WHITE NOISE, ÉCRITURE BLANCHE

Abstract

Le Dernier Homme is Blanchot’s last narrative or récit. Afterwards, he would begin to write in a more fragmentary mode, which suggests that he may have felt that the narrative form had been pushed as far it could in this work. This point of extremity is marked in particular by the monotonous style for which he has become notorious. This essay examines why this style arises, and how it leads to an extreme that can be usefully contrasted with Barthes’s notion of écriture blanche (“blank” writing). It becomes apparent that the blankness of this writing is not innocent but arises as noise for Blanchot, which not only manifests the material attenuation of the narrative but also its relation with the dead.

Keywords:

• Blanchot‎; Barthes
• the last man
• noise
• dirge

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

abbreviation

abbreviation
DH	=	Le Dernier Homme.

Notes

Where double page references are used they refer to the French or German text first, and then the English translation. Translations have been amended throughout.

1 Blanchot recognised this weakness himself as he noted in regards to the risks of monotony in the obsession of the récit (L’Espace littéraire 14–15/24).

2 This essay is part of a larger project I am currently finishing that seeks to examine how Blanchot’s thought and writing change in the post-war years.

3 As Leslie Hill has pointed out, the designation of Le Dernier Homme as a récit is ambivalent, for when it was reissued in 1971 in a corrected edition, this designation was removed. A fact further complicated when it reappeared in 1977 as a “nouvelle version,” which was, however, otherwise identical to the corrected edition (229–30). The three texts are largely identical in themselves, except for their titles, which places an extra burden on the act of nomination that opens the work as it seeks to name “the last man.”

4 See especially Sheaffer-Jones; Hill (233–43). On Blanchot’s relation to Bataille, see Holland, “Bataille, Blanchot, and the ‘Last Man’”; Boldt-Irons. See also Frey; Just.

5 This sentence, “I sought, this time, to approach him [à l’aborder],” is discussed by Derrida (Parages 96/82, 103/89).

6 This movement is closer to the image of the flying spear in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura I: 968–82.

7 This idea recurs across Blanchot’s career: “The word, almost deprived of sense, is noisy” (L’Écriture du désastre 87/52). And earlier, when Blanchot relates a passage from Jean Paulhan’s 1917 récit “Le Pont traversé,” where a dreamer “senses some flaw [défaut] in his words that makes them transparent to noise” (Paulhan, Progress in Love 64; Blanchot, La Part du feu 67–68/63).

8 In what is perhaps the most interesting revisiting of this notion, Blanchot speaks in his elegy for Merleau-Ponty of the way that philosophical discourse always undermines itself because in speaking it uncovers the “disgusting murmur” of the non-philosophical as its own dis-course. But what is significant is that Blanchot feels that Merleau-Ponty sought to uncover this other language in its inhuman silence and wildness by turning philosophical discourse back on itself so that it

could and should give way to this other speech [parole], terrifying speech, in the sense that one cannot welcome it without in a way becoming “the last man”, a speech that in every case does not give us an easy life and with which one perhaps cannot live. (“Le ‘discours philosophique’” 336)

9 This is not just a reference to Blanchot’s emerging engagement with ethical thought but also to his interrogation of the convergence of nihilism and humanism in the works of des Forêts and Foucault through the anomalous form of the murmur, of a voice without words or silence, without beginning or end, a cry that is both more and less than human (L’Amitié 146–47/126–27; L’Entretien infini 392–93/262–63). The politics of such a semi-human speech will, following the experience of May 1968, form one of the major themes of Le Pas au-delà.

10 Barthes mentions Blanchot, Cayrol, and Queneau in relation to écriture blanche, but the role of Camus is critical as it is in relation to L’Étranger that he first formulates the idea of a blank, neutral writing in one of his earliest articles in 1944 (Œuvres complètes I 60–63).

11 This is also the basis of the distinction between what Blanchot is seeking to discuss and what Barthes has addressed as the “rustling” (bruissement) of language, which in this case is more accurately translated as “hum.” The phenomenon he is attempting to describe is the mode of language when it is “working well,” by analogy with the hum of a machine or an office when it is operating smoothly. In the context of language, this hum would refer to the free signification of meaning as a capacity of language in general, not the noise of specific meanings but what arises in their absence as the sound of meaning as such (Rustle of Language 76–79). In its utopian horizon, this hum accords with what Barthes discusses as the neutral (as well as écriture blanche), thereby marking his distance from Blanchot, in which he seems to be following André Breton’s injunction: “Put your trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur” (Œuvres complètes I 332; Manifestoes of Surrealism 30).

12 Although it takes the discussion in a very different direction it is worth noting that Blanchot later discusses white writing in relation to the Talmudic idea that the oral Torah derives from a pre-existing written Torah, where the former appears as letters of black fire written on a background of white fire. Thus, what is oral is also written but is a delimited version of a writing whose whiteness indicates its neutrality, invisibility, and indefiniteness (L’Entretien infini 631/430; Hart 176–77).