In “Literature and the Right of Death,” Maurice Blanchot asserts that literature begins with a question which it addresses to language. For Blanchot, beneath the ruins of literature—the paradoxical “cliché” of the literary critique—there resides an exceptional “force laboring in the secrecy” of the literary object: “If literature coincides with nothing for just an instant,” Blanchot explains, “it is immediately everything, and this everything begins to exist.” [301-2]
Through the example of the ideation of the strove—emerging from the desire for warmth—that irrevocably transforms its constituent elements of stone and cast iron, Blanchot traces the enigmatic force at work in the literary object to Hegel and Marx, and their emphasis on the historicity of the object, as the embodiment of the changing state of things—the gesture of “denial and destruction” achieved through the work—that is exhibited in the particular—in the author—and in general, in the revealed existant of the literary object that leaves an indelible imprint on the world [313-14]: the movement from “nothing to everything.” [318]
This action of literature is, for Blanchot, analogous with revolution: not only in the conceit of it’s historicity, but also, in it’s “demand for purity,” it’s “absolute value,” and it’s inherent telos—“that it is itself the ultimate goal, the Last Act.” [319] In this respect, the inactivity of the author, his neglect of the reality of his “emancipation" is—itself—a realization of “absolute freedom” as an event, as instantiated “above time, empty and inaccessible.”[315]
“Freedom or death,” then, for Blanchot, is the slogan of literature. For the question of literature, is none other than a question of becoming; it is the “to be, or not to be” of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy; a monologue of revolution where, as Blanchot states, “life endures death and maintains itself in it.” But it is a death that is the “impossibility of dying,” a death viewed through a naked consciousness devoid of identity. [329]
Marlon Smith N0290682
Ref: Blanchot, Maurice, "Literature and the Right to Death" from M. Blanchot, The Work of Fire (Stanford University Press: Stanford,1995), pp. 300-344
Thanks Marlon. Nice work. And very brave taking on one of Blanchot's most enigmatic of texts!! I like the fact that you tried to think along with Blanchot. And always great to finish on Hamlet's great phrase, which I think nicely encapsulates what is at stake for Blanchot. Either the literary object should be a question of transformation of ones life or it should not. Anything in between is mere noise! The text can only come to life by metaphorically surging out of its brute materiality. A text exists only when it contributes to freedom rather than death. As we mentioned in the lecture, Lazarus is of key importance for Blanchot!
ReplyDeleteI think this is the point that Bergson wants to make in 'Time and Freewill,' when he talks about the 'bold novelist' peering behind the 'cleverly woven curtain of our conventional ego.' Although he is critical of the medium of literature, the idea of words being expressions of 'elements' in 'homogeneous time'-which he perceives as representing a world of 'shadows'; He wants to applaud the Novelist for bringing us back to 'our own presence.'
ReplyDeleteBergson, Henri, “The Multiplicity of Conscious States: The Idea of Duration” in Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Cosimo Classics: New York, 2008), pp. 133-34