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Abstract
Blanchot’s rejection of vision as the fundamental philosophical metaphor is well known: “Seeing is not speaking” (The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 25). Furthermore, his central idea of the limit-experience (borrowed from Bataille) is a “detour from everything visible and invisible” (210). As part of his Heideggerian heritage, the increased importance of hearing (and aurality in general) lacks the critical appraisal it deserves. Pari passu for voice. Blanchot’s investigation of voice, spoken, interior, literary, is extensive. Various works of fiction, notably The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, explore the meme, which is intensified in critical essays on Hölderlin, Kafka, Rilke, and Valéry, where the voice’s musicality is given to performance. The studies exemplify the operation of “pure voice,” voice no longer in relation to and under the constraints of the interlocutor: its rhythm, tempo, and melody. His clearest, though lapidary, remarks on voice appear in discussion of the Narcissus mythomeme. There, voice is related not only to Narcissus’ love of an (unrecognized) self but also to the intrigue of Echo and her mimetic reproduction of voice. I give a close reading of Blanchot’s rendition of Ovid’s story to show the central role that voice plays in his “great refusal” of philosophy and concomitant opening to the outside, the “beyond being,” its nomadism and messianism.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
abbreviations
| AO | = | Awaiting Oblivion. |
| BR | = | The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. |
| IC | = | The Infinite Conversation. |
| IMD | = | The Instant of My Death. |
| SNB | = | The Step Not Beyond. |
| TOW | = | The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me. |
| WD | = | The Writing of the Disaster. |
Notes
1 As Blanchot says in his discussion of Simone Weil:
this sort of blind spot of thought – this impossibility of thinking what thought is for itself in its reserve – can appear to us to be not only present in all things, in all speech and all action in a certain negligible way, but also, by this negligible presence, able to take up always more space, to extend itself to all experience, and, little by little, alter it completely. (IC 119)
2 Silence and the cry are linked in their non-vocative form of address; “both are addressed to no one and which no one receives” (WD 51). Both perform in different ways an originary power of language that pre-dates the representative function. Silence continues to bear the traumatic intervention that breaks linguisticality and the human relation to language, and Blanchot thinks of the lapse as the “silent exteriority” that invites in illusion, deceit, equivocation, and travesty from the outside, characterized as otherwise than speaking, i.e., intending to give voice to good sense.
3
An objective “worldly” science surely can teach us nothing about the essence of the voice. But the unity of sound and voice, which allows the voice to be produced in the world as pure auto-affection, is the sole case to escape the distinction between what is worldly and what is transcendental; by the same token, it makes the distinction possible. (Speech and Phenomena 79)
4 The collapse of polarity is rendered in Blanchot’s poetics by saying the writer is no longer an “I” but a “one,” “he,” or “it” – il in French. But it isn’t clear whether Levinas is really speaking about an interiorization of the exterior since this would bring closure. On this view, Blanchot says (in reference to Foucault): “The demand to shut up the outside, that is, to constitute it as an interiority of anticipation or exception, is the exigency that leads society – or momentary reason – to make madness exist, that is, to make it possible” (IC 196).
5 “The there is lacks rhythm, as the points swarming in darkness lack perspective” (Existence and Existents 62). The absence of rhythm has to do with alterations in time that characterize the il y a, from a time that lapses (“vulgar” time) to one that neither lapses nor elapses, i.e., that has no present in which to lapse. Such is immemorial time, or as Blanchot calls it, “most ancient.”
6 The radical replacement of the life-world, the Umwelt, is described by Levinas: “When reduced to pure and naked existence, like the existence of the shades Ulysses visits in Hades, life dissolves into a shadow” (Totality and Infinity 112). If rhythm and repetition are necessary to becoming-creating, the outside is barren, sterile, uncreating, and uncreated.
7 Levinas speaks of a relation, “a duality in being. It is what it is and is a stranger to itself” (Collected Philosophical Papers 6). It isn’t clear how resemblance (as relation) is able to carry back and forth between the different ontologies or consciousnesses. Blanchot will want to fashion a “plural speech” that hearkens to a relation without relation.
8 The original reference, of course, is to Heidegger’s meditation on “the nothing” (das Nichts) in “What is Metaphysics?” (95, 105).
9 Not the silence of absolute zero, where no forces would be in movement, but “the silence of silence which by no means has any relation to language for it does not come from language but has always already departed from it” (WD 57). Here, departure means the abandonment of the good sense of language, instead investing in travesty, parody, betrayal, corruption, or as Blanchot puts it, “the transposition of the unique speaking language into a space where the requirements for effectiveness are attenuated” (BR 415 n.).
10 Mental reservations as travesties or betrayals, mockings or simulations, of the primary thought-project. If “noise” is primarily the whirring il y a, the disruptive noise of a passing train or coughing fit is its duplicitous repetition, an obscene doubling that obtrudes into the world of discourse, threatening forgetfulness of thought and place.
11 My use of “auditory image” differs from Saussure’s, for whom the auditory image that belongs to parole is the material, time-bound counterpart to the timeless form of meaning of langue. It is essentially vocalic, the voice’s intervention in making good sense.
12 Gary Peters gives a cogent analysis of the rhythmic quality of ordinary discourse, in “The Rhythm of Alterity: Levinas and Aesthetics” (9–16).
13 Merleau-Ponty’s thinking overlaps with that of Lacan, for whom the constitution of consciousness takes place in the “mirror stage” of infancy, in the difference between an infant’s perception of her body’s reflection and the vécu or lived body experience. Rather than a simple univocal structure, consciousness is folded onto itself. See Lacan, “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze.”
14 Compare “as if the neuter spoke only in an echo, meanwhile perpetuating the other by the repetition that difference, always included in the other, even in the form of the bad infinite, calls forth endlessly” (SNB 77). The neuter gives the form of being without its content of being.
15 Vivian Liska luminously observes: “In this entwinement, reality and the imaginary fold in upon each other, undoing their distinction as they head toward a dehors that knows neither an interior space nor one that would oppose it” (89).
16 Correlatively, it is possible to speak of shame, the primary affect, that arises from exposure of a hidden intimacy with the outside, what ought not to have been heard. Compare Blanchot on Kafka’s shame, “shame survives, which is to say, the infinite itself, a mockery of life as life’s beyond” (WD 53).
17 “A Primal Scene?” appears italicized at the centerfold of The Writing of the Disaster as a récit embedded in the text. Lacoue-Labarthe conjectures that it is autobiographical or autothanatological, along with the later récit, The Instant of My Death. “The Contestation of Death” in The Power of Contestation 141–55.
18 Derrida, for instance, applies the après coup logic to the writer’s signature: “The signature becomes effective – performed and performing – not at the moment it apparently takes place, but only later when ears will have managed to receive the message” (The Ear of the Other 50). The general application to listening is made plausible by the fact of the half-second lag between the vibrational event of a rhythm impacting the tympanic membrane and the cortical record of it. For insightful comments on the philosophical implications of the delay, see Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect” 23–45.
19 A more ample consideration of “dummy talk” can be found in my In His Voice: Maurice Blanchot’s Affair with the Neuter 94ff.
20 The constitution of everyday language thus proceeds through so-called acousmatical voice, voice from an unknown source. (Pythagoras’ students, according to Diogenes Laërtius, were known as the Acousmatics because they could only listen to school lectures from behind curtains during an extended probationary period.) Other cultures read this voice as oracular, divine, messianic, magical, diabolic, or mad.
21 Blanchot places the blame in the ear of the listener, specifically, in its inability to agree to listen: “this voice is narcissistic precisely in the sense that he does not love it – in the sense that it gives him nothing other to love” (WD 127).
22 From Narcissus’ point of view, one could say that Echo represents the sonic condition that the watery surface of the pool does for vision. From Echo’s point of view, desire operates like a wall that redirects the original voicing back to its source.
23 He continues:
In this turn that turns toward that from which it turns away, there is an original torsion in which is concentrated the difference whose entanglement every mode of speaking, up to and including dialectic, seeks to slacken, to put to use, to clarify: speech/silence, word/thing, affirmation/negation – all the enigmas that speak behind every language that is spoken live in these. (IC 31–32)
24
Desire is bound to unconcern by impatience. A person who is not impatient will never reach the point of being unconcerned – the moment when concern merges with its own transparency; but a person who does not get beyond impatience will never be capable of Orpheus’ unconcerned, thoughtless gaze. (BR 442)
25 It is also the site of an unexpungeable forgetfulness, traceable to immemorial time, time bereft of a present in which presence, consciousness, and the I that is required by which remembrance can be constituted. “The disaster is related to forgetfulness – forgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated – the immemorial, perhaps” (WD 3).
26 On the nature of suppression, Fred Evans’s The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity is admirably clear. See especially Part 1, “The Dilemma of Diversity” 3–90.
27 “Is inspiration then,” Blanchot asks, “that critical moment when the essence of night becomes the inessential, and the first night’s welcoming intimacy becomes the deceptive trap, the other night?” (BR 439).
28 Kevin Hart’s profound meditation on the “counterspiritual life” develops this idea. He locates Blanchot’s sacred in “the revelation, consequent upon an ontological attunement, that the distance between being and image is always and already within being itself” (224).