{"id":835,"date":"2016-10-17T14:06:15","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T18:06:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=835"},"modified":"2016-10-18T14:17:09","modified_gmt":"2016-10-18T18:17:09","slug":"annelies-schulte-nordholt-blanchot-and-nietzsche-full-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/annelies-schulte-nordholt-blanchot-and-nietzsche-full-text\/","title":{"rendered":"Annelies Schulte Nordholt: Blanchot and Nietzsche (full text)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"monoblue\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Annelies Schulte Nordholt<\/strong><\/p>\n

The title of our session is \u2018Blanchot\u2019s Nietzschean inspiration.\u201d And certainly Blanchot was reading Nietzsche as early as the 1930ies \u2013 he was one of the rare French thinkers who were fluent in German. Still, our aim today is not to determine how Nietzsche may have influenced or inspired Blanchot, we will leave that \u2013 huge \u2013 task to historians of philosophy. It may seem surprising that there is no solid study on that subject today. This is probably due to the idiosyncratic character of Blanchot\u2019s work, which stands on the crossing point between literature and philosophy. This makes a traditional philosophical approach slightly questionable. Blanchot is a thinker and writer with a questioning and a method entirely his own. His great question is: how is literature possible? What\u2019s at stake in literary writing? He elaborates this question both in novels and in literary criticism. His essays are the best known part of his work. It is a continuous dialogue with a great variety of authors: writers like H\u00f6lderlin, Baudelaire, Mallarm\u00e9, Rimbaud, Rilke, Kafka, Proust, Ren\u00e9 Char and Marguerite Duras but also philosophers, especially Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Levinas. This vast pantheon of names makes clear that it would be hard to read Blanchot through an exclusively Nietzschean filter.<\/p>\n

So the question is not whether Blanchot\u2019s reading of\u00a0Nietzsche is hermeneutically correct but what intuitions of Nietzsche\u2019s he resonates with and how they inform his own thought. Let me first try to briefly formulate two of these resonance points or crossings. One is on Blanchot\u2019s and Nietzsche\u2019s thematic, the other is on their style of thinking.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The first point is what we could call the experience of nihilism, or negativity: a collapse or exhaustion of all transcendent meaning. In Nietzschean terms this is the all invading intuition that \u2018God is dead\u2019. Biographically, one should know that Blanchot was originally a fervent Catholic. He lost faith in the 1930ies; the strongest testimony of this experience is his first novel, Thomas l\u2019obscur<\/em> (<\/em>1941). Here, the collapse of transcendent meaning is experienced by the main character as a radical loss of the self, a depersonalization which makes him fall into night and absence.<\/li>\n
  2. The second crossing point is Blanchot\u2019s intuition that nihilism is experienced pre-eminently in art, more particularly in literature or what he calls \u2018writing\u2019 : l\u2019\u00e9criture. Therefore, for Blanchot, literature is not only the core of his questioning but also the medium of it. Literature and art have a privileged relationship to nihilism. This is another common point with Nietzsche, for whom art and especially poetry \u2013 rather than philosophy – become the first knowledge, they \u201care there to liberate us from truth\u201d. As a poet-thinker, who, especially in Zarathoustra<\/em>, dramatizes philosophical thought, Nietzsche certainly was an important figure for Blanchot, whose work also belongs both to literature and to philosophy.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So let me sum up the gesture of Blanchot\u2019s work, in Nietzschean terms: literature as a descent into the deepest pits of nihilism, of \u2018the death of God\u2019. Could it also \u2013 but I state this in the form of a question \u2013 be a way of coming to terms with nihilism, of going beyond it? From his earliest works to The Writing of Disaster, <\/em>Blanchot obsessively worked on the question: what survives after the ruin of everything? Does anything survive after the ruin of everything?\u00a0 In order to better understand this question, I will give a short \u2018topos\u2019 on Blanchot\u2019s\u00a0 questioning of literature and then focus on a single question: his conception of the specific temporality of writing in its relation to Nietzsche\u2019s Eternal Return.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. The epigraphs of The Infinite Conversation<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Let us try to better understand Blanchot\u2019s questioning, and look at the first pages of The Infinite Conversation,<\/em> : the epigraphs and the opening Note. The book opens with a page displaying five epigraphs. Three of them, the middle ones, are auto quotations from \u00a0The Infinite Conversation <\/em>itself. Each of them announces a key feature of the book, but the first and the last quotation \u2013 by Mallarm\u00e9 and Nietzsche –\u00a0 are the crucial ones. They strategically encircle the other three. We could also say that they encircle \u2013 they open and close \u2013 the entire book, with all its more than 400 pages. Blanchot thus places his book under the double sign of Mallarm\u00e9 and Nietzsche, which is a strong rhetorical gesture. Moreover, the two quotes seem to point in the same direction.<\/p>\n

      For Mallarm\u00e9, poetry, literature is \u201cthis mad game of writing: \u201cce jeu insens\u00e9 d\u2019\u00e9crire\u201d. In this formula, the first thing to note is the infinitive \u2018\u00e9crire\u2019, takes on an unusual, intransitive meaning: to write not as writing something, but as writing tout court, as the \u00a0process of writing, its \u2018experience\u2019. This is what Blanchot is after, as opposed to the finished product of writing: the Book, the literary Work (l\u2019oeuvre). But on the other hand, it is only in existing books \u2013 and in one\u2019s own writing – , that this experience may be pursued. This explains what I said earlier, that literature is both his object of research and the medium of it.<\/p>\n

      In this process of writing, an experience unheard of reveals itself, because writing is a \u2018jeu insens\u00e9\u2019. Now \u2018insens\u00e9\u2019 does not only mean \u2018mad\u2019 (as the English translation has it) but also, literally, \u201cwithout meaning\u2019, like a meaningless word. This refers to Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s and Blanchot\u2019s conviction that in literary language, words have no fixed, no a priori meaning, but that they create meaning in their successive movement. The word \u2018jeu\u2019, in turn, does not only mean \u2018game\u2019 but it is also connected with the expression \u2018mettre en jeu\u2019, to put at stake. In the introductory Note, Blanchot repeats his overall question: \u201cWhat is at stake in the fact that something like art or literature exists?\u201d (IC VII).<\/p>\n

      But before we turn to that question, what about the Nietzsche quote? It seems to echo the Mallarm\u00e9 phrase. \u201cSpeaking is a fine madness; with it, man dances over and above all things.\u201d It is taken from Zarathustra <\/em>(chap. \u2018Der Genesende),<\/em> from his speech to the serpent and the eagle. This passage is an ode on the virtues of language and on words. In the end, Zarathustra\u2019s favourite animals respond by stating the Eternal return of everything: \u201cEverything goes and comes back. Everything dies and comes into bloom again.\u201d By quoting the line about speaking as a divine madness, Blanchot thus implicitly announces the importance that Eternal Return will take in his book. <\/em>More explicitly, he announces several key features of The Infinite Conversation<\/em>: the stress on \u2018speaking\u2019 points to his experimentation with \u2018conversation\u2019 (entretien) as a means to go beyond monolithic forms of speech; the word \u2018madness\u2019 (in both the Nietzsche and the Mallarm\u00e9 quote) , points to Blanchot\u2019s \u2013 nietzschean \u2013 critic of Reason and western metaphysics; the word \u2018dance\u2019, in the end, resonates with Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s \u2018game\u2019 . And of course both quotes implicitly refer to the main topic of the 400 pages that will follow: the idea \u2013 and experience \u2013 of writing as a force, an exigency going beyond discourse, beyond language, towards \u201cpossibilities that are entirely other\u201d (XII), towards difference.<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. The introductory Note of IC<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Let us now turn to the introductory Note of IC. Here, Blanchot\u2019s main questioning is formulated in an extraordinarily dense and bold way. Writing \u2013 as the infinitive wants to express \u2013 is not something given, the corpus of literature as we know it, but it is a movement, a force of contestation, of refusal, a violent force, bringing \u00a0everything into question. Let us read together a central passage of it:<\/p>\n

        \u201cthrough its own slowly liberated force<\/strong> (the aleatory force of absence<\/strong>), [writing] seems to devote itself solely to itself as something that remains without identity<\/strong>, and little by little brings forth possibilities that are entirely other<\/strong>: an anonymous<\/strong>, distracted, deferred [diff\u00e9r\u00e9e], and dispersed way of being in relation<\/strong>, by which everything is brought into question<\/strong> \u2013 and first of all the idea of God, of the Self, of the Subject, then of Truth and the One, then finally the idea of the Book and the Work<\/strong> \u2013 so that this writing [\u2026] far from having the Book as its goal rather signals its end: a writing that could be said to be outside discourse, outside language<\/strong>.\u201d (IC, XII)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

        I will try to comment a few of these terms, that I put in bold in the text:<\/p>\n

        1) writing as a \u201cforce of absence<\/strong>\u201d: to understand this, we must recall the crucial essay Blanchot wrote twenty years earlier, \u2018Literature and the right to death\u201d (1949), where he states that writing is a force of negativity affecting everything: language, the self and reality with its coordinates of space and time. As a force of negativity, writing upsets, or unsettles all these levels of human experience. It turns them inside out, showing what B calls their \u2018other version\u2019. He has elaborated this in innumerable commentaries of Mallarm\u00e9, Kafka, Artaud and many others.<\/p>\n

        2) \u00a0the self :<\/strong> all these authors experienced writing as an autonomous force, with no goal except itself [\u201cit devotes itself solely to itself] and also that writing implies a depersonalisation of the author, a loss of identity and of the self.\u00a0 This is again the experience of Thomas l\u2019obscur<\/em>, that I mentioned in the beginning. Blanchot demonstrates it most clearly with Mallarm\u00e9, who famously states in one his letters: \u201cje suis parfaitement mort\u201d: it is not I who is speaking in my poems, but an anonymous voice. This also has to do with the experience that, once the book is written, it dismisses its author.<\/p>\n

        3) language, reality and Truth:<\/strong> \u00a0writing also turns inside out current, instrumental language \u2013 what Blanchot calls discourse: the language of representation, tending towards identity and unity . Writing is an endless force of negativity and absence; going beyond the meaning of words, writing turns them into material entities, made of sound and rhythm. Language thus has a nihilist vocation, but the most striking thing is that, at the extreme point of annihilation, what one encounters is not nothingness, death, but being, endless being or the bare fact of existing.<\/p>\n

        4) In writing, the world becomes absent; writing points to what B called the Outside (\u2018le dehors\u2019) That is why writing is \u201coutside discourse<\/strong>\u201d and even \u201coutside language\u201d. The verb \u00e9crire used intransitively shows that writing is no longer an action aimed at a result (that is, a book). That is why writing \u201csignals the end of the Book<\/strong>\u201d, of the Work in general, it belongs to what Blanchot calls the \u2018d\u00e9soeuvrement\u2019. This word currently means idleness, literally being out of work.<\/p>\n

        Literature is a world of images and words. It is the Imaginary, where things exist as shadows, images. In the Imaginary, there is no such thing as Truth, there is only error. Here, the rules of space and time do no longer apply. Time has become an empty time, without events, made of endless repetition. This is where Nietzsche\u2019s Eternal Return becomes a touchstone for Blanchot, in his attempt to think the specific temporality of writing.<\/p>\n

        Before we go into that last point, let me briefly return to our quote: \u00a0in it, all terms \u2013 God, the Self, the Subject, Truth, the One, the Book – are in a way equivalent. They stand for the same instance of western metaphysics. Blanchot\u2019s most original move is probably the idea that writing is a refusal or contestation \u2013 we could also say a deconstruction – of the power of metaphysics.<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Writing and the Eternal Return<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Blanchot\u2019s essays on Nietzsche think through his main concepts, from the Will to power to the Last man, to nihilism but no notion resonates so strongly with him as the Eternal Return. To my view, there are mainly two reasons for that. Firstly, it provides him with a tool to conceive the strange temporality that is specific to writing. And two, but that\u2019s a hypothesis, the Eternal Return might be a way out of Nihilism. As we have just seen, literature points to the Outside, where everything lapses into its image, into absence. Out there, time is no longer the time of daily life in the world, where \u00a0things and beings are present, or where events are \u00a0expected or remembered. The time of the world is the dialectics where things are realized; this also means that they are finite; they are born and will die one day.<\/p>\n

          The temporality that is experienced in writing is altogether different; there everything falls into what Blanchot calls \u2018the absence of time\u2019. This is not a very happy expression since it wrongly suggests some timeless realm of eternity, where all time would be suspended. This is not at all the case. What is missing here is not time itself, but the present: it is a temporality \u201cwithout present, without presence\u201d (EL 32). But presence is precisely what makes it possible for something to come into existence and to end. So if presence falls out of time, then nothing will any longer be able to pass, everything will itself \u00a0in its absence, and persevere in it. This is precisely the way things exist as their images, in art and literature. So the temporality of writing – Blanchot does not tire to repeat it – \u00a0is endlessness, it is \u2018the incessant\u2019; out there, things and beings are liable to endless return, to what he calls \u2018the impossibility to die\u201d. In the realm of writing, there is no such thing as progress; there is only return and repetition.<\/p>\n

          At this point, we can see why Blanchot was so fascinated by Nietzsche\u2019s notion of Eternal Return. In a passage of The Infinite Conversation<\/em>, he wonders why the Eternal Return is such an anguishing, disquieting thought for Nietzsche, in Zarathustra<\/em> (IC 148-151). You may remember how, in Zarathustra<\/em>, the dwarf sits on the shoulder of Zarathustra and points out to him the eternal circularity of time: time itself is circular, we are imprisoned in it, we are powerless in front of time. The dwarf is the spirit of weightiness, that Zarathustra is fighting against.\u00a0 This is the fatalistic conception of time that he tries to transform, in particular in the Nachtwandlerlied<\/em>. Here, the ugliest man says to Zarathustra: \u201cWas this it, life? Then let me say to death: come on, let us start all over again!\u201d In other words: please give me the Eternal Return, please let me live my life once more. Nietzsche thus affirms that we must joyfully accept the Eternal Return, celebrate it because it is not the return of the same, but of eternal change, it is life itself.\u00a0 Now this vitalistic message is altogether absent in Blanchot. For him, Nietzsche\u2019s great discovery is that the Eternal Return, although it is at the heart of nihilism, does not affirm the nothingness of everything, but states being itself, in its most basic sense. And this is what makes the Eternal Return so frightening. He quotes Nietzsche saying: \u201cLet us think this thought in its most terrible form: : existence, as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness : the eternal recurrence\u201d (IC, 149). The profound truth of the Eternal Return is that it is not tied to nothingness, but to being, and states that being is inescapable, that \u201cnothing ends, everything begins again; that the other is still the same.\u201d (IC 149). \u00a0This implies that there may be no refutation to nihilism, except the affirmation of it, with a Nietzschean \u2018Yes\u2019.<\/p>\n

          In the other essay about the Eternal Return \u2013 \u201cOn a change of epoch\u201d- Blanchot wonders what this affirmation may mean. Is Eternal Return \u201cthe affirmation itself, the affirmation that only affirms\u201d(EI 409), in other words, is it an empty affirmation? But what precisely recurs in eternal return (of recurrence)? \u00a0For Blanchot, in Eternal return, it is only return that recurs, but that which returns is never the same, because repetition itself produces difference. The movement of repetition always implies a shifting, however slight, a displacement, a deferring. Therefore the Eternal return is not a circular, sterile movement, but it is life itself, and here B is in perfect harmony with Nietzsche. Nevertheless, \u00a0in their conception of life, Blanchot and Nietzsche seem quite far apart: Nietzsche conceives it extrovertly, in terms of dance and singing, and of dithyrambic life, but for Blanchot it is the affirmation of life at the most basic level of existence, where living is equivalent to a permanent dying, to sufferance and unhappiness (these are important themes in IC).<\/p>\n

          The quote from Nietzsche about existence as recurring inevitably, without ever attaining nothingness, is so important for Blanchot because it expresses the core of what the experience of literature is about. Literature, as I\u2019ve tried to show, is a radical experience for Blanchot: \u00a0it is a language where the world lapses into an everlasting absence, which is equivalent to existence itself. He thus thinks nihilism to the end, but is he also taking us beyond it? This is one of the questions we may discuss.<\/p>\n

          Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          By Annelies Schulte Nordholt The title of our session is \u2018Blanchot\u2019s Nietzschean inspiration.\u201d And certainly Blanchot was reading Nietzsche as early as the 1930ies \u2013 he was one of the rare French thinkers who were fluent in German. Still, our… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51935],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-3-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}