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Abstract
In a recent volume titled Demande (Expectation), containing texts written over a period of more than thirty years, but each devoted to different aspects of the relationship between philosophy and literature, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a suggestive account of their mutual genesis and ongoing dialogue in order to underline the way in which, beyond their apparent dialectical reciprocity, philosophy and literature are each inseparable from the unanswered and unanswerable questions they ask themselves and each other. Both, in other words, are said to belong to the “in-between,” that fragile zone of undecidability that, according to Nancy’s reading of Kant, is a salient characteristic of all supposed self-identity. This article explores some of the implications of Nancy’s formulation as it affects the seemingly intractable question of myth’s interruption. It considers in particular some of the problematic features, deriving, it argues, from the inescapable fragility of thought itself, that may to be found in Nancy’s sometimes tense and contradictory engagement with the work of Maurice Blanchot, the subject of two important essays in Demande, which raises probing questions of Nancy’s own philosophical enterprise.
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Notes
1 Jean-Luc Nancy, Demande: littérature et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 2015); Expectation: Philosophy, Literature, trans. Robert Bononno, with an introduction by Jean-Michel Rabaté (New York: Fordham UP, 2018). While the French edition comprises a total of thirty-three texts of diverse genres from different periods, its English counterpart contains only twenty-eight, to which it adds an introduction by Jean-Michel Rabaté. A coda, according to the dictionary, is “a passage of more or less independent character introduced after the completion of the essential parts of a movement, so as to form a more definite and satisfactory conclusion.”
2 For a detailed account of the dispute between Nancy and Blanchot on the subject of “community,” literature, religion, and politics, see Hill.
3 See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable 12–13; The Unavowable Community 3–4. On the frequently misunderstood and widely misrepresented motif of the “unavowable” in Blanchot, see Hill 103–16.
4 Robert Bononno’s over-literal English version uses an unconvincing unidiomatic present tense here: “‘One day the gods withdraw … ’”
5 Nancy’s original text has “le corps divin.”
6 For the passage to which Nancy refers, see Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften V: 205–06; Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology 136 and 187ne.
7 On this prior history of the term “unavowable,” and for the precise reference to the source of the double quotation in Blanchot’s title, see Hill 103–16.
8 It should be emphasised here that there is no truth in the much repeated but unsubstantiated allegation that Blanchot before 1940 was sympathetic to “French fascism” (or any other kind of fascism).
9 Somewhat regrettably, in translating the second of these titles as “The Neutral, Neutralization of the Neutral,” Robert Bononno follows the established but misleading convention of rendering Blanchot’s “neutre” or “neuter,” which is primarily a linguistic or syntactical category, with the predominantly political term “neutral,” one of the prime meanings of which, according to the OED, is “taking neither side in a dispute, disagreement, or difference of opinions; not inclining toward either party, view, etc.; assisting neither of two contending parties or persons.” It should however be emphasised that the “neuter” in Blanchot never corresponds to such non-partisan equanimity between extremes.
10 Several other “literary” essays not included in Demande may be found in the English translation in Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts.
11 As Nancy points out, unlike some of the surrounding material, the sentence recurs unchanged in Blanchot, Thomas l’Obscur, nouvelle version 42. For Nancy’s citation and commentary, see Demande 255; Expectation 179. According to etymology, “ressusciter,” as commonly used in French translations of Matthew 28.6, means: to “reanimate” or “restore to life.”
12 See Hill 193–208.
13 For the essay on which Nancy is drawing, see Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire 121–66; The Space of Literature 120–59. It is a curious feature of Nancy’s reading of Blanchot (also in evidence in La Communauté désavouée) that he seems unwilling to distinguish between Blanchot’s own thinking as a writer and his observations regarding the works of others.
14 See Blanchot, L’Entretien infini 515–27; The Infinite Conversation 351–59.