{"id":948,"date":"2016-11-07T17:04:59","date_gmt":"2016-11-07T22:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=948"},"modified":"2017-03-31T13:33:00","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T17:33:00","slug":"jiwon-hahn-the-play-of-plurality-and-temporality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/jiwon-hahn-the-play-of-plurality-and-temporality\/","title":{"rendered":"Jiwon Hahn | The Play of Plurality and Temporality"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jiwon Hahn<\/strong><\/p>\n

Employing Nietzsche\u2019s concept of eternal return, Maurice Blanchot explores the temporality of writing, reading, and speaking as well as their plurality and relationship to self.<\/p>\n

In Blanchot\u2019s view, Zarathustra\u2019s announcement of the God\u2019s death marks both the birth of nihilism and of men\u2019s creative power. Negating the one Truth is a \u00ab\u00a0r\u00e9volte\u00a0\u00bb[1]<\/a> which allows men to create meanings instead of finding one. Thus, men who now can \u00ab\u00a0se conna\u00eetre dans ses vraies limites\u00a0\u00bb and \u00ab\u00a0devenir pleinement responsable de lui-m\u00eame\u00a0\u00bb has now become \u00ab\u00a0cr\u00e9ateur\u00a0\u00bb (290-1). This is why Nietzschean atheism in Blanchot\u2019s view is \u00ab\u00a0l\u2019affirmation de l\u2019homme\u00a0\u00bb (290). At the same time, nihilism is defined as absence of any a priori <\/em>meaning, as a state where \u201crien sur quoi l\u2019homme puisse s\u2019appuyer, rien qui vaille autrement que par le sens, \u00e0 la fin suspend, qu\u2019on lui donne.\u201d(217)[2]<\/a> As a result of the revolt, Blanchot imagines there being blank pages where men are free ot write new Genesis. Consequently, text becomes the metaphor of the world: \u201cPensant le monde, Nietzsche le pense comme un texte\u2026C\u2019est une m\u00e9taphore\u00a0\u00bb (248). The first speech that generates subsequent text\/world in this case would be Zarathustra\u2019s uttering of \u201cGod is dead.\u201d This beginning is an exact opposite of the biblical Genesis: as God created men in his shape, men killed God by sharing with him their mortality. Nietzsche has thus replaced the writer of the very first text.<\/p>\n

Yet the tabula rasa, <\/em>to remain as such, requires constant contradiction, negation and difference that keeps defying new one Truth from being found and settled. Consequently, Blanchot\u2019s nihilistic state represents the celebration of plurality of men when the singularity of God has fallen. However, Blanchot\u2019s pluralism is not as simple or numerical. His \u00ab\u00a0\u00e9trange\u00a0\u00bb plurality is \u00ab\u00a0sans pluralit\u00e9 ni unit\u00e9, que la parole de fragment porte en elle comme la provocation du langage, celui qui parle encore lorsque tout a \u00e9t\u00e9 dit\u00a0\u00bb (232). This unique plurality translates into Blanchot\u2019s idea of plural speech. The fragmentary speeches never succeed to form a dialogue, communication, or delivery of meaning. Instead, one of the two interlocutors is the Other or Autrui, <\/em>the unknown and the unknowable (320). As a result, the plural speech \u201cexc\u00e8de toute communaut\u00e9 et elle n\u2019est pas destin\u00e9e \u00e0 rien comuniquer, ni \u00e0 \u00e9tablir entre deux \u00eatres un rapport commun, f\u00fbt-ce par l\u2019interm\u00e9diaire de l\u2019inconnu.\u201d (216). By saying that plural speech exceeds all community, Blanchot defines community as people who share a coherent system of meaning and language.<\/p>\n

While his usage of parole <\/em>is not limited to oral speech, Blanchot begins differentiating between parole <\/em>and \u00e9criture<\/em> in L\u2019Entretien infini <\/em>and further develops it in Le pas au-del\u00e0. <\/em>The text, not speech, was the metaphor of the world and it was speech that was plural, since this plurality is defined as \u201ccelui qui parle<\/em> encore lorsque tout a \u00e9t\u00e9 dit\u00a0\u00bb (232) (emphasis added). In Le pas au- del\u00e0<\/em>, Blanchot further mentions that \u201c[l]a parole est toujours parole d\u2019autorit\u00e9\u00a0\u00bb, \u00ab\u00a0nul sceptre pour celui qui \u00e9crit, f\u00fbt-il d\u00e9guis\u00e9 en b\u00e2ton de mendiant\u00a0: nul appui et nul cheminement.\u00a0\u00bb (67)[3]<\/a> Supposing that speech requires a scepter appears that speech always require the presence of the listener who shares the present where the words are being said, since the authority to be respected, heard and uninterrupted attaches to the scepter. In fact, Zarathustra did not have such scepter in a typical sense, but he almost always had a listener since he is the speaker, whether it be people, students, or animals. However, Blanchotian autrui <\/em>interrupts the speech, making it plural and meaningless. Perhaps this is why Zarathustra\u2019s voice diminished towards the end, after realizing the impossibility of making the listener understand. As a result, language as a medium of meaning fails, becomes obscure and ceases to serve as the light in traditional western metaphysics. The failure of communication again invites the thought of singularity and plurality.<\/p>\n

Zarathustra needed others because his speech needed to be heard in order to materialize outside his self, but misunderstanding of his speech renders him irrevocably solitary. However, the solitude does not, in Blanchot\u2019s view, justify his truth as being superior to the others. Instead, the new plurality cradles singularities without ever resolving them. The overman emerges from the tension among contradicting singularities, according to Blanchot, since the overman is the one who can will this meaninglessness: \u201cLe surhomme est celui en qui le n\u00e9ant se fait vouloir et qui maintient, libre pour la mort, cette essence pure de sa volont\u00e9 en voulant le n\u00e9ant. Ce serait le nihilisme m\u00eame\u00a0\u00bb (EI, <\/em>222). In the plurality\/singularity context, the overman is\u00a0thus someone who wills this solitude, of being misunderstood, as well as misunderstanding the others, the multitude.<\/p>\n

Blanchot differentiates writing from speech, since writing \u00ab\u00a0n\u2019est l\u00e0 que pour conserver\u00a0\u00bb (PA, <\/em>47). As Professor Nordholt remarked, \u201cNietzsche\u2019s Eternal Return becomes a touchstone for Blanchot, in his attempt to think the specific temporality of writing\u201d which is \u201caltogether different [from the time of the world].\u201d[4]<\/a> Writing is similar to speech since \u201c[a]u bord de l\u2019\u00e9criture\u201d one is \u201ctoujours oblig\u00e9 de vivre sans toi\u201d (15) which reminds the absence of the known and knowable interlocutor whose place autrui <\/em>has taken. But it is the temporality of writing that invites the concept of Eternal Return since Blanchot\u2019s writing interrupts and breaks the temporal circle by making present simply absent: \u201cce qui fut \u00e9crit au pass\u00e9 sera lu \u00e0 l\u2019avenir, sans qu\u2019aucun rapport de pr\u00e9sence puisse s\u2019\u00e9tablir entre <\/em>\u00e9criture et lecture\u201d (46-7). Thus texts will be written and read, in past and in future respectively, regardless of what takes place in the present. Yet nihilism is \u201ccelui qui parle encore lorsque tout a \u00e9t\u00e9 dit\u201d (EI, <\/em>232), and as a result, the absence does not stop the movement and the irresolvable plurality is perpetuated. When Blanchot writes that \u201cl\u2019absence de pr\u00e9sent sous la forme simplifi\u00e9e de l\u2019oubli\u201d (27), his temporality of writing sounds similar to that of Proust, who suffered from and wrote on the impossibility to close a full circle between the writing self and the written self. The critical difference between the two derives from the presence and absence of self. While Proust explored the time through the means of his own biographical time and writing, Blanchot writes: that \u201cil n\u2019y a pas de biographie pour la graphie\u00a0\u00bb (51). But Blanchot is not blind to the fear of inevitably making one\u2019s text into a book, a canon, and as a result, a part of the tradition or system of Western metaphysics.<\/p>\n

Eternal return is the mechanism with which one does not (en)close the book, in Blanchot\u2019s view. As the eternal return rendered men to keep surpassing the unsurpassable, keep finding meaning which is meaningless, the writer\/man can access dehors <\/em>which is not necessarily \u201cover\u201d text in a vertical hierarchical sense, but certainly outside the \u201climit\u201d of limit-experience. Professor Nordholt elaborates that \u201c[this] is why writing \u2018signals the end of the Book,\u2019 of the Work in general, it belongs to what Blanchot calls the \u2018d\u00e9soeuvrement.\u2019\u201d The word \u201ceternal\u201d appears to eliminate the temporal limit, but the word \u201creturn\u201d presupposes a solid limit drawn between \u201cre\u201d and \u201cturn,\u201d the limit which is reached before the turning occurs. This limit where \u201cle passage du Non au Oui\u201d (EI, <\/em>225) occurs is also the one between singularity and plurality because \u201cle \u00ab\u00a0re\u00a0\u00bb du retour inscrit comme l\u2019\u00a0\u00ab\u00a0ex\u00a0\u00bb, ouverture de toute ext\u00e9riorit\u00e9\u201d in not only spatial sense of exterior, but also \u201cl\u2019exil\u201d (PA<\/em>, 49).<\/p>\n

Blanchot, by making the text a metaphor of the world, renders the writer as the creator of the nihilist world. Yet the strange plurality requires this writer to be anonymous, solitary and misunderstood. The absence of presence and self in writing, though ideal in Blanchot\u2019s interpretation of eternal return, is difficult in reality since perfect anonymity as a writer is impossible to achieve, just like the speaker is identified immediately when he speaks. The act of writing assumes communication and community, though perhaps not in the present as in the speech so that one does not need a scepter. Blanchot begins with such assumption by starting Le pas au-del\u00e0 <\/em>with the phrase \u201cEntrons dans ce rapport\u201d (7), but liberates himself and readers from this \u201crapport\u201d by ending the book with the phrase \u201cLib\u00e8re-moi de la trop longue parole\u201d (187). Liberty from meaning and time makes the reader of Blanchot to enact the mise-en-ab\u00eeme<\/em> of eternal return via trying to find meaning and beginning the \u201crapport\u201d all over again.<\/p>\n

\n

Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Maurice Blanchot, \u00ab Du c\u00f4t\u00e9 de Nietzche\u00a0\u00bb, La part du feu <\/em>(Gallimard, 1949), pp. 289-301. Referred to as PF.<\/em><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Maurice Blanchot, L\u2019Entretien infini <\/em>(Gallimard, 1969). Referred to as EI <\/em>(short for L\u2019Entretien infini).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Maurice Blanchot, Le pas au-del\u00e0 <\/em>(Gallimard, 1973). Referred to as PA.<\/em><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Annelies Schulte Nordholt, \u201cBlanchot and Nietzsche,\u201d https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/annelies-schulte-nordholt-blanchot-and-nietzsche-full-text\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jiwon Hahn Employing Nietzsche\u2019s concept of eternal return, Maurice Blanchot explores the temporality of writing, reading, and speaking as well as their plurality and relationship to self. In Blanchot\u2019s view, Zarathustra\u2019s announcement of the God\u2019s death marks both the… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1644,"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":[38961],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-3-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948","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\/1644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}