Maurice Blanchot: Suffering and Affliction as Epiphany

Abstract

This essay seeks to examine the theme of suffering and affliction in Blanchot with a view toward whether it provides an epiphany in the sense of a pathway to Blanchot's notion of the Outside and the experience of the ‘Impossible Relation’. The article takes its starting point from a previous suggestion made by Michael Purcell that Blanchot's impossible relation may constitute a prolegemonon for a Christian doctrine of grace. Fundamental to this thesis is the philosophical journey of selfhood from Heidegger through Levinas to Blanchot. For Heidegger the self is constituted by death as the possibility of impossibility, whereas for Levinas and Blanchot the self is constituted by the impossibility of possibility. Consequently, for Levinas and Blanchot, the self, strictly speaking, as self-constituted, is impossible. Thus the self is due to excess, surplus, infinity – all suggestive, argues Purcell, of the gratuity of grace. However, a feature of distinction between Levinas and Blanchot is that the latter contains no sense of a Judeo-Christian concept of God. There is, for Blanchot, no opening out onto divinity and whatever excess constitutes the selfhood is correlated to something that is not divine in any traditional Christian sense. The paper argues that affliction and suffering serve to point to the dispossession of the self and open up to an experience of a ‘relation without relation to the outside’. In Blanchot's Death Sentence it becomes possible to see some features of how this dispossession of the self unfolds in the events between J. and the narrator. The paper concludes by suggesting that suffering and affliction disclose to us the truth of the self as constituted by an-other.