Approaching Disappearance - Anne McConnell Dalkey Archive Scholarly

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produces the book, and, faced with the inadequacy of the book, he or she returns to writing, hoping that a little more time and effort will complete the task. For Blanchot, the writer’s illusion, or powerlessness to stop trying, remains important because it sends him or her back to work, even if “what he wants to finish by himself remains interminable” (23). While the book can have significance in the world, as the material or worldly aspect of the work, it has nothing to do with the writer’s approach to the work, which eludes signification; yet the book remains, paradoxically, as the only evidence of the writer’s task. John Gregg provides insight into the relationship of the book and the work in The Literature of Transgression:

      The work, on the other hand, escapes comprehension. It contains an inexhaustible reserve that can never be completely explained away, accounted for, or summed up by interpretation. The “evidence of the book” seems to be a solid structure, but it is an edifice built on the ever-shifting sands of the work. The lack of solid foundation accounts for the inadequation of the work with itself, which Blanchot calls “the absence of the book.” [ . . . ] The work is and is not there. Its constant movement is an oscillation between apparition and disappearance [ . . . ].11

      The work exceeds the limits of the book; it does not appear anywhere in the book. But this excessiveness remains at the heart of the book, as the book’s inability to contain it or to do away with it—to make it appear or disappear. The book remains as that which is available to comprehension, and, for this reason, refuses the reading of the work. Blanchot suggests, though, that this refusal and the non-coincidence of book and work provide a space of rupture where the disappearance or concealment of the work might paradoxically come forward, as that which must remain hidden. He approaches this subject first by considering the writer’s attempt to read his or her work.

      In the face of the inability to finish the task of writing, or to bring forth the work in anything other than a book, the writer might decide to approach the book as a reader. In doing so, the writer confronts “the abrupt Noli me legere,” experiencing inability for a second time. Blanchot tells us that “the writer never reads his work. It is for him illegible, a secret” (24).12 But he also clarifies that the refusal, the Noli me legere, establishes the writer’s relation with the work.

      It is not the force of an interdict, but, through the play and sense of words, the insistent, the rude and poignant affirmation that what is there, in the global presence of a definitive text, still withholds itself—the rude and biting void of refusal—or excludes, with the authority of indifference, him who, having written it, yet wants to grasp it afresh by reading it. (25)

      The moment when the writer faces that which turns him or her away, that which affirms concealment, recalls the characterization of the work as the appearance of “everything has disappeared.” The writer, in his or her attempted approach as reader, experiences the depth of this concealment—a depth that otherwise remains unapproachable to the writer during the patient efforts to continue working. The Noli me legere affirms the disappearance of the work, if only for a moment, since the writer ultimately returns to work with no choice but to do so. We might imagine the sick hand again, especially since Blanchot describes the writer’s approach to the text as reader in terms of the desire to “grasp it afresh by reading it.” The sick hand grasps the pencil, unable to let it go, but in doing so, as we saw earlier, exposes the writer to “the fundamental passivity where the word, no longer anything but its appearance—the shadow of a word—never can be mastered or even grasped” (25). While grasping first suggests power and understanding, it reveals itself as a sort of passive movement that stems from inability. The desire to read, for the writer, reflects the loss or absence involved in his or her task, since it would ideally serve to recover what has disappeared, or has receded beyond the grasp of the writer in his or her approach to the work. The writer attempts to read with mastery, and in doing so encounters a refusal that constitutes his or her only relation to the work.

      In Blanchot’s thought, the writer clearly does not operate from a position of ability or mastery, but rather slips into a movement where the power to speak, to say “I,” disappears. “To write, moreover, is to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time” (26). Writing turns language over to the movement of the work, which lacks time and exceeds the activity and comprehension of the world. And the turning over, or withdrawing of language, which is writing, also opens a space for writing. This space becomes a risk to the writer, who no longer inhabits the realm illuminated by the light of day, where language signifies the power to express oneself and the truth of the world. Not only does writing withdraw language from the world, but it also withdraws the writer from the world—again, not in the sense that the task of writing requires that the writer seclude himself or herself from the daily activity of the world. Rather, the writer is pulled into the dark of withdrawn language, where he or she can make nothing appear or disappear through language, including the “I.”

      The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the extent that, being a writer, he does justice to what requires writing, he can never again express himself, or even introduce another’s speech. Where he is, only being speaks—which means that language doesn’t speak anymore, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being. (26-27)

      Blanchot clarifies that the language of writing has nothing to do with claims of universality or objectivity; it does not signify the writer’s sacrifice of a subjective, personal voice in favor of one that attempts to speak a more general truth. Writing withdraws language away from a relation with truth, light, or understanding, and the writer’s sacrifice takes on a much different character—a sacrifice of the ability to speak, and thus to say “I.” Blanchot writes, “The third person substituting for the ‘I’: such is the solitude that comes to the writer on account of the work. [ . . . ] The third person is myself become no one, my interlocutor turned alien [ . . . ]” (28). In this case, the “third person” does not suggest a character, a carefully developed “he” who one might imagine finding in the world; the third person indicates no one, a voice that rises out of the inability to speak.13

      When considering that the writer belongs to a language where he or she doesn’t have the power to speak, we can begin to sense the risk of disappearance that the writer confronts in the process of writing. Blanchot briefly touches upon the tendency of writers to keep a journal because he believes it reveals the writer’s suspicion of his or her disappearance in the impersonality of the work.14

      When faced with anonymity, the writer often takes up writing of a different sort—one which might re-establish the writer’s place in the world, as an “I.” Blanchot calls the journal a “memorial,” suggesting that the writer seeks to remember what has been lost, perhaps in an effort to salvage something of this “I.” Of course, the writer problematically turns to language in order to overcome the withdrawal of language, and the exposure of the “I” to this withdrawal, which would seem to reveal the futility of the effort. But Blanchot proposes that the interest of the journal lies in its deliberate references to the mundane events of everyday life and the writer’s participation in this life. The writer is grasping:

      Here, true things are still spoken of. Here, whoever speaks retains his name and speaks in this name, and the dates he notes down belong in a shared time when what happens really happens. The journal—this book which is apparently altogether solitary—is often written out of fear and anguish at the solitude which comes to the writer on account of the work. (29)

      In his or her disappearance, the writer turns to the journal almost in an act of denial. In the journal, the writer believes him or herself to be able to speak, to say “I,” to belong to the present—that which the experience of the work refuses.

      We might

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