Madou, The Law, The Heart Blanchot and the Question of Community

The Law, the Heart: Blanchot and the Question of CommunityAuthor(s): Jean-Pol MadouSource: Yale French Studies, No. 93, The Place of Maurice Blanchot (1998), pp. 60-65Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3040730 .

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JEAN-POL MADOU

The Law, the Heart: Blanchot and the Question of Community

Echoing Jean-Luc Nancy's La communaute desoeuvree, which was published by Christian Bourgois in 1986, but first appeared in the journal Alea in the Spring of 1983, Blanchot attempts, in his La communaute inavouablel to trace-on the flip side of every social philosophy and in the very irruption of the political-the outlines of a community whose advent is even more urgent, to the extent that its instauration reveals itself to be impossible. A strange community this, that does not allow itself to be circumscribed by any form of sociality and is not taken up in any dialectical process. A community, I want to add, that is not capable of being conserved, nonproductive, inoperable [desoeuvreeJ, and which, emptied of all transcendence, is abandoned to an immanence just as impossible. What is more, the Hegelian manner of recognition between consciousnesses is found to be radically put into question in the first pages of Blanchot's essay:

A being does not want to be recognized, but to be contested: in order to exist it goes towards the other, which contests and at times negates it, so as to start being only in that privation that makes it conscious (here lies the origin of consciousness) of the impossibility of being itself, of subsisting as its ipse or, if you will, as itself as a separate individual: this way it will perhaps ex-ist, experiencing itself as an always prior exteri- ority, or as an existence shattered through and through, composing itself only as it decomposes itself constantly, violently and in silence. [CI, 16/6]

1. Maurice Blanchot, La communaut6 inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1993); translated by Pierre Joris as The Unavowable Community (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988). Henceforth CI, followed by page numbers for the French and English, respectively.

YFS 93, The Place of Maurice Blanchot, ed. Thomas Pepper, ? 1998 by Yale University.

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JEAN-POL MADOU 61

These are also the categories of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, which are found to be unwound, because the community in question is not a matter either of the serial collectivity (the individual as number), nor of the fusional group founded upon oath and terror, nor, furthermore, of the praxis that this group would pretend to make hap- pen free of any inertia (the practico-inert). In effect, in Hegel as in Sartre, it is never anything other than a matter of the relation of the Same with the Same, or of the reciprocity of the Same and the Other- which amounts, in any event, to the same.2 For Blanchot, as for Le- vinas, the dissymmetry of the Same and the Other is ineluctable. Any sublimation or transfiguration amounts to a mystification. What be- comes, then, of the communitarian demand, if the I can never be on equal footing with the Other [l'Autre], if any other [autrui] is always closer to God than to myself? But whereas for Levinas the irreciprocity of the Same and the Other is experienced from the very beginning as an ethical demand [exigence], for Blanchot this demand is experienced in a privileged manner, as the "pure movement of loving" [CI, 70/411, which exceeds the pure reciprocity of an I and a Thou because it is, abandoning without limits, a movement without return, a movement that exposes lovers to the abyss and to the night of the Outside:3 "For the Greeks, according to Phaedrus, Love is nearly as ancient as Chaos" (CI, 68/40). But let us not simply oppose ethics (Levinas) and love (Blanchot, Duras). Their relation reveals itself to be infinitely complex in Levinas and in Blanchot. Asking if it is a matter of the same dissymmetry, Blanchot responds:

This is not certain, and neither is it clear. Love may be a stumbling block for ethics, unless love simply puts ethics into question by imitat- ing it. [CI, 68/401

What Blanchot calls the "pure movement of loving" is not the mortal fusion of hearts dear to romantic myth, but rather the strange relation that attracts lovers into an intimacy that makes them even more for-

2. It is the Critique of Dialectical Reason that is at issue here. In Being and Noth- ingness, it is rather irreciprocity that is in evidence. The other [autruil is present to me without intermediary, without mediation, without distance. But this distance is not reciprocal: "The total opacity of the world is necessary for me to be, myself, present for an other [autruil" (Jean-Paul Sartre, L'6tre et le neant [Paris: Gallimard, 19421, 329).

3. In Levinas, eros also leads to a beyond, beyond the beloved, beyond the face, to a future never future enough. Levinasian love leads to paternity, to fecundity: "The relation with the child-that is to say with the Other, not power, but fecundity, places into relation with the absolute future or with infinite time" See Emmanuel Levinas, Totalit6 et infini (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971; Paris: Livre de poche, 1990), 300.



62 Yale French Studies

eign to each other: "Not separated, not divided: inaccessible and, in the inaccessible, in an infinite relationship" (CI, 72/43). Passion and the Law, while in no way identical, both reveal an infinite attention to the Other [1'Autre], an attraction for an other [autrui]. This attraction seems to be even more irresistible inasmuch as an other cannot be reached [rejoint]. So it goes-both for love and for friendship.

The community-which, for Blanchot, is a matter at once of the ethical demand (Levinas) as well as of political utopia (Marx), of the passion of love and of communism-would only be capable of being manifested in the faultlines of the social fabric, in the tearing or rend- ing of ordinary communication. It would not be capable of being real- ized without being lost immediately. The Acephale Group, conceived by Georges Bataille, was the most gripping example. The failure of this enterprise on the eve of the Second World War does not allow us, how- ever, to abandon the question. Today Blanchot sees as privileged these two forms of apparently opposed communitarian manifestation: the limitless and anonymous presence of the people-May '684-and the world of lovers-Bataille and Duras. Everything would lead to oppos- ing these currents if it were not for the fact that they share a trait [trait]: that of being a gathering held together only by its imminent disap- pearance, a proximity all the more close by virtue of the fact that, at the heart of the embrace, the imminence of the retreat [retrait] is always already announced. Thus the idea of this community can only be grasped by default by those who brought it into existence.

How does one conceive a community in which singular beings would come to communicate amongst themselves the deconstruction of their own identity, and thus to share, in the "consummation," which is also the consumption of every social tie, the unmasterable excess of their proper finitude? How does one reconcile the communist demand for equality-which, for Blanchot, remains more than ever incapable of being superseded-with that, no less imperious, of sovereignty and of ecstasy? Must not the community refuse ecstasy on pain

4. The theme of the anonymous crowd is already present in one of Blanchot's first rdcits, Le dernier mot. But whereas, in this recit, the crowd, with its sinister torchlight processions and yelping dogs, seems to be linked to the advent of National Socialism, in The Unavowable Community it is linked to leftist insurrection. One would thus have to analyze in greater detail the relation, in Blanchot, between "the people" and "the crowd." The people is not the crowd. They are contraries. The question of the people is also that of sovereignty as the state of exception that no law circumscribes, "because [sovereignty] challenges [such a law] while maintaining [the-lawi as its foundation" [CI, 56/33].



JEAN-POL MADOU 63

of sinking into fascist communion? In other words, how do I conceive my presence to an other, other than in the mode of intersubjective specularity, of the master-slave dialectic and its cortege of mediations? The stakes are high.5, For Blanchot, it is a matter not only of the meaning of the political but, before all else, of love and of friendship. It is a matter of the meaning of literature:

What, then, calls me into question most radically? Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being towards death or for death, but my presence for another in as much as this other absents himself by dying. To remain present in the proximity of an other who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself another's death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me outside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community. [CI, 21/9; translation modified]

What happens, Blanchot asks, when I take the hand of one who is dying? How can one share the solitude of the event? "I die without you with you," he responds, echoing Bataille: "'A man alive, who sees a fellow-man die, can survive only outside himself"' (CI, 21/9, translation modified). Is this to say that the essence of community, and of its eminent manner in the "community of lovers," -the paradigm of community-is found to be revealed by and in the death of an other? In fact, it is only to the degree that the community is not up to the task of death, as Bataille says, that death reveals its truth to the community. The community only reveals its truth by putting itself to the test of its impossible immanence.

This community, ordered around the death of each [autrui], is what Duras gives us to read, in an exemplary fashion, in the text "On the Image of the Death of the German," published as an appendix to Hiroshima mon amour:6

5. It is a matter of articulating what Heidegger did not succeed in articulating: Mitsein and Sein zum Tode, being together and being towards death.

6. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 125; here- after HA. [This is the first of a series of notes Duras writes to the text of Hiroshima mon amour, and which are now published in the same book as the screenplay. Before the title of this particular note, on the same page, appears the word "APPENDICES, " followed by the subtitle "NOCTURNAL EVIDENCES (Notes sur Nevers).*" The asterisk refers to a note by the author at the bottom of the page, which reads: "Without chronological order. 'Do as if you were commenting the images of a finished film,' Resnais said to me." Trans.]



64 Yale French Studies

Both of them, equally, are on the verge of this event: his very own death....

She dies so much of his own death that one might believe her to be dead....

It might be said that she helps him to die. She does not think about herself but only about him. And that he consoles her, almost excuses himself for having made her suffer, for having to die.

When she is alone, at this place where they were just before, grief has not yet taken its place in her life. She is simply in an unvoiceable astonishment at finding herself alone. [HA, 1251

How can one conceive of a community founded not upon the reproduc- tion of identities, but on the apportionment of ecstasy, ravishment, and the forgetting of the world? Without a doubt no text has better evinced the joy of forgetting in the community of lovers than the last scene in Hiroshima mon amour:

SHE I'll forget you! I'm forgetting you already! Look how I'm forgetting you! Look at me!

He holds her by the arms [the fists!, she keeps herself facing him, her head turned backwards. She moves away from him with great brutality.

He helps her in his own absence. As if she were in danger. He looks at her while she looks at him as she would look at the city

and calls him very sweetly all of a sudden. She calls him "into the distance," in astonishment. She has suc-

ceeded in drowning him in universal forgetting. She is astonished at this. [HA, 1241

From Rousseau to Marx, the question of community has not ceased to haunt Western philosophy. There, history is thought in terms of a community to be retrieved or reconstituted. Thus the distinction between society-Gesellschaft-which evokes neutral and anonymous allotments of forces and of needs, and community-Gemeinschaft- which, as Nancy shows, evokes the "intimate communication of its members amongst themselves, but also the organic communion of this very community with its own essence" (Nancy, 30). Society is not built upon the ruins of community. Far from being what society would have lost or broken with, community is what reaches us starting out from society-in the form of questions, of the imperative. In an exemplary manner, Bataille-as Blanchot reminds us-has thought the destiny of modern communities in reference to three problematics that border its



JEAN-POL MADOU 65

horizon: communist egalitarianism, fascist communion, and the community of lovers. The question that Nancy raises and that Blanchot takes up again is thus not that of understanding how singularities compose a community, but of how a community is, from the start, the exposition of singularities. But is such a community even conceivable? How might singularity accomodate itself to the constraints of a norma- tive society? Isn't singularity incommunicable? Blanchot writes, commenting on ecstasy and the abyss in the Bataille of L'experience inter- ieure:

In a certain way, the instability of illumination needed, before being capable of being transmitted, to expose itself to others, not in order to reach in them a certain objective reality (which would have denatured the reality immediately), but for the purpose of reflecting itself therein by sharing itself and letting itself be contested. [CI, 34-5/17; translation modified]

Inconceivable, unavowable, the unworkable community could only be the despair of the political. It is exactly this impossible community that Utopia and Apocalypse-those two great discourses of the West-have not ceased to fight over without ever being able to name it, and that, like voice-overs, have shared the soundtrack of History in the manner of a badly-dubbed film. Community-not the political, in the current meaning of the word, nor the mystical, in the theological sense, neither depending on any social contract, nor being supported by any transcendent order, nor targeting, furthermore, any fusional communion, but testing its own radical immanence-opens that which is exposed on that disputed site to the infinity of alterity, at the same time that it consecrates its own ineluctable finitude. Not for Blanchot any more than for Bataille is it a matter of a marginal community, that is to say, of a community that, in its deviation from any social norm, would still remain the parodic mirror of the society from which it would pretend to remove itself. It is precisely not a matter of removing itself. What the unavowable community reveals to me in its un- workability, in the blanks and the rips and tears of daily communication, is the violent dissymmetry of my presence to an Other, to an Other [Autrui] who, as Levinas reminds us, is closer to God than to myself. The community is the only place where the infinity of alterity responds to the call of finitude. Solitude-is it necessary to recall this?-is never experienced alone.

-Translated from the French by Thomas Pepper



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Madou, The Law, The Heart Blanchot and the Question of Community