maurice blanchot's "writing the disaster"

written in 1997 for continental philosophy class:


The vigil the night in prison writing on the walls the nameless scratching names. Writing as a mode of vigilance, a venturing forth into the crypt. Beguiling the night of its darkness with light, writing of the disaster is the penultimate impossibility. And yet it is needful, and fitting to do so in spite of a language that does not suit the task.

“write in the thrall of the impossible real” (38) Blanchot notes, reminding us that the writing imperative (and language---its medium) is a slavery, giving rise to the servitude of the scribomaniac. Moreover, language is ever in thrall to itself, nonetheless constantly disservicing itself. If the vigilance of language can be said to take place, where can we locate it? Place, an irrelevancy, is born away by the disaster. In “Writing the Disaster,” Maurice Blanchot says “there is no future for the disaster, just as there is no time or space for its accomplishment,” (2) thereby dislocating and de-temporalizing his text. The disaster reverberates a homelessness---non-temporal and removed from the most basic of questions: when? Where?

Does Blanchot merely vocalize the explosion of space or time, events for which we cannot hold him responsible? Or does he actively smash these concepts? Could we hold his text guilty? Or rather, is it the disaster which bears the guilt of carrying away our most trusty philosophical notions, carrying away even their opponents: the skepticism and nihilism which stood us in good stead, also falling away, falling apart with the disaster? And the disaster exculpating itself, bearing away the guilt which we would like to ascribe to it.

“Know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know.”

Maurice Blanchot’s “Writing of the Disaster” is devastating, hard to locate. It does not belong to the body of post WWII literature composed of easily identifiable memoirs, autobiography or political history. Ironically it bears similarity to these categories. It is an intensely personal, spiritual undertaking which becomes a very dark night of the soul, yet blanchot rarely yields to the temptation of speaking in the first person voice. It is rooted in historic events, and yet undermines common historical understanding of these events. It is charged with the question of the political, but exposes the dangers of reducing events to the purely mechanical or inevitable function of history. To view it as a work of art, merely on the basis of the stylistic elegance would pollute blanchot’s motives. He says, “there is a limit at which the practice of any art becomes an affront to affliction” (83) to dwell on the text’s artistic merits would be a grievous insult to suffering. But the art of blanchot beguiles, even to the point of obscuring its own artfulness. And so, despite its lean burnished beauty as a work, we cannot respectfully call it anything perhaps, but writing. And even that is presumptuous. The question stands: is writing possible after the disaster?

“Writing the disaster” further eludes definitive categories in its very nature as a book. Blanchot does not write about the disaster in any journalistic sense. He writes of the disaster, and more oftenof the impossibility of writing of the disaster or even writing anything at all. WTD constantly undermines its own bokness, its very status as a literary production at every moment. To speak of it as a work, in any other sense than the most provisional and hesitant sense, seems to show that we have missed the point. It is more than a writing, or even an anti-writing. It’s a text loaded with contradiction, the very paradox of its being as a text. According to blanchot a book has for its being a “noisy, silent bursting” (124). This being is always “being violently exceeded and thrust out of itself” and so “gives no sign for itself save its own explosive violence” (124). To say blanchot problemetizes his own text is understatement, or inaccurate. The text problemetizes itself, it outraces definition, it explodes traditional ways of regarding a book. How can we avoid falling into “the passive kind of reading which betrays the text while appearing to submit to it, by giving the illusion that the text exists objetive” (101)? And so we act as if, as if there were a text, for the sake of discourse? Or do we do active violence to the text, a violence which creates text? Indeed productive reading “produces text” (101). Or do we escape this active/passive problematic, yielding to “passivity’s reading” which is without joy or comprehension—the “nocturnal vigil” (101)? How could we possibly read of the disaster with joy? How could we comprehend the incomprehensible? How as active readers could we re-create the disaster, an ultimate irreverence? Unify the shards of history, totalize it, name it? The danger of nomenclature: to name and speak of the disaster already assumes a false unity and a misprision. How can we allow, as passive readers, the disaster to assume the false aspect of a unified whole? All these pitfalls threaten us. We assault the graves of the dead by our banal attempts to recall horrors we do not cannot know.

And what of the life of the text independent of author? The activity of the text—a degree of autonomous independence from its author. The detachment of the author who says “did I write that? What did I mean . . . did I mean anything at all?” the slavery to writing connects the author too intimately with the text, yet distances. The text belongs to no one. No one is responsible: no author chooses to write. But can the extreme political potential of the text, make such a detached or irresponsible attitude extremely dangerous? Yes, more fundamentally, the act of writing is violence. Violating all and no one, a text is fragile and crafty. It can easily burn into nothing, the victim of book burning or obscurity, vanishing as though nothing had happened. As though its violence did not occur. Writing fragments, morcellates, rips: “tearing of the shred—acute singularity, steely point” (46), skewering thought on its steely barbs. To write on blanchot is further impeded by the danger in quoting him, ripping fragments out of their context. And yet the aphorisms can live on their own, and demand to be read, reread and studied fragmentally. Difficult to take WTD as a whole. By liberating a quote from the text, I risk severing it from the whole. But I know no other way to unpack the layered complexity of each line—not to mention each word—and so, I quote, at the risk of barbaric manhandling.

Blanchot is ever self-effacing and yet presides as the bearer of bad tidings, and I could not help wondering who is it that shoves such horror in my face? Who can I blame? To speak of, or to write on WTD is difficult. So it should be. We talk to easily of suffering, of events we do not know, can never know. We bandy about clichés with which we hope to show ourselves as concerned, deeply sensitive beings. We make a carnival of our ignorance. Blanchot exposes the utter puzzle of even beginning to talk about the disaster. His text conjures the most paradoxical of feelings. At once I was struck. How to describe this lightning? Words like gloom, grim, dark creep into my head. At first, I could not utter them. To do so would be to expose the complete inadequacy of these terms. Indeed blanchot cautions against all words---they carry excessive theoretical freight. But even silence seems profane, and I yield to shabby phrases composed of words not my own.

Given the difficulty of writing the disaster, of the disaster, or about blanchot's work--or the even greater difficulty of remaining silent---i will try to draw out passages which gripped me by the throat, terrified me, shook me up.

One of the most pervasive themes in WTD is the degeneration of language after the disaster. it is the "ruin of words" (33) that assails us. The ruin is further confounded by our lack of any other medium to express what has happened. Memory relies on words. How do we respond when the tools of memory become the tools of a lie, a fictive remembering which dismembers the integrity of what has happened---the integrity of the disintegration (morbid), so to speak. To want to write: “an absurdity.” Not to write: “negligence.”

In approaching the text stylistically, we find it appears divorced from all premeditated structure or self-conscious technique. And yet the style coheres in its simple complexity, it coheres in its simple complexity; it coheres masterfully. The coherence of the fragmentary disorder mimics the coherence of the disaster; or rather the incoherence which sticks adamantly to the psyche, torturing it, demanding synthesis and comprehension where none is possible. Through word order reversals, oxymoronic word juxtapositions, repetition, and deliberate italicization of certain passages, Blanchot allows WTD to emerge as a naïve yet beguiling tour de force. And an oddity among books. Its very strangeness as a philosophical text which refuses to be philosophical, imposing order and contriving dialectics, emphasizing the disintegration of thought after the disaster. Indeed, thought is disaster.

Blanchot relies on the trope of word order reversals: demise writing, writing demise, or “desire of writing, writing of desire” (42) but immediately discredits the value of these reversals. “let us not believe we have said anything at all with these reversals” (42). He denies that these are mere plays on words, or that these terms coincide, but asserts we live them together “in the obscurity of the interim” (42). Desire is a nondesire, a “powerless power that traverses writing—just as writing is the desired, undesired torment which endures everything, even impatience” (42). To think these aporias is headache inducing. The contradictions massacre our sense of propriety of logic and simple cause and effect relations. Logic, limit, causality, place, time---all born away by the disaster. Writing post mortum. Thinking in this way jars every preconceived notion about language. The text violates, traumatizes. Blanchot’s syntax has an interesting effect. The repeated use of the colon carries the impact of causal relations. This: (therefore) that. Thoughts produce new thoughts that illustrate,emphasize and restate. But often blanchot’s use of the colon has the opposite effect. By separating two condradictory thoughts by a colon, blanchot twists the productivity of thought. It regresses: instead of spawning new thought, ideas kill off eachother.

How much do these thoughts require, insist on the numbing of sensitivity? If to think the disaster one would be borne away by it (along with the chance of putting it into words), is not our thought crystallized imitations, parodic—a mockery? And so, do we think or write about the disaster at all, or rather, something else, something horrible no doubt, a crude mock-up, but not the disaster itself? The disaster is too vast to bear the limit of its own name. furthermore, how can we say anything at all of the disaster without exposing a crudity of spirit—a lack of conscience? The knowledge which demands that we “accept horror in order to know it’ (82) exacts us from complicity, however reluctant.

Whence the primacy of knowledge? In our acceptance of horror there is the double assault of totalization and quantification. As though numbers could delimit a suffering so multiple, so infinite, and so intense. To say so many millions died does not get at it. Mathematical arrogance: the attempt to define and delimit the infinite in the attempt to locate origin. To call it pain is ridiculous understatement. The words expose themselves to be less than nothing, not even lines, strokes of pen. Page after page of print, irrelevancies. Less than ink.

Blanchot also makes use of contradictory adjectives in his descriptions. Noisy silence. Possible impossibility. Unrepresentable representation (118). Mortal, immortal (119). Or such prescient inanities “daytime insomniac” (121). The words sit on the page in uncanny marriages. The quirky couplings irritate and jostle the brain. They grate on the meanings, reduce the defined to splinters. Nothing remains, but what remains without remains. The disaster’s negative fruition. Blanchot’s style verges on the epigrammatic, and he never apologizes for the confusing Confucian fragmentariness of his prose. He writes cryptically, then writes on the cryptic in fertile moments loaded with irony. He both undermines and vindicates his text, only to mock his own pretense at attempting to achieve anything. Blanchot calculatingly undermines any attempt at interpretation, deciphering, or uncrypting the text, yet demonstrates how its very cryptic quality is contingent on the confusion of the reader and his or her resulting attempts to decode. He locates in cryptic language “cavernous places where words become things” which are “inaccessible to cryptanalysis” (136)—and yet “deciphering is required to keep the secret” (136). He injects the infinite into his prose and gives assent to infinite interpretations: “the translation is infinite” (136). Petrified language thus makes an offering of itself to our deciphering, and promises the indecipherable “rich in what it cannot say” (136). That is to say, what lives, shrivels at the touch of the pen. We are left with always the text unsaid, the untextable. The disaster—what remains to be said, after all is said.

With irony (and what part of the text is not drenched with irony?), Blanchot begins “what Plato teaches us about Plato” (34)---and for a moment I was stirred to mirth. How easy to assume Plato teaches us about truth, knowledge, something universal, some stony ediface of reality, or at least the republic. Blanchot reduces Plato to Plato. Plato does not even teach us about Platonism---that being something entirely different---but teaches us about Plato. In the cave, death “arrives from the outside into the words of the philosopher as that which reduces him in advance to silence” (35). Death penetrates the words, contaminates them. The philosopher who relied once on the medium of communicable speech, is struck dumb. To say anything becomes impossible. Writing is what remains, and perhaps does not remain. “He wrote, whether this is possible or not, but he did not speak. Such is the silence of writing” (100).

The state of aphasia---the shock renders speechless, yet implores the dumb to write. Writing that begins with the impossibility of articulation---perhaps this is the only writing of the disaster. Again: the shock of the disaster gives birth to dumb writers who scribble away because of their silence.

The desire to write hides a multiplicity (or an utter lack?) of desires, and language becomes “a contaminated process” (136). What are those desires? The desires of the western philosophical tradition which divides into binaries, the colonization and appropriation of the other in a moment of ideological blindness? Making the incomprehensible, comprehensible? Manhandling, manipulating a text? But is not all reading and writing explosive, destructive? Blanchot is aware, very aware of the violence of his text. He strips his text of pretension, uncovering the limitless pretension of writing.

Blanchot reveals his concern for the “dangerous leaning towards the sanctification of language” (110). A danger of romanticism, and furthermore of all religions? And quite importantly, a danger of philosophy. Blanchot indicts Heidegger who sanctimoniously locates language as “the house of being,” and even levinas who “accords special value to speaking” (110). This moment of surrender represents a leap of thought which sanctifies language. Blanchot finds this leap---which even levinas makes--- a dangerous jumping to conclusions. He goes to levinas, in a moment of accord, agrees that language is “in itself already skepticism” (110). Skepticism being “gaiety without laughter” (76)---a neutralizing irony which accomplishes nothing. A sort of religious solemnity which binds the author to the text and spawns a slavery. Without laughter the thought sinks in its solemnity. The vigil, the surrender to the night without darkness. Language, infiltrated by death from the start, as its own requiem, forever singing its own demise: demise writing, writing demise.

Ever present in his text is an extreme self-awareness and self-depreciation as a (non)philosophical text. Blanchot’s sense of self-mockery allows the text to diminish itself. He writes lean, sparse unpretentious (all writing as pretense, pretending) prose. He is always gesturing away from an ontological tradition which was carried away with the disaster. It no longer bears weight. Unlike levinas who overtly states his separation from the tradition, blanchot is more subtle, or less programmatic about his divorcement from the tradition, and at once, more emphatic, and more deeply exiled from the tradition. And while he is entwined in the language of philosophy, he ties it into knots with concentrated dexterity. His text moves with an unprecedented gravity. The disaster was heretofore unsaid, and remains so. Yet in the attempt to say it, he undoes western philosophy, and furthermore undoes himself. For blanchot, even levinas is stuck in the tradtition and not radical enough. Blanchot assays the unthought of thought, necessitated by the disaster. In sweeping away the philosophical rubble, the very language of discourse must be looked at critically. The atrophy of western thought; it wastes away leaving fragmentary writing—emaciated and sickly, perhaps, but finally free of the weight of the past? Or rather, is fragmentary writing so dense, so compacted and tight as to create only an illusion of a simple skeleton freed from the tradition?

Ironically, every word blanchot uses, has manifold resonances from within the very tradition that was borne away by the disaster. He is very aware of this, and he submits this within the text again and again as evidence of the text. One might ask, how successful is his attempt to think away from the tradition? Does he rely too heavily on the disaster as a moment of inevitable point departure? Is it compelling enough to be taken seriously? Does he overestimate the political devastation of language by positing an inextricable degenerative relation which become absolutist, apriori, or similarly rigid---imitating the very pontifical attitude of the western tradition he attempts to think against or beyond? A tradition which he writes to be a no longer valid, possible, or pertinent mode mode of thought, yet lurks within his own text nonetheless. Does he fall into the tyrannizing power which he takes as a departing point? And yet, he is a renegade, self-ostracized and excommunicated from that schema. His style revolts, demolishes, is demolished; he resists succumbing to the pitfalls of logic, determinism, binary oppositions. His concentrated tongue in cheek self-depreciating writing is always very aware of that danger. It is because of that danger that he must write.

Blanchot undertakes the project of undermining every basis for the presumption that language has meaning. He goes to the instinctive notion that the etymology of a word will both locate an ordinary meaning and endow words with unassailable significance. Double danger: trusting the vitality of language as a shelter, as something natural, and trusting the history of language as a “sacred depository of all lost or latent meanings” (97). and then is "nature" not just another imposition? and language--the crude tool with which we naturalize that other than nature? he locates "zeal for etymology" with a "quest for an original secret held by a first lost language"-- a secret which "handily justifies the writing imperative" (119). the predominating question of the text: why, how can we write? the writing imperative operates on the presumption that man must disclose the secret which he holds separate from all others. but it is precisely his relation to the other which is the secret (if there is a secret), a secret which "meaning hides" (120). the secret points to his pre-original primal scene of disintegration--a cyclonic event which takes place outside of temporality: anterior (always posterior) to anteriority. it is a cyclone most un-natural; nature being irrelevant to the disaster. The cyclone swallows meaning. His writing style is cyclonic. He touches on ideas with whirlwind brevity, moves on rapidly to another thought, and allows the ideas to contradict, destroy themselves. Always moving, the multiple fragments of text, the shrapnel of western thought whiz past leaving no space for elaboration. And yet in his text mediation prevails. His work is an exercise of refined concentration: achieving deliberate collapse—fragmenting into millions of discrete particles, like the pillar of salt which reaches instantaneous disintegration. The text happens disastrously. A disaster unto itself. Behind the question of writing and his technique: the disaster. The occulocentricism of our metaphors, even etymology. Could the atrophy of thought be a movement away from light, a wasting away in darkness? The materiality of language is embedded in the most innocuous of words. Which raises the question of etymology. Are not words guilty? Exculpating themselves, deceiving each other in webs of meaning.

The disaster is what remains to be said after all is said: it is what “remains without remains (the fragmentary)” (33). Maurice Blanchot’ phrase carries the resonance of the ashes, anonymous and desecrated ashes. These sterile words are all that remains of they who do not remain, who were denied even their last remains. How wrong it would be to conflate the disaster with other moments of fragmentation. How impossible not to do so. Blanchot even speaks of the concurrent Gulag experience as a part of the disaster (82-3). “How possible is it to read the disaster as synecdoche for every moment of complete disintegration—pogroms, the inquisition,, every act of genocide, every death of a starving child? But also how completely wrong to do so. To lump all horrors into one horror---or allow one horror to represent all horrors (or one disaster to represent all disasters)---robs the disaster of its singular (not particular) uniqueness. Every finite suffering subsumed under the term the disaster also fails to capture the infinity of pain in the translation of the words, disrespecting those who have suffered. The disaster—horribly divisible into infinite small sufferings. Augustinian infinitizing of the disaster could not begin to say it. Grotesque subdivision—disastrous quantification. The terms self-destruct. By eclipsing all other words in their momentary pretense of unity and wholeness, they tyrranize.

He wields the injunction “do not forgive. Forgivenessaccuses before it forgives” (53). and so does bitterness become the act of utter kindness? If to forgive is to accuse, and thus to make irredeemable, irreparable—what is it to refuse to forgive? Does it open up the possibility of redemption or reparation? Or does it short circuit, and recoil into impossibility? Does not the very act of refusing to forgive accuse itself, independent of an outside forgiver-accuser? Yielding something putrid, guilt-laden, nonetheless? So, we must flee from both forgiving (accusing) and also flee from fleeing? There is no refuge, no land. The contamination springs from the multiplicity of self-interested desires which occlude their own self-interest. In not forgiving do we not merely try to reconfigure our self as the non-accuser, an a compassion which transcends mercy. At root is an indefatigable pride---a narcissism which shows itself in every self foiling attempt at com-passion, suffering with the other?

Suicide looms with the disaster (because of the disaster?) as an ultimate impossibility. Suicide is where passivity takes action, in the realm of the forbidden. It is the “faceless secret”---separate from all projects, all knowledge, all thought. Eloi eloi lama sabachtani? It “warns us that something rings false in the dialectic, by reminding us that the child still to be killed is the child already dead and that thus, in suicide—in what we call suicide—nothing at all happens” (69). Suicide “demonstrates the undemonstrable: that in death nothing comes to pass” (70).

what does blanchot mean by the disaster? He says it “would be beyond what we understand by death or abyss” (119). it is the “experience none can undergo” (120) resonating Nietzsche's untergehen. Blanchot intones “when all is said what remains to be said is the disaster” (33)---and so this book is nothing but a skirting around what refuses saying.

Writing as an art. How do we comport ourselves towards writing when the disaster descends? Blanchot speaks of life in the camps. He notes the concerts which were sometimes held there, and the numbing forgetfulness that music has the power to conjure. He goes on: “there is a limit at which the practice of any art becomes an affront to affliction” (83). how can we begin to address the burgeoning film, theater, and literary genres which seek to encapsulate, objectify the disaster as art? To grossly capitalize on the disaster: make an industry out of Auschwitz? One might argue, is not art of this sort, the most immediate way of communicating the disaster, so that it will not be forgotten? Danger of dangers: every (artful, artificial) word we speak irreverences the unspeakable. Silence becomes complicitous. And so we stand naked and inept. Notre musique, and the silent footage of bombs dropping. Hiroshima mon amour and the mangled children.

Blanchot's discussion of hunger relocates the disaster within the most basic human needs, reverberating the materiality of language. Hunger is confounded by futility in the camps. The breakdown occurs when “dull, extinguished eyes burn suddenly with a savage gleam for a shred of bread” evn when “there is no longer any point in nourishment” (84). the gleam “does not illuminate anything living”---not the will to survive, not the persistence of the human spirit, not the strength of animal need, not anything. The dying gaze n longer allows hunger “to be related in any way to nourishment” (84). “in this ultimate moment when dying is exchanged for the life of bread,” (84) need dies. “and need exalts, it glorifies---by making it into something inhuman (withdrawn from all satisfaction)--the need of bread which has become an empty absolute where henceforth we can all only ever lose ourselves” (84). This passage wrenched my heart—exposed me, my gluttony, my struggles, my hunger. Blanchot's language stripped me of my defenses. Unworthy, as kafka's hunger artist.

How can we begin to compare the experience in the camps with our modern society of waste and hyperconsumption, where nourishment is no longer? But we have no other frame of reference. Eat from boredom, for entertainment, socializing, neuroses, never hunger. Throw away so much. Eat too much. Waste means little to us, abundance less. Likewise, words cease to nourish. We famish for meaning despite the deluge of words. We do not understand, cannot undergo.

Blnchot positions pimal scenes towards the end of his book. He adds the significant syntax. The scene is uncertain, followed by a question mark. It occurrs (hides) within parentheses a parenthetical primal scene. Sometimes the scenes occur textually in italics—an effect which distances and encapsulates them: they happen as a dream separate from the text. Perhaps the daydream (nightmare?) of the text itself?

The first primal scene occurs in a moment of extreme intimacy between author and reader. Blanchot seductively beckons us to him in his whispering italicized print “you who live later, close to a heart that beats no more, suppose, suppose this: . . . “ (72). He breaks into a description of a child looking into the sky. The child realizes the nothingness not beyond and is suffused with such happiness, such a “ravaging joy” (72) that he forevermore will live in the silence of this secret. The portrait is brief but real, gripping in its psychological exploration. The child is ravaged by the nothing. Could this be the first step in the shedding of myth---the realization of nothing in the darkness of the sky? What is the meaning of this identifiable child? Is he the child always being killed in the preceeding passage? Is he the child that we once were, or perhaps will come to be? Is he the young self-absorbed Narcissus?

In another primal scene, Blanchot glides into the myth of Narcissus with the preface “what is there that isn't narcissistic?” (125)In language, which is always self-effacing, narcissism is insidiously abundant. Every act of self-abasement, asceticism, “absolute withdrawl into the void” (125) abounds with narcissism. Every attempt at non-being belies an active being. Narcissus does not recognize himself, but an image. The “surface proximity” dissolves the “dissolution of the imaginary” which is death. And death's unstated presence in the water's “shimmering of limpid enchantment” (126) ravishes him. The myth is signal without significance, myth of fragility, transparent mystery. And yet blanchot elicits the myth's (imagined) import to be the possibility of self-creation (destruction) in regard (or disregard) for the imagined self. An image which does not pertain to the being ever illusory. No such “I”! Narcissus sees the “visible in the invisible” (134). And the schism of the self and the imagined self, unrelated to the being, prevents “sheer visibility” and “drags everything . . .into a confusion of deire and fear” (135). Much as the disaster bears away the possibility of communicating the disaster. The self is submerged in the pool. The discrete appearance of being undoes being---”undoes this me” (The Step Not Beyond, 69).

the self is borne into confusion, or into a former state of selflessness. Is this scene—a scene where nothing really happens—a disasterous scene where the self dissolves, breaks down—a primal reenactment of the disaster? Is blanchot positing the disaster as pre-temporal? Or does it annul time, or the possibility of viewing the disaster within a chronology? Is time borne away, along with selfhood, even in the most ironic sense? He calls it a primal scene. A rape? Could this be a psychological event, the first glimpse of the abyss---the disaster within, or the nothing within when the disaster befalls us? Some kind of terrible mistake embedded in the pattern of everything, renderring the world un-organizable? A terror written in every cell, every atom? And a terror terrible in every old testament and post-genocidal sense? A sort of an original impovrishment echoing the fall from grace? But an impovrishment beyond volition, a scene of discovery which is not a sin? But the disaster does not have a future (2), so how could we be harmed? And yetmaimed by this book, sent to hell.

When Narcissus looks into the pool, and sees the image of self, internalized self dissolves in the very uncanniness of the unified image. It echoes a modern and universally experienced uncanny “this is not me, this image has nothing to do with me” feeling vis-a-vis the mirror the pre-nervous breakdown moment of self-disintegration. The melancholy solipcist in tears before the mirror which assaults us with the lie of self, a finite being. The disintegration occurs ironically at the sight of the strange unicity of the image. The integrity of the image is a glassy mirage, subject to shattering. It prompts the primal recognition of the dis-unity of being. The image alienates being, reduces it to nothing. And yet is not the humanistic opposite an even greater lie, pretending a unity of beings wedding a utopic vision of integration with others who are always totally other, not-me either. And so alienated, there is no peace.

Blanchot's fragmentary writing style is undeniable infectious. The devastating failure of language implies the inconceivability of ever speaking in sentences again. The degeneration of language runs throughout twentieth century literature and philosophy and points to questions about the functioning of the mind in relation to language.blanchot's primal scene where self and language fall apart, implies a very fragmented psyche, or rather, the fragmentary functioning of the mind. Do we think in sentences? Is thought not often too diverse, too multiple and impressionistic for sentence structure? Is not sentence structure an imposition, or an affectation belonging to a mentality which seeks to order and delimit the world? The disaster has “broken every limit” (1). is not the sentence frgment and the nonsequitur a more primal mode? But blanchot would be wary of a naïve optimism seeking to return to an idyllic state fragmentary thinking. We return, if there is a return, with utmost fragility—vanquished by the disaster. The return is the imperative of the disaster, but it is the disaster which prevents a return.

How much does the text rely on the real event of the disaster? How much are the terms too other-worldly, transcending any physical or ontological correlations? Blanchot speaks of hunger, of cold, of trembling. How much language relies on the primal experience, even when claiming to transcend physical existence. A materiality of language which relies too heavily on the isolated experience of the individual, so that we will never know. “Never will you know.” While we cannot know the disaster, how does what we think we know of the disaster rely on our own personal experience of devastation, physical or psychological, which we use as a basis for imagining the disaster?

Jerusalem wanted a political savior. Is it not dangerous to allow language to become our self-fulfilling politicized messiah? A danger when language becomes political, but it can never be anything other than intimately political Blanchot interrogates the messianic hope “which is dread as well” (142):

“if political thinking becomes messianic in turn, this confusion, which removes seriousness from the search for reason (intelligibilit) inhistory---and also from the requirement of messianic thought (the realization of morality)---simply attests to a time so frightful, so dangerous that any recourse appears justified: can one maintain any distance at all when auschwitz happens? How is it possible to say auschwitz has happened?”

It happens in the present, and we cannot maintain a distance. It violates us. When any recourse becomes justified---any slaughter before the messianic hero (nti-christ?) who comes to save europa, distance becomes impossible. With messianic political thought, seriousness dissolves in the intoxication of the melodramatic “enchantment of profundity” (133). Blanchot repeats “the great audacity in thought consists in daring to be sober” but cautions against the peril of excessive sobriety: “the tempting rigor of order” (133). Has not nietzsche taught us that inebriating powers of thought and language blance on the precipice before insanity's abyss?

Is the disaster natural? Whence nature? Nature was borne away by the disaster, or was it illusion all along? In Blanchot, death is a backdrop, ever-present and defying presentation. Death is often described in terms of nature: it is natural to die: death reunites us with nature. Can we know this? While death remains problematic: “there is no death now or in the future” (69)---and is ever a fraud which the fraud of suicide exposes, cancer which is symbolic of the “refusal to respond” (70) does more. As a political phenomenon which “destroys the very idea of a program” (86), it becomes a “derangemnt more threatening than the fact of dying” (87) by giving back to death the impossibility of its being accounted for.

Blanchot uses repetition with a cunning which exposes repetition to be impossible---repetition being a stylistic illusion which belongs to the art of the rhetoricians and logicians. But in reading Blanchot the deja vu feeling is undeniable. He always seems to be echoing himelf, not to mention the thoughts of the philosophical past. The question of repetition and its impossibility recalls kierkegaard's meditation on repetition. Blanchot's text returns to certain phrases, words, and ideas, but invests those repetative refrains with a unique power which finds no precedence and does not brook repeating. The utterance of a word—anditsmeaning--is never the same. It bears a presence which belongs always to a moment never recapturable. And would not repetition be emblematic of stagnant thought? Blanchot asks, if going to the edge of thought is “possible only by changing to another thought? Whence this injunction: do not change your thought, repeat it, if you can” (4). And while history is shattered by the disaster, words nevertheless carry a theoretical cargo in history. Blanchot advises that this theoretical freight yields resonances potentially dangerous, and so words to avoid (repeating) include “finally all words” (87).

in writing this paper I scribble a note to myself---advice I aquired in philosophy 100 class: be wary of the use of every, never, all, and also always. But with the disaster every rule falls apart, and interestingly blanchot uses, and repeats, these disturbingly all-inclusive words. They speak a finality of thought; they close off and limit. The threat of the disaster has “broken every every limit” (1), but the writing of the disaster seems at times to reinstate limits at every turn. Could it be that blanchot, in using such totalizing language at times, is striving to show the emptiness and futility of those very terms, exposing them as a farce, in its attempts at seriousness, becomes all the more ridiculous? How are we to take this seeming contradiction? Could it be that in proliferating limit after limit often to the point of contradiction, the limits cancel each other, growing and killing like cancer? And so blanchot in madly erecting limits, turns out to have built a house of cards which collapses insantaneously.

Exploration of the question of death in Maurice Blanchot's The Step Not Beyond and Writing the Disaster is always a movement in the inerim---a place of unceasing motion where all stops still, dies in life. The “still point (=god) in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, is the centerless point around which life runs circles, producing a Dante-esque concentric series of rings. Eliot, as modernism's prophet of oblivion, delineated a paradoxical fixity without center which bears similarity to the place not a place where the disaster might be said to occur. Blanchot's expression for this interim “the circle, uncurled along a straight line rigorously prolonged, reforms the circle bereft of center” (2) exceeds eliot as the project of writing th disaster would demand. Blanchot embeds each word with a paradox. The center is no god. There is no center of chaos---could a center be possible? Could the centerlessness ever find space for a center—however arbitrary, off-kilter, de-centered it might be? Would it matter? In the step not beyond, blanchot meditates on fear in relation to death: “the collapsed center of empty fear. Fear, that which does not have death as its limit, even the infinite death of others; nevertheless, I am afraid for the others who are afraid of dying, who will die without me” (57-8).

Heideggarian being towards death is always in the foreground of Blanchot's discussion of death. Blanchot quite viciously attacks heidegger at oints (“the disaster takes care of everything” [3]), but nonetheless heidegger's encounters with the thoughts of death and dying yield important discoveries about the difference between thinking death and the actual dying. Blanchot continues and radicalizes the interrogation of how we think of death, and moreover how possible is it to think death in the first place. Blanchot imports death to be the ultimate unknowable.

Simplicity of ignorance: when we speak of death, are we not being, to put it crudely, presumptuous? Similarly, how can we speak of another's death? We could say provisionally, with reservation, we speak of death for the sake of discourse or exploration, but is there not already in the very utterance a presumption that we know something about it? An appropriation implicit in the most provisional of discourse which skirts irreverence, not in a christian sense (however impossible it is to escape)? Is not the utterance of death, made always and only by the living, a question? Death? Death has told us nothing of death . . . not in any way to sanctify the word, or make it into a mantra, or endow it with ultimate unspeakableness. But is not the speaking of death utterly questionable? Writing as the space where utterance fails and all writing is writing of death or away from death. The saying does not defeat the said, but in mutual inadequacy they enter into relation. Relations being ultimately futile.

Eliot's Unreal City in the wasteland. In The Step Not Beyond the city is “completely foreign to the idea that one could die in it,” yet blanchot says, breaking into the first person “i crossed it, as one passes distractedly over the graves in a cemetary” (83). The city, always living, becomes a site not of death, but of incessant dying---amass grave where the living are buried, bury thems. Discussion of location (rare in Blanchot)---the city as the interim—a da for the disaster.

It is crucial not to conflate death with dying. Ironic: as though the word dying is any more precise, or any less totalizing. Heidegger draws out the use of the word death to totalize dying, the corpse, the living person that was, the memory of the survivors, into a unified concept. Not blanchot's project but he moves with this in mind always. Never to conflate the corpse with the person who was living, or my death with the death of any (and every) other.

Blanchot's discussion of suicide. Pivotal question for this century. A political act. Suicide as a statement. As not a statement—an attribution which glorifies it—expands it to a greater meaning. Not a statement but an act. Or a moment of ultimate inaction, total indecision. Suicide as suicide. Nothing more, especially not a barometer of anything, but how to resist imposing meaning on it. To be or not to be, a less important than being towards the other, (never) a simple act of avoidance which displaces the primacy of that relation with the narcissistic romance of thanatos. The question of the da—gas chamber, an unreal city: a place (a there) where there is not meaning, where meaning exterminates itself. And yet there is no place for the disaster to take place (2). a place that is a now.

***

Words like shackles, bleats, cries to be fed, cries for comfort, when knowledge ever eludes, and love or succor, the last desire, so similar to the desire for dissolution in death, dissolution in love, in the other.

****

As for words---corridors of lost books, prospero and the last year in marienbad, and burning words, acid words, names, deciphering decoding discriminating words, lost burnt, digitized, books alight, illuminated manuscripts, preserve of the priors, privilege of learned classes, forbidden to women, or slaves, literacy and genocide, words like blood to support life, words to aid the dying.

****

as a second part, post trauma, to write, out of emptiness, as head throbs and angst ties me to my cage, and then to imagine beckett in the resistance. writing the resistance, mind/body dualisms, colonial ireland, stupefactions, absurdities, french, and new silences more meaningful than before, penury, the honest luck of being passed over, undead, the ungassed, the vegetable smugglers, the certain death no matter whose, a crony says the lost ones, and i'll wait at the endgame where the rubbish bin's texts for nothing, good for nothing textes pour rien helped ferry me across the great wordlessness only language and hunger could bring. imposters imposition of question and the binary stamp links rechts, off and now. it was a privilege, in december to wait out the mementos, with eachother so keenly arraigned, in california, sitting calmly like the dna of friends lost to other lands. there, and beckett gouged my eyes, or mitigated the death of academia, which followed a death of god, and preceded a death of physical safety.

so little leave yet now to die, i wonder what might, but the other in congo, obsession, obsess me, futile penetrating gazes, the dachau sister last words, last look, critical code. to ferry me to tomorrow, wherein i might help you out of your pain, the pain wrapped around you so tightly like a bandage on burnt skin, submission. i submit, obey, silently, i lie, i believe. i pretend to believe, that you might give me another day of gulag hunger dysentery, death on an installment plan, futility and one word on a wall:mute. forever mute to you the way you'd take me mute and dying, or fighting and screaming, to remind you that you too are alive in the hiroshima aftermath, and neither of us hang from trees, in the horror of the blood noon reverie, and copulation's curse but another pendulum's drift. moon struck us absurdly in the fancy of his daytime hour, waiting for nothing with ashen words, and good fridays, and another plath suicide, matronymic, pater familias.

unwrite me all these stories like a ball of yarn unspun, unsay this mayhem upon us, undo this curse, philosophize beauty back into existence when art was never a mistake, an affront to the dead or undead. at finnegan's wake, be we drunk or dreaming clearly the ameneusis was petered out by syllables and broke away. ev told me he would walk the cold corners of the montparnasse. beckett, know of more than blanchot. mysteries, biographies, and biographies die, one every 3.6 seconds of hunger, and get shipped home in body bags, and get written in surname, name short verse on stone walls by forgetful people. could we have a wailing wall for the congo, for bosnia, for the minds blasted through torture in guantanamo, oscar grant oakland. if i wrote your name, might we carry on another day to hear a song? music, an optimism, i can rarely fake, a requirement of the new holocausts, soundtracks, machine guns, killers, killers all.

complicity/resistance binaries, ignorance.

tales told by fools, and no man's land, every possible cliche, in every tongue in lieu of i love you.

silence as gift, and there hungry on the mountain intoxicated by air and wormwood, maniacal egotism gives a behest, encouraged by its solipcisms, another breath of smoke. in the acid land of a techno rattle where the good art bakes in the sun on the street and even blindness cannot hide poverty from me, and what i have read, the telegrams roosavelt ignored, as he sent ships back to wander the eternal diaspora, like birds off land, climate refugees, the generations colonial output, health and wealth of nations, and cleansing of an ethnos.

a woman, i loved, as keenly was to her that nonsense making me worthy of hate and therefrom the silence of repression did not undo the nazikiss of it all, all i'm saying, and i some kind of good german with friends speaking hate all over the marketplace like senile sun-crazed lunatics in the outdoor asylum, forgiveness welling up like a giant tear, until one day the bestial quality of it all overtook me, and no more, flee on your donkey anne. herr doctor, i know why poets put their heads in ovens, if you ask me the homicide is a slow annihilation beginning with the willful star you sew to my arm's bare flesh, tagged, tagged, genderized, hated, next in line, with a head on the block, and furiously running on the hamster wheel to a certain death, primate torturer, you.

when you gave me the diploma, reading"incomprehensible verbal pollution" and "crass, underhanded, venomous, vampire" clearly i was wrong. to sit there as you sewed stars to every corner of me, and told me i was "no fun" for not liking it, or that you were lonely. how was i to help? forty days, or a year, i'm sickly running straight into the certain holocausts of unknown era, and my rags, and civilized poverty, have no meaning towards the evenings fresh sapporo, and newest applications, and fossil fuels, marriages, money matters, lipstick crises, etc.

emptier than ever before, this word heap cancelled out all language, and helped me towards a law of light and sparks, and how i made it through last summer with caleb's barbed wire arm and star of david, lebanon, and how i was almost human then. so humanizing to have a friend, through this thicket of packet switchers and compressed files and deleted numbers, when the friendship willed one deeply into my mind and heart so that the night sky with diamond stars promised maybe something better tomorrow, and fatigue, after all.

the animal faces await, so cutely tied up as before. i know i must fight against the permanent adjustments, as the last came off bad, and surely dylan thomas and his liver had enough. and we of him? and virginia to learn greek? and tilda and sally, he would speak of us in our presence as if we weren't there . . .

yes . . . off now to other wars, and there will be writing after writing and after wars, and chomskies, and bliskis and spectrials and so stand new ways to meter out the shortcode momentary reality. genocide. today. in our hands. texting unicef thirst, texts for nothing, or little, but i love a lad, and hope for the young, oh but slightly, as a scribe, and kafka's burnt papers to keep us warm, at night, in sudan, and the fear of rape or death, which worse?

the first part was written for a class with idit dobbs-weinstein in 1997 april.

i used to fantasize about expanding it to include mind/body dualism obsessed, and writing obsessed "texts for nothing" by samuel beckett, and look at both the works in original french manuscripts and in so doing,  explore textual nuances, as well as biographical mythologies of the artists/writers.

a gulag, holocaust understanding of writing on the web as interconnected to the immediate atrocities of genocide, war, famine, and ecocide as we now complicitously permit them to unfold. as a child dies, how is the luxury of writing a affront to suffering? art, an "affront to affliction"? is writing crime, catalyst, irrelevant?