ORPHEUS AND THE VANISHING NOTE

Abstract

It is by now something of a commonplace for readers of Blanchot to claim that the limpid quality of his prose and the wealth of allusion woven through even his more opaque writings often have the paradoxical effect of making his work both engagingly lucid and approachable and utterly resistant to interpretation or even comprehension in any ordinary sense. At the core of this paradoxical experience is a theory of creativity that Blanchot frequently alludes to and often appears to be about to reveal before allowing it to vanish into what he calls his “third night,” a darkness beyond both day and night, being and non-being, from which the artist, writer or composer draws the inspiration required for both the initiation and completion of the textual artefact or, as will be argued here, the musical event. Focusing on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that Blanchot outlines most fully in “The Gaze of Orpheus,” and deploying this writer’s own theory and practice of xenosonics, the fundamental question here will be – and to borrow from his friend Bataille – the “use-value” of Blanchot’s evasive theory of creativity for the creator of music, text or art.

Keywords:

• Orpheus; xenosonics
• Blanchot
• ostinato
• disaster
• katabasis
• kleptomancy
• daemonotechnics

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

abbreviations

GO	=	The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Essays.
IC	=	The Infinite Conversation.
SL	=	The Space of Literature.
VE	=	A Voice from Elsewhere.
WD	=	The Writing of the Disaster.

Notes

1 Hatred of Music 7.

2 The Infinite Conversation 315.

3 “Jerusalem” in Collected Poems 736. This is an image that recurs in Blake’s visionary writings and art and connects in a number of ways – most of which are yet to be determined – with the image of the Orpheus Machine that follows.

4 From David Bowie’s song “Outside,” from the album of the same name.

5 On phenomenophagism, see Charlie Blake, “The Animal that Therefore I am Not” 91–109.

6 This passage is adapted from Charlie Blake, “A Thousand Chateaus” 384, and used here as an example of a broadly fictional yet practically oriented form of theory/divination employed in experimental daemonotechnics termed kleptomancy, which is defined as follows:

Kleptomancy – divination by theft, whether from oneself or another. Self-quotation to the point of infinite regress, either through pure spatial or linear repetition or temporal transection of that repetition. A symptom of certain forms of chronic neologophilia in cases of transmodal anxiety syndrome. Sometimes a synonym for a déjà vu within a déjà vu (archaic).

7 From Tom Verlaine’s song “Marquee Moon” from the 1977 album of the same name.

8 Some useful background in English to the work of des Forêts and Ostinato may be found in John T. Naughton’s Louis-René des Forêts.

9 For examples of work in progress on the experimental categories of daemonotechnics and xenosonics respectively, see Charlie Blake, “Dronoclasm” 10–14; “Sonic Spectralities” passim.

10 Specifically from the essay “Song of the Sirens” in The Gaze of Orpheus.

11 Nick Cave’s “The Lyre of Orpheus” follows his own maverick trail through the myth though there is much in Cave’s oeuvre that, like Bowie’s, hints at a notion of the outside as both the source of infinite longing and creativity.

12 Charlie Blake, “Sonic Spectralities.”

13 Deleuze starts to develop the notion of the dark precursor in Difference and Repetition 119–26. For an elaboration of this concept, see Kaufman’s Deleuze, The Dark Precursor.

14 This is the question posed by Georges Bataille in his essay of that name as collected in Visions of Excess. Its relevance here is reinforced in a number of indirect ways by the friendship between Bataille and Blanchot and by both Bataille’s analysis of sovereignty and Blanchot’s views on the philosophical importance of friendship and the relation between the two. On this, see Kaufman, The Delirium of Praise.

15 From Milton’s pastoral elegy Lycidas.

16 Charlie Blake, “Sonic Spectralities.”

17 Kierkegaard, Repetition. For a useful discussion of the second or “other night” in Blanchot in relation to philosophy as such, see Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse 43–47.

18 Simon Critchley follows this thread at various points in “Lecture 1: Il y a” from Very Little …  35–98.

19 The musical term da capo is used here to indicate that the reader is invited to return to the beginning of “Orpheus and the Vanishing Note” and reread at very least “The Orpheus Machine,” preferably aloud, so as to gain a sense of the xenosonic intervals and daemonotechnic resonances that have been set up by the writer for the first reading. This ritual of repetition, it is hoped, will also aid in heightening the sense of ostinato that Blanchot has woven into his reflections on the Orpheus myth and the various nocturnal and katabatic motifs that colour this exploration of the origins of art, creativity and inspiration.