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ABSTRACT
The article links Blanchot’s philosophical and political ideas. Embarking from his recurrent dialogue with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, it traces the development of Blanchot’s “dissident” version of modernism and his notion of “writing”, alongside his post-war political involvement and writing. I argue that Blanchot never relinquished the purist modernist idea of the privilege of writing and with it the privilege of his own self-identification primarily as a writer. It is my contention that this emphasis sometimes obfuscated his vision, both conceptually and politically. I exemplify my claim by appealing to Blanchot’s unconditional support of Israel and Zionism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Anat Matar is a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research interests include the philosophy of language, political philosophy, the Analytic-Continental divide and modernism, and the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Dummett, Derrida, Blanchot and Lyotard. Matar is the author of From Dummett’s Philosophical Perspective (de Gruyter, 1997) and Modernism and the Language of Philosophy (Routledge, 2006), and co-editor (with Anat Biletzki) of The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and Heroes (Routledge, 1998) and (with Abeer Baker) of Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel (Pluto, 2011). In her recent publications she deals with philosophical fear of concrete content.
Notes
1. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 337.
2. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Preface.
3. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is presented as the clearest expression of modernism in Matar, Modernism and the Language of Philosophy, Chapter 1. Modernism is frequently thought of only as an artistic movement. 1922, the publication year of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, is taken by many to be the annus mirabilis of modernism. In her book, Matar argues that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, also published in 1922, represents its philosophical gist perfectly.
4. Wittgenstein, Citation1922, § 7.
5. Russell, Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 22.
6. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 337.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., (emphasis original).
10. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 184.
11. Ibid.
12. “What can be shown cannot be said”.
13. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 186.
14. Ibid.
15. Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 22.
16. Blanchot, Political Writings, xv, quoted in Kevin Hart’s Forward to Political Writings, from Combat 20, December 1937.
17. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 185.
18. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 460 n. 6.
19. Blanchot, Political Writings, 130. The text first appeared as a handwritten letter in Globe, no. 44, February 1990, 72.
20. Out of the vast literature dealing with the politics of modernism let me site here only the following few: Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air ; Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution”; Williams, Politics of Modernism; and Clark’s, Introduction to his Farewell to an Idea.
21. Blanchot, “Who?”, 59.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 58.
25. It was published in the review Comité, in October 1968 (# 1; but only one issue of the review eventually appeared). The issue has been republished in Lignes, no. 33 (March 1998) and then in the French collection of Blanchot’s political writings.
26. Blanchot, Political Writings, 103.
27. Ibid., 104.
28. Compare this description with the way Blanchot analyzes the consequences of Russell’s “loophole”, above; e.g. with relation to scientific and political “possibilities of speech”. The texts, we remember, were written almost simultaneously.
29. Blanchot Political Writings, 105, emphasis original. The “insane game of writing” is a Mallarmé phrase, quoted throughout Blanchot’s writings.
30. That this inclusive notion of writing enables Blanchot to come back to his comfort zone – the modernist dichotomy of an internal “day” and an external “night” – can be seen in a late text, The Writing of the Disaster, a book of fragments published in 1980. One would expect a writing about disaster, in the last quarter of the 20th century, to be much more concrete, politically. But once the political becomes part of “writing”, no scruples accompany the decision to refrain from dealing with it explicitly and concretely. Rather than such treatment, Blanchot approaches the disaster via the solitude of writing. Note the reference, in the same vein as before, to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “Inasmuch as the disaster is thought, it is nondisastrous thought, thought of the outside. We have no access to the outside, but the outside has always already touched us in the head, for it is the precipitous … ” (The Writing of the Disaster, 6); “The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience – it is the limit of writing … It is dark disaster that brings the light” (The Writing of the Disaster, 7, emphasis original); “Wittgenstein’s ‘mysticism’, aside from his faith in unity, must come from his believing that one can show when one cannot speak. But without language, nothing can be shown. And to be silent is still to speak … Writing … precedes every phenomenon” (The Writing of the Disaster, 11, emphasis original).
31. Blanchot, Political Writings, 26. This quote is taken from a version of an interview for L’Express, which has not been published there eventually. It was published in “Le droit à l’insoumission (le dossier des ‘121’)”, Cahiers libres, no. 14 (January 1961).
32. Blanchot, Political Writings, 26.
33. Ibid.
34. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, xii.
35. Many years later, in 1986, Blanchot reissued a similar plea in a short article dedicated to Nelson Mandela. In this text, entitled “Our Responsibility”, he offers a concise reminder of the horrors of Apartheid, “so that memory of them should make us more aware of our responsibility”. We, who sleep calmly at night, he says, “have a share in them”, and hence “must know that we too are responsible and guilty, if we do not take a call (appel) heard, a denunciation, a shout and a shout once more” (Blanchot Political Writings, 169). Published as “Notre responsabilité” in Derrida, Jacques, and Tlili, Mustapha, eds., Pour Nelson Mandela, 213–217.
36. Cf. note 9 above.
37. Blanchot, Political Writings, 87.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Quoted by Kevin Hart in his Foreword to Blanchot’s Political Writings, p. xxviii, from Levinas’ “Judaism and Revolution” in his Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. A. Abramowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 115f. Levinas quotes Blanchot’s letter without disclosing his name, but the source is unmistakable as he gives enough clues to identify it.
41. Blanchot, Political Writings, 170. Preferring Peres over Begin because of the latter’s colonization policy is, in the best case, naïve and uninformed. Peres was one of the main founders of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. His more dovish attitude in the 1980s was far from a retreat from this policy.
42. It was published in La règle du jeu, January 1991. What prompted this note was a question presented to Blanchot as part of a “New Enquiry into the National Question”. The particular question he replies to, here, is “According to you, is there such a thing as a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ nationalism?” (Cf. Blanchot Political Writings, 198) Blanchot opens his rejoinder by noting, characteristically, “it suits a writer better to attempt to ask new questions rather than respond to questions that have already been posed”; however, he continues, when it comes to this particular questionnaire, “I would answer without hesitation” (Blanchot, Political Writings, 173). Note the deference of the writer’s position, when it comes to this acute political-ideological question. It is quite extraordinary for Blanchot.
43. Blanchot, Political Writings, 173.
44. Ibid., xxviii.
45. Ibid., 174. The text first appeared in La règle du jeu, no. 10 (May 1993), 206.
46. Engels’ idiom in his “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Idealism”.
47. Blanchot, Political Writings, 105.
48. Ibid., 26.
49. Ibid., 86.
50. Ibid., 169.