A mighty contagious absence, part two

On submission and resistance to AI-generated literature

 

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in conclusions, feeling themselves thereby given back to life. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labour. About it he draws a charmed circle of fragments.
                                              – Walter Benjamin ¹ 
                   

Many years ago I used this paragraph as the epigram to something of identical length – perhaps a short story or prose poem – as an alibi for its brevity and as a dig at the use of epigrams, a device as I saw it for co-opting the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other. It was weightless until it dropped into memory when I read a similar point made by one of Benjamin's keenest readers in an intellectual memoir prompted by the objects in his workplace:

The studio is the image of potentiality–of the writer's potentiality to write, of the painter's or sculptor's potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one's own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes of and forms of one's own potentiality–a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible. How can one have a potentiality? One cannot have a potentiality, one can only inhabit it.²

One can sense the weight of potential in the open notebooks on show, a place the reader inhabits examining the details.

Potentiality is a subject embedded in Agamben's thinking and extends beyond practicalities, but what struck me in the photograph is that there is no computer in sight, not even a typewriter. Agamben makes no explicit mention of his working method, but it's there to see. The clutter is a neat copy of the working mind as it seeks a completed work. The working method is also something I noticed on the cover of a very different but equally absorbing intellectual memoir whose cover has a cropped version of this photograph accompanying an interview. Peter Brown says his books are written by hand.

And recently I heard that Peter Handke is the only author Suhrkamp allows to submit work handwritten in pencil. He wants to move slowly, allowing sentences to come from a great distance. His collection of notebooks pictured below provokes an overwhelming sense of potential. 

The pleasure of writing by hand in notebooks is not in what one writes but in its opening onto possibility, the potential to become something complete. I write one sentence and a world opens. This is not possible on a computer because everything one types can be deleted in a moment (and usually is), whereas one is driven forward by the pen and potential is maintained despite striking out a typed or handwritten sentence; even an eraser leaves the ghost of a pencilled word. On completion, however, the world closes. As readers we know of Agamben, Brown and Handke only because of completion, and yet the presence of books like the self-portrait and Handke's The Weight of the World suggests Benjamin is right about the unique experience of potential, especially in light of these authors' prolific output, as if so many books are attempts not to add to the pile but to move in the opposite direction, towards potential. Writing longhand may be a resistance to completion and conclusions, very much against the grain of cultural demand.

Image from The Goalie's Anxiety.

 

Technology now at hand enables completion without the need to work through potential. Much anxiety has been expressed about the threat of the new generation of large language models (LLMs) to destroy livelihoods in the short term and to erase the social role of literature in the long. One professional writer says "We're screwed. Writing is over. That's it. It's time to pack away your quill, your biro, and your shiny iPad: the computers will soon be here to do it better." Meanwhile, the Society of Authors has staged a protest about copyright infringement and the Guardian has run a discussion of an AI-generated story by various professional authors in which worries about the lack of a human connection are expressed. 

On a more philosophical level, it raises questions about the role of the writer in the writing process. The learning-theory guru Donald Clark reckons these are due only because we are "trapped in the late 18th [Century] Romantic view of authorship, the unique, divinely-inspired, creative spark of the individual". This has led to the Society of Authors appropriating the mystique of authorship to make it a respectable profession like carpet weaving or quantity surveying, while their public statements read like a corporate drone has written them.³ LLMs are really only the logical terminus of genre fiction that dominates book culture, the last thing the Society would march against.⁴ The scholar of digital literature Hannes Bajohr confirms AI is the genre author's secret sharer because it is designed to produce "normalization":

Their output is convincing precisely when they are supposed to spit out what is expected, what is ordinary, what is statistically probable...And just as there are assistive marketing AIs for expectable marketing prose, there are now also assistive literature AIs for more or less expectable literature....Genre literature is virtually defined by the recurrence of certain elements, making it particularly suitable for AI generation.

Like AI, genre writing minimises the creative workload for the author – each sentence an epigram – and allows easy digestion by the reader. This is has always been the ideal for the "feeble and distracted" to give themselves back to life without ever leaving it. Bajohr tells of the popular German writer Daniel Kehlmann's attempt to generated a story using a language model AI, which failed according to Kehlmann because it did not "seem good enough to be published as an artistic work rather than merely as the product of an experiment on an artistic level". "But" Bajohr asks "what does 'good enough' mean? Measured against what aesthetics?"

When Kehlmann speaks of 'experiment', he seems not to have experimental literature in mind, but rather the scientific meaning of the word: a controlled observation whose outcome supports, weakens, or refines a hypothesis. But it does so...only within the framework of an existing paradigm – new paradigms are precisely not what scientific experiments establish. Experimental literature, on the other hand – at least according to its avant-garde self-image – does not want mere refinement, but ideally questions the paradigm of literature itself.

Clark focuses on a "robot artist" that is at the forefront of challenging the paradigm of "the human-centric view of creativity as a uniquely human trait" in which:

vast pools of media representing the sum total of all history, all cultural output from our species, has been captured and used to train huge multimodal models that allow our species to create a new future. With new forms of AI, we are borrowing to create the new. It is a new beginning, a fresh start using technology that we have never seen before in the history of our species, something that seems strange but oddly familiar, thrilling but terrifying.

Examples are provided of "historical dawns that hinted at this future" such as the Library of Alexandria, "open to all containing the known world's knowledge" and latterly Wikipedia. The difference, he says is that AI is "much more profoundly communal". The examples remind us that AI is only the latest form of technology without which cultural production communal or otherwise would not be possible. Similar concerns were not expressed when a quill on papyrus became a fountain pen on mass-produced paper, or when a pen became a typewriter. Everything was positive moving forward. But of course there was concern following the invention of printing press and the subsequent availability of translations of the Bible into the vernacular, and this example immediately exposes the deeper issue lurking in the concern for AI-generated art. It is the ghost haunting Clark's assumption that art equals encyclopaedic knowledge, containing creativity within the boundaries of humanism. This is continued in his claim that we have entered a new era of artistic production defined by Nicolas Bourriaud as postproduction in which "art and cultural activity now interprets, reproduces, re-exhibits or utilises works made by others or from already available cultural products". If this seems familiar it's because it is the standard practice of postmodernism, with all the insoucient optimism that goes with it, and Clark does acknowledge that postmodernism shares with postproduction "themes of challenging originality and embracing plurality". The difference here is that this "moves us beyond simple curation, collages and mashups into genuinely new forms of production and expression". It cannot be pinned down to one word and we should "let the idea [of AI's 'outputs'] flutter and fly free from the prison of language". 

Such optimism about new technology and the arts is nothing new:

In the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.

This part of Paul Valéry's essay The Conquest of Ubiquity from 1928 was used by Walter Benjamin as the epigram to his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he sees such technological innovations as enabling a change in human perception, in this case the inexhaustible repetition of previously immutable works of art presented in limited arenas are injected with time and change, removing the aura surrounding them and brushing aside "outmoded concepts, such as ... eternal value and mystery", thereby empowering a perceptual and political revolution. What may be less familiar is the continuity of all three thinkers with the art production of a much earlier era.

"The artistic representation of sacred subjects was a science governed by fixed laws which could not be broken at the dictates of individual imagination" writes Êmile Mâle in the book subtitled Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. Every artist had to learn the rules of representation.

He must know that the circular nimbus placed vertically behind the head serves to express sanctity, while the nimbus impressed with a cross is the sign of divinity which he will always use in portraying any of the three Persons of the Trinity. He will learn that the aureole (i.e. light which emanates from the whole figure and surrounds the body as a nimbus) expresses eternal bliss, and belongs to the three Persons of the Trinity, to the Virgin, and to the souls of the Blessed. He must know that representations of God the Father, God the Son, the angels and the apostles should have the feet bare, while there would be real impropriety in representing the Virgin and the saints with bare feet. In such matters a mistake would have ranked almost as heresy. Other accepted symbols enabled the mediaeval artist to express the invisible, to represent that which would otherwise be beyond the domain of art.⁵ 

If this programme reads like the precise opposite of secular freedom and the unpredictable products of AI, that's because it is, but it is also determined by tradition and normalisation (in which anything goes becomes a programming command). Both bring forth the old and proclaim the new, appropriating an aura even in the act of discharging it; "nothing was left solely to inspiration", as Mâle says of Dante's Commedia. AI's rampant productivity also mimics capitalism's hothouse demand for new markets, 'growth' and human submission.

From expressing the invisible via religious art to escaping the prison of language via AI, there is continuity in utopian claims, for the promise of deliverance whether heavenly or humanist. The continuity is consolidated in Meyer Schapiro's revisionary account of church art in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when he says began "a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content" anticipating modern art because it was "imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in color and movement, and the expression of feeling". We can't help but regard medieval art as entirely symbolic and devotional, and Schapiro cites commentators who have sought to attach religious symbolism to the most mundane features. He explains this with Hegel's comment that "in an age of piety one does not have to be religious in order to create a truly religious work of art, whereas today the most deeply pious artist is incapable of producing it." 

This suggest that the basis of artistic production and what we are drawn toward is the "truly religious", however sublimated.⁶ This may be confirmed by the vast archives of scholarly material on the arts and popular culture communities devoted to billion-dollar movie franchises. Anxiety about the meaning and worth of art in the here and now is embodied in modern review culture. The reception of Daniel Kehlmann's bestselling novel Die Vermessung der Welt when published in translation as Measuring the World is a good example. One reviewer sought the incontrovertibility of paradigm-shifting European modernism to win credence for the crowd-pleasing entertainment by announcing without evidence that Kehlmann was "already being compared to Nabokov and Proust"; a claim that became its own evidence. Unable to recognise what it seeks, the visual arts has developed an aura as an investment commodity for the super-rich,⁷ and as sentimental ornamentation for the rest, while novels are evaluated by entirely extra-literary criteria: the public profile of an author, the number of sales, whether they have won a literary prize, and sometimes even by the number of pages. AI, however, may provoke a turn away from such inanities.

***

 

For a long time I thought writing was a job of work. I'm now convinced that it's an inner event, a 'non-work' that you accomplish, above all, by emptying yourself out, and allowing what's already self-evident to percolate through.
               Marguerite Duras ⁸

When Benjamin predicted the overcoming of auratic art, he defined the aura as "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be", and if distance has now become taboo in contemporary literature, it is with the advent of LLMs literature that the unique phenomenon is drawn back into the foreground. Invariably, distance is presented as the "inaccessible" and experienced entirely on the reader's side and is used as a critical barb directed at the "self-indulgent" author but, as Duras' remark suggests, it is also experienced by the author (at least by those who disavow the agency of the name). 

It's a curious thing, this intimate experience of distance and our need for the guarantee of a human presence in the background. Like road signs and adverts, genre fiction provides an a priori guarantee and must be why supernatural horror and stories of gruesome crime provides comfort to so many, much as the story of Christ's torture and death on the cross brings comfort to Christians. In 2004, I was drawn to write about the promotional phrases on two posters on a bus shelter, not to seek the identity of copywriters but because of their automated effacement, the empty space onto which the words open and how difficult it is to speak about.

There is someone speaking and yet nobody is speaking; assuredly, this is speech, but speech that does not think about what it is saying, always says the same thing, and is incapable of choosing its audience or responding to their questions. 

This is not one of the Guardian's guests responding to the soulless anonymity of an AI-generated story but Socrates talking about the phenomenon of writing, paraphrased here by Maurice Blanchot.⁹ Socrates proposes that language of this sort should be avoided in favour of a living speaker one can interrogate. He recognises its similarity to "the pure speech that gives expression to the sacred", such as at the oracle of Delphi.

In this regard, somewhat mysteriously...writing, as an object, appears to have an essential proximity with sacred language, whose strangeness it imparts to the literary work, while also inheriting from it its boundlessness, risk, and incalculable force beyond all guarantee. Like sacred language, what is written comes from no recognizable source, is without author or origin, and thereby always refers back to something more original than itself.

What is strange about literature? What risks does it take? In what way is it close to the sacred? These are the questions dilating the void beneath contemporary art and literature. They cannot receive answers because we have no means to formulate a response. To ask them invites weary contempt. For Heidegger, this is because literature has gone peak-Socrates to become a functional technology reducing the world and its inhabitants to a resource to be exploited. Strangeness, risk and the sacred have become marketing phrases. He traces the retreat of the sacred in the poetry of Hölderlin. In his time the "default of God" was distance – "the age [was] determined by God's keeping himself afar" – whereas now the default is absence and the "radiance of divinity is extinguished in world-history". The ground upon which humanity stood is no longer ground but an abyss: "The age is desolate not only because God is dead but also because mortals scarcely know or are capable even of their own mortality." Poetry offers a mode of truth-revelation more originary to commonsense correspondence between word and thing. Heidegger separates the hammer from the hand. For him, poetry is a means of building new ground, but in order to so "it is necessary that there are those who reach into the abyss", who seek to be capable of their own mortality, and in doing so enable others to experience and endure the loss and absence of the sacred, to recognise the disenchantment of the world: "How could there ever be for God a residence fit for God unless the radiance of divinity had already begun to appear in all that is?" ¹⁰

Heidegger was not alone in recognising symptoms in poetry. A few decades earlier Mallarmé claimed that literature was "undergoing an exquisite and fundamental crisis" as free verse flooded over classical forms following the instability of runaway industrial growth, and soon after Benjamin showed how even the everyday wisdom passed on in storytelling had succumbed to the novel in which "no event comes to us without already being shot through with explanations".¹¹ Nowadays poetry is difficult to identify as anything other than prose in an affectation of format, a prejudicial identification for sure but one made possible because of the dominance of functional prose. This would explain why it has a minor presence in literary culture, not refuted by the growth of boilerplate expressionism on social media. Readability has become unreadable. If the novel then functions only as information by other means – events shot through with explanation – and has in the process neutralised the potential for the unveiling of poetic language in Heidegger's sense, thereby creating conditions for literature identical to those summarised by Hegel for religious art, we might wonder if literature is even possible in our time.

Duras' conviction that writing a novel is non-work is not far from LLMs that can produce a complete work without indeed any work. Both disrupt our notion of creativity and both open onto distance. The similarity may help us to understand why in all its richness and variety of contemporary art and literature, and in its excited amplification in criticism, it nevertheless appears very much after the Lord Mayor's Show, forced and straining for glory; "pyrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness", as EM Cioran put it.¹² 

 

Duras was not alone in the manner of her discovery. Holly Langstaff recounts in her outstanding book how Blanchot at first agreed with Heidegger that poetic language was a vehicle of truth grounding human existence, but through his own experience as a literary critic in the day and as a novelist at night, his mind was changed. If the critic's task is to evaluate a literary work and to communicate this to the reading public it "requires there to be something particular about the work that sets it apart from the everyday". A paradox arises in the demand to bring to light that which is bound to the dark, but it is inevitable that the critic and the everyday reader will seek to utilise the experience of the night and to communicate it in some way, to itself if not also to others, and indeed Blanchot argued that this is also necessary to the work. Yet what sets the reading experience apart and why it maintains almost mystical prestige in an otherwise non-literary culture is that the essence of literature is perpetually removed from such utility. Critics invariably point to specific details to shine a light on a novel's dark, such as its ingenious plotting, its psychological insights, its geographical and chronological span, the knowledge we absorb of other people and cultures, its relation to similar books or an account of the author's career thus far, or simply how good, bad or indifferent it makes them feel. But the light merely illuminates itself. In reading, and for the writer too, as Duras says, something escapes rational translation. This should not be news to any keen reader because it is the fundamental experience of reading a novel, the longue durée of curling up with a good book. Blanchot calls it La Part de feu, the fire's share, as in the swathe of a forest sacrificed by a firebreak so the rest can survive. This is the determinate sentence of literature. However, there is what Langstaff calls slippage between the two modes of language that Heidegger saw as a great danger as it "results in the forgetting of Being which is characteristic of modernity" leading to everything, including literature, becoming a resource to be exploited. This is related to Blanchot's criticism of word-by-word and line-by-line paraphrasing of poetry but praise for the critic who respects the fire "while maintaining his reader in a state of pure ignorance".¹³ How familiar this is to the reader of the broadsheet book reviews!

Literature haunts us because it is a confrontation with the "unsayable emptiness" of the fire, what Blanchot refers to elsewhere as "the outside", "the neuter" or, recalling but also deviating from Heidegger's es gibt, "the there is". He sees literary writing as a suspension of the empirical world, its negation, an inhuman interruption of human control and understanding. While this may be seen as nihilistic, and certainly not humanist, Blanchot sees it instead as an affirmation of the unknowable, which can be creative as well as destructive, "a radical nihilism which", Langstaff says, "is no longer nihilism in the sense of nostalgia for values, but an embrace of the impossible".¹⁴ In the final part, I'll turn to the writing of the impossible.

 

***

 

How many efforts are required in order not to write—in order that, writing, I not write, in spite of everything.
                  – Blanchot ¹⁵

 
In the first part of this inadvertent series, I responded to Alice Oswald's "manifesto of likeness" in which the Oxford Professor of Poetry calls for rhapsodic poetry to stitch the profusion of the empirical world together to counter lyric poetry, exemplified by a poem generated by chatGPT, because it not does not emerge from a "situated self" and "is not about things which are". In doing so, she says, it exposes us to "a mighty contagious absence". While Oswald's criticism presents a powerful case and appears to be humanism's definitive resistance to the advent of AI-generated poetry and prose, it does so by addressing a technology whose essence is and always has been precisely this absence; the absence of things which are, or the presence of that which is situated elsewhere, or indeed nowhere. Absence draws us to books; an absence we sense in the world and turn to books in the hope to fathom and resolve, an absence, however, we meet again in the infinity of prose, at once mocking and soothing our finitude, an absence we go on to explore and reinscribe in writing. Absence is contagious. Happy talk of novels opening "another world" is a symptom of this meeting; another world in which nothing dies, in which nothing can die.¹⁶  A confounding dualism is inherent to literature: it is nothing and nothing without it. So behind our literary evaluations and debates is our relation to this nothing, this space of absence. 

In an exceptional essay,¹⁷ Lars Iyer traces the origins of the relation back to ancient Palestine and the messianic hope offered by an apocalypse in which the coming messiah will end the dualism between God and the world. Despite the horrors associated with apocalypse – whose etymology can be traced to "an unveiling or revelation" – the faithful "can look forward to the coming vindication of the persecuted, to the divine redemption that brings an end to suffering and death". Hope lies in apocalypse. We can see the residue of this in the aura given to the book, the decapitalised version is its modest disguise of the divine Word, and the hope we invest in its promise of a revelation, however vulgar or diminished. "But what happens", Iyer asks, "when the putative messiah actually arrives and fails?" What happens when Christ dies upon the cross leaving the world order unchanged? And so we might ask, what happens when the book fails not only to resolve absence but augments it? Iyer cites Jacob Taubes' argument that St. Paul dealt with the crisis of a failed apocalypse by turning it inward. From now on it would take place in the individual soul, which for Taubes meant opening:

an inward messianic realm of freedom, of faith, which not only suspends the Mosaic law, the legal framework of the Roman Empire but also the Hellenistic metaphysics of law, which is to say, [the] general sense of worldly order and structure. Paul rejects all earthly, lawful, orderly authority in the name of faith.¹⁸ 

The freedom offered in the literary, reliant on our suspension of disbelief, has its DNA in Paul's rejection of worldly authority. The supposedly opposed genres of Realism and Fantasy can be seen as the culmination of our bad faith in what opens for us. What opens in Paul's theology is "very close to what [Taubes] calls called Gnosticism".

For Paul, like the Gnostics, the cosmos is ruled by demonic powers; Satan is the prince of this world. For Paul, like the Gnostics, the aim is to achieve a kind of gnosis, or knowledge, that allows you to hold yourself back from full participation in the world, which remains ruled by the wicked 'powers and principalities'. For Paul, like the Gnostics, very little can be said about God. As Taubes writes:

The negative statements about God—unrecognizable, unnameable, unrepeatable, incomprehensible, without form, without bounds, and even nonexistent—all orchestrate the . .. Gnostic proposition that God is essentially contrary to the world.

This suggests that Paul's faith is a relation to an empty transcendence, lacking determinate content and contesting at every turn the works that support the order of the world. God is what Hans Jonas called the 'nothing of the world', understood as the antithesis of worldly power.¹⁹

We go to books to understand and cope with the world, and of course to escape its demons for a while, and in doing experience a cover version of messianic promise which is, however, only ever an empty transcendence. Literature becomes the nothing of the world. No wonder modern readers have an almost identical relationship with religious faith as they do with books; a short walk from gush to disgust. ²⁰  

Novels generated by LLMs, however bad judged as works of art, reveal the essence of literature. This is the fear: every book is revealed as an excess of nothing.²¹  This would explain why fragments haunt great writers, as they maintain a relationship with that which is in excess of the world without falling into generic form and as such disrupts the use of literature as an everyday resource. They cannot make use of them. The writer in the centre of a charmed circle is only ever a writer in potential, the book only ever a book in potential. While this presents a roadblock, it may be key to resisting AI-generated and genre literature, which are, it has to be restated, identical; they cannot be told apart. Literature may be possible only by maintaining its potential within the work. But what does this mean in practice?

Agamben's essay On Potentiality discusses the aporia raised by Aristotle of why the senses cannot themselves be sensed in the absence of external objects. Aristotle's answer is that sensibility is not actual but only potential, which raises the question of what it means to have a faculty like sight. We tend to see our faculties as modes of power, and Agamben links this to "that part of humanity that has grown and developed its potency to the point of imposing its power over the whole planet". But Agamben interprets having a faculty as having a privation and potentiality is "the mode of existence of this privation". We would not be able to see light were it not for darkness, and darkness "is in some way the color of potentiality".

To be potential means: to be one's own lack, to be in relation to one's own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own nonBeing. In potentiality, sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness.²²

Presence is in relation to absence. Applied to literature, and Agamben says Aristotle draws his examples from "the domain of arts and knowledge", we are returned to Blanchot's writing set apart from the day and Heidegger's poets reaching into the abyss for a relation of finitude to the infinite. Our faculty to write is considered much like the power of that which has imposed itself over the planet. So if we are to resist AI-generated prose and its threat to human creativity, we must first recognise that its apparent inhumanity is and always has been part of us and part of writing. This is why it is indistinguishable from genre fiction.

Agamben ends by asking how we might consider the actuality of the potentiality to not-be. "The actuality of the potentiality to play the piano is the performance of a piece for the piano; but what is the actuality of the potentiality to not-play?". Aristotle answers:

if a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such. This does not mean that it disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it preserves itself as such in actuality. What is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such.

This may be how to question the paradigm of literature, to move in the opposite direction, towards potential.

 

Genre writing discovers AI

 

Notes

¹ From One-Way Street (not sure of translator). Click on the back button to return. 

² Translated by Kevin Attell. 

³ The author Matthew Teller resigned from the SOA following its "outlandishly opaque statement" on an Israeli raid on a bookshop in Jerusalem.   

⁴ According to the Verso Books blog, "Romance novels are said to account for nearly 40% of all book sales in the last decade". 

⁵ Translated by Dora Nussey. 

⁶ In the Talk Gnosis podcast, Jonathan Stewart claims "we have this deep yearning for the divine": 

"Even if you're not a spiritual person…consciousness is almost structured in a way where we want to have the divine. Doesn't mean that there is a god, but to be a happy, adjusted society and an adjusted individual, you have to acknowledge this and work with it in a healthy way.  You don't have to be religious, you can get it through good art. Because people aren't aware of this religious drive within us...we assume we live in the most secular society in human history [but] we live in the most religious society that has ever existed in human history. We act in religious ways without really knowing it, with no way to funnel it, no way to integrate it into our lives. The rationalist is missing all this."

⁷ We see this in action on the BBC's Fake or Fortune series, and Clark claims value for the robot artist's products because they sell for six-figure sums.

⁸ From Suspended Passion, translated by Chris Turner.

⁹ In the Oxford Literary Review, Volume 22, Number 1, translated by Leslie Hill.

¹⁰ From 'Why poets?' in Off the Beaten Track translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. 

¹¹ I used Benjamin's essay The Storyteller in The last novel, a discussion of JM Coetzee's The Death of Jesus.

¹² In A Short History of Decay, translated by Richard Howard. 

¹³ From 'The Myth of Mallarmé' in The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell.

¹⁴ Blanchot's atheism is discussed by Stefanos Geroulanos in An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. 

^{15 From The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock.}

¹⁶ The Morning Star in Knausgaard's novel of the same name is a symbol of the book and an allegory of this meeting, at least as I argue in my review. 

¹⁷ The Opposite Direction: Taubes, Bernhard and the Gnostic Imaginary was a paper given to the European Graduate School in 2023.

¹⁸ I wrote about a biography of Taubes in A modern heretic. 

¹⁹ Iyer cites my blogpost The withdrawal of the novel in which I write about Willem Styfhals' book on Gnosticism and postwar German philosophy.

²⁰ Larkin's poem A Study in Reading Habits is a prime example of the latter.

²¹ In my post A measure of forever, I wrote about how a combination of plainness and excess renewed my interest in novels.

²² In Potentialities, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.

 

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39 Books: 2014

One could say that Mallarmé, through an extraordinary effort of asceticism, opened an abyss in himself where his awareness, instead of losing itself, survives and grasps its solitude in a desperate clarity.

This is from The Silence of Mallarmé, an essay in Blanchot's first collection Faux Pas published in occupied France in 1943, translated here by Charlotte Mandell, the final two words of which provide the title to this year's book. The abyss is characterised by Blanchot as one that opens between Mallarmé's dream of a poetry of formal perfection so "prodigiously impossible that its realization would be the equivalent of the creation of the universe".

The essay is one of 170 Blanchot published in the Journal des débats between April 1941 and August 1944, a selection of which comprises Faux Pas, but those remaining were not collected in French until 2007 and not translated into English until these four editions were published between 2014 and 2019 (during which Fordham UP tweaked the design so that the title on the spines of the final two make for an inconsistent set, not to mention the logo).

The disaster of the first title follows the defeat of France, a defeat that for Blanchot opened an abyss of equivalent proportions, as Michael Holland explains in his introductions. Blanchot saw literature as "the purest expression of French civilization" and, while fiercely critical of Hitlerism and its racist ideology, he continued to review writers who associated with collaborators and anti-semites, "something extremely difficult to confront, and a source of profound unease" to modern readers, as the introduction also comments. 

Instead of dismissing Blanchot as a collaborationist, Holland argues that we need to approach Blanchot's writings at this time "as the site of a huge and fundamental change in Western values" in which "a new relationship is established...between literature and thought". If the idealised France of Blanchot's aristocratic characterisation placed literature apart from the demand of contemporary events, its defeat also defeated his concomitant ideal of literary perfection, turning "the silent retreat of the writer into a site of endless divergence and effectively suspend[ing] individual subjectivity":

Because in [Blanchot's] own mind the issue of collaboration and that of anti-Semitism had been clearly decided once and for all, it was of no interest to him whether a given writer subscribed to either or both, provided that in his writing, he recognized and responded to the disastrous ordeal onto which writing opened, and which for Blanchot constituted the sole reality henceforth. However, our consternation at this seeming absence of judgment is, I would argue, something that we, his readers can ultimately acknowledge and accept, in the knowledge that in 1942, the writer we expect better of is on the way to discovering an entirely new and original order of value. 

Anyway, Holland continues, there are examples of Blanchot's integrity regarding the occupation and offers some more himself with some detective work in the archives of the Journal des débats. 

In 2014, I did not write about this, nor any of the other three volumes, and do so now because the dates have taken on more significance. In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn became the first Labour Party leader with a meaningful record of resistance to racism and regime-change wars of aggression and, but for the machinations of the party bureaucracy run by his enemies in the party, would have won the 2017 election, "receiving the largest increase in the share of the vote by a Labour leader since Clement Attlee in 1945". It was clear the establishment had underestimated the effect having a real choice has on an electorate, even after the vote for Brexit. It would not make the same mistake again and a campaign of vilification whose cynicism and dishonesty infected the entire political and media class, including novelists, and shocked even lifelong Conservatives. Asa Winstanley's Weaponising Anti-Semitism describes it in chilling detail. I've written about this and literature recently concerning John Pilger's lament for the silence of writers, but rereading Michael Holland's introductions has helped bring clarity on the reasons for the desultory nature of my reading and, by extension, of contemporary literary culture. We are missing the abyss.

Kevin Hart and the outside

There are two reasons why listening to Kevin Hart's interview on the Hermitix podcast, and reading his new collection and The Dark Gaze for the second time, has helped me to recognise what I have forgotten, missed, misconstrued or misunderstood in Maurice Blanchot's writing or, rather, setting all that side as inevitable, what has been a distraction from what matters to me in his writing and in reading generally.

The first is the signal clarity of Hart's summaries whose presence in the source is shrouded in paragraphs as long, seductive and mind-expanding as Proust's. And while Proust's prose is bright and Blanchot's "darkly incantatory", the implications of what he writes, felt with a palatial intensity, often vanish as soon as one of Marcel's ecstatic instants. Such vanishing is also the product of what Blanchot calls "the light, innocent Yes of reading", which is not worth losing in favour of knowledge.

The other reason is that Hart is a theologian, unique in Blanchot studies. Most scholars constrain their discussion to Blanchot's relation to writers and philosophers of the last 200 years, but Hart includes medieval Christian mystics. For Blanchot, he says, belief in God is a belief in an original unity, a belief in oneness and, for him, to do away with God means doing away with unity of the Self, of the Book, and of the Subject (all of which he gives leading capitals). He is prepared to accept a world without such grounding in unity. Except Blanchot's atheism is something other than a straightforward deletion: "As Heidegger warned," Hart writes in The Dark Gaze, "the absence of God is 'not nothing' but on the contrary is the fullness of a vast and complex heritage, and...that 'The flight of the gods must be experienced and endured'":

If Blanchot interprets this experience by way of atheism, he acknowledges that the deity returns as a ghost in the assumptions of philosophy and in the reserve on which literature calls. [...] To deny God is not thereby to eliminate transcendence; it is to see how that question is transformed and where it takes up its new abodes.

Its apparent abode in modern literature has been a recurring theme on this blog in recent years, slowly turning it away from bookchat and straightforward reviews as I discovered what drove both and what both concealed. But I may have misconstrued the presence of the not-nothing permeating the books I have written about here in those years. Even as someone entirely untouched by religious observance, instruction and practice, and certainly not new age "spirituality", have I made of it something more than it is, "acceding to a secular occult" to use Hart's words, going in the opposite direction to Blanchot's "anonymous, distracted, deferred, and dispersed way of being", appropriating petty escape as quasi-mystical, projecting the possibility of gnosis onto the blank intuitions of reading?

An answer of sorts comes when the presenter of the podcast assumes Blanchot would not be sympathetic to a religious thinker like Meister Eckhart and Hart replies that it's not that simple: Blanchot thought that Eckhart and other theologians concerned with apophatic thought and negative theology were onto something, only he thinks it wasn't God they were approaching but "the outside, the neutral, or the impossible".

It's unclear whether each word is meant as an equivalence of the other two, but I will assume they are. In the new collection he says the outside "can be discerned in "intransitive writing", which he says for Blanchot means "literary writing". Writing poetry and narrative can be defined as "something that happens when we respond to the outside", when the singular 'I' is displaced, as writing replaces the object with an image, as a portrait replaces the sitter. In the new collection he describes the process as "the perpetual passing of being into nothingness" and in The Dark Gaze: "To write is to transform the instant into an imaginary space, to pass from a time in which death could occur to an endless interval of dying." If we still regard a work of literature is a product of mastery, this should challenge us, as should the recent proliferation of novels created by AI that have swamped the Amazon bookstore as it dispenses with the encounter with the presence and biography of an author.

On the side of the reader, we might see the effects of displacement in the focus in reviews on story, a stylistic tour de force and subject matter or, in literary criticism, on technical analysis and the tracing of an author's oeuvre. Nevertheless, the experience of something other than being in familiar time and space forms the cultural awe and reverence for books, but which in these displacements is immediately instrumentalised out of recognition; defining it as an experience is evidence enough of domestication. It is instead closer to a non-experience, and so the demand for it to mean something in the world, to be made real in some way; hence the vacillation between passion and ambivalence for books, more often than not patronising the act of reading as an indulgence, an escape, at best a tool with which to tackle current affairs. For some, however, a grave resonance remains: the eponymous character in Saul Bellow's novel Mr Sammler's Planet, who, like Blanchot in real life, survived a firing squad in the second world war, is captivated by Meister Eckhart: "Mr Sammler could not say that he literally believed what he was reading. He could, however, say that he cared to read nothing but this." Blanchot may provide understanding of such care as an experience of, as Hart writes, "the ceaseless oscillation of being and nonbeing", an awareness of "a neutral state that can only fascinate us and, in doing so, bind us to itself".

Despite all this, Hart complains that Blanchot is "less than clear" on the definition of the outside, though "perhaps we should not expect someone who mainly writes literary columns in journals to supply rigorous answers". He must surely know already that Blanchot mainly wrote literary columns because the outside can only be approached indirectly, intransitively, often in a performative mode (the light, innocent Yes of writing), so the answers may be considered rigorous in respect of the outside.

Hart also notes that "it is odd that many of his readers who work in colleges and universities have not sought clarification". Well, there is at least one book published in the same imprint whose title suggests otherwise. However, William Allen writes that "Blanchot never precisely defines what he means by the outside, because its status as the outside makes definition impossible", so perhaps this can be included under Hart's note. Nevertheless, the book does contain a description of how the experience of literature at least raises the question of the outside.

While the book comprises close readings of Blanchot's novel The Most-High and the récit The one who was standing apart from me, I have to constrain my attention to the introduction in which Allen addresses Blanchot's image of the "two slopes" of literature found in the essay Literature and the Right to Death (an image and title that Allen says is also unclear). There is the slope familiar to us all with its uncomplicated, common sense representation of things in the world – the kind that "protests against revelation" as Blanchot puts it –  and there is the other slope "by which things are separated from themselves and destroyed in order to be known, subjugated, communicated". In the hyperbolic terminology of the essay, there is the revelation of death in the enabling of things in the world to be communicated. Only it's a death that never quite occurs, as language never quite appears in itself nor disappears into its object, and in this impasse each slope is exposed to the other "without however converging on it, leading to an endless ambiguity about the presence of meaning"; we cannot locate meaning solely in language or in the world so there is an anxiety we overcome only in the violence of denial or by seeking sanctuary in the hypotheses of scholarship. 

Allen provides an example of ambiguity in a bravura passage on the consequences of the slogan "Liberty or Death!". In pronouncing it, the revolutionary impresses us with their heroic stance, but also frightens us by placing themselves at a distance from everyday values. In doing so, death becomes a part of everyday life, "coextensive" with liberty:

If the claim initially appears as all or nothing, then it quickly transforms into all and nothing, insofar as both outcomes are the same at this extreme, and this leads to its further transformation as all is nothing. But...this is not nihilism, as the status of the two terms has changed utterly in being so removed from ordinary values. What is exposed is a netherworld beyond their simple alternation or negation, a world that presents itself absolutely and also removes itself leaving neither a presence nor an absence.

I imagine we could apply the political "Liberty or Death!" to the literary "War on Cliché!", in which what we experience as a defamiliarising phrase liberating us from habit soon becomes a cliché itself deadening its impact, which thereby demands endless war and endless dying. Martin Amis' later writing became obsessed by death cults only because they revealed his own.

If I have been distracted from what matters to me in reading, it may be in seeking an accommodation of exposure to this netherworld within a culture that recognises only power and control. This blog is a prime example.

“Can there be a pure narrative?”

The question opening Maurice Blanchot’s essay The Experience of Proust* has always drawn me back, not to secure a yes or a no, but to keep the question of pure narrative open in its initial uncertainty, perhaps, rather, in its impossibility, as it appears to make reading and writing more vital, more promising, to me at least, than the forms and issues that keep book reviewers and literary critics spinning like whirling Dervishes before a God long since disappeared. This is an attempt to understand why.

First of all, what could pure mean this context? In the very next sentence, Blanchot writes "Every narrative seeks to hide itself in novelistic density, even if only out of discretion", which implies that pure narrative is narrative in itself – perhaps its Platonic form – but that would mean every narrative is pure until the writer begins to write; a form without content, which doesn't make much sense. Gérard Genette's study quoted at length in my previous post, itself seeking answers via Proust, may help here, as it begins by offering three definitions of narrative: 

• A statement telling of an event or series of events 
• The totality of actions and situations subject to such a statement 
• The act of narrating taken in itself
  

Two are familiar in regular novel reviews (We are taken from Europe to Persia during the political upheavals of the interwar years) while the third prompts the image of an orator reciting the Iliad before an audience, which is why Genette notes that this is the oldest definition and, we might assume, the purest. But there can be no degrees of purity here, and 'act' is a verb rather than an adjective, so the question remains open.

Blanchot essays seeks to understand why the possibility of a pure narrative led Proust, otherwise “so desirous of making books and of being thought of as a writer”, to put a 750-page novel in the drawer and yet hurry to publish Les plaisirs et les jours, a comparatively insubstantial volume of short pieces not likely to make much of an impression – an apparent perversity similar to Kafka publishing Betrachtung that alone would never have led to the word Kafkaesque; a decision all the more curious because Jean Santeuil has so much in common with the novel that gave us the word Proustian: a long and detailed account of the life of a fin-de-siècle upper-class Frenchman that not only begins with the seven-year-old Jean anxiously seeking his mother's goodnight kiss but also descriptions of the famous instants and what they suggest:

Could it be that beauty and joy for the poet resides in an invisible substance which may perhaps be called imagination, which cannot work direct on immediate reality, nor yet on past reality deliberately remembered, but hovers only over past reality caught up and enshrined in the reality now present? It is as though before the eye which sees it now and saw it long ago, there floats divine imagination, which is perhaps the source of all our joy, something that we find in books, but only with the utmost difficulty in things around us. [...]

And is it not more beautiful we wonder, that the imagination, which neither the present nor the past could put into communication with life and so save from oblivion and the misinterpretation of thought and unhappy memories, the varied, individual essences of life—trains and hotel rooms, the fragrance of roses, the taste of stewed fruit, washrooms and roads from which we can look at the sea while, as it were, travelling elegantly in a carriage—is it not more beautiful that in the sudden leap which follows on the impact between an identical past and present, the imagination should thus be freed from time? For the pleasure of that experience is a sure sign of its superiority, and in it I have always put such trust that I write nothing of what I see, nothing at which I arrive by a process of reasoning, or of what I have remembered in the ordinary sense of remembering, but only of what the past brings suddenly to life in a smell, in a sight, in what has, as it were, exploded within me and set the imagination quivering, so that the accompanying joy stirs me to inspiration.
                                                                                               [Translated by Gerard Hopkins]

Pure narrative then would be the divine imagination. But, as these passages show, the problem for Proust is that these transports are presented as moments of reflection and speculation alongside the narrative rather than its divinely guided principle. The instants are neutralised, set beyond the linear progress of Jean Santeuil's life, betraying its inspiration. This is one side of the "experience" referred to in Blanchot's title: the disappointment in writing by a process of reasoning outside of divine imagination – the other side, I presume, being the experience of the instants. If published, he says, "Proust would have been lost". A disconcerting thought given how easy it would have been for Proust to have settled on what he had produced. Jean Santeuil would have become only another grain of sand in the desert of regular novels, with the events of Jean's life comprising "ordinary novelistic material" with the occasional philosophical interlude we have just read; events that are certainly beautifully written and moving to read but soon indistinguishable from other novels with yet more beautiful writing, more interludes, and more moving events borne on the desert winds. A desert may have its own majesty, but it relies on death for its power, which in terms of biographies and regular novels is its submission to a conclusion towards which as readers we hurry, invariably construing the compulsion as pure pleasure rather than as despair.

Instead, Proust needed to write a novel in which death is suspended and neutralised. As Jean Santeuil suggests above, this demanded a novel "without any other matter than the essential"; a novel, in Blanchot's desert-contrasting simile, "made only of those points from which it is formed, like the sky where apart from the stars there is only emptiness". What form might such a novel take?

Blanchot notes that Impressionism, a movement Proust admired in the visual arts, gave him a model. If had he followed the example, however, he would likely have produced a short novel we might now call poetic; appealing for its potential for cystalline beauty and the shining of something intangible absent in more garrulous novels, but one that soon palls as one stalls over yet another fussily worded sentence (see much-lauded "very experimental" writers). Instead, of course, he produced one the longest novels ever published. Pure narrative as Proust conceived it had to be abandoned. But he found a way to justify the abandonment:

He discovered something about the space of the work that had to carry all the powers of duration at once, that had also to be nothing but the movement of the work toward itself and the authentic search for its origin, that had, finally, to be the place of the imagination.

Pure narrative would then be the origin of narrative – the experience of pure time in Proust's case, accessible in the space of the imagination. Blanchot says that Proust came to think of this space as having the essence of a sphere engorged with the impurities of "novelistic density", with the instants passing from buried centre to the bright surface, revealing the origin in "joyful flashes of lightning". By filling the emptiness of the sphere with the material we're familiar with from this and other novels, Proust created a turning world in which what on the surface appears settled only for the instants to disrupt and rewrite memory. We can see this from the very beginning as Marcel emerges from sleep and struggles to recall where he is. Everything around him that was immobile in wakeful hours revolves around him in the darkness – "things, places, years" – so that he has to form and re-evaluate his reality each morning, creating "a song of possibilities" suppressed by habit. It differs from "the unreality of a scintillating space" of purely imagined novels because it is a world very close to Proust's own life, except this is not a roman à clef requiring a biographer to tease out the connections to give us the truth behind the novel but one in which the narrative "happens as if it were fortunately superimposed onto the journey of his actual life". This is the best way to appreciate In Search of Lost Time as a novel: a form in which every apparent truth and every event is subject to re-evaluation as the sphere revolves. By superimposing its revolutions onto the movement of an actual life, it implicates the reader's own life and the potential for uncovering possibilities otherwise buried in their life.

In the one life there are many lives. Alternative lives. Some are lived and others imagined. That is the absurdity of biographies, he would say, of novels. They never take account of the alternative lives casting their shadows over us as we move slowly, as though in a dream, from birth to maturity to death. 

This passage from Gabriel Josipovici's 120-page novel The Cemetery in Barnes is, despite its length, very much in the Proustian tradition of countering the habits into which novels can fall. Our "actual life" can often become a worn-out genre.

Blanchot ends his essay on what Proust produced to erase the memory of Jean Santeuil with another passage that also draws me back to ponder its implications:

There is...something indescribably wonderful in this piece of writing, which has been brought back to daylight and which shows us how the greatest writers are threatened and how much energy, inertia, inactivity, attention, and distraction are needed to go to the end of what proposes itself to them.

Does Proust count as one of Blanchot's "greatest writers" not because (or not only because) of his uniquely beautiful style – "this style of slow curves, of fluid heaviness, of transparent density, always in movement, wonderfully made to express the infinitely varied rhythm of voluminous gyration" – but because he was able to resist generic form despite being a master of it and, instead, in a combination of contradictions, follow the truth and logic of his inspiration – that which interrupts regular narrative and appears, bizarrely, to redeem a life otherwise wasted or lost – in contrast to those who build a foundation on habit and expectation, thereby finding an all-purpose literary alibi?

This is why I am drawn back. The essay on Proust confirms Timothy Clark's statement that Blanchot "offers what is surely the fullest, least idealizing and most detailed theory of inspiration in Western literature" in which the "Romantic tradition of attempting to appropriate inspiration as form of human power may be said to come to an end", as "inspiration finds its provenance outside or beyond the consciousness of the writer"; the outside or beyond coming from "both the emerging work itself and, literally, nowhere".

"Nowhere" may be pure narrative, the centre of the sphere; a less joyful version Proust's experience of pure time; "the giant murmuring upon which language opens" as Blanchot characterises it in The Space of Literature, "and thus becomes image, becomes imaginary, becomes a speaking depth, an indistinct plenitude which is empty". This alternative rendering of pure narrative helps me to understand my ambivalent relationship with narrative content, or at least with the sphere of contemporary literature as it bloats into an ever-expanding universe of love and loss so large no privileged instant can penetrate its happy and virtuous surface, and yearn instead for an acultural, ahistorical writing that puts everything into question, including itself. Except Blanchot's Proust confirms my undue haste, as this may require a paradoxical indulgence in both culture and history (which may also justify my advocacy for Knausgaard's struggle). Clark again:

The demand made by the work on the writer is...less to instrumentalize language in a certain way, than, suppressing the urge to personal expression, to impose a certain silence, form or limit upon that 'giant murmuring'.

If I have written my own Jean Santeuil, I have at least the ability to abandon it, although I did hurry to publish my own Les plaisirs et les jour. Yes, it has its moments, I think, and then realise that of course Proust’s novel has its moments too, and look what he made of them. 

 

*The Experience of Proust can be found in The Book to Come translated by Charlotte Mandell

Axe-books of the year

 A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us, says Kafka in the famous letter.

I wondered what this might mean as the 'books of the year' lists began to appear last month. Imagine if each contributor constrained themselves to choose only axe-books. Each entry would likely remain blank and the value of what did appear would be extreme compared to the predictable logrolling we see each year. Or maybe they would be exactly the same, as the idea of such a book is so vague that it could include everything from everyday escapist relief to a silent version of Freud's talking cure.

For this reason, it is the second most abused quotation of modern literature, after Beckett's Fail better. While Beckett is encouraging deeper failure rather than one that is closer to success, its playful ambiguity has enabled it to become a motivational mantra for a million creative writing memes, allowing Beckett one more catastrophe as he fails to turn budding writers away from the sewer of success. Kafka's line may not be misunderstood but is preceded by flourishes that rather complicate its promise:

We ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. We need the books that affect us like a disaster. We need books that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.

You can see why these words haven't become as popular. Yet as easily as such teenage-goth hyperbole is dismissed, the words do stir something beneath surface cynicism, which may be as slight as disappointment with everyday escapist relief, with Kafka's grim enthusiasm maintaining the promise of a future book that will allow us to bear the heaviest burdens without the lingering trauma, even if in doing so they retain the formula of disappointment: words that carry no weight.


My year of reading ended with four new books by or related to Maurice Blanchot, with one experienced with this kind of disappointment. I had been waiting twenty years for Christophe Bident's biography to be translated, as it promised a measure of the distance between Blanchot's life and his writing (what he discovered in writing). Several hundred pages later, the words Bident used to discuss key ideas and concepts became so light they floated free of any context that held any meaning for me: the absolute, the neuter, the unsayable, the avowable, the unavowable, the infinite, the impossible, the infinitely impossible. There is very little biographical detail, certainly not the trivia one might expect of the genre; his acquaintance with Brigitte Bardot as reported in L'Herne or the rumour that he learned Danish to read Kierkegaard in the original are not mentioned. As the book is a study of the work organised chronologically and written during Blanchot's lifetime, this is fair enough and mine is only an expression of disappointment and intellectual stupefaction. In reading hundreds of pages of commentary and analysis, I was reminded of Saul Bellow's narrator of Ravelstein who, when charged to read a philosophical article, felt like an ant who sets out to cross the Andes. Except, I was on the other side.

While it was no doubt disingenuous of me to hope for trivia from the life of this writer, there are two moments central to Blanchot's work in which the personal is exposed to the impersonal, suggesting there remains a navigable plain to be explored before the mountains rise up. Here is the first, in Ann Smock's translation of The Writing of the Disaster:

If the tears are evidence of an unfrozen sea, they are also evidence of disaster, grief and banishment, and so an experience much closer to Kafka's demands. And even if he is reading the sky and not a book, what happens then has the same ambiguous properties of reading, amplified here into a variety of religious experience; an experience that is repeated thirty years later.

The Instant of My Death describes how in the summer of 1944 a Nazi lieutenant ordered Blanchot out of the same house, perhaps to the same garden, to face a firing squad. As he awaits the order to fire, Blanchot writes that he experienced "a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however)". Distracted by noise of fighting, the lieutenant leaves the scene and the firing squad tells Blanchot to nip off. Fifty years later, Blanchot speculates that what he felt was perhaps ecstacy, defined by the OED as "the state of being ‘beside oneself’ in ... anxiety, astonishment, fear, or passion" or "the withdrawal of the soul from the body [in a] mystic trance". But then Blanchot says it was rather the feeling "compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal", notable for being the opposite of the familiar literary pursuit of living forever.



There is so much to say about such passages that Derrida has written a book on the latter, emphasising there what concerns me here: that both experiences are also non-experiences. The content of each is an exposure to that which is not there or that which didn't occur. Both correspond to the experience of reading and both are essentially literary experiences, with all the features of reading stories and the prejudices they encounter. Derrida argues that fiction haunts the project to be truthful in testimony and "is perhaps the passion of literature" – the Christian sense included: a suffering unto death in which death is not an end. In reading we are "close to a heart that beats no more": the instant of death has become literature, opening the mysterious distance necessary to itself and the peculiar value we place in it, as witnessed in the power of Kafka's letter.

Remember Kafka says there that books should affect us like a 'disaster', a key word in Blanchot's work. For Blanchot, the word means not only the terrible events in the news or the historical record but the breakdown of our relation to the stars, as reported in the 'primal scene'. The OED says "Disaster is etymologically a mishap due to a baleful stellar aspect". William S. Allen explains further in Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism that, without the guiding light of the stars, our existence lacks unity to ground meaning or knowledge. The resulting anxiety necessarily infects language, as it fails to take the place of the stars. This is felt especially by the writer seeking, in both a personal and public sense, to stabilise existence and thereby reduce existential anxiety. But writing only doubles down on ambiguity: "Does this sentence describe my situation, or make it into something else; is it expressing my anxiety, or displacing it?" :

The disaster is not an event. It does not take place in the order of things that happen but is discovered as that which has taken place, as the experience of this utter lack of grounds for meaning, the lack of any transcendental unity or order, an experience that language conveys but that is not limited to language, which is its other, mortal side.

An experience of the transcendental and mortal sides combined might be the best way to define axe-books. It is not necessarily a pessimistic definition. What Kafka's writing gives is a glimpse of light, even if is the light of a baleful star, and thereby the possibility of communication in the darkness. Either instant on its own is not enough (perhaps Bident's string of key words became weightless for me because they were drained of their mortal side).

I have no axe-books for this year. Like Marcel's miraculous, timeless instants, they appear very rarely, if at all, always unexpected, and easily confused with narrative excitements. The closest for me was two years ago. I have often recognised since that this post was the culmination of what I had to say here (by coincidence, 'culmination' also has its root in the stars). And yet I continue. Why? Thirteen years after his famous letter, Kafka characterised his ability to write as "a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being". The question he asks in the next sentence remains outstanding: "But then what kind of surplus is it?"

Smothered Words by Sarah Kofman

Sarah Kofman wrote nearly thirty books between 1970 and her suicide in 1994. The majority have not been translated into English and those that have include titles on Kant, Nietzsche and Freud, which is enough to demonstrate range and seriousness. Derrida and Levinas admired her work so much they joined a campaign to get her the academic recognition she had been denied. However, I want to draw attention to one short book from late in her career.  

Parole Suffoquées was published in 1987 and translated by Madeleine Dobie as Smothered Words, an edition of less than 70 pages comprising commentaries on a short story by Maurice Blanchot and Robert Antelme's The Human Race, an account of his deportation to a Nazi work camp. But that description is not enough if it suggests another scholarly monograph, as the title alludes to the great tragedy of her life. She was a small child when her father, the rabbi Berek Kofman, was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Auschwitz, where he was beaten and buried alive for refusing to work on the Sabbath, a fact that until the opening pages of Smothered Words had remained unspoken throughout her life as a writer: "How can it not be said? And how can it be said? How can one speak of that before which all possibility of speech ceases?"

If the fact is now in the open, the trauma is spoken in response to other texts, interspersing commentary with quotation to such a degree that a single voice becomes a chorus. The other writers enable speech. Smothered Words begins by stating that if one is to adopt Adorno's injunction "to arrange one's thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen" then:

it behooves me, as a Jewish woman intellectual who has survived the holocaust, to pay homage to Blanchot for the fragments on Auschwitz scattered throughout his texts: writing of the ashes, writing of the disaster which avoids the trap of complicity with speculative knowledge, with that in it which is tied to power, and thereby complicit with the torturers of Auschwitz.

(A passage that ought to be noted by those who accuse Blanchot of anti-semitism.) 

Given her record of publications, one would expect a more formal, scholarly approach, keeping any personal stake out of the study, but Kofman recognises such speech is compromised and it is Blanchot's example that enabled her to speak of "this event, my absolute", and so mitigate any mastery:

To speak: it is necessary without (the) power [sans pouvoir]: without allowing language, too powerful, sovereign, to master the most aporetic situation, absolute powerlessness and very distress, to enclose it in the clarity and happiness of daylight.

Kofman uses Blanchot's 's 1935 story The Idyll as an example of how writing exercises such mastery. It is the story of a stranger entering 'the Home', a community in which differences between individuals are smoothed out or erased, and in which processes occur that prefigure the camps: welcoming the newcomer by sending him to communal showers, giving him a new name (if not a number) and directing him to a shed where other men live. Kofman discusses the story alongside quotations from Blanchot's post-war reflections on the story to emphasise the idyllic nature of fiction even as it describes terrible things. Storytelling basks in "the 'glory' of the narrative voice 'that speaks clearly, without ever being obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what it communicates' – not even by death". This is why Blanchot removed the label 'story' from his post-war narratives, famously ending The Madness of the Day with "A story? No. No stories, never again".


Robert Antelme's account of his time in the Gandersheim work camp had to confront this issue. After being rescued by his friend François Mitterrand, he experienced what other survivors experienced: "No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it." And so Kofman asks "How can testimony escape the idyllic law of the story?" Her answer goes directly to her father's act of prayer, which was:

the revelation of the word as the place in which men maintain a relation to that which excludes all relation: the infinitely Distant, the absolutely Foreign. A relation with the infinite, which no form of power, including that of the executioners of the camps, has been able to master, other than by denying it, burying it in a pit with a shovel, without ever having encountered it.

A prayer re-establishes "in this situation of extreme powerlessness and violence, a relation beyond all power", offering resistance to the ethic of productivity at the heart of western culture, which Blanchot claimed had reached its apogee in the production of death in the camps. We have only to read something as routine as Tim Lott's recent demand that novelists tell stories to recognise how deeply this ethic is still embedded in our culture. If Antelme's book is not quite a prayer, it is an extremely patient and remarkably self-effacing description of a system of power that worked and starved campmates to death but could never destroy their membership of the human race, that which unified them with their oppressors. Kofman says it is because no community was possible with the SS that there was also the strongest community, the community (of those) without community:

It is not founded on any specific difference or on a shared essence – reason – but on a shared power to choose, to make incompatible though correlative choices, the power to kill and the power to respect and safeguard the incommensurable distance, the relation without relation.

The Nazis justified their attempt to create an idyllic community by, among other things, appealing to Nietzsche's necessarily ambiguous aphorism "Man is the yet undetermined animal". Kofman says Antelme's response would emphasise that ambiguity with a yes and no: "No, if we must take this to mean that a transformation of the species is possible; yes, if this aphorism signifies that in man there is a multiplicity of powers, none of which is ever sure to triumph." She ends the book by emphasising that this is a new humanism, one based on "the infinitely Distant, the absolutely Foreign".

Writing Smothered Words did apparently determine something in Sarah Kofman. As Madeleine Dobie explains in her superb introduction to her translation, after it was completed "she was no long able to write in the language of mastery". Later, as this website reports, she "became unable to do the things she loved most dearly—reading, writing, listening to music, watching films and looking at works of art". Unfortunately, as far as I know, only one of her remaining books has been translated into English, so I cannot say what form they take. The one book, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is a "plain and unadorned" (TLS) memoir of her childhood and teenage years, moving from the house in one street from where her father was arrested and to another where she became torn between her mother and a Christian woman who had taken them in. The first page suggests that all reflection and analysis, if not writing, had come to an end, and why.

I have often wanted to write something about Smothered Words, not because of its subject matter – which at best I feared had attracted me because of the common assumption that extreme experience is a guarantee of value or, at worst, as some kind of Schadenfreude – but because of how the subject matter affected its writing. It is written in the voice of a person subject to her own experience. As one embedded in academic methods, this was especially intriguing. While the seamless inclusion of quotations has been mentioned, Dobie notes that "a significant number" of these in the French text are erroneous, suggesting it had been written with some urgency, as if the Scotch tape patching up her pen was disintegrating by proxy. A notable example is on the very last page where the quotation "after Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high...that has any right unless it has undergone a transformation" is attributed to Antelme rather than Adorno. I half-wish the errors had been repeated in the translation, as this would maintain and perhaps further the movement away from mastery, and may even reveal more. Blanchot is known for quoting from memory and not caring to amend where it is mistaken.

Kofman's mastery of scholarly writing and its transformation in Smothered Words is a profound example of what I sense is necessary on our own very mundane level. I have always been aware that my writings on this blog are written under the light of one subject or experience filtered through the prism of books, becoming present to me only in the colours emerging in this way. The epigraph to the very first essay I posted online makes this clear with its qualification that the revelation is also its own eclipse. Much of my disappointment and frustration with reviewing and critical writing has come from when I stray from this light in favour of engagement with a literary culture that is preoccupied with consumer evaluations and magisterial labelling rather than more fundamental questions about the presence of writing in our lives. So I present this post as a recommendation, both of Sarah Kofman's work and the direction it offers to those seeking to eclipse their own light.