experience \u2013 by turns casual and transfixed by \u201cthe rapture of plenitude\u201d \u2013 of the reader. Two experiences thus facing each other or rather tangential to each other, in any case radically irreducible to one another. For the author, the writer (Blanchot continually shifts between these two terms, plays on them), precisely, is the one who cannot read. Noli me legere<\/em>, Blanchot wrote elsewhere, in other contexts, several times. Returning to this injunction thirty years after \u201cReading,\u201d in a strange afterword to two early stories called Apr\u00e8s-coup<\/em>, which comments on these stories while at the same denying the possibility of any commentary on the author\u2019s part \u2013 taking up this injunction, then, he follows it with a curious personification of Writing itself. Writing, \u201cdismissing the author [not the reader, we should note],\u201d addresses him in extravagant terms: \u201cNever will you know what you have written, even if you wrote only to know it.\u201d An implacable sentence, from which the writer has no possibility of escaping, even if he can never entirely avoid the temptation, for him the supreme temptation, of seeking his own truth in what he has written; he then becomes, turning back towards his work, \u201cthe guilty Orpheus\u201d (Apr\u00e8s-coup<\/em>, again), incapable of leading his Eurydice to the light of day, and who loses her by that guilty turning back; powerless, he sees her draw back, swallowed up in a shadow forever impenetrable to him. The writer is thus the one who remains to the very end without any work to his name (and perhaps that is why Plato, in a gesture of mocking irony \u2013 or supreme offhandedness? \u2013 can write in his Second Letter: \u201cThere are no works by Plato and there will never be any,\u201d before adding, as if to mock our astonishment even more: \u201cWhat is now called by this name is in fact by Socrates during his sweet youth,\u201d that same Socrates who, as we know since Plato has told us, never wrote, so profound was his mistrust of \u201cthe impotent instrument that is language\u201d [Seventh Letter]. But is Plato actually the author of these letters? We don\u2019t really know).<\/p>\nHence the vanity of asking the writer what he \u201cwanted to say,\u201d what he meant, as if writing came from his wanting, from his free and sovereign will. It should rather be linked with anguish, as Blanchot stresses (invoking the example of Kafka). Already, in 1935, in Le dernier mot<\/em>, one of his first stories, he wrote: \u201cFear is your only master. If you think you no longer fear anything, there\u2019s no point in reading. But it\u2019s when your throat is constricted with fear that you will learn to speak\u201d (thus linking not only writing but also reading to anguish \u2013 a connection that two decades later, in \u201cReading,\u201d he will considerably modify). Writing is also related to desire (of the one who writes), but it is not the accomplishment of that desire, in the sense that it fulfills or appeases it, even if only temporarily; rather, it deepens its voracity; and so, Blanchot suggests, there falls to the reader the task, both arduous and frivolous, not of bridging the gap between the limitless desire of one who is losing his footing in writing, and the texts that are like the fragments of cooled lava that this experience leaves behind it, its scoria, but of discovering this gap, thrusting back into the shadow not the book, but the author (once a sad Orpheus with his lyre, now a pitiful Eurydice), and leading \u201cthe work hidden behind the book\u201d (I\u2019m paraphrasing) into the light \u2013 a gesture, though, that is carried out for him alone, in the solitude of his reading, an experience that is both unique and also infinitely renewable since it is lived for the first time at every reading, for every reader.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"Reblog](\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\")
<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Next month Jonathan Littell\u2019s controversial novel The Kindly Ones will be published in Charlotte Mandell\u2019s translation by Harper-Collins. Meanwhile, for a special issue celebrating the 100th anniversary of La Nouvelle revue Fran\u00e7aise (NRF), Littell...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[379,441,464,515],"class_list":["post-739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-harpercollins","tag-jonathan-littell","tag-kindly-ones","tag-maurice-blanchot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Jonathan](\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/02\/jonathan_littell.jpg\" "\\"Jonathan")
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