Farbman, Blanchot on Dreams and Writing

Blanchot on Dreams and WritingAuthor(s): Herschel FarbmanSource: SubStance, Vol. 34, No. 2, Issue 107 (2005), pp. 118-140Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685747 .

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Blanchot on Dreams and Writing Herschel Farbman

The Experience of Writing, "Impossibility," and the Dream Blanchot reaches for an experience in his reflections upon writing.

In his "critical" works--his reflections upon the writing of others-- Blanchot will speak of L'experience de Mallarmen or L'experience d'Igitur, L'expirience de Proust and L'expirience de Lautriamont.1 This "experience" is neither the extra-textual experience of a subject placed at the origin of writing nor the experience of a written object conceived as the product of the work of such a subject. Blanchot's "experience" -l'experience de Blanchot-is the experience of writing understood, itself, as experience. Consequently, Blanchot's reflections on the "experiences" of other writers entangle themselves thoroughly in the reflexive webbing of the experience of the experience ofwriting.2

This entanglement begins, for Blanchot, in the impossibility of determining a subject when it comes to the experience of writing. "Ecrire," says Blanchot, "c'est passer du Je au II, de sorte que ce qui m'arrive n'arrive a personne" (L'Espace litteraire 31). This II is not an identifiable third person to whom any writing that happens may be referred. Rather, it remains "uncharacterizable":

Si...&crire, c'est passer du "je" au "il," cependant le "il" substitue au "je" ne designe pas simplement un autre moi et pas davantage le diesinteressement esthetique...il reste a savoir ce qui est en jeu, quand ecrire repond a l'exigence de ce "il" incaracterisable. (L'Entretien infini 558)

It is a "troisieme personne qui n'est pas une troisieme personne, ni non plus le simple couvert de l'impersonnalit&" (563). Nor does this ni...ni construction that structures all of Blanchot's propositions concerning the il of writing map out, according to Blanchot, any via negativa to the positing of a subject. Rather, it presents the strange logic of "le neutre," by which non-term Blanchot underlines the impossibility of determining the il of writing as any subject, individual or collective:3

Le "il"...marque ainsi l'intrusion de l'autre - entendu au neutre--

dans son etranget6 irriductible.... L'autre parle. Mais quand I'autre parle, personne ne parle, car l'autre, qu'il faut se garder d'honorer d'une majuscule qui le fixerait dans un substantif de majestY, comme s'il avait quelque presence substantielle, voire unique, n'est pr"cisement jamais seulement l'autre, il n'est plut8t ni l'un ni l'autre, et le neutre qui le marque le retire des deux, comme de l'unite, l' tablissant toujours

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Blanchot on Dreams and Writing 119

au-dehors du terme, de l'acte ou du sujet ouf il pretend s'offrir. La voix narrative...tient de ii son aphonie. Voix qui n'a pas de place dans l'oeuvre, mais qui non plus ne la surplombe pas, loin de tomber de quelque ciel sous la garantie d'une Transcendance superieure... (564-65)

"Neutre" rather than negative, the impossibility of determining the il-the other that speaks in writing, as a subject-indicates, for Blanchot, an experience that cannot be understood in terms of the traditional (Aristotelian) logic of possibility:

Mais ne devons-nous pas dire aussi: l'impossibilite, ni negation ni affirmation, indique ce qui, dans l'tre, a toujours djii prc~dde l' tre et ne se rend a aucune ontologie? Assurement, nous le devons! Ce qui revient a pressentir que c'est l'etre encore qui veille dans la possibilitn et que, s'il se nie en elle, c'est pour mieux se pr6server de cette autre experience qui toujours le pricede et qui est toujours plus initiale que l'affirmation qui nomme l'Vtre, expirience...que nous cherchons a nommer...en parlant du neutre. (67)

And this "other experience" is the experience of the other, on which, according to Blanchot, all experience depends:

...l'impossibiliti n'est rien de plus que le trait de ce que nous nommons si facilement I'experience, car il n'y a experience au sens stricte que l1 o06 quelque chose de radicalement autre est en jeu. (66)

The strict sense of "experience" marked, throughout Blanchot's writings, by "l'impossibilit6" departs from the familiar sense in which a subject, as subject, does its dance with an object or with its own subjectivity. Rather, experience of the other as other -"experience" in Blanchot's strict sense--is marked, fundamentally, by the impossibility of saying whether that genitive construction ("experience of the other") is to be read as subjective or objective. And this grammatical ambiguity is inescapable in Blanchot's writing because writing, for Blanchot, is experience, in the strict sense of experience, before it is anything else. Writing, for Blanchot, is not, first and foremost, the particular sort of work that can be done and does in fact get done by writers; rather, the first mark of writing, in Blanchot's description of writing, is the "impossibility" that marks experience as experience.4

Whenever Blanchot discusses dreaming -and dreaming, along with the night, is an important and recurrent concern in his work-he discusses it in terms of the experience of writing. Just as the il of writing cannot, in its otherness, be given the form of a subject, the dreamer of the dream cannot be identified with the conveniently collected figure of the sleeper. In a meditation on Michel Leiris called "Rever, &crire," Blanchot thinks this likeness through:

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120 Herschel Farbman

Quel est le "Je" du rave? Quelle est la personne a qui l'on attribue ce "Je", en admettant qu'il y en ait une? Entre celui qui dort et celui qui est le sujet de l'intrigue reveuse, il y a une fissure, le souppon d'un intervalle et une difference de structure; certes, ce n'est pas vraiment un autre, une autre personne, mais qu'est-ce que c'est? Et si, au reveil, nous prenons hativement et avidement possession des aventures de la nuit, comme si elles nous appartenaient, n'est-ce pas avec un certain sentiment d'usurpation (de reconnaissance aussi), en conservant le souvenir d'une distance irriductible.... Intrigue et interrogation qui nous renvoient ' une experience, depuis quelque temps souvent decrite, celle de l'6crivain, lorsque, dans une oeuvre narrative, poetique ou dramatique, il crit "Je", ne sachant qui le dit ni quel rapport il garde avec lui-meme.

En ce sens, deja, le reve est peut- tre proche de la litt6rature... (L'Amitie' 164)

""Ecrire," Blanchot has said, "C'est passer du Je au II." And dreaming, in

his description of it, involves the same sort of passage: Ce qu'il y a au fond du reve-en admettant qu'il aii une profondeur, profondeur toute de surface -est une allusion ' une possibilit6 d'etre anonyme, de sorte que rever, c'est accepter cette invitation ' exister presque anonymement, hors de soi...un moi sans moi, incapable de se reconnaitre pour tel, puisqu'il ne peut tre sujet de lui-meme. Qui oserait transf6rer au reveur, ffit-ce h l'invitation du malin g6nie, le privilege du Cogito, et lui permettre de prononcer en toute assurance: "Je rove, donc je suis"? Tout au plus pourrait-on lui proposer de dire: "La oh je reve, cela veille," vigilance qui est le surprise du reve et oih veille en effet, dans un present sans duree, une presence sans personne, la non-prisence oih n'advient jamais aucun etre et dont la formule grammaticale serait le "Il" qui ne designe ni l'un ni l'autre... (169)5

The neuter "Il" that displaces the subject in the experience of writing also marks, in Blanchot's grammar of the dream, ,what wakes in the dream, separating it from the sleeping subject. Blanchot explains the desire to write about dreams on the basis of this shared grammatical formula:

Le reve est une tentation pour l'4criture, parce que l'6criture a peut- etre affaire aussi avec cette vigilance neutre que la nuit du sommeil cherche a teindre, mais que la nuit du rnve riveille et entretient sans cesse... (169)

The dream and writing thus "have to do" with the same neuter vigilance that continues, in sleep, where the subject leaves off. And the non-subject of the "refus de dormir au sein du sommeil" is marked by the same "trait de l'experience" with which writing is marked: in the dream, sleep becomes, for Blanchot, "l'impossiblite de dormir"(170).

In dreaming and in writing, "cela veille" in the place of the "je." This vigilance is not the heroic act of a self-present subject fighting off sleep but rather points to the impossibility of sleeping, which is the

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impossibility of gathering the indefinite cela that wakes (and that speaks what Blanchot calls the "parole d'4criture")6 into any definite subject position. "La podsie vit d'insomnie perpetuelle," says Rene Char in Blanchot's approving citation (170). And the dream, for Blanchot, is a kind of insomnia-an impossibility of sleeping-in the heart of sleep.7 Writing ("la poesie" is a name, in Blanchot, for writing) and dreams "live on," "have to do with" the same insomniac vigilance without subject.

This vigilance is Blanchot's central concern from at least L'Espace litt&raire to the last of his writings, and a latish work, L'icriture du disastre, pushes it to a feverish extreme. By 1968, the concern was widely shared. Restless vigilance (as opposed to the repose of knowledge sought in "totalizing" systematic thinking) became perhaps the central ethical attitude of the generation of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault in its struggle to wake from a thousand metaphysical slumbers. However, some of the clarity of direction in the imperative of "vigilance" might have been lost in the holding of that attitude over long years, and today it remains to be determined what all this talk of vigilance might mean for us and for contemporary writing and thinking about writing. The first step toward any such determination is to see what it meant for Blanchot, in whom the concern with this vigilance is most single-mindedly explored, and in whom it is explored concretely, with respect to the specific nocturnal experience of not being able to fully sleep, even in the depths of sleep.

Though Blanchot's exploration of this experience takes many paths, all of these paths return him, in the end, to the myth of Orpheus, which tells, in his reading of it, the first story of the night. The sleeplessness involved in the dream is, as Blanchot tells the story, a requirement of the changed night that Orpheus enters when he turns to see Eurydice.

The Sleepless "Other Night" of the Dream At the center of L'Espace littiraire is a chapter on "L'Inspiration." In a

note at the beginning of the book, Blanchot directs the reader to the central section of this chapter:

Un livre, meme fragmentaire, a un centre qui l'attire: centre non pas fixe, mais qui se deplace par la pression du livre... Celui qui 6crit le livre l'&crit par disir, par ignorance de ce centre. Le sentiment de l'avoir touchi peut bien n'Wtre que l'illusion de l'avoir atteint; quand il s'agit d'un livre d'6claircissements, ii y a une loyaut methodique a' dire vers quel point il semble que le livre se dirige; ici, vers les pages intitulees Le regard d'Orphie. (L'Espace littiraire 9)

"'crire," says Blanchot at the end of this section, "commence avec le regard d'Orphee"(232). This central experience is an experience, for Blanchot, of the "essence of the night":





Quand Orphee descend vers Eurydice, I'art est la puissance par laquelle s'ouvre la nuit. La nuit, par la force de l'art, l'accueille, devient l'intimit6 accueillante, I'entente et l'accord de la premiere nuit. Mais c'est vers Eurydice qu'Orph"e est descendu: Eurydice est, pour lui, l'extreme que l'art puisse atteindre, elle est, sous un nom qui la dissimule et sous un voile qui la couvre, le point profondiment obscur vers lequel l'art, le desir, la mort, la nuit semblent tendre. Elle est l'instant oui l'essence de la nuit s'approche comme l'autre nuit. (225)

Blanchot calls here upon a distinction between the two nights-between the "first night" and the "other night" --which he has developed in the first section of the chapter on "'Inspiration." In this distinction, which mirrors, in its form, other key Blanchotian distinctions (for example: between the possible death to the world and the impossible "other" death; and between the image as ideal place-holder of an absent object and the image as the visibility, not of an absent object, but of absence itself),8 Blanchot does not oppose the "first night" to the "other night" as contraries, but uncovers the latter "in the heart" of the former in the same way he finds the "ruin" or the "impossibility" or the "d6soeuvrement" of the true work of art to be the central experience and basis of that work:

Ce "point" [where the night becomes the "other" night], l'oeuvre d'Orphee ne consiste pas cependant a en assurer l'approche en descendant vers la profondeur. Son oeuvre, c'est de le ramener au jour et de lui donner, dans le jour, forme, figure et realit6. Orphie peut tout, sauf regarder ce "point" en face, sauf regarder le centre de la nuit dans la nuit. II peut descendre vers lui, il peut, pouvoir encore plus fort, I'attirer a soi, et, avec soi, l'attirer vers le haut, mais en s'en d6tournant. Ce detour est le seul moyen de s'en approcher: tel est le sens de la dissimulation qui se rivele dans la nuit. Mais Orphie, dans le mouvement de sa migration, oublie l'oeuvre qu'il doit accomplir, et il l'oublie necessairement, parce que l'exigence ultime de son mouvement, ce n'est pas qu'il y ait oeuvre, mais que quelqu'un se tienne en face de ce "point," en saississe l'essence, la oih cette essence apparait, oih elle est essentielle et essentiellement apparence: au coeur de la nuit. (226)

"Au coeur de la nuit" is "I'autre nuit," and in the heart of the work is the forgetting or loss of the work, the project of the work, and its possibility. "L'autre nuit" is not the negation of the first night, and the desoeuvrement or impossibility of the work of art is not the negation of the work of art. The otherness of the other in the "other night" and the "impossibility" of the work are to be thought of, for Blanchot, positively, "in the heart" of the night and of the work. The relation between these terms is thus not, in Blanchot, dialectical. The relation is rather, in his term, one of "duplicit6"--an irreducible doubleness that implies, endlessly, deception.9 Blanchot thus speaks of the first night as a "trap":

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"Le piege de l'autre nuit, c'est la premiere nuit ohi l'on peut p6netrer..."(220) It's in the first night that we are caught by the "other" night. There are no brave literary adventurers in Blanchot setting out in the heroic effort to penetrate to the "heart of the night." Rather, Blanchot's favorite literary figures are led there, not having chosen one way or the other, by the "first" night. There's no power and glory to be found in the "heart of the night," only the experience of the impossibility of the work that one has been trying to do, the pursuit of which has brought the writer to this inglorious point:10

L'oeuvre attire celui qui s'y consacre vers le point oui elle est a l'6preuve de l'impossibilite. Experience qui est proprement nocturne, qui est celle meme de la nuit. (213)

This does not mean, however, that the writer in pursuit of his or her work is an innocent and unknowing victim of this entrapment in the nocturnal experience of its impossibility. Blanchot sees, in the literature of his times, an irreversible and potentially paralyzing awareness of this formerly more thoroughly dissimulated essential experience:

Sur cette experience, I'essentiel a dire est peut-6tre ceci: pendant longtemps, les oeuvres ont passe par elle, mais en l'ignorant ou en lui donnant un nom qui la dissimulait, quand l'art voulait rendre les dieux presents ou representer les hommes. II n'en est plus de meme aujourd'hui. L'oeuvre n'est plus innocente, elle sait d'oi elle vient... Cette experience est devenue si grave que l'artiste...cherche...a faire de l'oeuvre une voie vers l'inspiration, ce qui proteige et preserve la puret6 de l'inspiration, et non pas de l'inspiration une voie vers l'oeuvre. (246)

The modern work depends, as much as the ancient work, upon inspiration, but upon an inspiration now seen to depend, in its turn, upon the work. This circle of dependence is, as far as logic is concerned, vicious, despite the fact that its ends can never be properly joined. The work can never fully be left (it can't reach or come to coincide with the inspiration it posits as its beginning and seeks as its end), nor can it properly be begun in an inspiration imagined to precede it. "Seul compte le moment de l'experience"(247), but the exact moment of the experience can never rightly be pinpointed as present:

...il n'y a pas d'instant juste oi l'on passerait de la nuit i l'autre nuit, pas de limite oh s'arreter et revenir en arriere. Minuit ne tombe jamais a minuit. Minuit tombe quand les des sont jetis, mais l'on ne peut jeter les des qu'a Minuit. (222)11

Thus, though Blanchot can say that "6crire commence avec le regard d'Orphee," the turning away from the possibility of the work, in which turning the night discloses "l'autre nuit," he can't say when that beginning takes place. There is no identifiable instant when that which precedes





writing stops and writing begins, since, for Blanchot, the experience in which writing begins is, already, an experience of writing:

...l'on n'6crit que si l'on atteint cet instant vers lequel l'on ne peut toutefois se porter que dans l'espace ouvert par le mouvement d'6crire. Pour ecrire, il faut djii &crire. Dans cette contraridt6 se situent aussi l'essence de l'6criture, la difficult6 de l'experience et le saut de l'inspiration. (232)

The "Mouvement" in the "Mouvement d'ecrire" "Le mouvement d'6crire" in the citation above names, for Blanchot,

the broad and most basic experience of writing, which cannot be reduced to the technical matter of putting pen to paper - to the doing of the work - and which thus cannot, with certainty, be limited to a particular time and place. (One never knows when the midnight of the experience of writing falls, since that midnight must always: 1, have fallen already for writing to begin; and 2, not have fallen yet). Throughout "Le regard d'Orphee," Blanchot speaks of Orpheus's turn toward Eurydice as his "mouvement."12 And in L'Entretien infini, Blanchot dwells on the question of this movement, calling it "La question la plus profonde":

Le langage est l'entente du mouvement de derober et de detoumer, il veille sur lui... Pouvons-nous, du moins, delimiter l'experience de ce tour neutre qui est a l'oeuvre dans le d6tournement? L'un des traits caractdristiques de cette experience est de ne pouvoir etre assumbe, comme sujet a la premiere personne, par celui ' qui elle arrive et de ne s'accomplir qu'en introduisant dans le champ de sa realisation l'impossibiltj de son accomplissement... La question la plus profonde est cette experience du ditournement... (31-32)

This movement in which "&crire commence" is "le mouvement ininterrompu de l'6criture" because it cannot itself be assigned a clear end or beginning and thus can indicate no definite end or beginning to the experience of writing (xxii). It is "le pur mouvement d'6crire" because it is not defined privatively, in opposition to rest, but is defined, rather, on its own terms, as entirely irreducible to any concept of rest (482). As pure restlessness, as movement irreducible to rest, the movement of writing is the source, for Blanchot's speakers in L'Entretien infini, of a truly endless fatigue.13 Blanchot's Entretien begins in this fatigue and takes this fatigue as its first theme--the entire opening conversation is a conversation on the fatigue of the two speakers, which makes the conversation impossible-but, as one of the speakers duly notes in the course of the impossible conversation, "Quand il parle de fatigue, il est difficile de savoir de quoi il parle"(xxi).

Fatigue is an impossible theme, the first sign of the experience marked, for Blanchot, by l'impossibilit, and is thus difficult to explicate in itself. Likewise, the utterly restless movement of which fatigue is the

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unavoidable companion is difficult to explicate. Indeed, in the existentialist climate in which Blanchot's thinking crops up, "movement" is a common name for what most deeply resists systematic, scientific explication. For a central figure and influential teacher like Jean Wahl, existence, in its essential undefinability, is thought of as movement:

Nous avons vu dijia que l'existence ne se laisse pas definir, mais si nous disons que l'existence est mouvement, nous pouvons ainsi la caract6riser k1gitimement, car nous la definissons par quelque chose qui lui-meme ne se definit pas, le mouvement ne se laisse pas plus definir que l'existence. (Cent annees 20)

Wahl takes his cue here from Kierkegaard: "Chez moi tout est mouvement," says Kierkegaard, in Wahl's approving citation, by way of an exposition of the vanity of systematic knowledge, in which everything might find its final explanation (20). Kierkegaard's struggle against Hegelian conceptualism--against merely logical, dialectical "movement"--in the name of the ultimately unconceptualizable movement of existence, is rejoined in French philosophy's post-war dance with Hegel, where it mixes with an old motif in French thinking. "Le monde," says Montaigne, "n'est qu'une branloire perenne":

Toutes choses y branlent sans cesse: la terre, les rochers du Caucase, les pyramides d'Egypte, et du branle public et du leur. La constance meme n'est autre chose qu'un branle plus languissant. Je ne puis assurer mon object. II va trouble et chancelant, d'une ivresse naturelle. Je le prends en ce point, comme il est, en l'instant que je m'amuse a lui. Je ne peins pas l'8tre. Je peins le passage... (Du Repentir 25)

...or what thinkers like Jean Wahl will call, following Kierkegaard, "l'existence."

By the generation of Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, Kierkegaard and l'existence are no longer the latest arms in the French struggle with and through Hegelian conceptualism. However, "movement" remains the key bone of contention. Deleuze, for example, in his attempt to conceive, against Hegel, difference and repetition in themselves (and not negatively with respect to sameness and the original), constantly opposes "real movement" to "abstract" Hegelian "movement" of the concept. In whatever topic he may be examining at any given moment in Diffgrence et repetition, Deleuze is always searching it for le mouvement reel. For example, on theater, and in light of Nietzsche, Deleuze opposes "la repetition comme mouvement reel...a la representation comme faux mouvement de l'abstrait" (Diffgrence et repetition 36):

Le theatre, c'est le mouvement reel; et de tous les arts qu'il utilise, il extrait le mouvement reel. Voila qu'on nous dit: ce mouvement, l'essence et l'interiorite du mouvement, c'est la repetition, non pas





l'opposition, non pas la mediation. Hegel est d6nonce comme celui qui propose un mouvement du concept abstrait... I1 represente des concepts, au lieu de dramatiser les Iddes: il fait un faux theitre, un faux drame, un faux mouvement. (Difference et repetition, 18)

In Derrida's more reserved discourse, what Deleuze thinks of openly as "real movement" (too frontal a term to do any work in the immanence in which deconstruction operates) moving beyond the "movement of the concept" is sought in slighter alterations, like that in which an "a" for an "e" makes "diffirance" in order to name, not a concept, but a prior movement undermining, constantly, the establishment of concepts.

So "movement" or metonymies of "movement" -from existentialism, through non-existentialist creatures of an existentialist climate like Blanchot, to the big last gasps of Deleuze and Derrida-have named (or named the trace of, or have given the trace of a name to) the positivity of what can't be explicated conceptually. And it can hardly be taken as a sign of an advance in conceptual explication that this positivity goes almost completely unnamed today, even in what are called (employing what is fast becoming just another period concept) the "post-modern" academic appropriations of French theory. Thus, in the current context, "Quand [Blanchot] parle du ["mouvement d'6crire"], it is especially difficult de savoir de quoi il parle" (L'entretien infini xxi).What sense, if any, does it now make to talk about a "movement" irreducible to rest -"movement" defined positively, and not negatively (i.e., in opposition to rest)? And what sense, if any, does it now make to talk about such "movement" in conjunction with writing? Again, any answer to these questions depends on knowing, still better, what sense it made for Blanchot.

The Dream as Movement and Mise-en-abime If Blanchot's claim that the dream is a kind of insomnia (the

impossibility of fully sleeping in sleep) is true, then the dream concretely represents the impossibility of rest and represents, therefore, a movement that cannot be brought to rest. Already in Aristotle, for whom all movement can be referred either to a violent displacement of something from its natural place or to the natural tendency of things toward restful position in their natural places, the dream is thought of as a kind of movement which sleep cannot still. For Aristotle, the dream represents the continuation of movements of sense-impressions received in waking. He compares these movements to those of projectiles in space, "for in the case of these the movement continues even when that which set up the movement is no longer in contact" (On Dreams 459). Though these movements of the dream cannot be brought to rest in sleep, they can, for

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Aristotle, be safely assigned a clear beginning in the sense-experience of daytime, which, in turn, can be understood in terms of his physics, in which all motions begin and end in rest. However, for Blanchot, who writes in a post seventeenth-century universe in which "natural place" no longer has any meaning and in which the fundamental Aristotelian concept of rest has long since been replaced by that of inertial movement, the old thought that the dream is a kind of movement becomes unsettling, as the movement that the dream represents can no longer be said to begin and end in rest. The dream comes to represent, in Blanchot, the very endlessness of inertial movement and the impossibility of resting even when, in sleep, things seem most restful.

In Aristotle's original distinction between the dream and sleep, the dream represents the continuation of the movements of the day- movements beginning and eventually ending in the day-whereas sleep is essentially a nocturnal matter. In Blanchot's post-Copernican following-through of the same basic distinction, the situation is inverted: sleep is now essentially an extension of daytime concerns, whereas the restless movement of the dream is conceived of as essentially nocturnal:

Que se passe-t-il la nuit? En g6neral, nous dormons. Par le sommeil, le jour se sert de la nuit pour effacer la nuit. Dormir appartient au monde, c'est une tache, nous dormons en accord avec la loi gendrale qui fait dipendre notre activiti diume du repos de nos nuits. Nous appelons le sommeil, et il vient... Dormir est l'action claire que nous promet au jour... Dormir profondement nous fait seul ichapper a ce qu'il y a au fond du sommeil. Ofi est la nuit? II n'y a plus de nuit... II faut dormir, c'est la le mot d'ordre que la conscience se donne, et ce commmandement de renoncer au jour est l'une des premieres rigles du jour.

Le sommeil transforme la nuit en possibiliti. (L'Espace littiraire 358)

We have seen that, for Blanchot, the essence of the night-the "other night" in the heart of the night-is l'impossibilitd. The heart of the night is an experience of which "l'impossibilit6...n'est rien de plus que le trait." Possibility is a matter of the light of day. Sleep, as a recharging of one's powers for the purposes of day, turns the night to the purposes of day. For Blanchot, we remain tightly "attached," in sleep, to the day:

Le sommeil...c'est un attachment, au sens path'tique de ce terme: je m'attache, non point comme Ulysse au mat par des liens dont je voudrais ensuite m'affranchir, mais par une entente qu'exprime l'accord sensuel de ma tite avec l'oreiller, de mon corps avec la paix et le bonheur du lit. Je me retire de l'immensit6 et de l'inquietude du monde, mais pour me donner au monde, maintenu, grace a mon "attachement," dans la viriti sfire d'un lieu limiti et fermement circonscrit. Le sommeil est cet intirit absolu par lequel je m'assure





du monde a partir de sa limite et, le prenant par son c6tW fini, je le saisis assez fortement pour qu'il demeure, me pose et me repose. Mal dormir, c'est justement ne pas trouver sa position. Le mauvais dormeur se tourne et se retourne a la recherche de ce lieu veritable... Le somnambule nous est suspect, ,tant cet homme qui ne trouve pas de repos dans le sommeil. Endormi, il est pourtant sans lieu et, on peut le dire, sans foi. La sincirit6 fondamentale lui manque ou, plus justement, a sa sincerit6 manque la base: cette position de lui-meme qui est aussi repos. (359)

Sleep, in the sincerity of its attachments, resists the irreducible "duplicite" of the neutre "parole d'criture," the speaker of which cannot be reduced to any locatable "je" or grouping of "je's":

Je dors, la souverainet6 du "Je" domine cette absence qu'elle s'octroie et qui est son oeuvre. Je dors, c'est moi qui dors et nul autre... (357)

In sleep, the sleeper collects him or herself, for the sake of the enterprises of the day, into a single position, a resting place in which he or she is a grounded and grounding subject, at home in the world.

But, in Blanchot's conception of sleep and dreaming, the night (every night) frustrates, in the form of the dream, this project of restful grounding:

La nuit, I'essence de la nuit ne nous laisse pas dormir... Dans la nuit, l'on ne peut dormir... On ne va pas du jour a la nuit: qui suit ce chemin trouve seulement le sommeil, lequel termine le jour mais pour rendre possible le lendemain... Le rave, en ce sens, est plus proche de la region nocturne. Si le jour se survit dans la nuit, depasse son terme, devient ce qui ne peut s'interrompre, ce n'est deji plus le jour, c'est l'ininterrompu et l'incessant... Le rave est le rnveil de l'interminable... (361)

"The interminable," "the un-interrupted," "the incessant": there's more than a little theatricality involved in these Blanchotian substan- tivizations of adjectives, and the "Voilh!" tacit in these gestures obscures as much as it puts in view. What is "the interminable," after all? What is "the incessant" in itself, beyond this or that failure to stop? "Real movement" or "pure movement beyond rest"-strange names-do clearly designate, at least, what can't be substantively defined. But awkward adjectival appelations come with the nocturnal territory in which Blanchot is operating. All of these weak half-namings are a function of Blanchot's strong claim that what dreams the dream, like what speaks the "parole d'criture," is not recognizable, and therefore namable, as a subject:

Celui qui r&ve dort, mais celui qui rove n'est deji plus celui qui dort, ce n'est pas un autre, une autre personne, c'est le pressentiment de l'autre, ce qui ne peut plus dire moi, ce qui ne se reconnait ni en soi ni en autrui. (361)

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Who or what dreams is not this or that thing that can be dragged into the light of day, there to be stopped for identification. What dreams, in the dream, is the incessance of the movement of the dream. The dream is, for Blanchot, as it was for Aristotle, movement; however the dreamer, in Blanchot, is not the subject of this movement-who or what moves or is moved -but its essential quality, "incessance." The dreamer, celui qui reve, is a feature of the dream.

Thus the dreamer, in Blanchot, cannot be said to exist outside the dream. Blanchot would be offering, in this accounting of the dream, a rather traditional picture of skepticism if the dreamer were not, in his account, rigorously distinguished from the sleeper. Though the dreamer cannot be said to exist outside the dream in Blanchot's account, neither can the dream be located inside the mind of any sleeper. The space of the dream is that of le dehors, which Blanchot points to as the central espace littiraire throughout his writings (the central chapter of L'Espace litteraire on Le regard d'Orphie begins with a section called "Le dehors, la nuit"). In this respect, Blanchot is closer to the Homeric, mythological tradition than he is to Aristotle's psychologism. Though, in Blanchot, the dream can no longer be said to come through the gates of horn, from the gods, from demons, or from the dead, and though it can no longer be said to appear at the foot of the sleeper's bed, in the literal outside space of the bedroom, it does, in Blanchot, exist on the outside and not inside the mind of the sleeper. The endless mise-en-abime structure of the dream without subject does not, in Blanchot, lock the dreamer in, cutting the dreamer off from contact with the outside.'4 On the contrary, in Blanchot's account of the dream, the dreamer is locked out and therefore radically exposed to "the outside," "le dehors sans lieu et sans repos"(28). "Le dehors" to which the mise-en-abime structure exposes us, in Blanchot's account, is "la region oih regne la pure ressemblance":15

Tout y est semblant, chaque figure en est une autre, c'est semblable a l'autre et encore a une autre, celle-ci a une autre. On cherche le modele originaire, on voudrait tre renvoyd a un point de d6part, i une r6vilation initiale, mais il n'y en a pas: le reve est le semblable qui renvoie eternellement au semblable. (362)

In Blanchot, this desert region without resting place or point of departure is the region of the image.'6

Dream, Writing, and the Image In L'Espace littiraire, Blanchot tries to develop a notion of the image

founded upon "pure resemblance"- "une ressemblance qui n'a rien '

quoi ressembler"(350). This line of thinking begins in a questioning of the usual subordination of the image to the object:





D'apres l'analyse commune, I'image est apres l'object: elle en est la suite; nous voyons, puis nous imaginons. Apres l'object vient l'image. "Apres" semble indiquer un rapport de subordination. Nous parlons reellement, puis nous parlons imaginairement, ou nous nous imaginons parlant... Mais peut-etre l'analyse commune se trompe-t- elle. Peut-itre, avant d'aller plus loin, faut-il se demander: mais qu'est- ce que l'image? (32)

The model for the image no longer subordinated to a model that precedes it is, in Blanchot's analysis, the corpse. In the corpse, Blanchot observes, "le difunt regrett6 commence a ressembler a lui-meme"(346). This resemblance of the deceased to himself is not, principally, a resemblance of the deceased to himself in life, but rather to himself as deceased:

A lui-meme: n'est-ce pas la une expression fautive? ne devrait-on pas dire: a celui qu'il etait, quand il 6tait en vie? A lui-meme est pourtant la formule juste. Lui-meme designe l'etre impersonnel, 6loigne et inacessible... Oui, c'est bien lui, le cher vivant, mais c'est tout de meme plus que lui...si absolument lui-meme qu'il est comme double' par soi... (346)

This doubling adds something-"c'est tout de meme plus que lui" -which can't be reduced, in any way, to the object doubled. What is added, in the case of the corpse-image, is the positive absence of "le cher vivant":

...l'image peut certes nous aider a ressaisir idealement la chose...elle est alors sa negation vivifiante, mais...au niveau oii nous entraine la pesanteur qui lui est propre, elle risque aussi constamment de nous renvoyer, non plus a la chose absente, mais A l'absence comme presence, au double neutre de l'objet... (353)

In what Blanchot calls "la ressemblance cadaverique," the corpse is not only an image of an absent object (le cher vivant) but also an image of the absence of the object. This latter version of the image in what Blanchot calls "les deux versions de l'imaginaire" is not subordinated to the former. On the contrary, for Blanchot, the image as image is, first and foremost, the image of image -the image as presentation of absence itself, which, in itself, is image. First and foremost, "le cadavre est sa propre image"(347). In this more radical of the "two versions of the imaginary" the corpse is, in itself, the image of a corpse, which is to say, the image of an image of an image, ad infinitum. This endless, groundless structure is, for Blanchot, that of resemblance itself, defined on its own terms and not according to those of the logic of the representation of objects:

Et si le cadavre est si ressemblant, c'est qu'il est, a un certain moment, la ressemblance par excellence, tout a fait ressemblance, et il n'est rien de plus. II est le semblable, semblable a un degre absolu, bouleversant et merveilleux. Mais a quoi ressemble-t-il? A rien. (347)

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For Blanchot, this pure resemblance (resemblance without object) is pure movement (movement without rest). "Subjects" and "objects" take up positions in the world -they are posed and therefore capable of repose. In the more radical version of Blanchot's "deux versions de l'imaginaire," the corpse, as pure resemblance, is not an object and cannot be said to be at rest:

Le cadavre que nous avons habille, rapproch6 le plus possible de l'apparence normale en effagant les disgraces de la maladie, dans l'immobilit6 si tranquille et si assuree qui est la sienne, nous savons cependant qu'il ne repose pas. L'emplacement qu'il occupe est entraind par lui, s'abime avec lui et, dans cette dissolution, attaque, meme pour nous autres qui demeurons, la possibilite d'un sejour... La croyance qu'a un certain moment: le defunt se met " errer doit tre rapport6e au pressentiment de cette erreur qu'il repr6sente maintenant. (348-49)

In the very extremity of the immobility of the corpse understood as an object, the corpse appears as the objectless image of itself and thus as errant movement. Any image, no matter how "still," of an image as image (and not as object) will present such movement, as no such image can be fixed to a firm placement in the world of objects. But, for Blanchot, the corpse is the first and last of such images, as it is the very image of the "suspension of the relation with place" that he thinks of as death:

La mort suspend la relation avec le lieu, bien que le mort s'y appuie pesamment comme a la seule base qui lui reste. Justement, cette base manque, le lieu est en defaut, le cadavre n'est pas a sa place. Ohi est-il? II n'est pas ici et pourtant il n'est pas ailleurs; nulle part? mais c'est qu'alors nulle part est ici. (344)

The restless "mouvement d'&crire" is, for Blanchot, a result of this suspension. At the very beginning of L'Espace littiraire, Blanchot thinks of writing -that form of speech that does not depend upon the live presence of a speaker-as an image in something like the way in which he thinks of the corpse as an image.

In a long footnote to the last line of the first section of L'Espace littiraire, Blanchot raises the question (a traditional question, which he hopes to inflect in a new way) of the relation between writing and image. "Poesie" and "litterature" here, as always in Blanchot, are synonyms, or at least close metonyms, of "&criture," in the broad sense of the "mouvement" or the "experience" of writing, and not in the narrow sense of scribbles or of the act scribbling on a page:

...est-ce que le langage lui-meme ne devient pas, dans la littirature, tout entier image, non pas un langage qui contiendrait des images ou qui mettrait la reialite en figures, mais qui serait sa propre image, image de langage-et non pas un langage image--, ou encore langage imaginaire, langage que personne ne parle, c'est-a-dire qui





se parle a partir de sa propre absence, comme l'image apparait sur l'absence de la chose, langage qui s'adresse aussi " l'ombre des evenements, non a leur realite, et par ce fait que les mots qui les expriment ne sont pas des signes, mais des images, images de mots et mots oih les choses se font images? (31-32)

Having raised this traditional question in a rather traditional way, Blanchot tries to distinguish the line of thinking he is trying to open up from the more familiar line of thinking in which the image is subordinated to what it represents and in which writing is subordinated to language as its image:

Qu'essayons-nous de representer par 1l [by this line of questioning]? Ne sommes-nous pas sur une voie oh il nous faudrait revenir a des opinions, heureusement delaissees, analogues a celle qui voyait jadis dans l'art une imitation, une copie du reel? Si dans le pokme le langage devient sa propre image, cela ne signifierait-il pas que la parole poetique est toujours seconde, secondaire? [And here we pick up where we began to track Blanchot's thinking on the image] D'apres l'analyse commune, l'image est apres l'objet: elle en est la suite; nous voyons, puis nous imaginons. Apres l'objet vient l'image. "Apres semble indiquer un rapport de subordination. Nous parlons r6ellement, puis nous parlons imaginairement, ou nous nous imaginons parlant. La parole poetique ne serait-elle que le decalque, l'ombre affaiblie, la transposition, dans un espace oi s'attinuent les exigences d'efficacite du seul langage parlant? Mais peut- tre l'analyse commune se trompe-t-elle. Peut-etre, avant d'aller plus loin, faut-il demander: mais qu'est-ce que l'image? (32)

If the answer that Blanchot essays at the end of the book (that the image, before it is the representation of an object, presents itself, giving an image of image) holds, then writing-"the poem" -is an image of language in the same way that the corpse is the image of itself. Writing - "the poem" - doesn't represent language from the outside, as a prior objet. In "the poem," language is given not as an object to be represented but as "sa propre image," the image of the objectless image that it is. Writing, the image of language, is, in this analysis, involved inseparably in language from the beginning, because, in the beginning, language is image and not object. Thus, "litt6rature...langage que personne ne parle," cannot, in this analysis, be neatly separated from spoken language or from "ordinary language." "Litterature," through its relation to the image, comes to name, in Blanchot, the impossibility of such neat separations, and, as a result, the problem of literature can't, for Blanchot, be limited to a particular field of knowledge, defined in terms of its object. The problem of literature defined - as Blanchot defines it- as image of language, is the broader and more general problem of the restlessness of the corpse -the restlessness of the image as image even, and especially, in the very image of final rest.

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For Blanchot, dreams -the images that are somehow ours in sleep - involve all of us, nightly, in just this restlessness. And, in Blanchot's image of this generally shared restlessness, the common analogy, as old as mortality itself, between the sleeping body and the corpse is reconfigured. Traditionally, both are figures of rest, the one provisional and the other final (unless one believes in resurrection, in which case the difference between death and sleep is largely elided). This remains the case in Blanchot. However, Blanchot reads these exemplary figures of rest ironically, as extreme indications of the ultimate impossibility of rest. We have seen that the dream, in Blanchot's conception of it, is restlessness in the heart of sleep--the impossibility of fully sleeping that presents itself in sleep. Full sleep, sleep without images (without dreams) would be death, which, though like sleep in the analogy, is not sleep. The possibility of sleep is thus the impossibility of full sleep, or death, in sleep. The corpse, as image of itself, is, in Blanchot's analysis, itself restless, despite the extreme rest that it represents in the world of objects. Though death is not sleep in Blanchot, the impossibility of rest is the same both in sleep and in death: the restlessness, in sleep, of the dream and, in death, of the corpse is, for Blanchot, a result of the same "impossibility of death."

Just as there are "two versions of the imaginary" in Blanchot, there are two versions of death.17 The first is death to the world -the vale that one has in one's power and that one can accomplish in suicide. The second is the impossible death-the death that one does not have in one's power, as a subject, to accomplish. This death, though it indubitably happens (the impossible does, without fail, happen in Blanchot) does not happen to "us" or to "me" or to "you" or to any other possible subject of the happening, since it is the very absencing of the subject of its happening. No one can, as subject, be said to be present and "there" for his or her own death, in this sense of "death." "De sorte que ce qui m'arrive" when death, in this sense, happens "n'arrive a personne."'8 Dreams, the images that happen in sleep, can be said to happen "to the sleeper" in only the same limited sense in which death can be said to happen "to the body." The death that happens "to the body," which, unlike the subject, is there in death, is not the impossible death for which the subject cannot be present. In its restlessness, the dead body-the corpse-image--is, in Blanchot's analysis, the image of the absence of the subject of that death and not, in any way, an image of the subject of the experience of death. Likewise, dreams are, in Blanchot's account, images of the absence of the subject of the experience of dreaming. Though, upon the return to life





signalled by waking-up, the likeness of the latter absence to the former might seem to be undone, the cognate absence of the subject in writing- in the general, limitless, and therefore inescapable experience of writing that Blanchot explores - carries the restlessness of the dream, in the form of the image of absence, past the return to life, through the day, and back into the night, the center of which, the source of all restlessness, is, as we have seen, I'impossibilite' that marks all radical experience in Blanchot's account. "Awak'd you not in this sore agony?" asks the Keeper of the Tower, interrupting Clarence's account of his dream of death. "No, no," Clarence replies, "My dream was lengthened after life" (Shakespeare, Richard III, I.iv: 42-45).

Dream, Writing, and Disaster: Veiller "J'appelle le disastre," says Blanchot by 1980, "ce qui n'a pas l'ultime

pour limite" (L'Ecriture du disastre 49). In L'Ecriture du disastre, Blanchot names the impossibility of resting in sleep, and even in death, "disaster." In the dream, as in death "le sujet se fait absence"(51). What speaks in this absence-what, in L'Entretien infini, Blanchot calls "parole d'&criture" - is now named "desastre." Instructing himself in the writing of this "subjectivite sans sujet"(124), Blanchot tells himself, toward the beginning of L'Jcriture du disastre, "Ce n'est pas toi qui parleras; laisse le dcsastre parler en toi..."(12) Though such speech may be "allowed" or accepted to a greater or lesser degree, it is not in one's power in such a way that it can be willed or even wanted: "Vouloir &crire, quelle absurdite: 6crire, c'est la decheance du vouloir, comme la perte du pouvoir, la chute de la cadence, le disastre encore"(24). The writing of the disaster is thus not a writing that one desires and does as a project in the world, and, therefore, it is possible that it may never, in fact, get done: "Quand &crire, ne pas &crire, c'est sans importance, alors l'kcriture change-qu'elle ait lieu ou non; c'est I'6criture du desastre"(25). But whether or not any writing actually gets done, the writing of the disaster goes inescapably on: "Ne pas 6crire, effet d'&criture"(23). The verb that Blanchot everywhere employs to name this restless going-on without beginning or end is "veiller":

La veille est sans commencement ni fin. "Veiller" est au neutre. "Je" ne veille pas... Cela veille... Le d6sastre veille. (82)

"Si je dis: le disastre veille, ce n'est pas pour donner un sujet ' la

veille"- Blanchot issues such cautions at every turn of L'Ecriture du disastre (85). The genitive construction of "the writing of the disaster"-the writing of this veille -can thus not be determined as indicating either an

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objective or a subjective sense. "The disaster," "la veille," is not a subject of writing, nor is it an object to be written "about" by any subject. It names what we've seen Blanchot call, in earlier writings, "the movement" of writing itself. Though this movement, in Blanchot's conception of it, goes on beyond the willing and doing of any subjects, it remains, somehow, a responsibility: "Cependant, veiller sur l'absence demesuree, il le faut, il le faut sans cesse..."(134) Though one does not "do" this writing-though one cannot, as subject, wake or be vigilant in this necessary way-this writing, this waking, is, nonetheless, our responsibility. Everyone is implicated in this writing/waking precisely because it is not the doing of this or that particular subject. In this generally shared implication, Blanchot sees, as in L'Entretien infini, "l'exigence d'une pensee se rendant au multiple et cherchant a &chapper a la majoration de 1'Un"(196). This exigency does not determine a responsibility for any subject and cannot, thus, be understood in juridical terms--the "exigence d'une pensee se rendant au multiple" is, says Blanchot, "l'exigence sans droit de l'autre"(198). The surrender of thought to the multiple does not occur in the light of any right or any law; rather it is a surrender to the lawless night. The starry night presents, for Blanchot, the universe - the concept of which depends upon le "un" with which the word begins--with its laws and its order. The disaster, "nuit liberee d'6toiles" is, says Blanchot, a "nuit multiple"(13). The shared responsibility in this night (for the "disaster") exceeds the subject (individual or collective) and, by the same token, exceeds universality. Though general and inescapable, this responsibility for "le desastre"-- "nuit multiple" irreducible to l'un -cannot be said to be "universal."

"Nuit, nuit blanche-ainsi le diesastre..."(8) The disaster, night without stars, is a night without sleep--the night not of sleep but of the dream, which, as we've seen, Blanchot defines as the impossibility of sleep. The writing of the disaster is thus always the writing of the dream, and, in the irreducible ambiguity of that genitive ("writing of the dream"), the dream may, in Blanchot, be thought of as a kind of writing in which everyone (everyone dreams) is involved every night. Blanchot's definition of writing as objectless image, in L'Espace litteraire, opens the way for this line of thinking, since dreams are images in the same sense (images that can't be subordinated to objects). But the way, indicated by Blanchot, in which we are responsible for this kind of writing (for our dreams) remains largely unexplored-just as largely unexplored as the ways, beyond the juridical, in which we are responsible for all of the disasters of our times, the ceaseless images of which are generally either mistaken for objects or





decried, by those who claim to know, as the making imaginary of "real" objects of knowledge. In this general subordination of the image to the object, the tendency, when it comes to literature, is to look at writing in only its objective senses, quietly slipping Blanchot's dreamier sense of writing into the long sleep of intellectual history.

But sleep is not death, though it may look like it, and the irreducible difference between the two is the dream. This difference is the easiest thing in the world to forget, as the experience of every morning shows. Remembering it calls for a vigilance beyond the familiar kind (the kind that begins its watch only upon waking and ends it at the moment of falling asleep). Though nothing in Blanchot's obsessive pursuit of it makes a "vigilance" that crosses the frontier of sleep feel familiar, and though it retains, in his discourse, more than a little of its oxymoronic ring, nothing in Blanchot removes it from the ordinary either. Blanchot may or may not succeed, at the end of the day, in remembering the dream, but, either way, by locating the vigilance needed in order to remember the dream in the very heart of the dream-by defining the dream as nocturnal vigilance-Blanchot insists that remembering the dream is remembering, among other things, that there is no special distinction in being vigilant. Everyone dreams, and Blanchot's strange talk of nocturnal vigilance brings us back, in the end, to that. The verb in the final complete sentence of L'Ecriture du disastre is "partageons"(220). This imperative comes not from the deathly heights of the tower of the law, where Clarence sleeps (see, again, Richard III, I.iv), but from the shared depths of our nightly experience of the impossibility of fully resting, from the bottom of the sea of Clarence's dream.

Harvard University

Works Cited Aristotle. On Dreams. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1. Ed. Jonathan Barnes.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Blanchot, Maurice. L'Amitid. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. - . La communaut' inavouable. Paris: Minuit, 1983. --. L'Ecriture du d'sastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. - . L'Espace littdraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1953.

L'Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. S. Lautreamont et Sade. Paris: Minuit, 1963.

Le livre a venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Diillenbach, Lucien. Le recit spdculaire. Paris: Seuil, 1977. Deleuze, Gilles. Diffdrence et repetition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972. Derrida, Jacques. Parages. Paris: Galilie, 1986. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

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Levinas, Emmanuel. De l'existence ia l'existent. Paris: Vrin, 1984 [1947]. Mallarme, Stiphane. Igitur; Divagations; Un coup de des. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Montaigne, Michel de. "Du Repentir" in Essais. Paris: Librairie Generale Frangaise,

1972. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Richard III. In The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G.

Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Wahl, Jean. 1848-1948: Cent annees de l'histoire de l'id'e d'existence. Paris: Centre de

Documentation Universitaire, 1949.

Notes 1. See L'Espace littiraire, 37, 135; Le Livre aZ venir, 19; Lautr'amont et Sade, 243. 2. Reflecting upon the surrealist "experience," the lessons of which he takes great pains

to learn throughout his critical writing, Blanchot admires most its radically reflexive form: "I'experience surrialiste est experience de l'experience... Dans de telles [surrealist] oeuvres, la pensee est experience, comme l'6crit, dans le mouvement d'6crire, vient a la pensee; le savoir ne priexiste pas a l'6criture..." (L'Entretien infini 18) In this "experience of experience," "experience" cannot be imagined to pre-exist writing but is, from the beginning, experience of writing.

3. Though what speaks in writing is not, for Blanchot, any more a collectivity than it is an individual subject, Blanchot does, throughout his post-May 1968 writings-and especially in La Communaut" inavouable-insistently affirm an impossible "commu- nity" beyond and before any concept of unity. Much of this affirmation passes by way of the central theme of friendship in his writings, the relationship between friends being, for Blanchot, irreducible to any one-to-one correspondence of one to an other conceived of as another one. The relationship, the partage, is not intersubjective and not an exchange; it has, rather, the form of entretien in which each entretenant (there are no "parties," properly speaking, to such a discussion) finds himself or herself always already "impliqu6 dans une parole qui lui est exterieure"(L'Entretien infini xix). This implication is, for Blanchot, a shared implication in what he calls, on the title page of the first section of L'Entretien infini, the "parole d'criture," "La Parole Plurielle."

4. The reflection that Blanchot sustains throughout his work on "l'impossibilit'" grows out of Heidegger's thinking of death as the "possibility of the absolute impossiblity of Dasein" (Sein und Zeit, 250, 255, 262, 329). Blanchot tries, out of Heidegger and against Heidegger, to think of the undeniable coming-to-pass of death not as an indication that the impossible is somehow possible, but as pure impossiblity-impossibility that comes to pass as impossibility. For Blanchot, though death happens, it is in no way in our power; it is not something that any subject can be said to do or to be capable of doing, even in the case of suicide. (I discuss this conception of death toward the end of this article).

5. Blanchot returns to this passage nine years later on page 97 of L'Ecriture du desastre, citing it prominently there, and analyzing it in the context of a reflection on the "disastre" as "veille." I explore this later reflection in Blanchot in the last section of this article.

6. See, again, footnote number three here. 7. Insomnia is an obsession for Blanchot. He shares this life-long obsession with his

friend Levinas, who begins to elaborate a line of thinking on it in De l'Existence a' l'existent, in which he distinguishes between "attention," which is directed toward objects, and "vigilance," which is "absorbed in the rustling of unavoidable being" and "anonymous"(110-111). In its irreducibility to a namable subject of consciousness, this "vigilance" shakes up the phenomenological terminology within which Levinas is working:





L'affirmation de l'anonyme vigilance d6passe le phenomine qui suppose deja un moi, echappe par consequent a la phenomenologie descriptive. La description utilise ici des termes dont elle cherche pricisement a depasser la consistance, elle met en scene des personnages, alors que l'il y a [the elemental state of affairs in which insomniac vigilance is absorbed] est leur dissipation. Indice d'une methode oih la pens&e est invit-e au dela de l'intuition. (112)

Blanchot, like Levinas, takes up this invitation in a radical way throughout his thinking. As in Levinas, this "vigilance" precedes, in Blanchot, the distribution of the world into subjects and objects and thus cannot be attributed to any definite subject. "Cela," or "il," or "le neutre" veille. However, unlike Blanchot, Levinas does not link the vigilance of insomnia to the dream. For Levinas, the dream "s'emboite dans un sommeil" (110), and Levinas, like Blanchot, defines "sommeil" as the placement, the positioning par excellence, of a subject of consciousness.

8. I will explore both of these distinctions at greater length toward the end of this article. 9. See, for Blanchot's use of "duplicitd," L'Entretien infini 42: "L'image est la duplicite de

la revelation. Ce qui voile en riv1lant, le voile qui revivle en revoilant dans l'indicision ambigue du mot riveler, c'est I'image. L'image est image en cette duplicite, non pas le double de l'object, mais le d6doublement initial qui permet ensuite a la chose d'etre figurde...c'est...le tour du tournant...La parole dont nous essayons de parler est retour a cette premiere tournure..." Or, L'Amitid, 186, where, Blanchot finds in the heart of the monism of Jean Paulhan, "la duplicit6 irriductible de l'Un." In L'Espace littiraire, Blanchot exposes this duplicitd, as in L'Entretien infini, with respect to the image: "l'image...risque aussi constamment de nous renoyer, non plus a la chose absente, mais a l'absence comme presence, au double neutre de l'object en qui l'appartenance au monde s'est dissipee: cette duplicite n'est pas telle qu'on puisse la pacifier par un ou bien capable d'autoriser un choix et d'6ter du choix l'ambiguit6 qui le rend possible. Cette duplicite renvoie elle-meme a un double sens toujours plus initial" (353).

10. Blanchot brings out the out-datedness of traditional ideas of literary power and glory in the final section of Le livre a venir. Pointing to the avenir (the chapter is titled "Ou va la litterature?"), the section, called "La puissance et la gloire," sees literature moving closer and closer to the fundamental experience-le trait of which is impossibilit-e-in which it originates. This nearing of literature to its fundamental experience, to impossibility, distances literature from ideas of power and possibility. The fundamental writing-experience, Blanchot reminds us four years after L'Espace littfraire, is given in the myth of Orpheus:

Quand Orphie descend aux enfers a la recherche de I'oeuvre, il affronte un tout autre Styx: celui de la separation nocturne qu'il doit enchanter d'un regard qui ne la fixe pas. Experience essentielle, la seule oh il doive s'engager tout entier. (339)

In L'Espace litteraire we have seen that, for Blanchot, this essential experience takes place at "le point oh [l'oeuvre] est

' l'apreuve de l'impossibilite" (213). At the end of

Le Livre ai venir, Blanchot gives a picture of the contemporary crisis in literature 'a l'preuve de cette impossibilitd:

L'extraordinaire pele-mele qui fait que l'6crivain publie avant d'6crire, que le public forme et transmet ce qu'il n'entend pas, que le critique juge et definit ce qu'il ne lit pas, que le lecteur, enfin, doit lire ce qui n'est pas encore 6crit, ce mouvement qui confond, en les anticipant chaque fois, tous les divers moments de formation de l'oeuvre, les rassemble aussi dans la recherche d'une unite nouvelle. D'oui la richesse et la misere, l'orgueil et l'humilite, l'extrime divulgation et l'extrime solitude de notre travail litt6raire, qui a du moins ce merite de ne desirer ni la puissance, ni la gloire. (340)

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The old desire for power and glory through literature is part of a desire for immortal- ity. In this desire, the nostalgia for which Blanchot sees in the decadence all around him, literature is a link to the eternal:

La parole qui s'eternise dans l'Vcrit promet quelque immortalit6. L'Ucrivain a partie lide avec ce triomphe de la mort; il ignore le provisoire; il est I'ami de l'ame, l'homme de l'esprit, le garant de l'kternel. Beaucoup de critiques, aujourd'hui encore, semblent croire sincerement que l'art et la littirature ont pour vocation d'6terniser l'homme. (Le livre & venir 333)

In 1980, more than 20 years later, Blanchot is still locked in a tooth-and-nail battle with this persistent nostalgia. The last sentence of L'Ecriture du desastre (two italicized fragments in something like the form of writing-notes, notes for future writing, follow it) is a cry for help in this battle:

Partageons l'Vternit6 pour la rendre transitoire. (220) 11. Many of Blanchot's thoughts on the dream and the night vis a vis the experience of

writing are thoughts on Mallarme. The allusion here is to Igitur, a central instance of Mallarme's "reve pur d'un Minuit...oii doivent 6tre jet6s les des."

12. See, for example, pages 226, 227, 228. 13. For further examples of Blanchot's meditations on "the movement of writing," Le livre

a venir is a rich source. In this earlier work, which aims at reading, beyond the book, what hasn't been written, the irreducibility of this movement to any concept of rest is nearly always marked, in one way or another, by the adjective "pure." On Beckett: "Peut-.tre ne sommes-nous pas en presence d'un livre, mais peut- tre s'agit-il bien plus que d'un livre: de l'approche pure du mouvement d'oii viennent tous les livres" (290). On Mallarme: "La podsie devient alors ce que serait la musique reduite a son essence silencieuse: un cheminement, un diploiement de pures relations, soit la mobilite pure" (305; see also pp. 307, 311, 320, 322, 324, 326, 330 for this "movement" vis ti vis Mallarme). "I1 faut ajouter que l'&crivain, s'il est a cause de cette mobilite detourn6 de tout emploi de specialiste, incapable meme d'&tre un specialiste de la litterature, encore moins d'un genre littiraire particulier, ne vise pas pour autant a l'universalite... Rien d'universel, rien qui fasse de la litterature une puissance prometheenne ou divine, ayant droit sur tout, mais le mouvement d'une parole d6possdd~e et deracinde..."(338-39).

14. Though Blanchot, sharing a fascination widespread in his generation, reflects often on this structure, he never names it mise-en-abime, the going term for it since Gide in France (for a good genealogy and exploration of the uses of this strange term from medieval heraldry, see Lucien Ddillenbach, Le Recit speculaire). He tends, rather, to redescribe it, in every instance, from scratch. His sense of his own implication in the structure, wherever he encounters it, makes it impossible for him to speak from outside of it, in the structuralist, as it were scientific, nomenclature. He tends to speak of what his structuralist contemporaries would call the "mise-en-abime" from the inside, as an existential predicament--as the very structure of the basic fact of being, from the start, "impliqud dans une parole qui lui est extirieure,"('L'Entretien infini xix) or implicated, impossibly, in the experience of writing. Derrida, in his studies of this basic structure in Blanchot's fictions, also avoids the term, speaking instead of "une double invagination chiasmatique des bords" (Parages 244; 270-272). This way of speaking has the advantage of de-dramatizing the situation of being without clear exit from a fiction. No grand abysses here, just the turning of things inside out and back again in such a way that the source of the fiction cannot be safely located outside of itself and that, in turn, the inside of the fiction becomes a "dehors." This fundamental structure of fiction is often described by analogy to the mirror, and, as a result, the widespread fascination with this structure through the 1970s, has since been derided





as a "narcissistic" turning away of Literature, with a capital "L," from everything that isn't literature (i.e., its "contexts" or "histories"). But, in Blanchot's conception of the inside-outs and outside-ins of literature, what Derrida will call "une double invagination chiasmatique des bords" is the very structure of the utter impossibility of any such turning away-an impossibilty that defines any literature worth the name. If there's any turning away in Blanchot, it is turning away from the work, with all of its clever structures, and towards the ruin, represented by Eurydice, of all of those structures-towards what he calls "le dehors." By this inside out and back again structure in Blanchot, "literature" names an irreducible relation with the outside, the impossibility of withdrawal to any solipsistic inside.

15. In Blanchot, the unconditioned--everything he marks with the adjective "pure" ("pure movement," "pure

resemblance")--remains, though denuded of power and

glory--sovereign. What's characterized as pure still "reigns," impossibly, in this exile. Throughout his late work, Derrida, following through on the gesture that Blanchot begins in stripping the unconditioned of power and glory, tries to remove the unconditioned from its traditional association with sovereignty.

16. Blanchot relates "le dehors" to the desert in a section of Le livre u' venir on "La parole prophetique": Quand la parole devient prophetique, ce n'est pas l'avenir qui est donne, c'est le present qui est retire et toute possibilit6 d'une pr6sence ferme, stable et durable. Meme la Citi 6ternelle et le Temple indestructible sont tout a coup- incroyablement-detruits. C'est a nouveau le d6sert, et la parole aussi est desertique, cette voix qui a besoin du desert pour crier et qui sans cesse reveille en nous l'effroi, l'entente et le souvenir du desert... La parole prophetique est une parole errante qui fait retour i l'exigence originelle d'un mouvement, en s'opposant a tout sejour, toute fixation, a un enracinement qui serait repos. (110)

17. Blanchot obsessively explores, throughout his work, what, in L'Espace littiraire, he calls "la double mort"(128). The broad strokes in my summary here are thus both unjust and necessary. Pages 106-134 of L'Espace litteraire are the closest Blanchot comes to such a summary.

18. Again: "Ecrire," for Blanchot, "c'est passer du Je au II, de sorte que ce qui m'arrive n'arrive a personne" (L'Espace litte'raire 31).

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Documents

Farbman, Blanchot on Dreams and Writing