Blanchot and Bataille on The Last Man

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Notes

notes

1 M. Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. K. Fijalkowski and M. Richardson (London: Verso, 2002) 311; referred to hereafter as GB. The importance of this meeting is also described by Christophe Bident, who writes:

It became clear to everyone – close friends, readers, detractors – that the meeting of Bataille and Blanchot was that of two lives put into play through thought (through writing), the meeting of two experiences engaged in the totality of being, to the point of including its uncertainties, its conversion, its unlimited opening.

Maurice Blanchot partenaire invisible: Essai biographique (Seyssel: Champ Villon, 1998) 167 (my translation); referred to hereafter as MB.

2 Christophe Bident also refers to this tendency to complement or echo one another's thought:

Each one embodies the latent qualities of the other, like a secret, silent, hidden part of their nature. Blanchot is like Bataille's passivity (his share of calm, his withdrawal, his reserve) while Bataille is like Blanchot's passion (his inner violence, his mental disorder). (MB 168, my translation)

3 G. Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. L.A. Boldt (Albany: State U of New York P, 1988); referred to hereafter as IE.

4 M. Blanchot, The Last Man, trans. L. Davis (New York: Columbia UP, 1987); referred to hereafter as LM.

5 M. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1982); referred to hereafter as SL. See pages 26–28 of this text for Blanchot's writings on “the interminable,” “the incessant.”

6 The tendency to ‘echo’ if not ‘complete’ one another's way of thinking can also be examined in light of the fact that Blanchot wrote several pieces on his friendship with Georges Bataille (“L’Amitié: Pour Georges Bataille” Les Lettres nouvelles 29 (1962): 7–12; L’Amitié (Paris, 1971) 326–30) as well as on Bataille's way of thinking (“The Affirmation and the Passion of Negative Thought,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 202–11). For his part, Bataille writes a review of Blanchot's The Last Man, “Ce monde o[ugrave] nous mourrons,” in 1957 in Critique, republished in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. XII (Paris: Gallimard, 1988) 457–66.

7 These references can be found on pages 3, 7, 12, 53, 61, 101–02, and 180 of Inner Experience.

8 M. Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (New Version), trans. Robert Lamberton (New York: D. Lewis, 1973 [1988]).

9 M. Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003); referred to hereafter as BC.

10 G. Bataille, “Madame Edwarda,” in My Mother, Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man, trans. A. Wainhouse (London: Marion Boyars, 1995).

11 M. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988); referred to hereafter as UC.

12 G. Bataille, “Sacrifices,” in Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. A. Stoekl (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985); referred to hereafter as VE.

13 G. Bataille, “Labyrinth,” in Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. A. Stoekl (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985).

14 M. Blanchot, Death Sentence, trans. L. Davis (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1978).

15 This lack of attention, this indifference to the presence of the others only makes the others desire even more that he notice them. The last man is deemed worthy of the gift of that which is most secret or most central within each of them; only the last man should receive this gift, as if he alone could be entrusted with its safekeeping: “And maybe each one of us, by preserving what was most central to us, was only trying to show it to him, out of some need to put it under his protection, as though in safe custody” (LM 8–9).

16 M. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation; referred to hereafter as IN.

17 Conversely, when the female patient questions the narrator about the last man, it is as if she is speaking directly to the last man through the narrator: “She questioned me about him, as though I had actually been him, and at the same time she said that I was pushing her toward him” (LM 17). The narrator claims that he needed the female patient to be able to think through to the last man, to be able, as well, to free himself from himself:

It is certainly true that without her, I might never have had the strength to think of him […] She must have helped me in my relations with him, to free me of myself, and I experienced a certain happiness limiting my thoughts to her, though they were directed at him. (LM 17)

18 Blanchot's use of the term “labyrinth” in this passage invites us to make a further comparison with Bataille's description of a labyrinth of paths all leading to a summit (which is, for all intents and purposes, never reached). Given that Blanchot's labyrinth in this context is temporal and Bataille's is primarily spatial, one can conclude that the irreducible if illusory difference between selves at work within Bataille's social labyrinth is far more likely to provide a stable point of departure for relations between selves than is the case in Blanchot's descriptions, where the self is continually blurred and exchanged, mediated and recast.

19 The figure of the limit and its role in Bataille's thought is given full treatment in Michel Foucault's “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977). Christophe Bident notes the following difference between Bataille and Blanchot:

one may wonder what became of eroticism and the sacred in Blanchot's writing, both of which are at stake at the heart of Bataille's thought and life. Eroticism did not have the same charge and frequency that it had in Bataille's work. (MB 173, my translation)

20 Nancy views Bataille's enterprise as being suspended between the two poles of ecstasy and community, each one “arealizing” the other by “suspending the immanence that their connection nonetheless implies.” J.-L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community. ed. and trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991) 20; referred to hereafter as IC. For Nancy, Bataille's encounters with ecstasy suspend and limit community without, however, dispensing with it.

21 Indeed, although Blanchot concedes that “all of our language… is arranged to reveal in what ‘is’ not what disappears, but what always subsists” (IN 34), his own writing is devoted to expressing another form of speech, another kind of relation, a relation always in displacement that “does not tend towards unity,” that is not a “relation of unification.” In this form of writing, another kind of relation emerges, whereby “the presence of the other […] would return us neither to ourselves nor to the One” (IN 67).

22 J. Libertson, Proximity. Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982) 81; text referred to hereafter as PL.

23 One might ask whether Blanchot's last man's power of attraction bears any resemblance to the sovereignty so often mentioned in Bataille's fiction and theory. Blanchot refers to this strange power again when the narrator describes the last man's ability to resist what appeared to be certain death as his health suddenly and rapidly declines. After recuperating from the illness that nearly killed him – and it is noteworthy that Blanchot's last man does not slip easily into death – he is seen to be imbued with a power that, while impotent, is superior to all other power:

It was as though an inordinate power had swept down on him and by crushing him so excessively had endowed him in turn with a power – to give it that name – superior to everything, a powerlessness over which, now, no superiority had any hold. (What would happen to man who came up against a death too strong for him? Every man who escapes violent death wears, for an instant, the glimmer of that new dimension). (LM 49)

It is the narrow escape from death, or the extreme proximity to death that transmits power to the last man, but a power whose powerlessness makes it superior to all other power. This description is indeed reminiscent of Bataille's articulation of a sovereignty that, as Derrida has so carefully argued, is both more and less powerful than mastery (cf. J. Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve” [1967], Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1978).

24 Christophe Bident proposes another set of questions asked by Blanchot's text: “Is the thought of death deadly? Into which death does this thought plunge us?” (MB 364).

25 In noting that, from the period of La souveraineté on, Bataille's specific references to community appear to wane in favour of a growing interest in the sovereignty and ecstasy of the individual, Nancy writes:

[…] it is as though the communication of each being with NOTHING were beginning to prevail over the communication between beings, or as if it were necessary to give up trying to show that in both cases it was a question of the same thing. (IC 22)

26 Nancy writes of sovereignty that it is a state where one is “of” an exteriority that one cannot relate to one's self:

[…] in nothing – in sovereignty – being is “outside itself”; it is in an exteriority that is impossible to recapture, or perhaps we should say that it is “of” this exteriority, that it is of an outside that it cannot relate to itself, but with which it entertains an essential and incommensurable relation. […] This relation prescribes the place of the singular being. […] Only community furnishes this relation its spacing, its rhythm. (IC 18)

Could one not relate this description of sovereignty provided by Nancy to what Blanchot has called Bataille's “absence of community”? For Nancy, the individual who experiences sovereignty is both outside itself and “of” an exteriority that it cannot relate to itself. Hence, one has the very real impression of adhering to or experiencing an “absence of community.”

27 Richard Stamp notes that even after Bataille's death, Blanchot maintains a discretion bordering on silence as he nonetheless attempts to “place his own thinking in proximity to, or in the vicinity of (‘auprès de’) the friend who is absent”: “… there is the staging of a resistance to biography, a discretion or indirectness when faced with speaking of his deceased friend, which seems to structure the general impetus and direction of Blanchot's thinking.” “The Discretion of Dying: Blanchot and the Death of Bataille” in Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers, ed. M. Crowley (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) 164–65.

28 Jane Gallop explores the ramifications of Blanchot's position as witness to the friend's death and absence: “Bataille now has the beau rôle, sovereign and silent.” Blanchot is now “[d]esperately in search of a way out, a way to avoid guilt, awkwardness, and mendacity, to avoid violating his dead friend….” “Reading Friends’ Corpses,” MLN 95.4 (1980): 1018–19.