Levinas, Blanchot, Jabes: Figures of Estrangement (Crosscurrents : Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy)

cover title : author publisher isbn10 | asin print isbn13 ebook isbn13 language subject : : : : : : publication date ...

Author: Gary D. Mole

50 downloads 771 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

cover

title : author publisher isbn10 | asin print isbn13 ebook isbn13 language subject

: : : : : :

publication date lcc ddc subject

: : : :

next page >

Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès : Figures of Estrangement Crosscurrents (Gainesville, Fla.) Mole, Gary D. University Press of Florida 9780813015057 9780813022031 English Lévinas, Emmanuel, Blanchot, Maurice, Jabès, Edmond, Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism, Alienation (Social psychology) in literature, Alienation (Philosophy) 1997 PN771.M63 1997eb 809/.93353 Lévinas, Emmanuel, Blanchot, Maurice, Jabès, Edmond, Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism, Alienation (Social psychology) in literature, Alienation (Philosophy)

cover

next page >

< previous page

page_i

next page > Page i

Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès Crosscurrents

< previous page

page_i

next page >

< previous page

page_ii

next page > Page ii

Crosscurrents: Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy Edited by S. E. Gontarski Improvisations on Michel Butor: Transformation of Writing, by Michel Butor, edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Lois Oppenheim; translated by Elinor S. Miller (1996) The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras, and Robbe-Grillet, by Raylene L. Ramsay (1996) The Ghosts of Modernity, by Jean-Michel Rabaté (1996) Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic, by Albert Sbragia (1996) Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tradition in Perspective, by Nancy M. Shawcross (1997) Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement, by Gary D. Mole (1997)

< previous page

page_ii

next page >

< previous page

page_iii

next page > Page iii

Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès Figures of Estrangement Gary D. Mole

< previous page

page_iii

next page >

< previous page

page_iv

next page > Page iv

Copyright 1997 by the Board of Regents of the State of Florida Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper All rights reserved 02 01 00 99 98 97 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mole, Gary D. Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès: figures of estrangement / Gary D. Mole. p. cm. (Crosscurrents: comparative studies in European literature and philosophy) Based on the author's thesis (Ph.D.). Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8130-1505-7 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 2. Blanchot, Maurice. 3. Jabès, Edmond. 4. Literature, Modern 20th century History and criticism. 5. Alienation (Social psychology) in literature. 6. Alienation (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Series: Crosscurrents (Gainesville, Fla.) PN771.M63 1997 809'.93353 dc21 97-12250 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprised of Florida A & M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611

< previous page

page_iv

next page >

< previous page

page_v

next page > Page v

In memory of Arlette and Edmond Jabès

< previous page

page_v

next page >

< previous page

page_vii

next page > Page vii

Contents

Foreword By S. E. Gontarski

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

1

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif

5


12


20

1. Differing Alterities: The Etranger, the Jew, and the Writer

23


23


25


27


28


29


29


30


33


33

The Writers

The Readers

The Chapters

Lévinas: Escape, ''Ex-Cendance," the "There Is," and the Étranger

Escaping from Being

The Unbearable Presence of Being

The Shamefulness of Being

The Sickness of Being

The Plenitude of Being

The Horror of Anonymous Being: The "There Is"

Blanchot, L'Idylle, and the Play of Ambiguity

History of Publication


34


36


37


39


40


44


48


54


54


54


56

The Narrative Voice

Beyond Memoirs from the House of the Dead

Vicious Circles: Repetition and Difference

The Étranger and Nonidentity

The Étranger and the Jew

The Étranger and the Anti-Semite

Blanchot and the Question of Anti-Semitism

Jabès: Etranger-Writer-Jew

Displaced Figures

From the Particular to the Universal (and Back Again)

The Absence of Identity

< previous page

page_vii

next page >

< previous page

page_viii

next page > Page viii


57


59


64

2. Versions and Subversions of the Law

67


67


67


70


73


76


78


78


82


88


88


95

Nomadic Truth and the Myth of Exile

Trials and Tribulations

Questioning Jewish Reflections

Lévinas and the Revelation of the Law

Reading the Talmud

God and Philosophy

Revelation, Transcendence, and Obedience to the Most-High

Moses, Slow of Speech and Slow of Tongue, Face-to-Face with the Most-High

Jabès and the Eye of the Law

The Vision of Aely

Moses the Lawgiver

Blanchot and the ''I" of the Law

Aminadab and Le Très-Haut

Breaking the Law

3. From Abram to Abraham, from Dialogue to Silence

100


100


100

Lévinas, Dialogue, and the Figuring of Abraham

Abra(ha)m and Ulysses


102


106


108


109


111


111


112


115


120


121


123


125

4. Auschwitz and the Limits of Dis-Course

131


132


132


136


143

Abra(ha)m and Dialogical Philosophy

Abraham and the Strangers

Abraham and the Just

The Metamorphosis of Abram

Jabès and the Figuring of Silence

Abram and the Discovery of Alterity

The Dream of Dialogue

Abram and the Silence of God

Blanchot's Au Moment Voulu and the Self-Sacrificial Text

Writers and Self-Deprivation

The Four Moments

Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac

Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès, and the Shoah

Lévinas

Blanchot

Jabès

< previous page

page_viii

next page >

< previous page

page_ix

next page > Page ix


147


147


150


154


154


161


163


167


168


171

Toward a Conclusion

177

Notes

181

Bibliography

191

Index

201

Lévinas, Testimony, Suffering, and the Shoah

The Witness and the Face

Useless Suffering and the Shoah

Blanchot, Waiting, Forgetting, and the Subjectless Subject

The Fragmentary Demand

The Obliteration of Time: The Infinite Dying

The Torment of Injustice

Jabès and the Wound of Writing

The Poetic Discourse

The Dis-Course of Auschwitz

< previous page

page_ix

next page >

< previous page

page_xi

next page > Page xi

Foreword The Crosscurrents series is designed to foreground comparative studies in European art and thought, particularly the intersections of literature and philosophy, aesthetics and culture. Without abandoning traditional comparative methodology, the series is receptive to the latest currents in critical, comparative, and performative theory, especially those generated by the renewed intellectual energy in post-Marxist Europe. It will as well take full cognizance of the cultural and political realignments of what, for the better part of the twentieth century, have been two separated and isolated Europes. While Western Europe is now moving aggressively toward unification in the European Community, with the breakup of the twentieth century's last colonial empire, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe is subdividing into nationalistic and religious enclaves following the collapse of the Communist hegemony. The intellectual, cultural, and literary significance of such profound restructuring, how history will finally rewrite itself, is difficult to anticipate. Having had a fertile period of modernism snuffed out in an ideological coup not long after the 1917 Revolution, the nations of the former Soviet Union have, for instance, been denied (or spared) the age of Freud, most modernist experiments, and postmodern fragmentation. While Western Europe continues reaching beyond modernism, Eastern Europe may be struggling to reclaim it. Whether a new art can emerge in the absence or from the absence of such forces as shaped modernism is one of the intriguing questions of postCold War aesthetics, philosophy, and critical theory. In the current offering in the Crosscurrents series, Gary D. Mole analyzes and compares the work of three critical (in all senses of that term), if heretofore underappreciated, cultural theorists: Emmanuel Lévinas, a Lithuanian talmudic scholar and philosopher; Maurice Blanchot, a French Catholic novelist and literary theorist; and Edmond Jabès, an Egyptian Jew and poet. In Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement, Mole traces these ''formative marginal figures" (hence the estrangement of the title) beyond the

< previous page

page_xi

next page >

< previous page

page_xii

next page > Page xii

modernist enterprise into a postmodern discourse: through the post-Hegelian metaphysical shift in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and the philosophy of phenomena in Husserl and particularly Heidegger to a postconsciousness philosophy with a decidedly ethical turn (''The essence of discourse is ethical," Lévinas reminds us in Totality and Infinity); and through the modernist literary strains of Sade, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Kafka, et al. to the post-modern (if not postliterary) discourse of Beckett and Duras. Like Derrida, Lévinas emerges from the phenomenological tradition pioneered by Husserl and Heidegger, but because of Heidegger's support for National Socialism, Lévinas came to suspect that Heidegger's entire philosophy might be corrupt. For Lévinas the critical ethical encounter is working with another person, the other, the you (or thou), or, in Lévinas's coinage, illeity. Through essays by Derrida ("Violence and Metaphysics," for instance) and Lyotard ("Logique de Lévinas," among others), the talmudic scholar's work began to gain wider attention; with the recent publication of Marie-Anne Lescourret's biography Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Flammarion) and Mole's translation of Lévinas's Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) and now his Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement, Lévinas's work is poised to attract wider attention still. With Lévinas as his focal point, Mole proceeds to the work of Maurice Blanchot, who, rather than simply shedding new light on the major writers of his age, "subordinates them to the mystery of literature . . . and allows the texts to suggest their own theory to him." "Poststructuralism," Mole continues, "thus owes a considerable debt to Blanchot." Jabès is also a "precursor of postmodernism," and in his own ethical turn "[conflates] the Jew with the condition of the writer." All three writers are sensitive to the dominant shadow the Shoah casts across the entire twentieth century; "the Shoah furnishes perhaps the major reason for the need to question the Western tradition of metaphysics, clarity, and truth of vision." Mole's comparisons among this unlikely triumvirate of theorists form precisely the sort of comparative philosophical and literary study that the Crosscurrents series is designed to foster. The series will continue to critique the developing, often conflicting, currents of European thought through the prism of literature, philosophy, and theory.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif S. E. GONTARSKI SERIES EDITOR

< previous page

page_xii

next page >

< previous page

page_xiii

next page > Page xiii

Acknowledgments Parts of the sections on Blanchot and Jabès in chapters 3 and 4 appeared previously in ''Blanchot's Au moment voulu and the Silence of Abraham," in Australian Journal of French Studies 32, no. 1 (1995): 47-65, and "Edmond Jabès and the Wound of Writing: The Traces of Auschwitz," in Orbis Litterarum 49 (1994): 293-306. I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint the material. Part of chapter 4 on Blanchot was first given as a seminar paper at BarIlan University, Israel. My thanks to the French Department for giving me a valuable opportunity to work through some of the ideas. I am also grateful to Pembroke College, Cambridge, for granting me sabbatical leave to take up a research post at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, which permitted me to complete this book. Many thanks also to Colin Davis, who supervised the Ph.D. dissertation on Blanchot and Jabès on which this book is based. His advice has always been exemplary. Finally, my deepest expression of gratitude to Nicole, for untold reasons that remain beyond words.

< previous page

page_xiii

next page >

< previous page

page_xv

next page > Page xv

Abbreviations Biblical references are taken from The Jerusalem Bible, translated by Harold Fisch. Passages from talmudic tractates are from The Babylonian Talmud, under the editorship of Isidore Epstein. Full references to all works cited are given in the bibliography. All translations from the French and German are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Those works by Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès most frequently cited are identified in the text with the following abbreviations. Emmanuel Lévinas

L-ADV

L'Au-delà du verset. Lectures et discours talmudiques

L-AHN

A l'heure des nations

L-AQE

Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence

L-BTV

Beyond the Verse. Talmudic Readings and Lectures

L-DDQVI

De Dieu qui vient à l'idée

L-DE

De l'évasion

L-DEE

De l'existence à l'existant

L-DL

Difficile liberté

L-DSS

Du sacré au saint

L-EDEHH

En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger

L-EI

Ethique et infini

L-EN

Entre nous

L-HAH

Humanisme de l'autre homme

L-HS

Hors sujet

L-NP

Noms propres

L-QEV

Emmanuel Lévinas: Qui êtes-vous?

L-QLT

Quatre lectures talmudiques

L-SMB

Sur Maurice Blanchot

L-TA

Le Temps et l'autre

L-TI

Totalité et infini

< previous page

page_xv

next page >

< previous page

page_xvi

next page > Page xvi

Maurice Blanchot

B-AC

Après coup précédé par Le Ressassement éternel

B-Am

L'Amitié

B-Amin

Aminadab

B-Amv

Au moment voulu

B-AO

L'Attente l'oubli

B-CI

La Communauté inavouable

B-ED

L'Ecriture du désastre

B-EI

L'Entretien infini

B-EL

L'Espace littéraire

B-FJ

La Folie du jour

B-IM

L'Instant de ma mort

B-LV

Le Livre à venir

B-PAD

Le Pas au-delà

B-PF

La Part du feu

B-RE

Le Ressassement éternel

B-TH

Le Très-Haut

Edmond Jabès

J-A

Aely

J-CSC

Ça suit son cours

J-DCASF

Désir d'un commencement Angoisse d'une seule fin

J-DDD

Dans la double dépendance du dit

J-DL

Du Désert au livre: Entretiens avec Marcel Cohen

J-E

Elya

J-EDD

L'Enfer de Dante

J-EDL

· El, ou le dernier livre

J-II

L'Ineffaçable l'inaperçu

J-JBD

Je bâtis ma demeure

J-LD

Le Livre du dialogue

J-LH

Le Livre de l'hospitalité

J-LP

Le Livre du partage

J-LQ

Le Livre des questions

J-LR

Le Livre des ressemblances

J-LY

Le Livre de Yukel

J-P

Le Parcours

J-PLS

Le Petit Livre de la subversion hors de soupçon

J-RL

Le Retour au livre

J-SD

Le Soupçon le désert

J-UE

Un Etranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format

J-Y

Yaël

< previous page

page_xvi

next page >

< previous page

page_1

next page > Page 1

Introduction In a speech delivered before the Foundation for French Judaism in Paris in 1982, Jabès concluded with three quotations that constitute the nexus of my concerns in the present study:


7d5aff9


7d5aff9


7d5aff9

Lévinas: ''Questioning one's Jewish identity is already to have lost it. But it is still to hold on to it, since otherwise one would be avoiding the question" (L-DL, 78). Blanchot: "Whoever writes is in exile from writing: this is his own country where he is no prophet" (B-ED, 105). Jabès: "Faced with the impossibility of writing which paralyzes every writer and the impossibility of being Jewish which for two thousand years has rent the people of this name, the writer chooses to write and the Jew to survive" (J-LY, 5960, J-DDD, 86).

Interrogation, identity, the Jew, exile, writing, and correlatively the figure of the étranger: 1 this book is organized around the interference of these preoccupations in the works of Emmanuel Lévinas (Lithuanian Jew, philosopher), Maurice Blanchot (French Catholic, novelist and literary theorist), and Edmond Jabès (Egyptian Jew, poet). Jabès's quotations indicate that the convergence of these writers is by no means arbitrary, and I shall explore the legitimacy of such a convergence shortly. I wish to pause from the outset, however, to consider the central position of these writers within postmodern discourse and the tremendous influence they have exerted on a generation of philosophers and writers. Although all three have writing careers extending from the 1930s onwards, mainstream critical interest in their work did not begin until the 1970s, as the more visible authors of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction paved the way to a return to the formative marginal figures who preceded and accompanied them. Hence, Lévinas gradually came to be acknowledged as one of the first French thinkers to engage with Husserlian

< previous page

page_1

next page >

< previous page

page_2

next page > Page 2

phenomenology and Heideggerian thought, an engagement that still governs the horizon of Continental postmodern philosophy, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. The reflexivity of consciousness privileged by the phenomenological method in which meaning and truth are shown to be generated by intentionality rather than by abstract deduction provided Lévinas with the tools he needed to dislodge Husserl's system while still working within it, a move that was to become instrumental in deconstructive practice. Husserlian phenomenology, Lévinas realized, was unable to admit meanings that were irreducible to representation, and these nonrepresentational intentionalities were what Lévinas identified in the ethical encounter with another person. Such a contestation also led Lévinas to break with Heideggerian Being that for Lévinas, despite its claim to have brought an end to the metaphysics of presence, continued to subordinate the relation with the other to the relation with Being. In other words, whereas Heidegger located signification in existence as a project, Lévinas located it in responsibility for the other. Moreover, by persistently criticizing what he saw as the totalizing vision of the Western metaphysical tradition from Plato to Heidegger via Descartes Lévinas opened a radical break in the very structure of being in which the other became irrecuperably sovereign. These positions, whether supported or contested, revealed Lévinas to be a central figure in questions of the other within philosophical, sociocultural, and literary discourses. But in the process of uprooting the ontological in order to privilege the ethical, Lévinas turned not only to (or against) Western philosophical models, but to the ethical principles of the Jewish tradition. Through the Greek and Jewish traditions, Lévinas has thus forged a place as one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the century, alongside Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin. This is prestigious company indeed, and proof of the radical challenge to thought posed by Lévinas's philosophy. To consider Blanchot alongside Lévinas is in many respects to turn from the strictly philosophical (a strictness, in fact, the contours of which both Lévinas and Blanchot collapse) to the literary and theoretical. Yet a cursory glance at the cluster of authors around whom much of Blanchot's critical thought crystallizes reveals not only a dazzling array of some of the key figures of modernity, but also the same philosophical heritage as Lévinas. Sade, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, Proust, and Artaud are thus read in conjunction with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. But Blanchot also turned his attention to his own contemporary writers such as René Char, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Leiris, Francis Ponge, Albert Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and Duras; to a handful of German

< previous page

page_2

next page >

< previous page

page_3

next page > Page 3

authors whom Blanchot was instrumental in introducing to the French reading public, such as Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Ernst Jünger, and Thomas Mann; and finally to such Anglo-American writers as Henry James and Virginia Woolf. As he reads these authors and philosophers, Blanchot does not set out simply to throw new light on them (although he often does just this); rather he subordinates them to the mystery of literature, which preoccupies him, and allows the texts to suggest their own theory to him. The influence of these readings, and of Blanchot's own fiction, which appeared concurrently with his criticism, can be discerned in the early works of more prominent theorists such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Derrida. Much of Blanchot's analyses and practice of writing, for example, are behind Barthes's Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (Writing degree zero), in which Blanchot figures as a ''writer without Literature," whose "white writing" 2 is exemplary for Barthes of the attempt to call into question the very existence of literature. Alongside Barthes's celebrated notion of the death of the author, which owes not a little to Blanchot's theories, Foucault's critique of the sovereignty of subjectivity finds an echo in his reading of Blanchot (via Lévinas) as a thinker of exteriority whose writing is an expropriation of itself, a self-denial that breaks with the Hegelian dialectic in which negativity is always taken up and appropriated by consciousness, history, or meaning. And it is impossible not to see some of Blanchot's concepts of writing in Derrida's own notion of "différance," where meaning exists, but no longer as being or truth (the ontotheological categories Derrida is at pains to deconstruct), but rather as linguistic difference that is textually produced and contextually deferred. Poststructuralism thus owes a considerable debt to Blanchot. More generally, Blanchot's repeated aestheticizations of the philosophical discourse, his engagement with the ambivalent status of representation in modern aesthetics, oscillating in the irresolvable tension between transparent mimesis and nondiscursive language, find distant echoes in literary theorists from the phenomenological criticism of Roman Ingarden, to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and to the negative hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur*. Although belonging to the same generation as Blanchot and Lévinas, Jabès did not undertake his major work until the 1960s, and therefore for many readers Jabès has been seen not so much as a precursor of postmodernism but as its very contemporary. Yet Jabès's poetic enterprise dates back much earlier and finds its place alongside the work of, for example, Max Jacob, Char, Henri Michaux, and Leiris. Jabès's later work, like the work of Lévinas, owed its growing prominence to the deconstructive enterprise of Derrida, and, like Lévinas and Blanchot, Jabès became instrumental in extending the

< previous page

page_3

next page >

< previous page

page_4

next page > Page 4

field of literary theory to the domain of Jewish exegesis. Unlike Lévinas, however, whose Judaization of the other means the other becomes transcendent, Jabès not only Judaizes the other, he also goes one step further by conflating the Jew with the condition of the writer. One finds such a double identity in other writers, but none has equalled Jabès in giving philosophical credibility to a poetic discourse that uproots ontology and subverts subjectivity as unityidentity, concerns clearly shared by Blanchot and Lévinas. More formally, Jabès's discreet influence can be discerned in the work of a younger generation of French poets, such as Anne-Marie Albiach and Claude Royet-Journoud, who herald from the Mallarmean tradition but through the prism of Jabès. This dissemination of the works of Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès would in itself legitimate a study of their respective relations to one another, so far neglected in French and Anglo-American criticism. The present work is intended to fill this lacuna, and it does so partly in answer to the sense of urgency with which their work is infused, namely, the imperative of responding to the Shoah. Such responses are undeniably constitutive of the postmodern condition, and the Shoah furnishes perhaps the major reason for the need to question the Western tradition of metaphysics, clarity, and truth of vision. The specificity of the chosen configuration of writers, then, is that all three hold fast to this questioning of the ontological and the phenomenal in relation to the étranger, the Jew, exile, writing, and the Shoah. It has not been my intention in what follows to elide the different statuses of such problematical figures as the étranger and the Jew in the respective philosophical, critical, fictional, and poetic discourses, but my approach has been governed by this constellation of concerns because it seems to me that in their implicit and explicit convergence they introduce us not only to the very pulse of the respective thoughts of Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès, but also to the literary, philosophical, and cultural questions that continue to dominate much of today's intellectual and political landscape, from xenophobia and racism to expulsion and genocide. In my own questioning of these figures, however, I have not attempted to write a strictly philosophical work, nor indeed a purely theoretical one, and certainly not one that would attempt to define Jewish identity and Judaism outside the parameters set up by the writers with whom I am dealing. This approach is caused partly by the heterogeneity of the material and partly by the desire to prevent one discourse from reducing and marginalizing the other. I have attempted, then, to respect the element of surplus in the writers I shall address, the fact that Lévinas is more than a philosopher, Blanchot more than a literary theorist, and Jabès more than a poet. Therefore, although this book touches on all

< previous page

page_4

next page >

< previous page

page_5

next page > Page 5

these modes of writing, it assumes the more modest task of critical elucidation from specific points of view in order to provide the nonspecialist reader with an ingress into these three difficult but important writers. Before offering a synopsis of the chapters and the texts discussed in this book, I wish to introduce further these writers and, in particular, to establish the groundwork of their thematic and formal concerns in relation to Judaism. In the second section, I have thought it crucial for the reader to see how each writer engages and disengages with the other two in his explicit writings on them, in order for the implicit echoes of the subsequent chapters to resonate more fully. As we shall see, productive interchange veils essential differences as notions are rewritten, extended, and deconstructed. The Writers Lévinas was born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1906 of Jewish parents. He studied the Bible in Hebrew, but in his father's bookshop he was also exposed to the great Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoyevsky (whose words spoken by Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov resound throughout Lévinas's mature work: ''We are all responsible for everything and everyone else, and I more than the others"). During the First World War his family moved to Russia, where they experienced the upheaval of the 1917 Revolution. In 1923, urged by the philosophical preoccupations of the Russian novelists, Lévinas left for Strasbourg to study philosophy under such teachers as Charles Blondel and Maurice Pradines. It was here that he met and became friends with Blanchot, who introduced him to the works of Proust and Valéry. In 192829 Lévinas spent a year at Freiburg University, where he attended lectures on phenomenology and intersubjectivity by Husserl, and, following his discovery of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and time, 1929), he assisted at the encounter in Davos between Cassirer and Heidegger. In 1930 he published his university dissertation, Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, and opted for French nationality. He later began to work out his own philosophical positions in De l'évasion (1935) and at the same time published a number of articles reflecting on Jewish identity and the rise of fascism in Germany. In 1939 Lévinas was mobilized into the French army as an interpreter of German and Russian. Quickly taken prisoner after the defeat of France, he spent the war in captivity in Germany, protected from deportation by his French uniform. In between forced labor in the surrounding forest, Lévinas was able to draft his first extended philosophical essay, De l'existence à l'existant, published in 1947. After the war he became director of the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale and gave a series of lectures at the Collège

< previous page

page_5

next page >

< previous page

page_6

next page > Page 6

philosophique, founded by Jean Wahl, which were to become Le Temps et l'autre (1948). At this time Lévinas met the prestigious and mysterious teacher Monsieur Chouchani, 3 an encounter that subsequently led him, from 1957 onwards, to contribute a talmudic reading almost annually at the International Colloquium of French Jewish Intellectuals. His 1961 doctoral thesis, Totalité et infini, earned him his first and belated academic appointment at the University of Poitiers. This was quickly followed in 1963 by Difficile liberté, bringing together numerous articles on Judaism. In 1967 he took up a chair at Paris-Nanterre, followed by a further professorship in 1973 at Paris-Sorbonne. A year later he published perhaps his major philosophical work, Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence. Lévinas retired in 1976, but he continued to publish important philosophical essays, talmudic readings, and texts dealing with Jewish issues until his death in December 1995.4 It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the indebtedness of Lévinas to the philosophies that have most influenced his own work.5 Although I address some of the problems of Heidegger's work with which Lévinas takes issue, there is no discussion here, for instance, of Husserl, whose phenomenological method, as I have indicated, is crucial in helping Lévinas to formulate his own ideas. It is nevertheless important to emphasize that whereas Husserl defines intersubjectivity as an egology, Lévinas radically reformulates it in terms of an asymmetrical relation of alterity. Ethics, in Lévinas, opposes all philosophies predicated on the self, and all ontologies, in order to become what he calls the first philosophy. Moreover, in his rethinking and reworking of such notions as subjectivity, the face, language, God, responsibility, and justice, Lévinas's Jewish heritage is always present, even if it is not made explicit. This Jewish heritage, however, is not just textual, even though Lévinas views the Talmud, for example, as a supreme height of thought. For Lévinas also inherited the history of persecution culminating in the Shoah, which chapter 4 will suggest is the horizon of all Lévinas's thought and an important point of convergence with the works of Blanchot and Jabès. A similar biographical sketch concerning Blanchot is somewhat more problematic, and his writing requires a little more preliminary comment. This is not because Blanchot is a more difficult writer than Lévinas, nor in biographical terms because of his renowned withdrawal from public life in 1940 and his avowed commitment to his own words: ''The writer, his biography: he died, lived and died" (B-ED, 61), but because of his ambiguous relationship to Judaism. The barest outline of his biography would run as follows: he was born in Quain, Sâone-et-Loire, in 1907; like Lévinas, he

< previous page

page_6

next page >

< previous page

page_7

next page > Page 7

studied philosophy at Strasbourg University, but, unlike Lévinas, in the 1930s he turned to a political discourse that expressed itself in right-wing ephemeral journals; after the defeat of France in 1940, he nevertheless refused to collaborate with the Vichy regime. The remainder of Blanchot's biographical sketch is principally literary, but not necessarily apolitical. Blanchot's first novel, Thomas l'Obscur, appeared in 1941, followed by Aminadab in 1942 and his first collection of essays, Faux pas, a year later. After the war he continued to pursue his joint literary career as critic and novelist, with the publication in 1948 of his last novel, Le Très-Haut; his first major récit, L'Arrêt de mort; and the critical work La Part du feu in 1949. The 1950s saw a particularly fruitful period in Blanchot's work, with the collections of essays L'Espace littéraire (1955) and Le Livre à venir (1959) and the series of récits Thomas l'Obscur (1950) (a considerably altered version of his previous novel), Au moment voulu (1951), Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas (1953), and Le Dernier Homme (1957). Blanchot's last work of fiction, L'Attente l'oubli, was published in 1962 (in fact, however, as we shall see, Blanchot published a brief récit in 1994 entitled L'Instant de ma mort), followed by the critical works L'Entretien infini (1969) and L'Amitié (1971) and the nongeneric works Le Pas au-delà (1973) and L'Ecriture du désastre (1980). If one attempts to locate in this huge corpus the point of transition in Blanchot's thought vis-à-vis Judaism (I shall explore the Jewish, or rather anti-Semitic, aspect of his early political writings in the first chapter), one finds it almost exclusively not, as might be expected, in his early friendship with Lévinas, but in his purely literary awakening to the work of Kafka. In a series of idiosyncratic readings, written between 1943 and 1968, Blanchot repeatedly suggests that Kafka be returned to the Jewish tradition. Transposing his theoretical concerns with the Hellenic myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Ulysses and the Sirens (paradigms for the récit, which he distinguishes from the novel), 6 onto the Hebraic dimension of Kafka, Blanchot argues that Kafka must be read within the Jewish perspective of the ''erring in the desert" and "infinite migration" of Abraham (B-EL, 7879). Hence, Blanchot relates Kafka's condition as a writer to what he views as the fundamental condition of the Jew: errancy, exile, and the "truth of the desert" (B-EL, 80). For Blanchot, then, Kafka's relation with writing is a relation with an outside, a positive value that is essentially Jewish. It is specifically to this notion that Blanchot turns in his 1962 essay "Etre juif." But, while it is striking how much Blanchot's reading of Kafka is reproduced in broader terms of "Jewish being" or "being Jewish," there is something else at work in this essay. For the terms Blanchot begins to employ

< previous page

page_7

next page >

< previous page

page_8

next page > Page 8

suggest an interference of Lévinas's notions of alterity, exteriority, and the interdiction of murder as they are developed in Totalité et infini. But whereas Lévinas in Totalité et infini does not attach alterity specifically to the Jew, Blanchot does. ''Etre juif," then, locates a "truth of Judaism . . . a grave truth, an exceptionally important relation" (B-EI, 181, 182) in the very words "being Jewish": "It exists so that the idea of exodus exists and the idea of exile as a just movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative of exodus, so that the experience of estrangement can be affirmed close to us in an irreducible relation; it exists so that, through the authority of this experience, we can learn to speak" (B-EI, 183). Blanchot argues here that the very meaning of Judaism is to show us that at all times we must be ready to depart, because going out (to the outside) is the demand that we cannot escape if we wish to maintain a relationship of justice. This imperative Blanchot calls a "demand to uproot, an affirmation of nomadic truth" (B-EI, 183). In contradistinction, therefore, to the sedentariness of paganism (which Blanchot and Lévinas would locate in Heidegger's metaphysics), nomadism establishes a relation that possession cannot satisfy: "Every time that Jewish man signals to us in history, it is through the call of a movement. Abraham, happily anchored in Sumerian civilization, at a certain moment breaks with this civilization and renounces the sedentary. Later, the Jewish people becomes a people through exodus" (B-EI, 183). Blanchot's reference to Abraham's migration here conflates André Neher's analysis in L'Existence juive (Jewish existence), to which I shall return, and his own previous reading of Kafka. Blanchot is quite insistent that the words "exodus" and "exile," as well as God's words to Abram: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house" (Gen. 12:1), do not have a negative meaning. Rather, Blanchot states, "exodus and exile indicate a positive relation with exteriority. . . . Exodus and exile express precisely the same reference to the Outside carried by the word existence" (B-EI, 186). Here, then, is an instance of interference. "Exteriority" is Lévinas's terminology from Totalité et infini, where Lévinas works out his positions concerning the face and the asymmetry of the interpersonal. The "Outside," on the other hand, is purely Blanchot's. Blanchot suggests that they express the same idea, but, as we shall see, this is not quite the case. Moreover, in contradistinction to the temptation to posit God as the dimension of transcendence elaborated in Lévinas's Totalité et infini, Blanchot categorically states that "what we owe to Jewish monotheism is not the revelation of the unique God, but the revelation of the word as the place in which men are held in a relationship

< previous page

page_8

next page >

< previous page

page_9

next page > Page 9

with that which excludes all relationship: the infinitely Distant, the absolutely Etranger. God speaks and man speaks to him'' (B-EI, 187). To speak, for Blanchot, is thus to dislocate, to maintain an irreducible difference between the interlocutors, and "to seek the source of the meaning in the prefix of the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, estrangement whose task is to deploy it in the different modes of experience, a prefix which designates to us the distancing and the separation which are the origin of all 'positive values'" (B-EI, 187). By further exploring two instances of what he calls Jewish humanism (God's first question to Adam in Gen. 3:9, and Jacob's struggle with the angel in Gen. 32), Blanchot draws the conclusion that "whoever encounters the Other can relate to him only through mortal violence or through welcoming the gift of the word" (B-EI, 18889). Again, Blanchot's final words indicate that he is writing in the margins of Lévinas, who formulates the idea as: "The Other is the sole being that I can kill" (L-TI, 216). The face of the infinite of transcendence, however, is that which is stronger than murder, and it "already resists us in its face; it is its face, the original expression, the first word: 'thou shalt not commit murder'" (L-TI, 217). There are two points to note here: (1) Blanchot seems to concur with Lévinas's notion of "ethical resistance" (L-TI, 217) by reading this ethical dimension into Judaism as that which asserts an absolute difference between beings, "this distance separating man from man when he is in the presence of the Other" (B-EI, 189). But (2) it is not Lévinas who speaks of Judaism here, but Blanchot. This is not to suggest that the ethical dimension of Judaism is not behind Lévinas's ideas. The interdiction of murder, for example, clearly posits this. But it remains problematic that whereas Lévinas is moving in more universal terms, Blanchot is moving into Jewish specificity. Blanchot ends his essay with a brief meditation on that which refuses the irreducible distance of the other, that which exercises the mortal violence: anti-Semitism. For Blanchot, anti-Semitism figures the repulsion that the other inspires, the need to kill the other, to submit to the all-powerfulness of death that which cannot be measured in terms of power. What the anti-Semite desires, Blanchot concludes, is the suppression of the otherness of the other, and this, as we shall see in chapter 1, has important implications for Blanchot's fictional étranger. For while Blanchot in his conflation of his readings of Kafka, Neher, and Lévinas clearly insists on the "positive values" of Judaism the valorization of exodus, exile, errancy, and estrangement; the rich cultural heritage of Judaism (B-EI, 181); and the name of the Jew as the most worthy of names (B-EI, 184) the ambiguity I shall extract from Blanchot's initial portrayal of the étranger in L'Idylle, a récit contem-

< previous page

page_9

next page >

< previous page

page_10

next page > Page 10

poraneous with his right-wing political leanings, has never been subsequently disambiguated by Blanchot himself. I wish to leave Blanchot at this point and present some of the main features of the work of Jabès and of his own relationship to Judaism, a relationship that is as problematic as Blanchot's, but for different reasons. Jabès was born in 1912 in Cairo to middle-class Jewish parents of Italian origin. He received a French education, French being his mother-tongue. He began publishing poetry in the 1930s, both in France and in Egypt, usually with small publishing houses or in ephemeral journals. These early poems, which Jabès later retracted, bear the imprint of his major influences: Mallarmé, Paul Eluard, and, in particular, Max Jacob, who was to become Jabès's poetic mentor until his death from typhoid in 1944 in the concentration camp at Drancy. During the war, Jabès worked for the British in Palestine, writing poetry that returned him to his youth and took him outside the historical catastrophes happening around him. After the war, he returned to Egypt, visiting Paris regularly and cultivating friendships that ranged from Char, Michaux, the German poet Paul Celan, Gabriel Bounoure, Jean Grenier (who was Camus' mentor), and Camus himself. After the Suez crisis, Egyptian nationalists under Nasser made it increasingly uncomfortable for Jews to stay in Egypt, and in 1957 Jabès exiled himself to Paris. He never returned to Egypt, and he received French citizenship in 1967. After his expulsion, Jabès collected together his main works of poetry from 1943 onwards and, with the insistence of Camus, had them published by Gallimard in 1959 under the title Je bâtis ma demeure. This collection, then, indicates, as it were, a break from the past and a paving of the way for the greater works to come. In 1963 Le Livre des questions appeared, the first in a series of books that gradually took shape to form the main body of Jabès's work a work born of exile, which he continued until his death in January 1991 at the age of seventy-eight. 7 The publication of Je bâtis ma demeure places Jabès squarely in the French poetic tradition from Mallarmé onwards, but one can also discern the problematical nature of silence, absence, and the struggle between the poet and his words that became key notions in Jabès's later work. If the subject of Je bâtis ma demeure is clearly poetry itself ''Poetry has but one love: Poetry" (J-JBD, 165) with his exile from Egypt, this poetry stops. Something radical has happened: the poetry of Le Livre des questions is no longer, strictly speaking, poetry. It is the book. And Jabès is no longer the poet, but the writer and, more importantly, the Jew. Mixing together interminable questions, meditations, imaginary rabbinical commentary, dialogues, quotations, aphorisms, poems, elegies, songs, prayers, fragments, récits, journals, and

< previous page

page_10

next page >

< previous page

page_11

next page > Page 11

letters, Jabès's book escapes generic classification. Pursuing a number of interrelated themes the étranger, exile, errancy, estrangement, the Jew, God, the Book, the word, the letter, silence, the desert Jabès's self-confessed yet problematical ''deconstruction of the book" 8 is one of fragmentation, a decentered and ex-centric writing whose errant words move across the white of blank pages, undermining certainties, subverting totality. It is an immense questioning that moves from the concrete to the abstract, from the horrors of suffering to the temporary comfort of the book. The book contains three main cycles: the septology Le Livre des questions (196373), the trilogy Le Livre des ressemblances (197680), and the four volumes of Le Livre des limites (198287). To these one can add the two volumes of Le Livre des marges (1975, 1984), in which Jabès meditates on the writers to whom he feels close, or indeed distant, including Blanchot and Lévinas, and two separate books that prolong the questioning of the main cycles, Un Etranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (1989) and the posthumously published Le Livre de l'hospitalité (1991). The unusual typographical disposition of these books is their most immediately striking feature and contributes to the disorientation the reader experiences in first encountering them. But their predominant characteristic is the melancholic tone of suffering, loss, and death, revealed to Jabès at the age of twelve with the death of his elder sister (J-DL, 2324). Here, Jabès talks of a mutation of his personality, the realization that there is a language for death, just as there is a language for life. This personal experience of death is inextricably linked in his work to the death of the six million Jews in the Shoah. The gravity of tone attached to Jabès's writing is inseparable from these deaths. Indeed, loss is the starting point for Jabès's whole poetic enterprise from 1963 onwards. The hiatus that death opens up, between past and present, between what was and what is, and what is no more, gives impetus to the irrevocable movement into exile, where the book is to turn such irrevocability into writing. Jabès's writing is thus specifically post-Shoah: a writing that is wounded, the wound of writing, as Jabès puts it. The necessity of writing, for Jabès, keeps this wound open and bleeding, travelling the tortuous path between "the memory of suffering" and "the forgetting of misfortune" (J-A, 153). The writer in a sense is called to the book by the words that precede it, and the writer's vocation, for Jabès, is precisely to link this call of the book to the writer with the call of God to the Jew. This extremely problematical bringing together of the Jew and the writer constitutes the fundamental and quite extraordinary leap of Jabès's new poetic enterprise after his expulsion from Egypt: "I spoke to you of the difficulty of being Jewish, which merges

< previous page

page_11

next page >

< previous page

page_12

next page > Page 12

with the difficulty of writing; for Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same wearing down'' (J-LQ, 132). By further subsuming both the Jew and the writer into the category of the étranger, Jabès sets up the tripartite configuration that I shall explore in detail in chapter 1 and that permits us to see how Lévinas's questionings of ontology and Blanchot's views of the Jew in exile find their counterparts in Jabès. We have seen, then, that Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabés come from markedly different backgrounds and yet find common ground in the questioning of alterity and Judaism. This common questioning helps to explain the importance that each has acquired for the others, and the next section of this introduction provides a brief outline of the texts that each has written on the others. The Readers Lévinas's major essays on Blanchot can be found grouped together in Sur Maurice Blanchot (1975). 9 In "Le Regard du poète" (1956) Lévinas identifies the salient features of Blanchot's L'Espace littéraire: the rejection of committed literature (Sartre); literature as a fundamental experience of alterity and exteriority (Lévinas employs his own terms); impersonal speaking; writing and dying (Mallarmé and Kafka); presence and absence; nomadism as opposed to Heidegger's "truth of being"; and exile (Lévinas evokes the forty years spent in the desert by the Hebrew people after leaving Egypt). But Lévinas also notes that Blanchot, in his opinion, refuses, at least explicitly, ethical preoccupations (L-SMB, 23), while nevertheless using art to uproot Heidegger's being as rootedness in order to explore "the eternal glistening flow of the outside" (L-SMB, 25, inaccurately citing Blanchot's "the glistening flow of the eternal outside" in B-EL, 98). Lévinas concludes by evoking the notion of justice and alluding to the Bible and to the existence of Amalek as that which "prevents the integrity of the Divine name in other words, precisely, the truth of being" (L-SMB, 26). In his reading of Blanchot, then, Lévinas moves from the atheism and inhumanism of Blanchot's work which he stresses is not nihilistic to the evocation of monotheism, the Divine Name, as the real "truth of being." In doing so, Lévinas reads Blanchot with and against Heidegger and distances himself from both in other words, works out his own space in relation to both. This is not so much Blanchot's literary space nor Heidegger's philosophical space, but the ethical space, the order of justice. One can already discern a certain mistrust on Lévinas's part of the purely literary and of the ontological that would subordinate the ethical to their concerns.

< previous page

page_12

next page >

< previous page

page_13

next page > Page 13

Lévinas hints at a similar distance from Blanchot almost thirty years later when he refers to Blanchot's L'Ecriture du désastre in his interviews with Philippe Nemo. In Blanchot's work, Lévinas remarks, it is not a question of being nor of a ''something" but of an event that is neither being nor nothingness: "Blanchot calls it the 'disaster', which signifies neither death nor misfortune but is being, as it were, detached from its fixity of being, from its reference to a star, from all cosmological existence, a dis-aster. He gives an almost verbal meaning to the substantive disaster. It seems that for him it is impossible to escape from this terrifying and obsessive situation" (L-EI, 4041). Lévinas, precisely, does seek a way out, as his first essay, De l'évasion, suggests, and he will find this in ethics as first philosophy, not in the disastrous space of literature. Lévinas performs a similar move in his brief reading of Jabès in Noms propres. 10 The poet, Lévinas begins, is someone who loses his place, the "poetic saying" profoundly opening up to a depthless height (or abyss) where all interiority is cracked open to render it more exterior than exteriority (the same trait he identifies in Blanchot). This is the denucleation of being or its transcendence from which only the neighbor is lacking (that is, Jabès does not establish the ethical relation Lévinas would like). When Lévinas reads Jabès in this way, he "forgets" that Jabès takes writing as the very theme of his writing and "forgets" that Jabès has a role in the world and in the fashions of modern literature. We see three things here: (1) Lévinas reads his own transcendence of subjectivity into Jabès; (2) he identifies in Jabès what he earlier identified in Blanchot: the denucleation of being in the Heideggerian sense; and (3) Lévinas demonstrates his inveterate mistrust of poetry (that is, Lévinas can read a philosophical position into Jabès, and can thus forget that Jabès is only a poet). Nevertheless, Lévinas concludes that the Judaism of exile and errancy in Jabès is not just a theme, but the vertiginous place of the book. His praise of Jabès is thus couched in ambiguity: he will not see either God or the Jew as metaphors, even if he himself does not speak of the idea of the Infinite in terms of a religious experience. Like his reading of Blanchot, then, Lévinas is both admiring and reserved in his reading of Jabès, admiring because there is a break from subjectivity, reserved because the break lacks an ethical content. Blanchot's readings of the other two writers reveal a not surprisingly similar phenomenon: writing in the margins of the other's work leads to an appropriation and expropriation of the other's frame of reference. Concerning Lévinas, Blanchot indicates his admiration in a letter published in 1980: "I would like to say, quite simply, that the encounter with Emmanuel Lévinas

< previous page

page_13

next page >

< previous page

page_14

next page > Page 14

when I was a student at Strasbourg University was the fortunate encounter which illuminates a life in its most sombre aspects.'' 11 The admiration, of course, is mutual, as Lévinas states in his interview with François Poirié: "[Blanchot] for me was like the very expression of French excellence; not so much in terms of ideas but in a certain possibility of saying things, which is very difficult to imitate and appears as a force of the highest order. Yes, it is always in terms of height that I talk about him" (L-QEV, 71). This deep and bonding friendship, however, as we have seen in the distance Lévinas takes from Blanchot's literary space, does not prevent Blanchot too from adopting his distance from aspects of Lévinas's ideas on alterity. Blanchot's major essays on Lévinas fall into three groups. The first consists of three dialogues on Lévinas in L'Entretien infini; the second is an important series of fragments entitled "Discours sur la patience"; and the third is a more traditional but trenchant analysis of Lévinas's philosophy entitled "Notre compagne clandestine." In his dialogues on Lévinas, Blanchot reproduces Lévinas's critique that the majority of Western philosophies are philosophies of the Same, and he suggests that what Lévinas teaches us in contradistinction is that the other is not an other me but "the wholly Other; the other is what surpasses me absolutely; the relation with the other that is otherness is a transcendent relation, which means that there is an infinite and, in a sense, insurmountable distance between me and the other. The other belongs to the other side, has no country in common with me, and can in no way be positioned in the same concept, the same totality, nor constitute a whole or be counted with the individual that I am" (B-EI, 74). Blanchot goes on to identify the prominent features of Lévinas's philosophy: separation as the prerequisite for the relation to the other; the idea of the Infinite; metaphysical desire; the face; language; true discourse as a discourse with God, not an encounter between equals; and the denunciation of all dialectical systems, of ontology, of almost all Western philosophies that subordinate justice to truth. The second interlocutor, however, the voice that "explains" Lévinas to the other, also indicates a certain reserve. Hence, (1) Blanchot suggests leaving God aside, "a name that is too imposing" (B-EI, 71); (2) terming Lévinas's Other, the Etranger and the "Unknown," as the relation with philosophy, Blanchot adds: "Lévinas says: metaphysics" (B-EI, 74); (3) commenting on Lévinas's notion of the face as a force of resistance to me, Blanchot notes that "this is how Lévinas characterizes it as ethical" (B-EI, 78); and (4) arguing how Lévinas (and Socrates) privileges the oral discourse as alone capable of sustaining the plenitude of discourse, Blanchot comments quite categorically: "Let us admit this for a moment, although I do not at all

< previous page

page_14

next page >

< previous page

page_15

next page > Page 15

believe it'' (B-EI, 81). These are important reservations: God, the metaphysical, the ethical, and the oral are not to be privileged in Blanchot's own plural written word. These differences are accentuated in the second dialogue, where Blanchot introduces his notion of the neuter to characterize the human relationship of alterity, and he explicitly rejects the word "ethical" as an adequate means of characterizing the abyss that the word asserts between me and the other (B-EI, 89). The third dialogue indicates more clearly that Blanchot, while still writing in the margins of Lévinas's work, is seeking to go beyond Lévinas's positions. The "estrangement" of the multiple relation he is working toward is not sufficiently characterized as a separation or a distance (as Lévinas defines his notion of alterity), but is rather to be seen as an "interruption" (B-EI, 97). Moreover, Blanchot suggests that the communication with the Other as it is marked in the word is not a transubjective or intersubjective relation, but inaugurates a relation that is between neither subject and subject nor subject and object. In other words, it is neuter and leads Blanchot to reject Lévinas's Other: "The Other is admittedly not the word I would like to retain" (B-EI, 99). What Blanchot is rejecting, however, is the substantiation of the Other in its capitalization, whereas the neuter of the other for Blanchot opens up a space of what he calls an infinite dying. Blanchot, then, collapses Lévinas's ethical relation of alterity into what he has come to call no longer just the literary space but the neuter of literary language in which he will also locate Kafka and Jabès. Blanchot ends his dialogues with a third voice that identifies as an oblique summary four essential points: (1) the experience of language is writing, and this opens up not so much a relation to the other but an other relation itself; (2) this is the relation of the neuter, the very fact of writing; (3) the neuter relation is a relation without relation, where the relation of one to the other is doubly dissymmetrical; (4) for me, the other is both the relation of inaccessibility to the other, the other that this inaccessible relation installs, and the inaccessible presence of the other that becomes the relation by first being the inaccessibility of its approach. These are much more radical positions than those adopted by Lévinas, and I shall return to them in chapter 4. Blanchot's "Discours sur la patience" is a "marginal" engagement with some of Lévinas's key terms in Autrement qu'être, such as passivity, patience, the hostage, and responsibility. Blanchot deploys them and puts them and his own fragmentary discourse into relation with the "disaster," the "final crushing of the concentrationary state," 12 the Shoah. By once more reading Lévinas into his own neuter, unworking him (Blanchot introduces his notion of the "désoeuvrement*"), Blanchot "interrupts" Lévinas's dis-

< previous page

page_15

next page >

< previous page

page_16

next page > Page 16

course. But in a footnote added to the republication in L'Ecriture du désastre of the fragment concerning responsibility and eternal philosophy (B-ED, 45), Blanchot implicitly suggests that the interruption also constitutes the difference between Lévinas's Totalité et infini and Autrement qu'être. In the former, Blanchot alludes, Lévinas still speaks ''Greek," in that the said of the text replies to the universal exigency of philosophical language. In the latter, however, Lévinas introduces a surplus, a beyond the universal (Lévinas's "saying"), which Blanchot qualifies as Jewish. This distinction between the Greek and the Jewish is one that Lévinas himself makes, as my chapters 2 and 3 argue, and it provides the focus for Blanchot's final essay on Lévinas, "Notre compagne clandestine." In that essay, Blanchot draws attention to the fact that much of Lévinas's work subsequent to Totalité et infini is an always more rigorous reflection on what he has already said in that work. "But that's just it," Blanchot adds, "it was said, in other words, thematized, and so always already said in place of remaining to be said." 13 In his text "Le Dire et le dit,"14 however, Lévinas goes much further, for here "the Saying stays a saying": "Through the Saying we are torn from order without order quietly disappearing into disorder. This is what the Saying commits us to in our responsibility for the Other: the noncoincidence with the other, the impossibility of being together in a simple simultaneity, the necessity (the obligation) of assuming a presentless time, what Lévinas will call the 'irreducible diachrony', which is not the temporalization that we live but is marked as the lapse of time (or the absence of time)."15 Moreover, by picking up on the way Lévinas in Autrement qu'être breaks the order of his own discourse by introducing qualifying and modifying statements such as "unless," Blanchot highlights the fragmentation at the margins of philosophy, which he relates to the rupture of the Shoah: "How can one philosophize, how can one write in the memory of Auschwitz, of those who said to us, sometimes in notes buried near the crematoria: know what happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know. This is the thought that runs through and carries the whole philosophy of Lévinas and that he offers us without saying it, beyond and prior to all obligation."16 Blanchot's readings of Lévinas clearly betray a movement of accord and discord that takes the notions of the other and the étranger to the Jew and to Auschwitz, and it is precisely around these concerns that Blanchot reads Jabès while maintaining Lévinas on the horizon. Blanchot follows his dialogues on Lévinas in L'Entretien infini with an essay entitled "L'Interruption, comme sur une surface de Riemann," which first appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Française (1964) as the opening section to his reading of Jabès's

< previous page

page_16

next page >

< previous page

page_17

next page > Page 17

Le Livre des questions (this section was later published in L'Amitié). Here Blanchot applies to Jabès the interruption he had earlier located in his essays on Lévinas: ''In the totality of fragments, thoughts, dialogues, invocations, narrative movements, and errant words that constitute the detour of a single poem, I find at work the powers of interruption through which what is offered to writing (the uninterrupted murmur, what never ceases) must be inscribed in the act of interrupting itself" (B-Am, 252). Now, however, Blanchot comments, the rupture is marked not only by poetic fragmentation at its various levels, but by a second rupture: "in history and in the writing in the margins of history. In history where the center of the rupture is called Judaism" (B-Am, 252). This rupture that Blanchot calls Judaism he might also call it Lévinas's "other philosophy" is identified as both recent (the Shoah) and ancient (the original rupture with God, the movement into exile): "A rupture suffered in history, where the catastrophe still speaks and is always near, the infinite violence of pain: the rupture of violent power that has tried to make and mark an era. Then, the other, the original rupture, which is anterior to history, no longer suffered but demanded and which, expressing the distance adopted in relation to all power, delimits an interval where Judaism introduces its own affirmation" (B-Am, 25253). From one rupture to the other, via Moses' breaking of the tablets and the kabbalistic notion of the breaking of the vessels, Blanchot concludes that all discourse becomes discourse and that Jabès's experiences of Judaism and writing as the "core of a rupture" (J-LQ, 137) "have their common origin in the ambiguity of this rupture that, in its explosion, leaves intact and yet reveals the center (the core, the unity), but that is perhaps also the explosion of the center, the excentered point that is center only in the explosion of its shattering" (B-Am, 256). In his contribution to Les Nouveaux Cahiers (1972), however, Blanchot relegates to the background Jabès's poetic discourse of rupture and explosion and highlights in his series of six fragments only the most recent rupture he had identified in his earlier essay the Shoah: "The existence of the concentrationary, the extermination of the Jews and the death camps where death continues its work, is an absolute for history that has interrupted history: this must be said but without being able to say anything else. Discourse cannot develop from this point. Those who require proofs will receive none. Even in the agreement and friendship of those who bear the same thought, there is practically no affirmation possible, because all affirmation has already been broken, and friendship is sustained with difficulty through it. All has foundered, all founders, no present can resist it." 17 The

< previous page

page_17

next page >

< previous page

page_18

next page > Page 18

Shoah as an absolute, the obligation to say this and no more, the inability indeed to affirm anything when the present has foundered these, as I argue in chapter 4, are key terms for Blanchot's and Jabès's writings on the concentration camp experience. The fact that Blanchot is so insistent in these fragments on the Shoah and its effects on writing points toward the importance that this experience takes on for Blanchot within the framework of the ''fragmentary writing" that he gradually develops. In his third essay on Jabès, published in Instants (1989), Blanchot once more focuses his thoughts on the Shoah, mentioning Jabès only at the end with three quotations. Blanchot notes the apparent discrepancy in God's words concerning Amalek, the embodiment of evil, who had attacked the Hebrews upon their exodus from Egypt (the very Amalek Lévinas evoked at the end of his first essay on Blanchot as that which prevents the integrity of the Divine Name). Blanchot comments: "The two commands are close yet different. In Exodus [17:14] it is 'God' (the unnameable name) who asserts: 'I will utterly blot out the remembrance of 'Amaleq from under the heaven'. In Deuteronomy [25:19], it says: 'thou shalt blot out the remembrance of 'Amaleq from under heaven'. An impressive change. But in both cases, if it is commanded to blot out, it is no less commanded to remember: 'Write this for a memorial in a book' (Exodus). In Deuteronomy: 'Remember what 'Amaleq did to thee' and to conclude: 'thou shalt not forget'." 18 Remembering and forgetting are the contradictory imperatives in which all writers of (after) the Shoah, for Blanchot, are caught. Evidently, Blanchot considers these imperatives to be at work in Jabès, and he concludes: "It is incumbent upon each of us to remain steady (or to founder) faced with the event, an event beyond reply and beyond question. This is the pact."19 Blanchot, Jabès, and Lévinas all adhere to this "pact," although each in a different way. The friendship to which Blanchot's essays testify is reciprocated in the proximity that Jabès himself feels toward Blanchot, writing in 1980: "I have never met Maurice Blanchot, whose proximity is so important for me. He has never shown the desire to do so and our friendship has lasted more than fifteen years despite one or two discreet calls on my part. He does not hide the fact that for him certain friendships have nothing to gain from personal meetings. They must neither impose themselves nor, even in their strongest moments, break the silence in which they are immersed. His books, the words of his letters, accompany me and have often sustained me" (J-DL, 63). This proximity, then, exists entirely through their writing and is more specifically attested in three essays that Jabès has written on Blanchot, contained in Ça suit son cours (1975) and Dans la double dépendance du dit (1984). The first of these essays, "L'Inconditionnel I," originally pub-

< previous page

page_18

next page >

< previous page

page_19

next page > Page 19

lished in Le Nouveau Commerce (1974), is essentially a dense meditation on the concerns in Blanchot's fiction that Jabès makes his own: exile, silence, the white of the page, the black of the ink, the unthought, and the unspoken. The latter two terms come to constitute the unconditional of the title, but Jabès contextualizes them in relation to the Shoah: ''(In effacing the Name, God multiplied the roads. / The chosen people then became a people of nomads. / Millions of unknown names have buried the Name.) . . . // The crematorium ovens were not their only crime; but surely, in full daylight, the most abject, in the abyssal absence of the Name" (J-CSC, 106-7). It is not words in the black of their ink that can come to terms with this crime, but the white of the spaces in between, the silence from which writing emerges and into which it disappears again. "L'Inconditionnel II," first published in Exercices de la patience (1981), pursues the notion of the unconditional, but here the unthought is portrayed in terms of God, a move that applies more to Jabès's own work than to that of Blanchot. Moreover, in the dialectic of word and silence (or rather negative dialectic, the one consuming the other in perpetual effacement) that Jabès extracts from Blanchot's work, a third term comes into play, forming the focus of "L'Infaillible décret," a brief reading of Blanchot's L'Arrêt de mort, and opening a Jewish perspective with which Jabès's own work is concerned: the law. Jabès follows "L'Infaillible décret" with his marginalia on Lévinas, "Il n'y a de trace que dans le désert," reprinted from Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas (1980). Here, Jabès essentially employs the same process he had used with Blanchot; in other words, just as he had disrupted Blanchot's narrative voice, here he fragments and scatters Lévinas's discourse. But in redeploying Lévinas's notions of the trace, the face, the saying, passivity, desire, the Good, God, and responsibility into his own discourse of the desert, errancy, absence, silence, death, and nothingness, Jabès in fact carries out the same move we saw Blanchot performing in his reading of Lévinas. That is, both Blanchot and Jabès suspend Lévinas's ethical discourse in order to privilege a questioning of the written and the self-effacement of the writer it entails. Hence, Lévinas's third person, the beyond being who is not defined by the self (Lévinas calls this "illeity," as we shall see), is reformulated by Jabès into the figure of death, "this absent reality in whose name all reality founders into its name" (J-DDD, 71). Hence, too, the revelation of the Infinite in Lévinas, which is the transcendence through which the Good and responsibility become ethical realities, is conflated by Jabès to God (not unreasonably so, since Lévinas in his talmudic readings does just this), but Jabès blocks the transcendence. The discourse of alterity clearly does not

< previous page

page_19

next page >

< previous page

page_20

next page > Page 20

have the same status on the planes of the philosophical and the poetic, and Lévinas's mistrust of poetry as a philosopher corresponds to Jabès's inability as a poet to submit the poetic word to anything other than itself as other. The Chapters In the light of these interchanges, we can now more profitably turn to extended analyses of these three writers and see how the questions of the étranger, exile, writing, and Judaism not only form the major preoccupations of the texts concerned, but how they situate Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès at the forefront of postmodern thought. The principal texts I shall be dealing with have been chosen partly from personal preference but more importantly because they allow me to trace the interferences that occur in each author's works in relation to each other and to certain Jewish motifs. Each of the following chapters, then, has essentially three parts, each dealing with one of the writers. Each to some extent is thus self-contained as the respective sections trace out a progression in their work and thought, organized around the chosen themes and concerns. But each chapter and each section also call to the others. The self-containedness is therefore broken, interrupted, as it were, to expose the planes of the dialogue between the writers while each retains his essential difference. Chapter 1 opens by examining aspects of Lévinas's indebtedness to Heidegger's philosophical project, while showing how Lévinas rejects Heidegger's ontology as he seeks an escape from the crushing presence of being in De l'évasion (1935). Moving through Lévinas's analysis of what he terms the ''there is," the experience of anonymous being, the section concludes with Lévinas's notion that being is essentially étranger. The next section pursues this notion in relation to Blanchot's depiction of the étranger in his 1936 récit L'Idylle. Reflecting on this récit almost fifty years later, Blanchot intimates that the persecution of the étranger in his fiction finds its tragic counterpart in the real persecution of the Jews in the concentration camps. Blanchot clearly suggests that his étranger can be read as a Jew. In the light of these comments, the perspective is then widened to include a number of Blanchot's contemporaneous political writings for the right-wing journal Combat, material that certain critics have seen as conclusive evidence of anti-Semitic sentiment. My main motive in this part of the chapter is not so much to defend or condemn Blanchot the articles I cite speak for themselves but to highlight the fact that L'Idylle contains an ambiguity in its portrayal of the étranger as a Jew, which Blanchot later seems willing to acknowledge only as the récit's obscurity. I maintain, on the other hand,

< previous page

page_20

next page >

< previous page

page_21

next page > Page 21

that this rather menacing ambiguity opens up an anti-Semitic perspective that uncomfortably accompanies the proSemitic reading positively encouraged by Blanchot himself. The third part of the chapter turns to Jabès's Le Livre des questions (196373) and Le Livre des ressemblances (197680) and the explicit rhetorical and problematical configuration of the étranger, the Jew, and the writer within the framework of persecution. I conclude the chapter by examining how this resembles or differs from Blanchot's concept of the étranger and Lévinas's tentative view of the étranger as irreducibly other. Chapter 2 pursues the Judaic theme by first examining the interference in Lévinas's work between the philosophical and the Jewish. These two discourses are analyzed in particular in Lévinas's essay ''Dieu et la philosophie," followed by a consideration of Lévinas's analysis of the revelation, the law, and exegesis in the Jewish tradition. Lévinas's notions of transcendence and obedience to the Most-High, finally, give on to a concluding section that looks at the place of Moses within the economy of Lévinas's thought. The chapter then turns to Jabès to explore the intimate relationship in his work between the law and the book, in particular in Aely (1972), and how Moses figures within the thematics of writing and the subversion of the law. The key concepts of the law, interpretation, and subversion also form the focal point of the final section on Blanchot's novels Aminadab (1943) and Le Très-Haut (1948). Chapter 3 continues the biblical perspective by identifying the distinction Lévinas makes between the patriarch Abraham and the Greek Ulysses, the distinction essentially between the openness to the other of Jewish ethics and the self-enclosed being of the Greek ontological tradition. In the light of Abraham's discovery of heteronomy, I then discuss Lévinas's views on dialogical philosophies, an important difference between Lévinas and Blanchot and Jabès. I conclude the section on Lévinas by considering Abraham and his relationship to responsibility, hospitality, and justice. The remaining two sections explore the way in which the patriarch functions in Jabès's Le Livre des limites (198287), in relation not only to the discovery of alterity but also to silence and the paradoxical initiation of dialogue, and how these tropes are instrumental in Blanchot's 1951 récit Au moment voulu. Chapter 4 is slightly different in format from the previous three chapters. The book, in a sense, comes full circle by returning to the étranger, the Jew, and the question of anti-Semitism in the context of the concrete historical event in which Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès anchor their common preoccupations: Auschwitz. The opening section of the chapter, then, traces the individual relationship of each writer to the Shoah and some of the philo-

< previous page

page_21

next page >

< previous page

page_22

next page > Page 22

sophical, theoretical, and critical positions adopted. I then return to Lévinas and to the notions of testimony and suffering in his work. Blanchot is subsequently discussed in relation to his fragmentary récit L'Attente l'oubli (1962). This may seem an odd choice of text since it contains not one mention of the Shoah. In the light of Blanchot's theoretical pronouncements elsewhere, however, I suggest that it is a sustained yet fragmented meditation on Auschwitz and its repercussions on being and language that constitute the unexpressed and inexpressible experience lying behind the récit. I then conclude the section on Blanchot with some tentative reflections on the highly problematical récit L'Instant de ma mort (1994), published more than thirty years after his last work of fiction. Finally, I address a number of the aspects of the poetic discourse in Jabès's Un Etranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (1989), before examining the metaphorical use of the word ''Auschwitz" within the economy of this text.

< previous page

page_22

next page >

< previous page

page_23

next page > Page 23

1 Differing Alterities: The Etranger, the Jew, and the Writer This chapter aims firstly to indicate the trajectory of some of the preliminary thought of Lévinas regarding the possibility of an escape from being. Secondly, the proposition that being itself is étranger, tentatively circumscribed by Lévinas in his initial questionings of Heideggerian ontology in the 1930s, leads on to an analysis of one of Blanchot's earliest fictional works, L'Idylle, in order to determine, thirdly, to what extent Blanchot's and Lévinas's concept of the étranger resembles and differs from that presented by Jabès. These different aspects of a similar problematic will thus permit us to begin to trace the philosophical, literary, and potentially political spaces occupied by the étranger, the Jew, and the writer and to see how such figures serve to focus some of the wider issues of contemporary thought. Lévinas: Escape, ''Ex-Cendance," the "There Is," and the Étranger Lévinas's philosophical works De l'évasion (1935) and De l'existence à l'existant (1947) are to a large degree the fruit of his reflections on the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, on the ontological relationship, that is, between man and being. Lévinas freely acknowledges this in the introduction to De l'existence à l'existant, but he points out an important reservation: "If, in the beginning, our reflections are inspired to a large degree as far as the notion of ontology and the relation that man has with being are concerned by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, they are ordered by a profound need to leave the climate of this philosophy and by the conviction that it is impossible to escape toward a philosophy that one might qualify as pre-Heideggerian" (L-DEE, 19). In other words, Lévinas wishes to move outside the Heideggerian philosophical climate without falling back into metaphysics, without confusing being and beings, existence and existents.

< previous page

page_23

next page >

< previous page

page_24

next page > Page 24

Lévinas's 1932 essay ''Martin Heidegger et l'ontologie" offers a succinct summary of the way he understands the difference Heidegger makes between whatever is (das Seiende, l'étant) and the Being of being (das Sein des Seiendes, l'être de l'étant): "Whatever is comprises all objects, all persons in a certain sense, including God. The being of what is is the fact that all these objects and persons are. Being does not identify itself with any of these things that are, nor indeed with the idea of what is in general. In a certain sense, being is not, for if it were, it would in its turn be what is, whereas it is in some way the very event of being of all 'that is'" (L-EDEHH, 56). Heidegger's originality, Lévinas continues, is to have maintained this distinction. The Being of being (the being of what is) is the proper object of ontological thought, while the world of beings (that which is) is investigated by what Heidegger calls the ontic sciences. Hence, while the world of beings would be studied from the point of view of its attributes, physiology, or history, ontology attempts to experience that which gives existence itself by immersing itself in the very "thereness" of things. The second trait of Heidegger's philosophy that interests Lévinas is the way Heidegger considers man as a being whose essence consists in existence. What man is is at the same time his way of being, his way of being there (Dasein), of temporalizing himself. Man, for Heidegger, is not a substantive but a verb, and this verbal resonance of being the temporalization of time as the event of the comprehension of being makes man the object of Heidegger's ontological analysis of Dasein. Lévinas's admiration for Heidegger's philosophical project, and this new resonance found in the verbality of being, is not, however, without critique, as becomes increasingly clear in De l'évasion and De l'existence à l'existant. For Lévinas, as for Heidegger, being does indeed have to be thought from the starting point of ontological difference, but whereas Heidegger conceives of human existence in terms of finitude (his famous Sein-zum-Tode, being-towarddeath), Lévinas attempts an exit from being later qualified as an exit into infinity as a means of questioning the fundamentality of ontology altogether. 1 For our present purposes, then, Lévinas's position can be summarized as follows: (1) the primacy of ontology, which Lévinas locates in the whole Western philosophical tradition despite Heidegger's claim to have initiated a radical break (the claim that Western metaphysics has forgotten Being), leads to a subordination of ethics, of the relationship between self and other, a critique that will burn with indignation after the Shoah; and (2) the comprehension of being through the Dasein in Heidegger being as presence closes access to that which for Lévinas overflows comprehension: the absolute transcendence and exteriority of infin-

< previous page

page_24

next page >

< previous page

page_25

next page > Page 25

ity. For Heidegger, Dasein can grasp its own wholeness and meaning only when it faces its ''no-longer-being-there" (sein Nicht-mehr-da-sein). As long as Dasein has not come to its own end, it remains incomplete. Hence, Dasein has access to the meaning of being only because that being is finite. For Lévinas, on the other hand, access to the meaning of being is granted only by the experience of the invasion of infinity into being, and an "authentic being" would be senseless without a structure in which subjectivity is not rooted in being as presence but dedicated to the service of the other revealed through the infinite. These notions, however, are not worked out fully until a later stage in Lévinas's philosophy. The essay De l'évasion, in fact, fails to find an issue to the problem it poses and with which it explicitly concludes: "It is a question of exiting from being through a new path at the risk of overturning certain notions that to common sense and the wisdom of the nations seem self-evident" (L-DE, 99). Nonetheless, the essay explores the possible ways of achieving what he calls the "ex-cendance" that will remove being from the "brutality of existence" (L-DE, 94) the brutality, that is, of ontology itself. Between De l'évasion and De l'existence à l'existant, then, Lévinas sketches out two central concerns that are of interest to the present study: the notion of escape and the "there is." The following is a brief exposition of these concerns in order to provide ingress into related and wider aspects of the work of Blanchot and Jabès. Escaping from Being De l'évasion begins by outlining the philosophy of the bourgeois conception of the self-sufficient ego whose inner calm is based on possession and security and whose concern for the future is translated into demands of guarantee from the present. This category of sufficiency, Lévinas suggests, is based on the way that the image of being is offered to us by things. Things simply are and being simply is if we insist on conceiving of being only as existence. The attempt, therefore, to harmonize being and world, the perfection of being, shows that Western philosophy has never really understood the insufficiency of the human condition other than in terms of a limitation of being. The signification of "finite being" (Lévinas clearly has Heidegger in mind) has therefore never been properly envisaged, philosophy having been too preoccupied with the transcendence of limits, with the communion with infinite being. For Lévinas, however, modern sensibility indicates an abandonment of this concern for transcendence (L-DE, 69). The escape, for example, sought by contemporary literature (such as one finds indeed in Blanchot's L'Idylle)

< previous page

page_25

next page >

< previous page

page_26

next page > Page 26

is qualified by Lévinas as a ''mal du siècle," a radical condemnation of the philosophy of being. The situations of modern life in which such escape is envisaged "are being created at a time that leaves no person in the margins of life and where no one has the power to avoid himself" (L-DE, 70). Moreover, "the elementary truth that there is being being that is worth its weight is revealed in a depth that measures both its brutality and its seriousness. The amiable game of life loses its characteristic as a game. Not that the sufferings with which it threatens render it unpleasant, but because the core of the suffering is an impossibility of its interruption and an acute feeling of being riveted" (L-DE, 70). What this experience of being reveals to us, then, is the inescapability of the presence of ourselves to ourselves and simultaneously the need to escape. Here Lévinas interpolates a contemporary reference to the interwar years: "The being of self that the war and postwar period have allowed us to know leaves us with no room for play. The need to overcome it can be only a need to escape" (L-DE, 71). Yet while Lévinas evokes here a modern sensibility, he makes no reference in this early philosophical work to Hitler or to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. Jacques Rolland, however, quite rightly points out that the notion of being "riveted" to being is expressed in very similar terms in a contemporary article by Lévinas dealing with Jews and anti-Semitism. In "L'Inspiration religieuse de l'alliance," published in the review Paix et Droit in 1935, Lévinas writes: "Hitlerism is the greatest trial the incomparable trial that Judaism has had to go through. . . . The pathetic destiny of being Jewish becomes a fatality. We can no longer flee it. The Jew is ineluctably riveted to his Judaism. . . . [A youth] which, faced with the reality of Hitlerism, discovers the total gravity of being Jewish. . . . [I]n the barbarian and primitive symbol of race. . . . Hitler has reminded us that we cannot abandon Judaism" (cited by Rolland, L-DE, 103-4). 2 "The language of these sentences," comments Rolland, "cannot fail to strike us with its similarity to that employed by De l'évasion in order to express the way in which the existent is constrained to its existence" (Rolland, L-DE, 104). This equivalence between being riveted to being and the Jew riveted to his Jewishness also finds echoes in Blanchot's L'Idylle and in the following chiastic phrase by Jabès: "Being-Jewish is but the Jewishness of being" (J-P, 84). In De l'évasion, Lévinas's assertion of the discovery of the "irremovability" (L-DE, 70) of our presence leads him to posit a number of definitions of what escape is not. For example, it is not the poet's dream of escaping a contemptible reality (such as we might find in Baudelaire); nor is it the Romantic desire to break with social convention; nor is it a search for the

< previous page

page_26

next page >

< previous page

page_27

next page > Page 27

fantastic; nor is it the desire to escape the servitude imposed upon us by the blind mechanism of our body. These motifs, claims Lévinas, do not put being into question and are only the response to the need to transcend the limits of finite being. In other words, they translate the horror of a certain definition of our being and not being as such. Lévinas proposes, on the other hand, that the ''ex-cendance" he seeks will break the absoluteness of existence in terms of identity having at its heart an essential duality: "In the identity of the ego, the identity of being reveals its nature of being chained, for it appears in the form of suffering and is the invitation to escape. Escape is thus the need to get out of oneself, in other words, to break the most radical and inexorable chains, the fact that the ego is itself" (L-DE, 73). The self that wants to get out of itself is not fleeing itself as a limited being, but because it simply is. "The need to escape," concludes Lévinas, "allows us to renew the classical problem of being as being" (L-DE, 74). The Unbearable Presence of Being This need to escape, according to Lévinas, is not the result of a feeling of privation or lack, nor are the notions of the finite and infinite helpful as such, since they are applicable only to what is and lack precision when one attributes them to the being of what is. Lévinas goes on to explore this difference, while pointing out that "escape will not present itself to us as a fleeing toward death, nor as an exit outside of time" (L-DE, 76). Nothingness and eternity are not the object of his study, and the direction in which he orientates ontological difference is not that of Heidegger. The concept of need, then, initially seems to be something that aspires to its satisfaction. When I say I need something, I turn this need toward something that is other than myself, something I do not possess. Hence, it appears as an insufficiency of my being pushed to find refuge in something other than itself, an insufficiency that is usually interpreted as a lack, a weakness of my human constitution, the limitation of my being. This Lévinas qualifies as a psychology of need that presupposes a metaphysics in which need is characterized in advance as a void in a world where the real is identified with plenitude. This identification, Lévinas continues, "threatens all thought that has been incapable of distinguishing existence from existent and that applies to one what could only have a meaning for the other" (L-DE, 7778). Need becomes imperious only when it becomes suffering, and suffering is characterized as "malaise." This malaise is not at all a passive state but dynamic. Being "ill at one's ease" (mal à son aise) is a refusal to remain still, an effort to get out of an untenable situation. Hence, the suffering of need does not indicate a lack that has to be filled; nor does the satis-

< previous page

page_27

next page >

< previous page

page_28

next page > Page 28

faction of need destroy it. Rather, Lévinas locates in man an inadequation of satisfaction to need. Lévinas's thesis here is that need does not express a lack or an insufficiency of being and that what is unbearable is not a supposed ''lightness of being" but the presence of our being to itself. In order to justify this idea further, Lévinas examines the primordial phenomenon of the satisfaction of need: pleasure. In this phenomenology of pleasure, Lévinas pinpoints two traits: (1) the progressive movement of pleasure, where it is never whole because it has no end; and (2) the apparent possibility of escape it offers. Pleasure, then, is a concentration into a moment that is ruptured precisely by the pleasure itself: "We can thus perceive in pleasure an abandonment, a loss of self, an exit outside self, an ecstasy, as many characteristics that describe the promise of escape as its essence contains" (L-DE, 8283). While the movement of pleasure can untie the malaise Lévinas analyzed previously, it ultimately leads to disappointment because of its "internal becoming." In other words, in the constant going beyond of itself, pleasure merely accrues promises, admittedly ever richer, but that can never be attained. Pleasure is broken at the moment it seems to be escaping absolutely. This, suggests Lévinas, leads to the feeling of shame. The Shamefulness of Being Removing shame from its more familiar connotations of a moral order (the shame one may feel after having committed something one knows to be morally wrong), Lévinas states that "the whole intensity of shame, the whole stinging sensation it entails, consists exactly in the impossibility in which we find ourselves of not identifying with the being that is already étranger to us and whose motives for acting we can no longer understand" (L-DE, 85). Shame is not, therefore, dependent on the limitation of our being (that is, our susceptibility to commit sin), but on the incapacity of breaking with oneself; it is based on solidarity with our being, which obliges us to claim responsibility for ourselves. This analysis of shame, however, is insufficient for Lévinas because it presents itself as a function of a determined morally bad act, and Lévinas therefore attempts to free it from this condition by evoking the notion of nakedness 3 in its relation to shame. This is not just the nakedness of the body as it manifests itself to others, but the shameful nudity that Lévinas calls an eminently personal affair. The impossibility of escaping such shameful nudity brings Lévinas to a central point: "The necessity of fleeing in order to hide from oneself is held in check by the impossibility of fleeing oneself. What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing to hide from oneself, the irremissible presence of the ego to self" (L-DE, 8687). It is

< previous page

page_28

next page >

< previous page

page_29

next page > Page 29

therefore our intimacy, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful. It is not our nothingness that is revealed, but the totality of our existence: ''What shame uncovers is being uncovering itself" (L-DE, 87). The Sickness of Being Lévinas reinforces this idea that being is a weight for itself by returning to the notion of malaise as it appears particularly in nausea. "The nauseous state that precedes vomiting and from which vomiting is to free us confines us from all directions. But it does not come and confine us from outside. We feel sick from within; the depth of ourselves is stifled from within us; we feel 'sick'" (L-DE, 89). This revolting presence of ourselves to ourselves seems insurmountable; but if nausea adheres to us, it also contains an effort to escape. This effort Lévinas qualifies as desperate, "and this despair, the fact of being riveted, constitutes the whole anguish of nausea. In nausea, which is an impossibility of being what one is, one is simultaneously riveted to oneself, gripped in a tight and stifling circle" (LDE, 90). The fact that one is there, and that there is absolutely nothing one can do about it, is "the very experience of pure being" (L-DE, 90). But it is at the point at which one can do nothing about it, what Lévinas terms a "limitsituation," that the uselessness of action is the supreme moment in which all that remains is to escape. The issue of this experience is not death, but the nakedness of being in its plenitude and in its irremissible presence. Nausea is thus shameful in a particularly significant way, because it is a shame that arises from the mere fact of having a body, of being there. From this Lévinas goes on to suggest that the relation between nausea and ourselves is nausea itself and that nausea is the very affirmation of being in which being asserts its presence. The nature of nausea is nothing other than its presence, nothing other than the impotence to escape from its presence, a conclusion that resurfaces in more dramatic form in Sartre's novel La Nausée (Nausea, 1938), which arguably owes its central propositions to Lévinas's analyses here. The Plenitude of Being Lévinas's phenomenological analysis reveals that at the base of need there is not a lack of being but a plenitude and that need is directed toward deliverance and escape. Being is imperfect in as much as it is being and not in as much as it is finite, because being is essentially finite. Hence, the fact that man is engaged from birth in an existence he neither wanted nor chose cannot be limited simply to man, a finite being, for it translates the structure of being itself. In other words, the structure of being is the weight of being crushed by itself, the condemnation to be oneself, and this announces too the dialectical impossibility of conceiving of the beginning of being, that is,

< previous page

page_29

next page >

< previous page

page_30

next page > Page 30

of seizing the moment in which it accepts this weight. Hence, the problem of the origin of being is not the problem of its procession from nothingness (or the problem of a creator, a cause, preceding being), but that of its sufficiency or insufficiency. The problem, comments Lévinas, ''is dictated by all that is revolting in the position of being" (L-DE, 95). Having presented the main ideas of his thesis, Lévinas devotes the final section of the essay to a brief consideration of the problems he sees in Western philosophy, where ontologism, whether in realism or idealism, has prevented it from going beyond being. And on a contemporary political note in relation to the aspirations of idealism Lévinas writes that "all civilization that accepts being, the tragic despair it entails and the crimes it justifies, is deserving of the name barbarian" (L-DE, 98). That Lévinas writes these words in the shadow of events about to befall Europe and in particular the Jews indicates an urgency and topicality to Lévinas's essay not immediately apparent and an inherent critique of Heidegger. Ontological totality, Lévinas would suggest, is the first step to political totalitarianism. But Lévinas is far from formulating these ideas explicitly, and although he indicates the direction in which his thought is moving, he does not find a solution to the new path that will permit him to escape from being. From this schematization of De l'évasion, we can now highlight the issues that will be of particular significance to some of the notions I shall draw out of the works of Blanchot and Jabès. These are primarily threefold: (1) the notion of being riveted to being, of a plenitude of being that is an unbearable weight; (2) the Jew riveted to his Jewishness as defined from (a negative) outside; and (3) the need to escape such predicaments. Lévinas's next philosophical work adds one further dimension that remains a constant throughout his writings: the notion of the "there is." The Horror of Anonymous Being: The "There Is" In the preface to the second edition of De l'existence à l'existant, Lévinas acknowledges the central place of the "there is" in his text:


The notion of the there is developed in this book 30 years ago seems to me the central issue. A negation that would claim to be absolute, denying all existent even the existent that is the thought that brings about the very negation would be incapable of bringing to an end the "spectacle" of being that is always open, being in the verbal sense: anonymous being to which no being that is lays claim, being without the beings that are or without beings, an incessant "disordering," to take up Blanchot's metaphor, impersonal there is, like "it is raining" or "it is dark." A term that is fundamentally distinct from the Heideggerian "es

< previous page

page_30

7d5aff9

next page >

< previous page

page_31

next page > Page 31


gibt.'' It has never been the translation nor the copy of the German expression and its connotations of abundance and generosity. The there is that I described while in captivity and presented in this work, which appeared after the Liberation, can be traced back to one of those strange obsessions that we retain from our childhood and that reappear in insomnia when silence resounds and the void remains full. (L-DEE, 1011)

7d5aff9

Lévinas clearly wishes to make a distinction here between the "there is" and Heidegger's concept of the "es gibt" (from the verb geben, to give), which for Heidegger, according to Lévinas, implies the abundancy and generosity by which Being gives truth, freedom, and light to all beings. 4 Lévinas, on the other hand, insists on the inhuman neutrality of the "there is," its indeterminacy and chaos, where one's encounter with it provides neither truth nor light but leads to a loss of selfhood.


Let us imagine the return to nothingness of all beings: things and persons. It is impossible to place this return to nothingness outside all occurrence. But what about this nothingness itself? Something is happening, even if it is only the night and silence of nothingness. The indeterminacy of this "something is happening" is not the indeterminacy of the subject and does not refer to a substantive. Like the third-person pronoun in the impersonal form of the verb, it designates not an uncertainly known author of an action but the characteristic of this action that somehow has no author and is anonymous. This impersonal, anonymous, but inextinguishable "consummation" of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself, we shall designate by the term there is. The there is, in its refusal to take on a personal form, is "being in general." (L-DEE, 9394)

7d5aff9

The anonymous, depersonalized status of the "there is," then, creates horror and anguish; it is to lose "conscience," to be dispossessed of subjectivity. Heidegger had defined anguish as the anguish of death, the anguish of the loss of being. With the "there is," however, Lévinas proposes a description of being as a constant murmuring, a shapeless and worrying weight. Anguish here comes not from the idea of the loss of being, but from its persistence, the idea of the submission of the subject to the anonymous flow of being. With Lévinas, anguish proceeds from the fear of not being able not to be, the irremissible presence of being to itself we found in De l'évasion. The dissolution of the subject that Lévinas indicates here we shall see it reemerge, restructured is related by Catherine Chalier to the chaos following creation in Gen. 1:2 ("tohu v'bohu," without form and void). Referring

< previous page

page_31

next page >

< previous page

page_32

next page > Page 32

to the commentary of Rashi (10401105) on this verse, Chalier writes: ''The terror of the there is would hence be caused by the sudden intrusion of the originary tohu and bohu into existence since, according to the etymologies suggested by Rashi, tohu signifies astonishment, stupefaction, and bohu, void and solitude. Now, what do Lévinas's descriptions indicate if not that the tohu and bohu are constitutive not of an outmoded state of the world, but of one of its constant possibilities, one of its most dramatic temptations even?" 5 The intrusion of chaos into being, then, is the pure experience of being (analyzed in De l'évasion), the horror of anonymous being. To overcome the neutrality of such an existence is the purpose of what Lévinas calls "hypostasis," to take existence into existent: "The hypostasis, the appearance of the substantive, is not just the appearance of a new grammatical category; it signifies the suspension of the anonymous there is, the appearance of a private domain, of a name. On the substance of the there is emerges something that is" (L-DEE, 141). What the "there is" represents, then, is a deposition of sovereignty, the self deposed as one deposes a monarch. The primary experience of being is precisely this sense of dereliction, or what Lévinas characterizes as an essential estrangement: "The question of being is the very experience of being in its estrangement. . . . Being is essentially étranger that we come up against" (L-DEE, 28). Rejecting the dangers of Heidegger's celebration of death in the guise of the glorification of being, where the tragedy of existence is situated in finitude, in the nothingness toward which man moves, and where evil signifies a deficiency or a limitation of being, Lévinas proposes that it is not death that furnishes the tragedy of existence, but the impossibility of escaping the fatality of being, the constant threat of submission to the suffocating, crushing, and absurd hold of the "there is." For Lévinas, the identification of the "there is" and of the substantive being that can emerge from anonymous being through the hypostasis constitutes the beginnings of an ethical position that will take him from the conception of autonomous being-for-oneself, or the self chained to itself (like Thomas and Dom in Blanchot's Aminadab, as we shall see), to the heteronomy of being-for-the-other, or what we might term a being-faceto-face-with-the-other-through-language and what Lévinas later terms a responsibility-for-the-other. The loss of subjectivity into the flow of anonymous being is thus the first step for the opening to the other, the invasion of the other into the self. We shall see the more explicit formulation of these positions in subsequent chapters, but I now wish to turn to Blanchot and Jabès and read a number of works as extensions or reflections, as it were, of the preceding comments on Lévinas's early work. In the light of Lévinas's notions of the

< previous page

page_32

next page >

< previous page

page_33

next page > Page 33

irremissible and crushing presence of being to itself, the attempt to escape and the essential estrangement of being, I shall read in particular Blanchot's L'Idylle as a staging of two distinct (although paradoxically complementary) positions: (1) the étranger Blanchot figures in his récit can be read as a Jew, and the Jew, inversely, can be read as an étranger; (2) the experience of the étranger carries both negative and positive implications for a political reading of Blanchot's text. In Jabès, on the other hand, we encounter a valorization of anonymity that is clearly absent from Lévinas's thought and less ambiguous than in Blanchot's récit. Blanchot, L'Idylle, and the Play of Ambiguity History of Publication L'Idylle first appeared in the literary review La Licorne (Spring 1947), carrying its date of composition as July 1936. With minor modifications the récit was published in book form by Minuit in 1951 under the rubric of the overall title Le Ressassement éternel, together with a shorter récit Le Dernier Mot, which itself had previously appeared in the review Fontaine (May 1947), but its date of composition (although not given until the first edition of Le Ressassement éternel) is almost contemporaneous with L'Idylle, that is, 1935. In 1970 Minuit, in conjunction with the publishers Gordon and Breach, re-edited Le Ressassement éternel with an unsigned jacket insert stating that the récits were ''written from 1935 onwards" (B-RE, "prière d'insérer"). In 1983 Le Ressassement éternel again appeared in Minuit, but this time with an afterword by Blanchot concerning, precisely, the "afterwards" of his texts: Après coup. 6 It is quite exceptional for Blanchot to comment directly on his own work, and I shall return later both to the significance of this gesture and to the dates of composition of the récits.7 Here, however, in its deceptive simplicity, is a synopsis of L'Idylle: an étranger arrives in an undesignated town and is seemingly kept prisoner in a Home; he is put to derisory manual labor, but, after a period of illness, he is allowed to explore the town; attempting, finally, an apparent escape while the authorities are distracted by the preparations for his marriage to a young girl, which would grant him his freedom, he is recaptured and flogged to death. The central point of the text might be said to be the paradoxical lesson that the étranger learns and communicates to the new arrivals and that is not without echoes of Lévinas's question of being as the very experience of being in its estrangement: "You will learn that it is difficult to be étranger in this house. You will learn too that it is not easy to stop being so. If you miss your country, you will find more reasons to miss it every day

< previous page

page_33

next page >

< previous page

page_34

next page > Page 34

here; but if you manage to forget it and to like your new abode, you can return to your home, where, once more disoriented, you will begin a new exile'' (B-AC, 4142). Attempts to characterize the surrealistic or nightmarish quality of the récit have inevitably led to comparisons with Kafka. Jean-Paul Latteur, for example, comments that "the texts which carry Kafka's name are one of the sources of Le Ressassement éternel." 8 But it is by no means certain that Blanchot had read any Kafka when he composed L'Idylle. Sartre, in fact, in his highly critical review of Blanchot's second novel, Aminadab (1943), states that "Blanchot claims not to have read any Kafka when he wrote Aminadab."9 And a fortiori, then, he could not have for L'Idylle. It is true, however, that by the 1930s Kafka's work was known to the French reading public and that by 1937 André Breton was assimilating Kafka to surrealism. It may therefore seem extraordinary that Blanchot could have remained oblivious to these publications, as he himself admits in Après coup: "I was surprisingly étranger to the surrounding literature and knew only the so-called classical literature, with an opening nevertheless on Valéry, Goethe, and Jean-Paul" (B-AC, 92). Evelyne Londyn, on the other hand, has claimed that the genealogy of L'Idylle is not literary at all, but is to be found in the Spanish Civil War.10 As we shall see, however, the important sources of L'Idylle are neither Kafka (despite spiritual affinities) nor the war in Spain, but elsewhere altogether, and with much more ominous overtones. The Narrative Voice In Après coup Blanchot indicates that L'Idylle should be read not on the level of the events of the narrative but on the level of the very narration of those events: "Prior to all distinction between form and content, between signifier and signified, prior even to the division between the expression and the expressed, there is the unqualifiable Saying, the glory of a 'narrative voice' that intimates clearly, without ever being able to be obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what is communicated" (B-AC, 9798). What appears idyllic for Blanchot is not the content, the said of his text, but the very fact that the récit can be narrated at all. In an essay entitled precisely "La Voix narrative" (1964), Blanchot develops his concept of the narrative voice in relation to Kafka by first circumscribing the distance between writer, reader, and work in Flaubert and Thomas Mann. In Flaubert, Blanchot suggests, this distance leads to an estranged (strained) impersonality and in Thomas Mann to a malicious irony. In Kafka, however: "This distance that existed between the writer and the reader concerning the work, authorizing contemplative enjoyment, now enters, in the guise of an irreducible estrangement, the very sphere of the work" (B-EI, 562). In

< previous page

page_34

next page >

< previous page

page_35

next page > Page 35

other words, Flaubert's famous ''impassivity," the attempt to extract authorial judgment and subjective sentiment from the literary text, and Mann's undercutting ironical pirouettes remain for Blanchot outside the works themselves, as if their very use betrays the controlling hand of the authors. But in Kafka such estrangement operates more fundamentally within the text's own sphere, and what Kafka teaches us is that "to recount brings the neuter into play. The narration governed by the neuter is held under the guardianship of 'he', a third person that is not a third person, nor the simple cover of impersonality. . . . The narrative 'he' destitutes all subjects, just as it disappropriates all transitive action or all objective possibility" (B-EI, 56364). This destitution of the subject, the neuter of the narrative voice, the "he" that is not an impersonal third person, clearly bears a relation to Blanchot's understanding of Lévinas's "there is." But whereas Lévinas would seek to escape the horror of anonymous and impersonal being, Blanchot writes it into his reading of Kafka and sees it not as horror but as radical exteriority, "the outside that is the characteristic enigma of language in writing" (B-EI, 565). This enigma is Blanchot's most persistent and perhaps influential preoccupation throughout his critical texts. Time and again he asserts that the essence of art is, tautologically, art itself, where the origin and production of the work of art take precedence over the finished product. Blanchot's formulations on the narrative voice are an attempt to determine what happens when writing takes place, and how it is not that the writer willingly extracts himself from the work but that the work dismisses the writer once it is written. Almost thirty years, however, before he conceives of the narrative voice, Blanchot writes L'Idylle, in which the irreducible estrangement of the neuter is confronted with the étranger of the text. In this sense, one might say that Kafka is the source of Blanchot's récit, to the extent that what Blanchot later locates in Kafka's work are his own literary concerns. And those concerns themselves, dating from 1932 (the year Blanchot claims to have begun work on the first version of Thomas l'Obscur), also find philosophical expression in Lévinas's early thought, where the "there is" and Blanchot's neuter of the narrative voice echo each other before parting company. This is not to suggest that Blanchot and Lévinas, nor indeed Blanchot and Kafka, follow the same trajectory. The implicit textual affinities between these respective pairings do suggest, however, the multilayered complexity of a seemingly straightforward récit. L'Idylle, in any case, does not surrender its origins any more easily than the étranger himself when questioned on his provenance: "May I ask you where you come from?' The étranger, his throat seized, could not answer. . . . 'Where are you from?' the old man asked as he crouched down beside

< previous page

page_35

next page >

< previous page

page_36

next page > Page 36

him. 'So you're spying too?' he replied nastily. 'Does it matter what country I'm from? I'm étranger, that's all''' (B-AC, 10, 12). If in the first instance the étranger is unable to answer the question posed, as if the weight of the question were too great to permit a response, in the second he quite plainly refuses. In Après coup, moreover, Blanchot merely claims that if the récit offers no sufficient definition of who the étranger is, he nevertheless "comes from outside" (BAC, 94), while in the overdetermination of the word "étranger," the theme of L'Idylle announces itself from the very beginning: "the theme I recognize . . . because Camus was to render it 'familiar', in other words, the contrary of what it signified, a few years later, is designated from the first words: 'The étranger'" (B-AC, 94). Blanchot's critique of Camus here is quite clear. In narrating Meursault's experiences leading up to the shooting of the Arab and the subsequent trial scenes, Camus renders the étranger all too familiar. Blanchot is raising an important question: how does one narrate the étranger without engaging in a process of familiarization, without doing violence to his status as precisely étranger? Beyond Memoirs from the House of the Dead Blanchot's L'Idylle, it may be argued, does not respect the estrangement of the étranger when it begins to refer to him as Alexandre Akim, a name arbitrarily given to him by one of the female characters: "this foreign name ['ce nom étranger'] suited him as much as any other: here he was nothing but a kind of beggar" (B-AC, 12). But there is more in this name than Blanchot's text would intimate, for the name Alexandre Akim reveals the literary provenance of the étranger: Dostoyevsky's Memoirs from the House of the Dead (186162). Dostoyevsky's novel is a thinly veiled autobiographical account of the five years spent in a hard-labor prison camp in Siberia for his participation in semiclandestine political discussion groups in St. Petersburg. Blanchot's own contribution to penological literature lacks such personal experience, but it borrows from Dostoyevsky the themes of prison and exile and the paradox of incarceration and liberty. "Is it a privilege or a curse to live in the hospice?" asks the étranger (B-AC, 27). Blanchot's "borrowing" could of course be mere coincidence, and he could well be drawing on a host of literary sources. But an entire series of remarkable similarities makes coincidence alone seem implausible. The narrator of Dostoyevsky's novel is called Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov. In prison he meets a Russian nobleman called Akim Akimytch, who becomes an ally, if not quite a friend. Blanchot's étranger, Alexandre Akim, combines these two characters, setting off a process of duplication throughout the text. 11 Of the handful of characters who receive names in L'Idylle, all of them, in

< previous page

page_36

next page >

< previous page

page_37

next page > Page 37

one form or another, are taken from Dostoyevsky's novel. Thus, Blanchot's Isaïe Sirotk finds his counterparts in the Jew Isaïe Bumstein Fomich and the enigmatic Sirotkine; Blanchot's Grégoire echoes Grégoriitch; ''Vieux Piotl" plays a paternal role similar to the wise old man in Dostoyevsky's novel; the unfortunate detainee Nicolas Pavlon, who is whipped to death in L'Idylle, mirrors, if not in name (although the Russian form of the name is striking) then at least in event, the Kalmuck Christian (baptized Alexander) who is sentenced to four thousand lashes but who escapes death by feigning it at regular intervals. Contrary to the predominantly foreign names of the detainees in Blanchot's L'Idylle Jews, Greeks, Russians the director Pierre has an exemplary Christian name (Pierre is a nobleman in Dostoyevsky's novel), while his wife and tormentor, Louise, shares her name in Dostoyevsky's text with a woman involved in a love triangle ending in jealousy and murder. In a final similarity, Dostoyevsky's narrator notes one of the prisoners' sad songs: "My eyes will never see that land, / The land where I was born. / Condemned to torment without end, / Guiltless I lie forlorn. / Above the roof the screech-owl calls, / The woods the echoes hear; / My sad heart aches, my spirit falls / I never can be there." 12 It is difficult to see merely chance at play if we compare this to the following song from Blanchot's récit: "Country of my birth, / Why did I leave you? / No longer innocent / I am wretched. / Now without love, / Imprisoned forever, / My death will be my deliverance" (B-AC, 33). Beyond the clear derivation of Blanchot's song from Dostoyevsky's novel, the final line announces the fate of the étranger. Death will be the only issue from Blanchot's récit. If Blanchot was "surprisingly étranger to the surrounding literature" when he wrote L'Idylle, there can be little doubt that he knew his Dostoyevsky. Blanchot's extensive borrowing, transposition, and alteration of names, situations, and songs have important implications for the nature of his récit as a whole. L'Idylle reveals itself as a palimpsest of Dostoyevsky's novel, attaining its own specificity by creating from Dostoyevsky's novel a veiled political space that says far more than it would initially seem. Blanchot's text, then, liberates itself from its literary referent, escaping from the prison that is the House of the Dead. In the very act of copying, Blanchot effaces his textual antecedent and renders his text "étranger" to its origin. Vicious Circles: Repetition and Difference To copy, to reproduce, to trace out what already exists and yet to transfigure completely in the process, to give a new turn to the already known L'Idylle, precisely, moves within such a space, where repetition governs the

< previous page

page_37

next page >

< previous page

page_38

next page > Page 38

récit's internal structure, and difference regulates its play. Repetition, then, operates on four predominant levels: (1) the syntactic (the repetition and alteration of syntactic units functioning within a pattern of opposition; for example, Vieux Piotl's regret that ''it's all over for a man who gets out of prison" [B-AC, 27] contradicted by the Director's advice that "what is important is one day to get out of prison" [B-AC, 31]); (2) the scenic (the death of Nicolas Pavlon prefigures that of Akim, while at both events the sadomasochistic guard-cum-executioner finds intense happiness but vomits in remorse); (3) the sexual (the repressed and sublimated sexual desires of the étranger; the androgynous nature of the Director and his wife; the raising of marriage to an ideal, "the great hope of youth" [B-AC, 45], where in fact its potential liberation for the étranger is the means of torment for Pierre and Louise); and (4) the spatial (where the labyrinthine streets play out Akim's emotional dislocation and prevent him from centering himself, from grasping "the traces of a drama that remained elusive for him" [B-AC, 23]). The orchestration of these patterns of repetition and difference seems to offer the text as a highly structured, selfconscious piece of fiction where the reader moves toward a coherent assimilation of the events narrated. Yet, as Michel Jarrety points out, there is a serious breakdown in the relation between signifiers and signifieds: "A distance opens up between the words and the things they are intended to designate: behind the word community it is the absence of community that installs itself; behind the word hospice, the absence of hospitality; behind the word idyll, the absence of love." 13 Jarrety's comments beg the question that imposes itself throughout the récit: where or what exactly is the idyll? The idealized pastoral connotations of an idyll are clearly absent from Blanchot's somber tale of imprisonment and suffering. Like the image of happiness the étranger seeks throughout, L'Idylle is merely the simulacrum of an idyll, its apparent organization giving way to the subversive force of narration itself, displacing and marginalizing the centrifugal attraction inherent in the reading process (the attempt to construct meaning, signification). The récit's rhetorical "flowers" are part of a traditional game ("touching but useless" [B-AC, 23]) that Blanchot's narrative voice refuses to follow, just as the étranger refuses to take part in the game of cards with the other detainees (B-AC, 13). The étranger, in fact, refuses to be "detained" within a sedentary system of values. To marry Elise in order to be free to leave the Home not only would be to subscribe to the "rules" but would also mean merely entering another social institution. The étranger thus escapes both institutions when he breaks the rules and responds to the call from outside an inexorable gesture that becomes a pre-

< previous page

page_38

next page >

< previous page

page_39

next page > Page 39

lude to fatigue and death. Far from any movement toward unity, therefore, Blanchot's narrative voice (the neuter) subverts the very patterns it appears to instigate. The Étranger and Nonidentity These digressions into the external origins and internal organization of the text place us in a better position to ask a number of important questions. Can the étranger in fact be defined without recourse to familiarization can he be defined ''otherwise"? Why is he killed? And how exactly does he escape the grasp of the narrative? The étranger arrives in the town. Unable to answer his interrogators as to his provenance, he merely asserts: "I'm just a vagrant. . . . I'm étranger, that's all" (B-AC, 12). This is hardly enlightening information, since it is because he is an étranger that he is detained in the first place. He consequently becomes hostile both to his fellow inmates (B-AC, 13) and to the masters of the Home (B-AC, 18); his egotism (B-AC, 18) permits him to interiorize the death of Pavlon into the sphere of his own unhappiness (B-AC, 27); in the light of his intended marriage to Elise, one can only take his initial comment that he already has a wife as a lie (B-AC, 13); and his estrangement from the other detainees does not prevent him from picking up their habit of stealing (B-AC, 46). Yet these traits still fail to reveal what the étranger represents in the récit. What is clear is that he insists on asserting his status as an étranger: "I will never be anything but a man from another town" (B-AC, 32). As such, he appears within the text as a bearer of fragmentation and discontinuity. By refusing to deny his difference, the étranger poses a threat to the idyll of order that in its blatant obtrusiveness permeates L'Idylle. Hence, the étranger is whipped to death for nothing other than apparent deception and upsetting "the order of the house" (B-AC, 52). Yet the text points out that the inmates of the Home, far from forming a collective, or a society, do not in fact share any feeling of camaraderie (B-AC, 11, 16, 19, 34). The society that would ostracize the étranger thus appears "étranger" to itself, and the flogging of Akim becomes the society's self-flagellation, the confusion of victim and executioner, slave and master, exemplified in the figure of the guard. Philip Beitchman would also see the étranger as posing a threat to the Home and suggests that Blanchot has written a récit about the plight of the artist in modern bourgeois society: "Vagrancy, nomadism, lack of permanent address, etc. all very artistic qualities for Blanchot, are all anathema for the bourgeois order of things for obvious reasons, armies, schools,

< previous page

page_39

next page >

< previous page

page_40

next page > Page 40

factories cannot be staffed with vagrants! . . . It is as if Akim . . . is constitutionally incapable of living anywhere, that is, as an artist he is considered a permanent menace to the established order an order that must extinguish him to preserve itself.'' 14 According to this interpretation which neglects the fact that the "established order" of the hospice is a mere appearance, which the étranger himself is warned not to trust right at the beginning the étranger would be more specifically a writer, possibly Blanchot himself. On the other hand, Jean-Paul Latteur depicts the étranger as a veiled portrayal of the reader: "The reader also comes from outside. And is not the étranger though he is not just this a (very bad) reader? Interested in pictures, a copyist and copier, he reads like a child. L'Idylle puts the reader into play by writing him."15 As such, the reader, like the étranger, is condemned from the very moment of entering the récit: "Once the book is opened, the étranger/reader are enclosed, excluded."16 Neither of these arguments, however, seems sufficient. To read the étranger as the writer, positing vagrancy as a prerequisite for artistic temperament, is to ignore the fact that Akim exhibits nothing but contempt for all around him and actually does nothing creative at all. To read him as the reader, on the other hand, acknowledging the text's openness to incessant interpretation, is to ignore the récit's more subtle (and dangerous) implications. For if the étranger does figure errancy, spending all his time going from one interpretation to another of the happiness or unhappiness of the Director and his wife, ultimately he cannot be tied down either to writer or reader. His death at the hands of the society in which he finds himself is caused simply by his status as an étranger. This may seem mere tautology, but through it the essential ambiguity of the récit can be approached. The Étranger and the Jew This ambiguity can initially be located in the very fact that the étranger as a cultural and sociological phenomenon can hold different significations. Elie Wiesel, in his book Paroles d'étranger (A stranger's words), for example, identifies three types of étranger: (1) the étranger who is "neutral, above the fray, unconcerned, indifferent, almost absent";17 (2) the étranger "who excites, stimulates and shakes up: . . . the positive, good, creative étranger";18 and (3) the étranger who is "hostile if not full of hatred: he arouses fear, refusing to confide. He comes to take and not receive. Essentially malevolent, he introduces himself into the present not to enrich but to diminish and degrade. His means are hatred, grudges, suspicion. . . . He is the enemy."19 The negativity of this latter étranger who brings hatred and hostility represents a threat that must be eradicated: "The étranger is the other. . . . [He is]

< previous page

page_40

next page >

< previous page

page_41

next page > Page 41

the vagrant in search of a place to stay. . . . The étranger is sent away or rendered inoffensive. It is the law of the tribe operating: it wants to remain united, pure, shut in on itself. The étranger can thus only disturb, unsettle, undermine the established order. The solution? It is necessary to repulse the étranger. Or even eliminate him. And, at best, exorcize him.'' 20 Blanchot's étranger in L'Idylle, in asserting precisely his alterity, falls under Wiesel's third menacing category, and he is indeed eliminated. But for Wiesel the problem posed by the étranger does not belong solely to the realm of fiction. It has serious implications for the real Jew of history: "For the Jew the problem is particularly distressing. The reasons are obvious. Apart from the odd exception, from the beginning he has been considered everywhere as the étranger par excellence. Hunted down and hounded, he gives rise to the hatred harbored toward all those who do not belong to the clan, to the tribe."21 This detour leads us back into Blanchot's text, while opening up a new perspective: the relation between the étranger and the Jew. It is a relation that we have seen Blanchot himself endorsing in his essay "Etre juif." By relating the Jew to his historical condition of persecution, exodus, and exile, Blanchot suggests that Judaism is the affirmation of a nomadic truth that maintains the Jew in exile: "There is a truth of exile, a vocation of exile, and if to be Jewish is to be destined to dispersion, then this dispersion, just as it calls to a dwelling without place, and just as it destroys all fixed relationships of power with an individual, a group, or a State, also brings out in the face of the exigency of Totality, another exigency, and prohibits finally the temptation of Unity-Identity" (B-EI, 184). For Blanchot this is ineluctable logic. Like Lévinas's "ex-cendance" from being, Blanchot's concept of Jewish exile breaks with totality, extracting (Jewish) being from the apparent inexorable movement toward synthesis. This view of the Jew as the figure of exile would appear to belong to a purely mythical realm. But Blanchot invests this cultural commonplace with philosophical overtones, employing a vocabulary of Totality, Unity, and Identity resonating with Hegelian dialectic, in order to highlight Jewish difference that breaks with such notions, and he ends his essay not with myth at all but with the very real question of anti-Semitism. And it is here that our reading of L'Idylle takes on its new dimension. The étranger, as I have argued, is denied his difference and feels exiled. The cruel "joke" that the Director recounts to the étranger "When you no longer feel an étranger, there will be nothing against you becoming étranger again" (B-AC, 32) leaves him "overcome with sadness" (B-AC, 32). But it is at the point that he is to cease being an étranger through his wedding that he attempts his

< previous page

page_41

next page >

< previous page

page_42

next page > Page 42

apparent escape. By responding to the call from outside (B-AC, 50), he reaches ''the end of the town," ambiguously referred to as "the beginning of a new life" (B-AC, 51), and it is at these limits the beginning of the end of the récit that he drops with fatigue and is taken back to the Home to be punished for disturbing the order of the house. Yet the étranger proves to be a disturbing and disruptive element not only for the order of the society into which he has wandered, but also for the order of narration itself. In other words, when the young woman bestows upon him the name Alexandre Akim, the narrative voice immediately adopts this, or the shortened Akim. It fails, however, to sustain this nomenclature, and the étranger becomes successively and simultaneously a vagabond, "a kind of beggar," "the new arrival," "the invalid," "a man from another town," a detainee, a prisoner, and a thief. The narrative voice cannot tie down the étranger, and its call to him from outside restores him to the unknown. This returning of the étranger to the state of estrangement is accomplished in the final scenes of the récit. Akim, broken with fatigue, awakes "before the director acting as a judge" (B-AC, 51). The crime: "You have been guilty of a regrettable act. . . . You have deceived a young girl by a proposal of marriage while you were thinking of disappearing. You have deceived us by making us relax our guard under the pretext of the wedding we had to prepare. You have disturbed the order of the house" (B-AC, 5152). Significantly, "Akim could think of nothing but to listen to him without interruption" (B-AC, 52), as if already once removed from the scene. His final words, "I await your sentence" (B-AC, 52), bear all the weight of his submission to his destiny. The succession of statements immediately preceding his death testifies to the gradual disappearance of his inner self. He is reduced to merely a pair of obsessive eyes (B-AC, 5256) that fix and discomfort the Director-Judge. It is as if the étranger is, in the last resort, rendered absent from his own death. The étranger of L'Idylle is thus "étranger" in a multiple form: "étranger" to the strangeness of the Home; "étranger" to the strangeness of the town; "étranger" to himself doubly so, since he is "étranger" to the étranger and to the name Alexandre Akim; and finally, "étranger" to his own death. The récit, however, does not in fact end with the death of the étranger. For immediately after the bier has been constructed, a brilliant sun casts its rays over the Home: "The sun shone now in all its brilliance. The flowers in the garden, still half-damp, were blossoming. The greenery penetrated through the windows and flourished through the rooms. . . . [Louise looked at] the superb and victorious sky . . ." (B-AC, 56). Commenting on this note of

< previous page

page_42

next page >

< previous page

page_43

next page > Page 43

affirmation, Blanchot in Après coup states that L'Idylle is the ''récit of an errancy that does not close with death and that this death cannot obscure, since it concludes on the affirmation of the 'superb and victorious sky', étranger to the étranger and intimating that, whatever happens, the light of what is said, even in the most painful word, will not cease to brighten, like the ray as light as air that always transfigures the somber and starless night. As if the darkness were still is it happiness or unhappiness? yes, still the illumination of the interminable day, the luminosity of the first day" (B-AC, 99). It is as if the illusion of L'Idylle, what Blanchot in Après Coup refers to as "the torment of the happy idea" (B-AC, 94), reasserts itself in order to dispel the reality of the Home (unhappiness, persecution, torment, forced labor, death). Ultimately, to the Director's question "Is it an idyll? Is it really an idyll?" the étranger can only reply, "Yes, why not?" (B-AC, 44). The récit detains the questions without proffering the answers. It is the récit of an errancy caught up in the exilic movement of its own production. According to the rules of this production, then, the étranger is persecuted and killed for refusing to assimilate (into the society and the text), for not denying his difference. If we read the étranger as the figure of the Jew, then L'Idylle can be seen to be exposing anti-Semitism. Indeed, Blanchot himself encourages this reading in Après coup when he claims, tentatively, that while aspects of his récit clearly differ from the situation in which the Jews found themselves a few years after the composition of his text, the récit nevertheless (inexplicably) appears prophetic of "events that took place but became known only much later" (B-AC, 94). Blanchot refers quite explicitly to these events when he points out how impossible it is in reading and rereading his text not to evoke "the derisory work of the concentration camps, where those who are condemned to it like miserable workers transport mountains of stone from one place to another and then bring them back to the starting point, not for the glory of some pyramid but for the destruction of the work. This took place at Auschwitz, and it took place in the Gulag" (B-AC, 9596). As far as the fear, hatred, and elimination of the étranger are concerned, what "takes place" in L'Idylle and what "took place" in Auschwitz may seem to constitute a point of comparison. But in fact they are absolutely incommensurate, a point Blanchot hastens to make when he states that the récit (idyllic in its very possibility of narration) cannot be reduced to this tragic historical realization: "But I do not think that L'Idylle can be interpreted as the reading of an already threatening future. The story does not detain the meaning, any more than the meaning, which is always ambiguous and plural, can be reduced to its historical realization, even one of such tragic and considerable proportions. The récit simply cannot be

< previous page

page_43

next page >

< previous page

page_44

next page > Page 44

translated. If it is the tension of a secret around which it seems to develop and which immediately declares itself without elucidation, it is only announcing its own movement capable of giving rise to the play of decipherment or interpretation, but it remains itself and in its turn étranger to the movement'' (B-AC, 96). The récit, then, according to Blanchot, eschews definitive interpretation and announces only its own movement. But, as he recognizes, all in L'Idylle is ambiguous, an ambiguity that inevitably permeates the movement of the text. The implications of this are considerable, not only in relation specifically to the meaning of the death of the étranger, but also for the possibilities it opens up to reread the present reading in order to arrive at a diametrically opposed conclusion. The Étranger and the Anti-Semite Through a series of detours, we have arrived at the following interpretation of L'Idylle: the étranger is a disruptive (Jewish) element and hence persecuted and eliminated. Yet despite the fact that his flogging appears to restore him to his legitimate state of estrangement, the étranger, prior to his death, is utterly humiliated: "he did not know if he would live long enough to receive the death of a new wound; he was torn, humiliated, threatened with being left alive with sufferings so great as to take his life" (B-AC, 53). To read the text, then, solely as an exposure of political anti-Semitism, while condemning the Home and inscribing the étranger within a positive nomadic truth, would be to obscure a potentially negative reading of the étranger. For one could argue that the text, through its own narrative voice, not only constitutes the vehicle of the anti-Semitism exposed but also colludes with the Judge who pronounces the death sentence. The fact that the positive and the negative portrayals of the étranger proceed simultaneously leads one to wonder why Blanchot acknowledges only the first. For when he claims that the récit simply cannot be translated, is he not suppressing the anti-Semitism that his text can be seen to carry, in the same way that the society of L'Idylle suppresses the étranger? In other words, the idyll is to rid society of the étranger-Jew. This second, menacing reading is perhaps not directly of Blanchot's doing. It springs from the text's own postulates or, as Blanchot says, "its own movement." Nevertheless, the analogy that Blanchot encourages between the portrayal of the étranger and the situation of the Jews in the concentration camps, while quite categorically condemning the situation, raises a number of awkward questions that we can approach through a formulation Blanchot proposes in Après coup: "the exile is neither psychological nor ontological" (B-AC, 95). What sort of exile does the récit articulate then?

< previous page

page_44

next page >

< previous page

page_45

next page > Page 45

One is perhaps tempted to see the exile in terms of the society that imposes it; that is, the exile is political and social. Yet, as we have seen, the society that persecutes the étranger hardly forms a society or community at all. In fact, in order to answer this question of exile and to see how the ambiguity of the récit brings about a reverse reading of it, I wish to situate L'Idylle more firmly in its historical and political context. We have seen in a preliminary section that the first publication of L'Idylle dates its composition to July 1936, a period during which, Blanchot reminds us in Après coup suggesting it would be dishonest not to do so he was also composing the first version of Thomas l'Obscur (B-AC, 92). But he remains entirely silent (or dishonest?) in the same text on his equally contemporaneous writings, namely, his political contributions throughout the 1930s to rightwing journals such as Le Journal des Débats, L'Insurgé, Aux Ecoutes, Le Rempart, and Combat. Blanchot's activities during this period have long been acknowledged, and I offer here merely a brief overview of their critical reception. As early or as late as 1962 Eugen Weber, in his study of ''Action Française," suggests that Blanchot in the 1930s "opposed the undiscriminating violence of Fascism," but that he was not "against Fascism, nationalism, NationalSocialism, or anti-Semitism, but only against their use as easy panaceas prescribed for wooden legs." 22 In 1969, Claude Roy describes Blanchot's "diaphanous and fragile appearance" at meetings of the Combat group,23 while Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle includes Blanchot as one of "the non-conformists of the 1930s" and traces his movements from La Revue Française, "one of the political tribunes of the Jeune Droite," to Réaction and the Revue du XXe siècle and on to Combat (in 1936), which engages "much more directly in the political struggle and current debates."24 It is Mike Holland and Patrick Rousseau, however, who in 1976 provide more extended analysis of Blanchot's early career by situating Blanchot within the "Jeune Droite" and arguing that the spiritual and national revolution of the Right was gradually supplanted by the increasing totalitarian monologue of fascism, rendering silent Blanchot's calls to revolution. By 1939, Blanchot had thus rejected political engagement in favor of the literary discourse.25 Alain David, on the other hand, in an article in 1981, refuses to allow such rejection to efface Blanchot's past. While suggesting that Blanchot's anti-Semitism is "enormous, worrying, incomprehensible, iconoclastic," his turn-about into a philo-Semite, while being "more acceptable," is "just as incomprehensible."26 David, moreover, quotes a letter from Lévinas's Du sacré au saint that he suggests was written by Blanchot. Lévinas himself, in fact, intimates this in

< previous page

page_45

next page >

< previous page

page_46

next page > Page 46

his text, but does not make it explicit. The context of the letter quoted is important. Lévinas is speaking in one of his talmudic readings about Judaism and revolution, about the relation between Judaism and politics. Toward the end of the essay, Lévinas cites the events of 1968 and the author of the letter as having participated in these events, totally and lucidly, but having separated himself from his ''revolutionary friends when they chose to oppose Israel" (L-DSS, 48). Blanchot if he is indeed the author of the letter refuses to share a view that would simply see the Palestinians as a weak people occupied colonized by the imperialist Israelis, and he ends his letter thus: "Anti-Semitism would thus henceforth have as allies those who are deprived of anti-Semitism, as it were. / Is this not a strange turn-around, proving that the absence of anti-Semitism is simply not enough?" (L-DSS, 49). David picks up on these sentences and argues that the words "the absence of anti-Semitism is simply not enough" are precisely what motivates Blanchot's philo-Semitism: "the violence of the same, already inconvertible into presence and system, ejects the other thus affirming him. . . . Violence the equivocal trajectory of negative dialectics is altered into respect." 27 For David, Blanchot's later philo-Semitism is instigated not by "a pure and simple absence of anti-Semitism,"28 but by an affirmation of the Jew as other where violence is altered so that anti-Semitism in fact affirms Judaism. Yet David seems to take Blanchot's anti-Semitism for granted rather than proving it, which is precisely what Jeffrey Mehlman sets out to do in his 1980 essay "Blanchot at Combat: Of Literature and Terror." Mehlman begins by analyzing a series of talks delivered by Georges Bernanos to members of "Action Française" in 1929 (Bernanos is one of the frequent contributors to the review Réaction, as is Blanchot, in the early 1930s). These talks were an attempt "to revive and transmit the heritage of radical anti-Semitism."29 Mehlman then goes on to examine a number of Blanchot's articles for Combat in the light of this, and how Blanchot finally liquidates this "general political project" and his "anti-Semitic past" in Faux pas (1943).30 Not surprisingly, Blanchot's reaction to Mehlman's essay is one of "utter disagreement," and Mehlman includes Blanchot's one "rectification" in his essay.31 This rectification, in fact, has nothing to do with the Combat articles at all, and Mehlman would have us conclude that Blanchot simply cannot deny the written evidence. Mike Holland, however, accuses Mehlman of not exercising enough "care" in his article: "on the basis of a diary entry of Paul Léautaud's, he proceeds to implicate Blanchot in one of the most serious acts of collaboration committed by French intellectuals during the Occupation."32 Still, this is not the main thrust of Mehlman's argument, which draws its evidence from the Combat articles.

< previous page

page_46

next page >

< previous page

page_47

next page > Page 47

These debates over Blanchot's political past have gained greater currency in recent years. Steven Ungar thus refers to Blanchot as being ''associated during the 1930s with a number of short-lived non-conformist movements of conservative orientation" and quotes one of Blanchot's more vitriolic articles for Combat calling for a violent revolution. 33 Commenting on the fact that "a displaced political dimension can be discerned in narratives such as L'Idylle and Le Dernier Mot," Ungar asks whether the political supplement can help us to understand Blanchot's "place in literary modernity."34 Ungar seems to think that it can, emphasizing the "urgent necessity to (re)read [Blanchot's] fiction and non-fiction" in the light of the political material. Certainly, Allan Stoekl does just this when he refers to the problem of Blanchot as a "right-wing propagandist" and points out somewhat dramatically that Blanchot's "early political polemics would seem not only to be written by a different man from the critic and novelist, but on a different planet as well."35 Stoekl essentially repeats Mehlman's argument by showing how Blanchot strips contemporary texts of their political specificity in Faux pas and how this represents Blanchot's rejection both of his own past and of political engagement in general. He then reads Blanchot's novel Le Très-Haut as a similar silencing of the political discourse that this novel contains. In the course of Stoekl's discussion, Blanchot's status is altered from being a "right-wing propagandist" to a "fascist propagandist."36 It is but one step from this acceptance and judgment of Blanchot's past to Tzvetan Todorov's statement that "we know that before the war Blanchot spoke on behalf of a certain anti-Semitism."37 Faced with these accusations, Blanchot has maintained silence (except in the letter of disagreement sent to Mehlman and in a recent letter to Roger Laporte in which he states categorically that he never frequented Maurras, but that the evocation of this name in the 1930s and early 1940s is "detestable and inexcusable").38 This does not mean that Blanchot has not overtly condemned anti-Semitism. This can be seen not only in his eloquent writings on Judaism, but in particular in a striking comment on Céline: "that Céline was a writer given to delirium is not what makes me dislike him. Rather it is the fact that this delirium expressed itself as anti-Semitism; the delirium here can excuse nothing. All anti-Semitism is finally a delirium, and anti-Semitism, be it delirious, remains the capital error."39 It is precisely around this fundamental error that not only the debate concerning Blanchot revolves, but also in recent years the affairs concerning Paul de Man and, in particular, Heidegger. Victor Farias's book Heidegger et le nazisme (Heidegger and Nazism, 1987) rekindled debate in France of what in fact was already known of Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi party. Blanchot participated in the debate in a letter to Catherine David,

< previous page

page_47

next page >

< previous page

page_48

next page > Page 48

published in Le Nouvel Observateur, stating that it is ''in Heidegger's silence on the Extermination that his irreparable fault lies." 40 The problem central to the debate is stated in dramatic terms by the opening lines of the dossier that Le Nouvel Observateur devotes to it: "The whole folly of the century is condensed into this agonizing question: Heidegger, Nazi? . . . There is a justified outcry in hearing this. Thought might be said to be dead, for if thought can be Nazi, it must be dead in as much as it is thought."41 The implicit assumption here is that Heidegger's philosophy cannot be divorced from his political allegiances. Blanchot would seem to indicate that, as far as he is concerned, the two spheres can be seen independently and that Heidegger's "mistake" was not to have repented afterwards. In L'Entretien infini, on the other hand, Blanchot does explicitly condemn Heidegger, as we shall see in the final chapter. Moreover, in a letter to Salomon Malka in 1988 Blanchot claims that Heidegger's discourse from the beginning bears witness to a certain anti-Semitism and that this made "them" realize that the Jews were "their" brothers.42 The question that thus arises from such comments the question of Heidegger the philosopher of being and Heidegger the philosopher of Nazism concerns the extent to which, as Ungar previously suggested, Blanchot's own journalistic writings from the 1930s can be separated from his contemporary fiction. It is at this point that we can begin to return to L'Idylle. Blanchot and the Question of Anti-Semitism The political articles that Blanchot was writing at the time he also composed L'Idylle are for the most part for Combat (running from January 1936 to July 1939, and not to be confused with the daily newspaper of 1944, which issued from the clandestine resistance movement during the Occupation). These are the articles cited by most of Blanchot's commentators who have broached his political past. I reproduce here a passage from the April 1936 issue of Combat, which Mehlman cites as conclusive evidence of Blanchot's anti-Semitism:


7d5aff9

The disgraceful Sarraut government which seems to have received as its mission the humiliation of France, in a way that it has not been humiliated for twenty-five years, has brought disorder to its pinnacle. It has said everything it should not have said, it has done nothing it should have done. It began by harking to the call of revolutionaries and raving Jews whose theological fury demanded against Hitler all immediate sanctions. We have never seen anything so formidable and so senseless as this delirium of verbal energy. We have never seen anything so perfidious as this propaganda of national honour carried out by suspect for-

< previous page

page_48

next page >

< previous page

page_49

next page > Page 49


eigners [''étrangers"] in the offices of the Quai d'Orsay with the intention of plunging the youth of France, in the name of Moscow or Israel, into immediate conflict. . . . 43

7d5aff9

This is certainly strong language, the Jewish émigrés, foreigners, and Communists all thrown into the same melting pot as the forces that would lead France to the brink of war. Moreover, in the very month in which L'Idylle was written, July 1936, Blanchot published an article entitled "Le Terrorisme, méthode de salut public," in which he vigorously attacks Léon Blum's Popular Front government (Blum is Jewish of course):44 "What a fine union, what a holy alliance, this conglomerate of Soviet, Jewish and Capitalist interests. Everything that is anti-National and antisocial will be served."45 In response to this government, Blanchot calls for a violent and relentless revolution: "A revolution is needed because a regime which possesses everything and has its roots everywhere cannot be modified. It must be suppressed and crushed. This revolution must be violent because it is impossible by using decent measures to extract the forces and passions needed for renovation from a people as weakened as ours. Bloody jolts are needed to awaken this people, a storm, a complete upheaval. This is not at all rest, because there can be no rest precisely. This is why terrorism appears to us today as a method of public salvation."46 In a further article for Combat entitled "Le Caravansérail" (a word the dictionary defines as a "place frequented by foreigners from diverse countries") and published in December 1936, Blanchot attacks the hypocrisy and ineffectualness of the anti-Communist factions. Not that Blanchot is against anti-Communism: "Of course we understand full well that it is necessary to fight the Communists with all the severity and contempt we can have for indecisive, weak and narrowminded beings, for servile imbeciles who represent merely a slightly complex form of betrayal."47 Indeed, in the necessity of fighting Communism, Blanchot talks of "a police operation, . . . a matter of hygiene," but finds that: "Anti-Communism today is a kind of caravanserai to bring together self-congratulating and self-assuring people who have more money than ideas. These are the parliamentarians admired by Blum, the hackneyed radicals all excited because at last they have enemies on the Left."48 The hyperbole of these articles anti-Communist, anti-Jewish, anticapitalist, antidemocratic is by no means specific to Blanchot at this time. But although he is far from being a lone voice in a political wilderness, he is not a Brasillach or a Maurras, despite his desire for radical change. Nevertheless, his comments do provide evidence of a young Blanchot who perceives the society in which he lives and for which he wants a spiritual revolution as

< previous page

page_49

next page >

< previous page

page_50

next page > Page 50

fragmented and disjointed, a society that needs complete upheaval, and the Jews like the Communists, the capitalists, the bourgeois democrats and socialists are some of the many foreign elements in this society. I shall return shortly to the political background of this period, but in the light of these comments it is difficult not to pose the question of the relation between these articles and Blanchot's literary text L'Idylle. In other words, one may ask, is L'Idylle an attempt to work through this upheaval, an allegory of Blanchot's vision of the political situation in contemporary France? Once this question is posed, the following scenario would not seem so fantastical: the étranger (arrogant, hostile, disruptive the Jew) is eradicated from society (France). This society, of course, is far from being held together by a coherent order. Indeed it is a true caravanserai, but by eliminating the étranger (the Jewish element) from its ranks, it can at least begin to put some semblance of order into its hospice (''to carry out its duties as mistress of the house" [B-AC, 56]). Under the guise of fiction, then, L'Idylle would reveal itself as a potentially anti-Semitic text while paradoxically exposing anti-Semitism. As I mentioned earlier, Blanchot acknowledges only the latter reading in Après coup. None of this, in fact, is inconsistent with my reading of the text thus far (that is, the étranger can be read as a surrogate Jew). But if L'Idylle does indeed also posit the étranger as a function of the writer (rather than the political journalist), it is not in the restricted terms in which Philip Beitchman claims, that is, because of the marginal and disruptive quality of the étranger for the bourgeois order. For what L'Idylle perhaps teaches us perhaps teaches Blanchot is that the literary space is not devoid of politics, but is another space in which politics can be transposed. In order to see this more clearly, let us look once more at the publication of L'Idylle and Le Dernier Mot as Le Ressassement éternel (1951). When published for the first time, separately, in 1947, only L'Idylle carries a date, July 1936. At the end of Le Ressassement éternel, Blanchot gives two dates: "1935, 1936." L'Idylle is placed before Le Dernier Mot and all the subsequent editions of Le Ressassement éternel follow this order. Does this imply that the composition of L'Idylle predates that of Le Dernier Mot? This would clearly contradict the dating of these récits elsewhere. On the other hand, in the jacket insert to the 1970 edition of Le Ressassement éternel, Blanchot simply states that the two récits were "written from 1935 onwards." In the essay Après coup, Le Dernier Mot is specifically dated as 1935, while the dating of L'Idylle follows not immediately after the mention of the title, but after Blanchot's interpolated subtitle: "L'Idylle, or the torment of the happy idea (1936)" (B-AC, 94). One may not unreasonably conclude that our atten-

< previous page

page_50

next page >

< previous page

page_51

next page > Page 51

tion should be focused not on the individual dates of composition, but on the actual two-year period of 1935 to 1936. Blanchot's last word may be a correlative to the torment of the happy idea. Blanchot's Combat articles are evidently not devoid of anti-Jewish sentiment, but his desire for a national and spiritual revolution does not express itself either exclusively in these terms. Blanchot does not simply indulge in a delirious attack on the Jew. France, for Blanchot, is threatened by a host of foreign enemies that would plunge the country into war, but never in his articles does he call for a war against the Jews. Nor indeed does he rally to the apocryphal cry of ''rather Hitler than Blum." On the other hand, the period from 1935 to 1936 was one of great anguish for an already splintered Right. The municipal elections of May 1935 show a marked swing to the Left and in May of the following year Blum's Popular Front government won the second round of the legislative elections. In June, the so-called economic "Blum experiment" was instigated (scathingly attacked in Blanchot's "Le Terrorisme, méthode de salut public"). With France in an economic and political crisis, internally and externally French investors placed huge sums abroad in reaction against Blum's leftwing government, and reactions to the Spanish Civil War fractured the already precarious solidarity of the workers and the government on the Left Blanchot views the triumph of a socialist government as complete anathema to all he believes in. As a Catholic reactionary, Blanchot's political engagement manifests itself in a France still feeling the repercussions of the Dreyfus affair, with anti-Semitism resurfacing virulently against Blum's Popular Front. Blanchot's monarchist sympathies, his hostility to the Third Republic and to the Left in general, and his call for a national and spiritual revolution as a means of public salvation inevitably lead him into conflict with the Catholic Church, whose social policies are a reaction in themselves to the general deChristianization and non-Christian elements of France. The efforts of the Church to break the connivance between Catholicism and anti-Republic Nationalism can only lead to a crisis. Blanchot is thus faced with the victory of Blum's socialist Popular Front government on the one hand, and a Catholicism torn between the Left and the Right on the other. Blanchot's Catholicism and his desire for a spiritual revolution are no longer compatible in political terms. Between the church and a state in crisis, Blanchot may well feel an étranger to both. Moreover, with the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the threat of communism from the USSR, and the impossibility of fighting one nationalism with another, Blanchot reaches an impasse. His last article for Combat is precisely a call for a genuine dissident voice

< previous page

page_51

next page >

< previous page

page_52

next page > Page 52

that refuses to adopt a discourse of either Left or Right, but it is a call against the moderates that seems to reach the ears only of fascism, which Blanchot is far from embracing. Hence, the side step into the literary space with Le Dernier Mot and L'Idylle and the displacement of a political dimension would also reflect a displaced crisis in Catholicism. This would be the reverse side of the theme of this book: not the Jew as a displaced étranger, but the Catholic revolutionary displaced both by the society that needs revolution and by the Catholicism that would provide the spiritual values to assist this. This schematic incursion into a highly complex political situation permits us to make some concluding remarks concerning L'Idylle that open up a whole new vista on this apparently one-dimensional text. This new scenario, then, now suggests itself: the étranger (Blanchot) is punished for attempting to disturb the (dis)order of the hospice (France). While this may resemble the first scenario, here the Jewish element is now displaced: when the étranger fights with Isaïe Sirotk, the features of this character with an exemplary Jewish name are described in terms that fall little short of the most caricatured of anti-Semitic portraits of the Jew: ''his long protruding ears, his eyes without any iris, his hideous traits" (B-AC, 19). If Blanchot, moreover, writes himself into his text by transposing himself into the étranger, his death can be read almost as a self-sacrifice, a Christ-like figure redeeming the society that puts him to death. Pierre would become St. Peter rejecting Christ and/or the figure of God whose authority is undermined by Louise (France); Nicolas Pavlon would become St. Paul, another redeeming martyr; and the whole discourse on marriage would stand as an allegory of the relationship between the church (Pierre/God) and the state (Louise/France). This, I would stress, is a tentative reading, and space prevents me from developing it further. Nevertheless, it is not easy to see signs of redemption in the death of the étranger, as I argued earlier. The spiritual revolution that seems impossible on the real political front is no less impotent when played out in literary terms. Hence, the torment of the happy idea of revolution gives rise to a fictional work whereby one of its many paradoxes permits the central protagonist, the étranger, to be read simultaneously as the figure of the Jew and the figure of the anti-Semite (but not quite anti-Semitic enough, that is, not fascist). France (the hospice) figures as the prime enemy in both interpretations reflected in the titles of some of Blanchot's political articles in 1937 for L'Insurgé (which, like Combat, was born as a result of the victory of the Left): "Réquisitoire contre la France," "Notre première ennemie, la France," "Le Déshonneur français." Blanchot's first article, moreover, for the first

< previous page

page_52

next page >

< previous page

page_53

next page > Page 53

number of L'Insurgé is significantly entitled ''De la révolution à la littérature." This precisely would be one way of explaining Blanchot's composition of a text like "Le Terrorisme, méthode de salut public" and a text like L'Idylle in the very same month. Hence, Blanchot's récit does not just liberate itself from its literary referent (Dostoyevsky), but also from its political referent (a failed spiritual and national revolution). The liberation is not a renunciation, but a movement on to another plane. From this point on, or at least shortly afterwards though Blum's government falls in 1937, the threat of totalitarianism, the silencing of all discourse except the monologue, renders Blanchot's revolution untenable the revolution becomes literary, not an apolitical space but an-other political space. Perhaps the full ambiguity of Blanchot's L'Idylle can now finally be measured. If, on the one hand, we read the étranger as Blanchot, then liberation is to be found only in death: self-abnegation and self-destruction. These indeed are to become predominant themes in Blanchot's fiction, mirrored in Blanchot's own "disappearance" from 1940 onwards. On the other hand, if we read the étranger as the figure of the Jew (seen in negative terms), a reading positively encouraged by Blanchot himself in Après coup, then the question of exile at last finds a tentative reply. For if the exile of the étranger is neither psychological nor ontological and perhaps neither political nor social, it must ultimately be that of writing itself, Blanchot's own narrative voice. Blanchot reads post facto the effects of this narrative voice as the text's openness, yet this can be seen to be closing off possibilities of reading that would reveal the threatening question of anti-Semitism. This is not so much the caricature of Isaïe Sirotk, but the flogging and death of the étranger. Of course, a text can be about the suppression of the Jew without condoning such an action. No text has to judge what it portrays. In the case of L'Idylle this would remove the ambiguity altogether. But what we have in the case of L'Idylle is an interference: Blanchot later claims the étranger resembles the situation of the Jew; the political articles of 1935 to 1936 suggest a different scenario that Blanchot, consciously or unconsciously, silences. If Blanchot is the étranger of his text, he has "killed" himself. If he has portrayed the plight of the Jew as an étranger, his contemporary political material would make it dubious to argue in favor of sympathy for this plight. The étranger-Jew as the figure of the writer, however, is no less an act of self-destruction. The paradigm through which the anti-Semite and Jew confirm each other's existence is reversed, for the denial of the one would lead to the denial of the other. Blanchot's so-called anti-Semitism, when transposed into fiction, reverses itself: anti-Semite becomes Jew. This transformation of the negativity of the anti-Semitic discourse to

< previous page

page_53

next page >

< previous page

page_54

next page > Page 54

the problematical positive values of a so-called philo-Semitism revolves around the pivotal point of the étranger, a point around which much of Blanchot's subsequent comments concerning the Jew revolve. This point also determines Blanchot's fiction in the transitional period of the war, and, finally, it is the point at which being, the étranger, and the Jew have moved from Lévinas through Blanchot to Edmond Jabès. Jabès: Etranger-Writer-Jew Displaced Figures To turn to the work of Jabès is to shift the ground of the ambiguity we have located in Blanchot's L'Idylle. It is no longer a matter of whether the texts are pro- or anti-Semitic. This shift is not because Jabès is Jewish and the question could not be posed intellectual history is clustered with anti-Semitic Jews. As it happens, this is not the case with Jabés. Rather, the ambiguity presents itself in another form because Jabès overtly figures the Jew in his texts within an economy of difference that polarizes not around the positive and negative aspects of such a state, but around the questions of identity and nonidentity, the particular and the universal. Moreover, Jabès not only explicitly brings together the étranger and the Jew, but he proceeds from a conception of the Jew that goes one step (or one resemblance) further: the Jew is also a writer. In Jabès's work, however, it is writing that leads to a meditation on Judaism, and it is in the book that both Jew and writer are étrangers. In approaching Jabès, then, through the relation he asserts between Judaism and writing a relation that permits Derrida to characterize Le Livre des questions as ''a long metonymy" whereby "the Judaic situation becomes exemplary of the situation of the poet, of the man of the word and writing." 49 one enters Jabès's book: "I thought at first that I was a writer, then I realized that I was Jewish, then I no longer distinguished the writer from the Jew in me, for one and the other are but the torment of an ancient word" (J-RL, 60). Pursuing this torment, Jabès deconstructs the book through an incessant questioning whereby each renewed exegesis demonstrates the primacy of the commentary over the text itself, while paradoxically assigning all metatext to the margins of a book in which the Jew and the writer are crucial displaced figures, their condition of exile, errancy, and estrangement becoming the "unconditional of the étranger" (J-DDD, 103). From the Particular to the Universal (and Back Again) Critical reception of Jabès's relationship between Judaism and writing has ranged from reserved acceptance to outright rejection (which I shall look at

< previous page

page_54

next page >

< previous page

page_55

next page > Page 55

later). Derrida, for example, sees the poet and the Jew in Jabès's work as both unified and disunified, ''Judaic heteronomy" having no need of "a poet's intercession" who is excluded from the Jewish community. 50 Jabès's originality, for Derrida, is not in the themes dealt with the question within God, the negativity within God, exile as writing, the life of the letter, all of which Derrida claims to find already in the Kabbalah but in the specific question of identity: "Jabès, as we all know, is not Jewish. The Jewish identity that is confident enough of itself to submit a text to interrogation, to ask it to reply before it and to declare itself in relation to the 'Jewish condition', such identity has no place in Jabès's writing."51 Lévinas, too, suggests that the very vertiginous quality of Jabès's books is not merely the result of having errancy and exile as two of their major themes (L-NP, 75), while Jabès himself recognizes that specifically Jewish themes do not necessarily make a book Jewish: "No, a Jewish theme is not enough to make a book Jewish. The Jewish récit is much less in the anecdote, the avowal, the depiction of a milieu, than in the writing" (J-DDD, 82). The link Jabès thus establishes between Judaism, writing, and the notion of estrangement is not an objectively verifiable fact but a subjective condition based on the poetic experience of writing the book. While not being concerned with the objective analysis of Jewish principles, dogmas, and conditions of faith, Jabès can therefore claim that his work is autobiographical (J-DL, 26) and yet not purely personal (J-DL, 53), for the difficulty of the writer and the difficulty of the Jew have universal validity: "And what if this difficulty to be fully Jewish were but the difficulty of all men to be wholly human?" (J-P, 91). Hence, François Laruelle can claim that Jabès succeeds in making of the Jewish condition a universal condition through a "generalized Talmudism,"52 while for Gabriel Bounoure: "all men are Jews through exclusion and exile, rupture and death."53 Derrida, on the other hand, would retain the specificity of Jabès's Jew as the situation of the poet, but invokes Hegel to suggest that "Jewish consciousness is indeed the unhappy consciousness and Le Livre des questions is its poem, inscribed in the margins of the phenomenology of the spirit."54 There is much at stake in these readings of Jabès, not the least being the question of whether Jewish specificity is being denied and difference elided. I shall return to this question shortly to some of the implications of the Jew as other, the other as étranger but it is important to note here that while Jabès himself encourages this displacement of the Jew to a universal status he also, in typically contradictory fashion, suggests that he operates the reverse and moves back from the universal to the particular: "Introduce autobiography into the Jewish text, rehabilitate the 'I' the particular whence emerges the universal , assert the face, then proceed to the slow efface-

< previous page

page_55

next page >

< previous page

page_56

next page > Page 56

ment of the assertion. . . . For me, the detour through Judaism will have been but the shortest path from the particular to the universal and the universal to the particular'' (J-LP, 14, 100). The tension created by this oscillation is precisely where the Judaism of Jabès lies. The Absence of Identity This oscillation between the universal and the particular is a process (similar, in some respects, as I shall show in chapter 2, to Lévinas's process of the translation of Jewish specificity into Greek universality) in which Jabès is not concerned with portraying the Jew as he is, nor indeed for that matter, the writer as he is. Jabès's Jew and writer, rather, are perceived to be based on an absence of identity. In an increasingly secular century placed under the sign of what Gérard Macé in relation to Jabès calls "a negativity from which God himself has ended up dying," 55 the impossibility of self-definition has become very much a postmodern commonplace. In Jabès, it is an a priori. Jewish identity is thus displaced in Jabès's books not because the Jew throughout Western history has never been allowed to forget his identity the negativity defined through a history of persecution but because identity itself is primarily seen as a reflexive act of self-forgetting; that is, the Jew(-étranger-writer) inhabits a space that eschews subjectivity and intentionality. We find this absence of identity posed in similar terms in Blanchot's fiction, but not in Lévinas's work. As we have seen, if subjectivity, the sovereignty of the self, is deposed in Lévinas, it is in response to an alterity that breaks (en)closed self-sufficiency and opens onto a self-for-the-other, a responsibility-for-the-other that is precisely Lévinas's move from ontology to the ethical. For Jabès, on the other hand although he enters into dialogue with Lévinas on these matters, as we shall see in subsequent chapters identity is "subverted" and simply shown to be illusory: "To enter into oneself is to discover subversion" (J-PLS, 15); "To penetrate profoundly into self, in the quest for one's identity, what an illusion" (J-SD, 21); "Identity is perhaps an illusion. We are what we become" (J-DDD, 85). It is exactly this idea of becoming in Jabès's work that François Laruelle terms "Jewish-becoming," and he suggests that this is to "interiorize difference, Judaism as the unhappiness and happiness of exteriority, into Judaism itself: no longer a Jewish identity, but a becoming that is internal to Judaism and goes as far as to transform the notion."56 It is a process of becoming, then (becoming a Jew, becoming a writer, assuming a condition of strangeness), that is effected by a process of discontinuity preventing identity from crystallizing: "There is no continuity of being" (J-SD, 21). As Blanchot puts it, "Alone remains the nomadic affirmation."57

< previous page

page_56

next page >

< previous page

page_57

next page > Page 57

Nomadic Truth and the Myth of Exile This nomadic affirmation that Blanchot claims dwells in Jabès's book a paradoxical dwelling since it refuses to be sedentary is not only expressed in terms of negativity, of lack, and of absence, for Jabès precisely is affirming a metaphorical nomadism. Hence, what Derrida terms the ''impossibility of being self" 58 is enacted by Jabès's writing to create a positive textual anonymity: "Writing would be, through the words, gaining gradual access to this anonymity" (J-DDD, 22). To ignore this anonymity and to see Jabès's relation to Judaism purely in terms of an existential quest is not only erroneously to assimilate him to a philosophy to which his work is alien, it is also to suggest that Jabès seeks to create an identity for himself (and the Jew) through his writing. Max Bilen, for example, clearly inscribes Jabès within such a position when he refers to his work as a "total engagement," an "existential experience of writing," and to Jabès as an "authentic writer."59 Rockwell Gray would concur when he writes that "Jabès's story is the story of all stories, of the word which man is, of the word through which, in which, he realizes himself and names himself."60 Jabès, in fact, not only refrains from doing this, but quite positively negates it, as can be seen right from the inception of his book: "the writer is no one. . . . The writer is effaced before the work. . . . I am absent because I am the storyteller. Only the tale is real" (J-LQ, 28, 40, 60). Far from "realizing himself," then, Jabès writes himself (his self) out of the book, into a nonidentity that would defy the logic of the metaphysical, ontotheological discourse of being and presence. Anonymity, or nonidentity, then, is an essential attribute of the étranger. We have seen this at work in Blanchot's L'Idylle, in contradistinction to Lévinas's attempt to escape from the horror of anonymous being (the "there is," existence in its nakedness) to an existent expressed in terms of radical alterity or strangeness. What is valorized in Blanchot and Jabès would be seen in Lévinas's terms as still rooted in ontology and lacking an ethical dimension, a point to which I shall return in later chapters. For Jabès, however, not only do the Jew and the writer share the attributes of the étranger, the Jew is the archetypal étranger. By situating his Jewish vocation within these parameters, Jabès would thus seek to break through the collective experience of historical Judaism. Agnès Chalier identifies this break as a crucial element in Jabès's meditation on the étranger: "History is thematized as Jewishness. The history of the Jewish people becomes the history of the world. It is neither a religious discourse nor an orthodoxy but rather a meditation of/on man as étranger: étranger to himself, to others, to the world, to his own language, to God. Etranger, not alienated. Alienated man is sub-

< previous page

page_57

next page >

< previous page

page_58

next page > Page 58

jected to and consents to immediacy, to the deferment of his existence. But the étranger risks, risks himself through the interrogation and thus elucidates his condition.'' 61 Hence, Jabès's comment that he has "made of the Jew the model of the étranger" (J-DL, 97) points toward the mythical dimension that subtends the whole of the relationship between Judaism and writing in his work: "the Jew, as the figure of exile, errancy, estrangement and separation; a condition which is also that of the writer" (J-SD, 85). "The Jew, as the figure of exile" the simile is worth noting, for in the Jabès text, the Jew and the condition of exile become synonyms, the one reflecting the other: "I felt that I was exiled from the exiled the day I saw myself as Jewish" (J-P, 93). Jabès's (post-Shoah) Jew is thus not so much condemned to exile, but committed to exile, a destiny that can unfold only in the book in composition, as Philippe Boyer succinctly points out: "exile is not to be understood in the diachrony of a journey whose stages could be marked out, but the synchrony of a movement constitutive of each instant of the book in composition."62 In other words, the exilic movement enacted in Jabès's book prevents being from taking up residence; in Lévinas's terminology it is a movement that refuses to reduce to the same the alterity of the Jew. Boyer puts it thus: "this Other is inalienable in his alterity and can be approached only through the interdiction of all residence. This trait of the Other can be taken as indicative of Jewishness to the extent that it is indissociable from active deresidence."63 It is an active "deresidence," then, which affirms truth as nomadic, restless. This is the nomadic truth Blanchot indicates in his essay "Etre juif," the truth we shall also find valorized in Lévinas. For Jabès, however, nomadic truth is not just the truth of nomadism the foundation of justice for Lévinas, the very movement of writing for Blanchot, and for both the very meaning of Judaism but the freedom to question: "How free is the nomad! The desert asks nothing of him" (J-P, 93). The mythical wandering Jew wanders into the pages of Jabès's book metaphorically expressed as the desert, "the privileged place of depersonalization" (J-DL, 32), a desert in which alterity itself is produced: "in the desert one becomes other" (J-DL, 36). Etranger both to himself and to others, Jabès's Jew gains access to the freedom to discover his own Judaism: "It is indeed my impossibility of being an 'untroubled Jew', assuaged and anchored in his certainties, that has made me the Jew I think I am. This may seem paradoxical, but it is precisely in this break in that non-belonging in search of its belonging that I am no doubt most Jewish" (J-DL, 9596). Jabès's "certain Judaism" (J-P, "prière d'insérer") would thus emphasize that the Jew's condition as he defines it of victim, martyr, étranger is reflected in and

< previous page

page_58

next page >

< previous page

page_59

next page > Page 59

simultaneously imposed by the book. The Jew, in Jabès, is a metaphorical figure, ''the Jew, as the figure of exile." For Susan Handelman, this identification of Jew and writer is not merely "a convenient analogy or apt metaphor," but is "the essence of his vision," 64 while Rosmarie Waldrop identifies the Judaism in Le Livre des questions as metaphorical "when Serge Segal tells a group of prisoners that they are all Jews, even the anti-Semites, because they are all martyrs (J-LQ, 180)."65 Despite his problematical metaphor, however, Jabès would consider himself first and foremost a writer: "I was born to writing between 1912 and 1984, more at the beginning. I was born to Judaism between 1912 and 1984, more at the end" (J-P, 52). And yet he is a writer with the irrepressible desire to express the Jew within him: "How can I explain then the desire and the ambition to be simultaneously recognized as Jewish? . . . What is a writer? What is a Jew? Jew and writer have no image of themselves to brandish. 'They are the book'" (J-P, 54). Through the book, then, Jabès expresses a movement that, as Lucette Finas has called it, is "Jewish otherwise," where the Jew is "other than Jewish."66 Through the Jew as a metaphor for the writer, and the writer as a metaphor for the Jew, Jabès voices a profound and radical alterity that places both Jew and writer beyond classification: "To be Jewish and a writer would hence be to assume simultaneously, in their unconquered plenitude, a beyond-the-Jew and the beyond-a-book" (J-DDD, 85). Trials and Tribulations It will have become evident by now that there is much in Jabès's Jew and writer that resembles the figure of the étranger as we saw him in Blanchot's L'Idylle, while Jabès's use of such a concept as the beyond in the preceding quotation looks forward to aspects of Lévinas's work to be examined in subsequent chapters, both the "beyond essence" that defines Lévinas's mature philosophy of alterity and the "beyond the verse" that defines Lévinas's approach to the talmudic text. Whether their respective uses of the term are identical, however, is debatable. Lévinas in his philosophy is not speaking primarily of Jewish essence, nor do his talmudic readings reflect Jabès's poetic investment in the book. Hence, it becomes increasingly clear in Lévinas's work that he rejects the figure of the Jew as a metaphor, allegory, or trope. The Jew in Lévinas is not metaphorical but a "category of being" who possesses a sacred history and cannot be reduced to a figure of speech. Conversely, Jabès refuses or modifies a number of correlative notions to the beyond as Lévinas defines them, such as the face and the nature of responsibility, as we shall see in later chapters. Nor indeed is the mythical dimen-

< previous page

page_59

next page >

< previous page

page_60

next page > Page 60

sion of exile that we have located in Blanchot and Jabès of exactly the same nature or born of the same thought. The étranger as a questioner of certainties, a provoker of unrest and disquiet, subverting collective sedentary values and establishing a precarious nomadic truth all of this is operative in Blanchot's thought and retrospectively illuminates the récit L'Idylle, but Blanchot's narrative, as I have shown, registers an ambiguity absent from Jabès's work. On the other hand, it is the very notion of writing in Blanchot and Jabès and language (communication) in Lévinas that leads all three to formulate in their respective manners a state of estrangement or strangeness for being. Moreover, the impossibility of escape we have located in Lévinas's De l'évasion in relation to being and in Blanchot's L'Idylle in relation to the étranger is operative in Jabès in relation to the Jew: ''To be Jewish is to have often unsuccessfully attempted to abolish separation" (J-A, 126). Just as Lévinas's being remains riveted to being, and Blanchot's étranger inseparable from his estrangement, so too Jabès's Jew remains irremediably rooted to his Jewishness. It may therefore seem that Lévinas's "ex-cendance," Blanchot's outside, and Jabès's desert function in accord as the break in ontology that will turn the impossibility of escape into possibility. Hence, Blanchot's étranger and Jabès's étranger-writer-Jew are both dispossessed of identity as self-coincidence, what Lévinas calls the dethronement of sovereignty. Whether immanence within transcendence (Blanchot's move into an outside) or transcendence within immanence (Lévinas's invasion of being and Jabès's infinite interiority: "Exterior is the limit. Interior the unlimited" [J-P, 54]), subjectivity is deposed, and irrecuperable alterity is revealed. Such alterity in Blanchot's L'Idylle leads to the trial and execution of the étranger. Similarly, in a startling series of trials that close the three volumes of Le Livre des ressemblances, Jabès's Jew, metaphorical and unorthodox, is accused and sentenced to death by what Edward Kaplan claims are "the voices of a real Jewish community" who "uphold religious orthodoxy and defend the autonomy of God and the Law." 67 But Jabès also extends the indictment to the sphere of writing. Hence, the first accusation comes from the soul of a writer: "You wanted to write the book. You made us believe you would succeed. You have written nothing. You have done no book" (J-LR, 137). Jabès's accused, however, does not so much deny the accusations as highlight their very inadequacy, for if he has not written a book, it is because there is no book to write: "One writes nothing. There is no book" (J-LR, 137). This is more belief than sophistry, but the provocation merely aggravates the case against him, and the second witness for the prosecution, the soul of

< previous page

page_60

next page >

< previous page

page_61

next page > Page 61

a Jew, is decidedly and not unexpectedly vitriolic. Accused, essentially, of nihilism, of denying God's unity and existence, and of parodying the rabbinical tradition, Jabès's Jew and writer replies with an unequivocal commitment to writing as a challenge to the silence of God: ''And I say that writing is a revolutionary and scrupulously Jewish act, for it involves taking up the pen where God withdrew from His words, to pursue indefinitely a utopian work, following the example of God who was the Totality of the Text of which nothing subsists. / All writing embraces, in its end, the unpronounceability of the name of Yahweh; this is the lesson of Judaism. / To make of his name an unpronounceable name, to be the étranger of the étranger, the exile among exiles" (J-LR, 140). If, as Kaplan suggests, this is "a confession of faith that echoes the prophets' commitment to a 'utopian work' of transforming the world," 68 it is a transformation that works by subversion. The third of the accusers, the soul "renowned for its great wisdom" (J-LR, 140), notes this in his attack: "The soul of a writer, it incurs the censure of writers. / The soul of a Jew, it incurs the censure of Jews. / The soul of an atheist, it incurs the censure of the agnostics, for it uses a language which is the negation of all languages' raison d'être, in the sense that it makes use of the writer's discourse to direct it against the writer; of the Jew's discourse to direct it against the Jew; of the atheist's discourse to direct it against the atheist, hitting at their deep convictions, as if speaking were an act of self-destruction. Diabolical undermining" (J-LR, 14041). With complacent, unquestioning certainty, this wise soul points out the comfortable vision of an unchanging world: "The book remains book, man remains man, God remains God, the universe remains the universe, where Thought shines in the glory of the Verb" (JLR, 141). For the soul of the accused, however, such order and certainty are subverted by "the opaque, translucid, and accursed unthought" (J-LR, 141), and such "unthinkable" questioning seals his fate: "Decapitated, I will soon no longer have thought, I will lose sight and smell. I will become one with Nothingness. I shall be the errancy in the infinite persistence of the nothing which merges with the immobility of death. . . . An étranger like Yahweh among the gods, I too shall be without resemblance" (J-LR, 141). This absolute estrangement, the rejection of resemblance, the assertion of difference, forms an integral element in Jabès's subversive tactics. The power of Jabès's contradictions and paradoxes to shake assurances and certainties is witnessed in the second trial, which closes Le Soupçon le désert. Here, as Kaplan puts it, "the trial ends by dissolving itself as trial."69 The judges, wandering in the desert, have lost their faith in their sentence of the ac-

< previous page

page_61

next page >

< previous page

page_62

next page > Page 62

cused, and their former convictions concerning the book, religion, identity, history have been undermined. But they cannot reverse their decision, and the decapitation of the soul of the accused becomes the definitive movement into anonymity. This theme is made more explicit in the third and final trial, which closes L'Ineffaçable l'inaperçu. A brief summary of the two previous trials opens onto an ''impossible trial" at which both the judges and the guilty party are absent, thus consisting only of the souls of the jury. Questioning whether or not to suppress the judgment, these souls wonder whether the accused has not in fact shown them a means of salvation: "the rejection of resemblance, the coming of a different era where truth would no longer be envisaged as such, but as the virile effacement of all truth, through its own vulnerable words" (J-II, 106). These vulnerable words announce not only a different era, but an era of difference, in which the books left behind by the étranger serve as "the anonymous guarantors of the trace" (J-II, 108), a trace that Jabès, commenting on the final lines of the trial, characterizes as "something truly other." 70 This trace of the other is precisely the title of Lévinas's seminal essay "La Trace de l'autre" (1963), in which he sketches the movement from ipseity self-identification to illeity the third person, the irreducible Other, beyond the play of transcendence and immanence. By setting up an opposition between the Greek Ulysses and the Hebrew Abraham, Lévinas claims that the God of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Leibniz and through to the God of the scholastics, "is a god who is adequate to reason, a god who is understood, incapable of troubling the autonomy of conscience, finding itself again through all its adventures, returning home like Ulysses who, through all his peregrinations, merely heads toward his native island" (L-EDEHH, 188). Abraham, on the other hand, obeys the divine command to set out in search of heteronomy: "To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we would like to oppose the story of Abraham leaving his country forever for a yet unknown land and forbidding his servant to bring even his son back to this point of departure" (L-EDEHH, 191). What Abraham discovers alterity is revealed for Lévinas through the face of the other, a face that puts me into question, worries me, denudes me, opens me up to it and introduces its trace. This trace, Lévinas states, "does not belong to phenomenology" (L-EDEHH, 199); that is, it does not participate in the alternation of appearance and concealment, in the sphere of observable phenomena that vision and knowledge can acquire. To be, in these terms, is to leave a trace, and this is "to pass by, to leave, to absolve oneself" (L-EDEHH, 200). Referring to Exod.

< previous page

page_62

next page >

< previous page

page_63

next page > Page 63

33:1923, in which Moses asks to see God's glory but is allowed to see only the passing of God's back, Lévinas concludes: ''The God who has passed by is not the model whose face would be the image. To be in the image of God does not signify being the icon of God, but finding oneself in his trace. The revealed God of our Judeo-Christian spirituality keeps the whole infinite of his absence which is in the personal order itself. He shows himself only through his trace, as in Exodus 33. To go toward Him is not to follow this trace, which is not a sign, but to go toward Others who are held in the trace" (L-EDEHH, 202). Lévinas's God of revelation, then, in contradistinction to the God of the philosophers, is the means by which ethics is introduced into the human. This brief detour into Lévinas's essay, raising issues that I shall be taking up in later chapters, throws light on the irreducible alterity that we have uncovered in Jabès's Jew. Just as the trace of the face in Lévinas breaks the selfsufficiency of the ego, so Jabès's Jew breaks the system of totalization (and totalitarianism), his questions opening onto an infinite deferral of closure. Hence, through the Jew Jabès subverts totality, order, and stability, and it is because of his difference, his strangeness, that the Jew is constantly under the shadow of persecution: "The victim of injustice, the Jew is the enemy of those who base their justice on injustice. Annoying for absolute powers, he is the target of those who hold absolute power; annoying because refractory" (J-LQ, 73). The Jew is refracting rather than reflecting because his alterity refuses recuperation within the sphere of the same. He is refractory and self-refractory because identity is shattered through the maintenance of the question that shatters. Jabès's Jew is embarked on a passage, a journey, during which he is a writer and an étranger, and yet, like Blanchot's étranger, he escapes the confines of nomination. He is always "étranger" to the designation of Jew, "other than Jewish," a crucial paradox that the soul of the accused points out as part of his defense in the first trial: "I have said that the Jew, at the most novel, audacious, and dangerous point of his quest, is no longer Jewish for Jews and that this paradox was one of the keys of Judaism" (J-LR, 139). The fact that both the accused here and Blanchot's étranger are nevertheless sentenced to death is an indication of the intimate relation for Jabès and Blanchot between death and the étranger: "To die is finally to embrace one's condition as an étranger. Who is more étranger than a dead man? / Ah, all the dead are Jews; étrangers for others and for themselves. / At the moment of dying, one can but feel Jewish" (J-LY, 33, my emphasis). Again, Jabès's universalizing ambitions are evident here in the "one." If this means "everyone," one might quite legitimately wonder along with the "brothers" in Le Livre des questions who pose the question

< previous page

page_63

next page >

< previous page

page_64

next page > Page 64

''To make no difference between a Jew and someone who is not, is this not already no longer being Jewish?" (J-LQ, 64) what sense there is any more in the word "Jew." Questioning Jewish Reflections Jabès's articulation of his "Judaism after God" (J-E, 39), unorthodox to be sure, atheistic maybe, nevertheless permits him the freedom to interrogate Judaism without ceasing to be Jewish. That the criticism of Jewish orthodoxy, however, is not merely a figment of Jabès's imagination is amply demonstrated in the attacks on Jabès by Shmuel Trigano. In his book La Nouvelle Question juive (The new Jewish question, 1979), Trigano takes umbrage at the "school in the Western avant-garde" that makes of the Jew a myth of writing by simply dissolving (Christian) meaning and reducing Judaism to a cult of the letter. 71 Although Jabès is not referred to directly here, in an article published in L'Esprit in the same year, Trigano is less reserved: "Much more recent is the attempt to make of the Jew a myth of Writing, such as Jabès and the whole of his avant-garde school presents it. The themes of the Book, of the Written, of Writing, of Letters . . . testify that the West has exhausted the world of materialism, has reached its limit: the letter, the letter as object, writing as act, placed in reference to itself and no longer to meaning. . . . Jewishness becomes no more than a wholly Parisian aesthetic embellishment where rabbis go round in circles in a bourgeois sitting room."72 For Trigano, then, Jabès is merely a sower of despair, a nihilist, a bourgeois Parisian, a betrayer of Jewish values who has the audacity to use Judaism as an aesthetic backdrop in order to give voice to despair rooted in the failure of Western values. Jabès, it is true, does make of the Jew a myth of writing (Scripture), but in his insistence on the interdependence of Jew and writer on the book, Jabès would bring about a metamorphosis in which the Jew's nonidentity escapes negativity. Trigano argues in La Nouvelle Question juive for a rejection of Jewish negative alterity, in favor of a positive alterity in which the Jew is totally outside the Western discourse that has led the Jew to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. This notion of negative identity recalls the position occupied by the Jew in Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive (Reflections on the Jewish question, 1946). In its attempt to liberate the Jew from such negativity by raising him to the level of the universal, Sartre's discourse unintentionally denies the Jew his difference and maintains him paradoxically in the negative position. Inevitably, Sartre's text is more illuminating about the antiSemite than it is about the Jew. While Jabès also raises the Jew to the level of the universal, he does so through a discourse that refuses to sacrifice Jewish difference as a positive

< previous page

page_64

next page >

< previous page

page_65

next page > Page 65

attribute. Hence, Trigano's attack on Jabès for perpetuating what he sees as a decadent Western discourse is misplaced. For the radical alterity of Jabès's Jew is produced through the word, whether specifically Jewish or not: ''There is no Jewish word. There is a questioning word, held in reserve, waiting for questions. . . . [A] single word that I call Jewish because it issues from our fundamental questioning and in its plurality attests to our freedom and rebellion" (J-LR, 116). From apparently opposite spectrums of an ethical and aesthetic discourse, Trigano's positive alterity and Jabès's nonidentity would reevaluate "the Jewish question" and assert Jewish difference. Despite Jabès's insistence, however, that his is not an orthodox Judaism, Henri Meschonnic, like Trigano, rejects Jabès's work on the grounds that Jabès merely reduces Judaism to a figure of speech. With a certain unintended sense of humor, Meschonnic relates Jabès to one of Blanchot's "disseminated faces" "the characteristics of Maurice Blanchot have been impressed on so many faces that these faces are no longer anyone. The owner has multiplied himself. . . . His effacement is but apparent" 73 claiming that Jabès's subscription to Blanchot's myth of writing is sterile, pretentious, and absolutely lacking any grounding in Judaism. For Meschonnic, both Jabès and Derrida in his reading of Jabès are "taken in by an analogy that is not carried by any historical element but by a purely literary element, reducing Judaism to a figure in which all elements of meaning are those of Blanchot's model of language and myth of writing."74 By "applying the myth to a cultural support with only the name of this cultural support,"75 Jabès's book would have more in common with Mallarmé than with Jewish writings. Yet, as we have seen, Jabès constantly admits the metaphorical status of his Jew, and Meschonnic's criticism, as Joseph G. Kronick puts it, is "remarkable for its utter disregard of Jabès's own insistence on his distance from normative Judaism."76 This distance, finally, allows Max Bilen to state quite categorically the difference between solitude and separation for the writer (often self-imposed) and solitude and separation for the Jew (often inflicted, arbitrarily and unjustly) and to situate Jabès in "an interiorization of the beyond" in which he can assume "his Jewishness through and thanks to his experience of writing, as it is experienced today, and without therefore having to commit himself to sharing the religious faith."77 What we have seen, then, throughout this chapter from Lévinas's inescapability from the presence of being and the "ex-cendance" that promises a way out, to the crushing weight of estrangement from which Blanchot's étranger is unable to escape, to the nonidentity of Jabès's tripartite configuration of étranger-writer-Jew is an attempt to restructure being (Lévinas) and refigure the Jew (Blanchot and Jabès) as signs of challenge to rational

< previous page

page_65

next page >

< previous page

page_66

next page > Page 66

order, to Western philosophy, to autonomy, to the self-constituted self. The desire that we find in Blanchot and Jabès one might call it a fetish to Judaize the state of the other is emblematic of the postmodern discourse of alterity that would also include such theorists as Derrida, Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. But figuring the Jew as other in this way indeed, figuring the Jew as other than other does leave us with a number of questions: (1) if the Jew is meant to figure that which escapes the categories of rationalization, including the dialectical play of opposition, does not the opposition of Jew and other paradoxically reenact the binary terms it would attack?; (2) does not the Jew as ''otherness," even as "absolutely other" or "Other" set up a concept, reify the other, and thus reduce the very open-endedness it would figure?; and (3) does not the allegorical use of the Jew as a metaphor for exile and exclusion tend to suggest that the real Jew is a mere construction of a Christian West? These are questions to which, I should stress, this book does not provide direct answers, but they are worth posing now that we have reached the point at which the otherness established by the étranger can be said to formulate a law of separation. It is, then, to the notions of law and revelation in Lévinas, and to the function of the law in certain texts of Blanchot and Jabès, that the next chapter turns.

< previous page

page_66

next page >

< previous page

page_67

next page > Page 67

2 Versions and Subversions of the Law The aim of this chapter is firstly to consider the relation between the law and Judaism in Lévinas's explicitly Jewish writings where the call to exegesis is linked to the problematics of revelation and obedience to the Most-High, including the role of Moses within this economy. Secondly, I shall examine a series of working definitions of the law in Jabès's Aely, in order to circumnavigate Jabès's claim that the law is Jewish, and also examine his respective deployment of the figure of Moses. And thirdly, I shall explore the way in which the invisible yet all too oppressive law circulates in Blanchot's Aminadab, including the relation of the law to the epidemic and the insurrection in Le Très-Haut, in order to see how an infinite hermeneutics is put into operation, creating parallels with corresponding aspects of Lévinas and Jabès, even though in Blanchot the ''Jewish question" is still far from explicit. What the chapter proposes in general is that in all three writers the law forms part of a rhetoric of subversion 1 capable both of cracking open identity and of preventing the law itself from becoming fixed and immutable, precisely from setting itself up as Law. Lévinas and the Revelation of the Law Reading the Talmud In the previous chapter we saw how Lévinas in his early philosophy attempts to find an exit from self-enclosed being that will permit him to move toward a being-opened-to-the-other, an ethics of alterity developed extensively in his later philosophical work. We saw too that Lévinas in the 1930s was also involved in Jewish issues arising both from his membership in the Alliance Israélite Universelle2 and from his concern at the rise of fascism in Germany. His essays for Paix et Droit betray a Lévinas already anxious to circumscribe the specificity of Judaism, and he set out to do this more co-

< previous page

page_67

next page >

< previous page

page_68

next page > Page 68

herently in his talmudic readings after the war. But as Annette Aronowicz suggests, Lévinas's talmudic commentaries are also ''an attempt at translating Jewish thought into the language of modern times"; 3 in other words, his lectures constitute a fundamental part of his philosophical project as a whole, while still maintaining their specificity as Jewish readings: "the Jewish subjects were fed by the philosophical work, and the philosophical work was fed by the contact with Jewish sources. The Jew and the Greek were in constant relation."4 Susan Handelman also explores these issues, taking her cue from Derrida's remarks in his seminal essay on Lévinas concerning the relationship between "Jew" and "Greek" that "recapitulates the rabbi/poet conflict Derrida had written of that same year (1964) in his essay on Jabès."5 What Aronowicz and Handelman are anxious to point out is that the supposed distinction between styles in Lévinas's talmudic readings and his philosophical works is not at all neatly defined and that, despite the differences in exposition, there remain considerable interferences between them. Both Totalité et infini and Autrement qu'être, for instance, have biblical references scattered throughout and employ specifically Jewish formulations such as "Here I am" and "Thou shalt not murder." Admittedly, the biblical verses cited or alluded to are not employed as "proof" of the argument Lévinas is putting forward, but they nonetheless furnish a source of a particular point at hand. Beyond such literal references, such concepts as infinity, the face-to-face, responsibility, and justice are inherently Jewish ethical concerns, as his talmudic readings make clear. While Lévinas, then, extracts an ethics from philosophical discourse, he simultaneously extracts the philosophical options from the biblical or talmudic passages upon which he comments. We have already seen that Lévinas characterizes Western philosophy as an ontology, as a discourse of reason and comprehension, a totalizing system in which all other is reduced to the same. Lévinas presents this as philosophy's Greek inheritance where "to speak Greek," as he comes to characterize it, is to speak a universal language, a language of modernity shared by Jews (secular and religious) and non-Jews alike. To use such a language as regards the Talmud is to render accessible and comprehensible for modernity its apparently elliptical and incoherent style. In A l'heure des nations, for example, Lévinas, commenting on a passage from the talmudic tractate Baba Qamma 82b, makes a distinction between Greek language and Greek wisdom and concludes that Greek language is praiseworthy insofar as it embodies the clarity and the intelligibility of demystification (L-AHN, 65). According to Aronowicz, this is what Lévinas means by "translating into Greek" the Talmud. It is the "mark of the secularization of the Jewish

< previous page

page_68

next page >

< previous page

page_69

next page > Page 69

tradition'' where "the texts always need to be translated into secular language, into the language of contemporary issues, into the language that strives to be understood by all, into the language of prose and demystification." 6 Beyond the surface level of the apparent disorganization of the talmudic text, then, Lévinas sets out to show that there is an inner order and coherence calling for exegesis. Lévinas views this particular feature of the Talmud as the very life of Judaism, and it is one that he attempts to reproduce in his own readings. As Handelman puts it, "Lévinas's 'translating' is not just a question of style but itself a hermeneutic which embodies and enacts the content of what is being translated. The content unalterably affects the expression; language is not an empty container but already a relation to another, a hermeneutic."7 Lévinas's talmudic readings, then, were delivered almost annually from 1960 onwards at the conferences of Jewish Intellectuals of France, organized by the French section of the World Jewish Congress.8 The subsequent published versions in the proceedings or in Lévinas's own collections retain the mark of their original oral delivery. Hence, avowals of modesty for his undertaking, ironic and humorous asides, and at times his departure from the original Hebrew or Aramaic in his own translations of the talmudic text bear witness to the fact that Lévinas deliberately refuses to dissimulate his subjectivity behind the possible impersonality of an academic discourse. By thus highlighting the specific uniqueness of the interpreter "here I am" in my text Lévinas echoes the apparently obsessive concern he locates in the Talmud to cite the name of the person speaking and the name of the person from whom a particular lesson was received. During his own unique exposition, then, the "translation into Greek" brings to the fore contemporary history World War II, Nazism, Auschwitz thus placing Lévinas's readings firmly in the shadow of the Shoah and emphasizing too that the apparent anachronism of the talmudic text is exactly that, apparent. The Talmud, of course, has no need of Lévinas to assert its ability to cut through the ages and apply itself to modern problems; precisely that adherence to the oral law that is the Talmud has kept Judaism alive throughout its history of dispersion and persecution. Lévinas nevertheless focuses on this ability and makes it the kernel of his notion of the "beyond" of the verse. This beyond the call to interpret beyond the plain, obvious, and literal meaning is not indicative of a mystical sphere or a realm of otherworldliness, but the very opening of the text to the other person, the hermeneutic par excellence. Contrary, then, to hermeneutic theory in general, from Schleiermacher to E. D. Hirsch (where the reconstruction of the original text alone permits

< previous page

page_69

next page >

< previous page

page_70

next page > Page 70

proper comprehension), to the relativism of Heidegger and Gadamer (the fusion of the horizons of the text as the embodiment of past experiences and the historical and temporal situation of the interpreter), Lévinas returns hermeneutics to the biblical tradition in order to privilege an ethics of responsibility overflowing the text. By thus organizing his readings around the very question of interpretation as the spirit of Judaism, Lévinas allows the issue of form to open the horizon to the saying that says more than it can say, an overflowing or excessiveness in meaning that Lévinas associates with the Revelation itself. God and Philosophy Although not a talmudic reading, ''Dieu et la philosophie" (1975) raises issues that can be traced throughout Lévinas's lectures and demonstrates in particular, and particularly eloquently, the interference in his work between philosophy and Judaism. The essay is primarily a negative response to the remark (attributed to a Greek) with which Derrida closes his 1964 essay on Lévinas: "if one has to philosophize one has to philosophize; if one does not have to philosophize, one still has to philosophize." 9 Lévinas begins with his familiar comment on the priority of philosophical discourse in the Western tradition, which he here identifies with the very notions of thought, knowledge, intelligibility, and thematization. Since philosophical discourse, Lévinas suggests, deals with meaningful thought, it should be able to think the (possible) meaning of the biblical God. This, however, is precisely where such discourse comes unstuck, because in thinking God, it thematizes him and brings him into what Lévinas calls "being's move," whereas the God of the Bible (the Jewish Bible, despite the ecumenical character of the essay) "signifies the beyond being, transcendence" (L-DDQVI, 95); in other words, God is beyond thematization. Lévinas concludes, "It is not by chance that the history of Western philosophy has been a destruction of transcendence" (L-DDQVI, 95). The rest of the essay is an attempt to circumscribe the meaning of such transcendence and the limitations of philosophy's fundamental structure of ontology and immanence. Lévinas points out that he is not simply opposing reason and faith. Rather, he posits the category of insomnia as a form of vigilance, a wakefulness without intentionality and hence unable to contain a theme (in phenomenological terms, it is a noesis without noema) (L-DDQVI, 98). Insomnia is thus a "dis-interestedness," a disinvestment of being, being breaking out of its rootedness to "esse." In De l'existence à l'existant, insomnia appears as the category in which being (neither awake nor asleep) is confronted with the horror of the "there is," the anonymous and impersonal being that marks

< previous page

page_70

next page >

< previous page

page_71

next page > Page 71

the end of objectivizing consciousness. In ''Dieu et la philosophie," however, it is insomnia itself that signals the uncontainable, the opening onto infinity. A similar idea arises from insomnia in a talmudic reading bearing witness to the interference between the philosophical and the religious where Lévinas refers to the Midrash (a rabbinical term concerning biblical exegesis in which meanings other than the literal one are discovered) in the tractate Megillah that compares the insomnia of Ahasuerus (in the Book of Esther) to the very insomnia of God. "As if, in the impossibility of sleeping, the ontological rest of being were to be torn and entirely sobered up" (L-ADV, 139; LBTV, 112). In connection with this notion of being "sobered up," Lévinas again uses the category of insomnia in Autrement qu'être, when he explores the obligation incumbent upon me by the proximity of the other, 10 an awakening of an extreme consciousness in which the wakefulness without intentionality breaks with normal consciousness understood, as Lévinas puts it in "Dieu et la philosophie," as "the identity of the Same, the presence of being, the presence of presence" (L-DDQVI, 99). By thus establishing consciousness as presence, the present unfolding through consciousness, Lévinas can approach the question of the idea of the infinite that transcends the immanent and breaks up thematizing consciousness, the cogito itself. "The idea of God," he suggests, "is God in me, but God already breaking up the consciousness that aims at ideas, differing from all content" (L-DDQVI, 105). In other words, God, the Infinite, both includes and negates the finite, the in of the Infinite signifying both the non-finite and the in-finite. For Lévinas, the uncontainability of the idea of the Infinite interrupts the presentness of the cogito to become what he calls a passivity of consciousness, which is perhaps no longer a consciousness and in which passivity is more passive than passivity. What Lévinas is attempting to circumscribe is a state of being interrupted by the transcendent and opened up to an idea that signifies prior to presence, prior to all origin in consciousness, and is thus an-archical. Passivity, then, is not to be understood here with its usual negative connotations, but as a positivity, an awakening of consciousness in which the idea of the Infinite deposited within me (and deposing my subjectivity as a self-enclosed consciousness) is a demand, ordering and coordinating me toward the other. The idea of the Infinite, then, which cannot be comprehended by thought, opens the way to an endless desire for what is beyond being, disinter-es[se]-tedness, transcendence, what Lévinas calls a desire for the Good, a nonerotic relation that does not seek to absorb into immanence, presence, being, and interestedness that which is different or other to it. The word "Good," then,

< previous page

page_71

next page >

< previous page

page_72

next page > Page 72

can have a meaning in this context only ''if the Desirable orders me to what is the nondesirable, the undesirable par excellence the other. The reference to the other is an awakening, an awakening to proximity, and this is responsibility for the neighbor, to the point of substituting for him" (L-DDQVI, 113). This notion of substitution lies at the heart of responsibility for Lévinas; 11 it is "a denucleation of the transcendental subject, the transcendence of goodness, the nobility of a pure supporting, an ipseity of pure election" (L-DDQVI, 113). Hence, Lévinas can define transcendence as ethics itself and subjectivity as subjection to the other. The I of subjectivity, therefore, is not in the nominative for Lévinas, but the accusative, where I am under the accusation of the other even though I have committed no fault as such. The Good is what is expressed by this orientation toward the other, which Lévinas designates as transcendence or ethics, and in which "God is not simply the 'first other', or the 'other par excellence', or the 'absolutely other', but other than the other, other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethical bond with the neighbor and different from every neighbor, transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the there is" (L-DDQVI, 115). My responsibility for the other thus effects a dia-chronic break in time, resisting the synthesis of simultaneity, and turns me not into my brother's keeper but into my brother's hostage. Fraternal responsibility, Lévinas suggests and Cain demonstrates that biological human brotherhood does not preclude fratricide is a responsibility antecedent to my freedom. Its antecedence to my freedom effectively puts the seal on any remnant of subjectivity choosing to do good or evil, a choice that would leave subjectivity intact and fail to take us beyond the violence of one subject against another. The subjectivity Lévinas is proposing, on the other hand, is one that says "Here I am!" where I am ready to obey before hearing the terms of the obedience. Responsibility, in other words, means "I am never finished with emptying myself of myself" (L-DDQVI, 120) because the Infinite poses a hyperbolic demand that exceeds any response I can give. Lévinas calls it the "glory of a long desire" (L-DDQVI, 120), through which the subject as a hostage to the other is neither the experience nor the proof of the Infinite, but a witness born of the Infinite. In other words, there is a certain excess in my responsibility for the other, like a debt that can never be settled, a giving of myself without reserve and without expecting anything in return. "This excessiveness," comments Lévinas, "is saying. . . . Saying opens me to the other before saying what is said, before the said of this sincerity forms a screen between me and the other" (L-DDQVI, 121). Lévinas would understand language here not simply as said, as utterance,

< previous page

page_72

next page >

< previous page

page_73

next page > Page 73

a means of communication that thematizes its content, but as this ''Saying" that precedes all said and is already the testimony of responsibility (L-DDQVI, 122). The saying represents for Lévinas the beyond of transcendence, the beyond of the Infinite, the very source and possibility of ethics in which signification is not the signifyingness of something, a content, a theme, a said, but the signification of the one-for-the-other. Lévinas can thus conclude his essay by suggesting that the cry of ethical revolt, bearing witness to responsibility and beginning in prophecy, is a move beyond philosophy. And, in his rejection of Derrida's remark with which the essay began, he suggests, "Not to philosophize would not be 'to philosophize still'" (L-DDQVI, 126). "Dieu et la philosophie," then, summarizes many of the ideas with which Lévinas's philosophy is concerned: Infinity, dia-chrony, language as signifier where the saying exceeds the said, desire as different from need, love without eros, proximity, and responsibility. But it also contains elements that can be discerned in his talmudic readings in particular, the nature and meaning of the divine revelation in which the Infinite is revealed in such a way that its transcendence interrupts its own demonstration and monstration, its phenomenality. In the Jewish tradition divine revelation is inseparable from the Law, and Jewish hermeneutics is coextensive with it. It is to some of the specifics of revelation, law, interpretation, and Moses' role in Lévinas's thought which are also prominent figures in the wholly secular work of Blanchot and Jabès that I want now to turn. Revelation, Transcendence, and Obedience to the Most-High In "La Révélation dans la tradition juive" Lévinas continues to explore the notions of transcendence and the Infinite, but in explicit terms of the Revelation in traditional Jewish thought and the nature of the Law. Lévinas identifies "the four cardinal points of the Jewish Revelation" (L-ADV, 169; L-BTV, 139): the written law (the Torah, or the five books of Moses), the oral law (Mishnah and Gemara, constituting the Talmud), 12 Halakhah (texts and teachings relating to conduct and the formulation of practical and judicial laws), and Aggadah (texts and teachings of homiletic origin, consisting of parables, apologues, and the development of biblical narratives and representing what Lévinas terms the theologico-philosophical part of tradition it is these texts he chooses to comment upon in his talmudic readings). The Halakhah, for Lévinas, is what gives the Jewish Revelation, in both the written and oral law, its own physiognomy and is what "has maintained as an orthopraxis the unity of the very body of the Jewish people throughout dispersion and History" (L-ADV, 169; L-BTV, 139). The essential fea-

< previous page

page_73

next page >

< previous page

page_74

next page > Page 74

ture of the law in Judaism is that it is fixed yet dynamic, written yet constantly reassessed in open-ended discussion for its application in changing circumstances. Submission to the law by the practising Jew, Lévinas points out, is not at all a ''yoke" or a burden, as so often interpreted by Christian theologians in the light of the Paulinian distinction between the letter and the spirit. Indeed, the dynamism of the law, the particular feature of the Jewish Revelation itself, is its call to exegesis, a freedom engraved in the very letters of the tablets as interpreted by the Jewish fathers: "'And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven [haruth] upon the tables' (Exod. 32:16). Read not haruth [graven], but heruth [freedom], for thou findest no freeman excepting him that occupies himself in the study of the Law" (Pirqe Aboth VI: 2). 13 The law calls to each reader in his historical uniqueness, but such exegesis is protected from the risk of arbitrary subjective interpretation by the fact that any new reading has to pass through the tradition of commentaries and cannot claim to be simply "inspired" by the text. In other words, the text is not deconstructed in a manner which would suggest it can mean anything the interpreter wishes it to mean, or, put another way, the individual interpreter is in a relation to the text and its history that prevents the text from being treated in isolation. The unique and personal self, however, that responds to the call of the text is not, as Handelman puts it, "the self of substantial identity but the very rupture of that identity, and that very rupture makes possible a message coming from without."14 This, of course, is the status of subjectivity we have already encountered in "Dieu et la philosophie"; indeed, it is the crucial redefinition of subjectivity that Lévinas's whole philosophy proposes. The Infinite that breaks up the immanent, the present, and totality; the cracking open of the shell of imperturbable being; the freedom encountered in exegesis all this is specifically linked in "La Révélation dans la tradition juive" to the revelation as law: "But the most characteristic aspect of Jewish difficult freedom lies perhaps in the ritual that governs all the acts of daily life. . . . In ritual a distance is taken up within nature in respect of nature, and perhaps therefore it is precisely the waiting for the Most-High which is a relation to Him or, if one prefers, a deference, a deference to the beyond which creates here the very concept of a beyond or a towards-God" (L-ADV, 173; L-BTV, 143). Obedience to the Most-High thus passes through the Torah, itself filtered and interpreted by the Talmud, and determines ethics, a movement outwards, an exteriority where stress is already laid on the voice of the listener, on the listener's own capacities for understanding: reading, decoding, deciphering. Lévinas in this context cites the famous apologue from the tractate

< previous page

page_74

next page >

< previous page

page_75

next page > Page 75

Baba Mezia 59b in which Rabbi Eliezer, in order to prove his opinion on the Halakhah to his colleagues, appeals for celestial support, which is accorded him. His colleagues, however, remain implacable and Rabbi Eliezer's ruling is not accepted. The lesson is irrefutable: the Torah given to man is henceforth with man and no longer in heaven; it is among men and appeals to their exegesis and all the celestial voices cannot overrule this. Lévinas concludes: ''Man is not, therefore, a 'being' among 'beings', a simple receiver of sublime information. He is simultaneously him to whom the word is said, but also him through whom there is Revelation. Man is the place through which transcendence passes" (L-ADV, 175; L-BTV, 145). What Lévinas is posing here is the "possibility of a rupture or a breach in the closed order of totality, of the world, or of the self-sufficiency of its correlative, reason" (L-ADV, 176; L-BTV, 145). Seeking a model of intelligibility different from rationality and intelligence, Lévinas indicates a rationality in line with the talmudic scholars defined as "the irreducible 'intrigue' of obedience" (L-ADV, 176; L-BTV, 146); that is, an obedience that "can be traced back to the love of one's neighbour: a love without eros, without self-complacency and, in this sense, a love that is obeyed, the responsibility for one's neighbour, the taking upon oneself of the other's destiny, or fraternity. . . . It is precisely within this relation that man becomes his 'self': designated without any possibility of escape, chosen, unique, noninterchangeable, and, in this sense, free" (L-ADV, 177, 178; L-BTV, 146, 148). In conclusion, Lévinas can thus claim that "ethics is the model worthy of transcendence, and it is as an ethical kerygma that the Bible is Revelation" (L-ADV, 178; L-BTV, 148). The formal structure of the Revelation that Lévinas explores in his essay is extended in a talmudic reading proper (dealing with the tractate Sotah 37a37b), where he examines the way in which the covenants concluded with the people of Israel are handed down in the Bible. In "Le Pacte," however, Lévinas broadens the issue of responsibility by posing the very possibility and future of a real sociality. Taking his cue from the difference of opinions between the rabbis identified by R. Mesharsheya as "that of personal responsibility and responsibility of responsibility" (LADV, 87; L-BTV, 69), Lévinas goes on to deduce an excessive, extravagant amount of responsibility from the ineluctable mathematical calculations of the talmudic text. He concludes about such excessive responsibility:


[It] must also signify that my responsibility stretches to the responsibility that the other man can assume. I always have, myself, one responsibility more than the other, for I am still responsible for his responsibility. And, if he is responsible for my responsibility, I am still responsible

< previous page

page_75

7d5aff9

next page >

< previous page

page_76

next page > Page 76


for the responsibility that he has for my responsibility: en ladavar soph, 'it is never-ending'. Behind the responsibility attributed to everyone for everyone, there arises, ad infinitum, the fact that in the society of the Torah I am still responsible for this responsibility! It is an ideal, but an ideal that implies the humanity of mankind. In the Covenant, when it is fully understood, in a society that deploys all the dimensions of the Law, society is also community. (L-ADV, 106; L-BTV, 85).

7d5aff9

The humanity of mankind to which Lévinas refers here is, as he himself admits, an ideal, a utopia, but this is precisely the meaning for him of adherence to the divine law. Ethics social and communal is again defined as having its source in the transcendent, the Infinite. Excessive responsibility, then, flows from the excessiveness of transcendence; it cannot be limited to my face-to-face with the other who simply happens to be present. It has to be the basis of a social ethic that would include responsibility for others absent and responsibility for their responsibility, beyond any notion of decision or choice. This is not to negate free will, but to assert the difficult freedom of obedience. The true face-to-face for Lévinas may be with that which is not present, which cannot enter into the present, but which nevertheless leaves a trace: the Infinite. Moses, Slow of Speech and Slow of Tongue, Face-to-Face with the Most-High This last point brings me finally to a brief consideration of the figure of Moses in the economy of Lévinas's thought. Of the multiple aspects of the figure of Judaism's greatest prophet, Lévinas privileges essentially three. 15 The first scene concerns Moses' remonstrations to God when called upon to return to Egypt to set the Israelites free. Despite his immediate response of ''Here I am" (Exod. 2:4) to the voice calling him from the burning bush, Moses goes on to show considerable doubt regarding his worthiness and aptitude for the task God is setting him. His main reservation is that he lacks the eloquence necessary both to persuade Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go and to convince the Israelites themselves that God has sent him: "O my Lord, I am not an eloquent man, neither yesterday nor the day before, nor since thou hast spoken to thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue" (Exod. 4:10). For Lévinas, as indeed for the talmudic scholars, what is important here is that Israel's greatest prophet lacks the verbal sophistication and rhetorical powers necessary for persuasion. Placing this in the context of the Bible as a whole, Lévinas comments: "The language of the Old Testament is so suspi-

< previous page

page_76

next page >

< previous page

page_77

next page > Page 77

cious of the rhetoric which does not stutter that its chief prophet was 'slow of speech and of tongue''' (L-ADV, 166; LBTV, 136). Rhetoric and grandiloquence are precisely those aspects of language that contaminate Hellenic wisdom and open it to philosophical sophistry or political ruse, domination, violence and injustice. Hebraic ethics, conversely, is to be revealed to Moses through the Torah, which is to establish justice on earth, precisely because Moses lacks the power of such rhetoric. Moreover, it is as a result of Moses' hesitations concerning what he considers to be his deficiencies that God authorizes him to speak through his brother Aaron: "And thou shalt speak to him, and put the words in his mouth: and I will be with thy mouth, and with his mouth, and will teach you what you shall do. And he shall be thy spokesman to the people: and he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God" (Exod. 4:1516). There is a shift here in the definition of fraternity not lost on Lévinas's work, a shift away from the model of Cain-Abel to the model of Moses-Aaron. It is a fraternity that is "instead of God": transcendence, inspiration, speech, responsibility, justice to be close to God is to be close to my neighbor, to be his brother. The second incident involving Moses that Lévinas privileges (L-ADV, 174; L-BTV, 144) is that of Exod. 33:11, the verse, indeed, that makes Moses the privileged prophet of Judaism in that not only is the law revealed to him, but it is revealed to him in what the Hebrew text refers to as a face-to-face with God: "And the Lord spoke to Moshe face to face, as a man speaks to his friend." I shall return in more detail in the next chapter to this notion of the face-to-face, to the face itself in Lévinas's thought. The third passage about Moses, finally, to which Lévinas turns his attention in relation to the philosophical ideas he wishes to raise, is Exod. 33:1923. Moses asks to see the glory of God and is refused. He is allowed to see only the divine back: "And [the Lord] said, Thou canst not see my face; for no man shall see me, and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: and it shall come to pass, while my glory passes by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: and I will take away my hand and thou shalt see my back: but my face shall not be seen." 16 Lévinas cites the way the rabbinical scholars interpret the Epiphany here and goes on to extrapolate his own teaching, which once more revolves around the faceto-face and responsibility: "the 'back' that Moses saw from the cleft of the rock from which he followed the passing of divine Glory was nothing other than the knot formed by the straps of the phylacteries on the back of God's neck! A prescriptive teaching even here! Which demonstrates how thoroughly the

< previous page

page_77

next page >

< previous page

page_78

next page > Page 78

entire Revelation is bound up around daily ritual conduct. This ritualism suspends the immediacy of the relations with Nature's given and determines, against the blinding spontaneity of Desires, the ethical relation with the other man. To the extent that this ritualism does this, it confirms the conception of God in which He is welcomed in the face-to-face with the other and in the obligation towards the other'' (L-ADV, 174; L-BTV, 144). The trace of God, as we saw in chapter 1 in "La Trace de l'autre," is the trace that leads to the other, the opening of the ethical horizon in which all of Lévinas's work is inscribed. Moses is a biblical figure in whom Lévinas is interested as a philosopher and not just as a reader of Jewish texts. Lévinas pries open the philosophical options of Moses' lack of eloquence and of his face-to-face with a God who refuses to reveal his face. It is here too that Lévinas is furnished with a biblical reference par excellence of the way in which he conceives of the revelation that simultaneously reveals and dissimulates what it reveals, delivering a law that is fixed for all time and yet calls for infinite exegesis. Revelation, law, interpretation, Moses these Jewish figures circulate in Lévinas's thought, holding our attention in an extreme attentiveness to the other person. By turning now to works by Jabès and Blanchot, I shall implicitly and at times explicitly open a dialogue with Lévinas by tracing some of the circuitous paths taken by these figures in the realms of the poetic and the novelistic. Jabès and the Eye of the Law The Vision of Aely Aely (1972) is Jabès's sixth book in the septology Le Livre des questions and the third with an anagrammatic title comprising the letters Y A E L. Detour is the book's essential movement, the two sections of the "before the forebook" giving on to the three sections of the "fore-book," which themselves move through to the seven approaches of the central section, "errancy," before arriving at the "book" as such, with its four approaches to Aely. Aely's formal composition is thus like a succession of thresholds being crossed, folds being unfolded, commentaries gradually opening doors that lead into a book that works toward its own destruction. Hence, a phrase near the beginning, "The book is not constructed but deconstructed" (J-A, 26), finds its distant echo in the closing lines: "The book is destroyed by the book. We will never have possessed anything" (J-A, 176). Like each successive book in Jabès's cycles, the book simultaneously effaces and prolongs the questionings of its predecessor: "Henceforth, the book occupies the place

< previous page

page_78

next page >

< previous page

page_79

next page > Page 79

vacated by the previous book'' (J-A, 41), while the writer, as we saw in chapter 1, destroys the book (his "dwelling") in progress: "the writer builds his dwelling in the invisible and immediately destroys it so it can be everyone's dwelling, an eternal dwelling" (J-A, 26). Aely is thus both a continuation of its predecessors "I wrote to Yaël. My correspondence with my dead love had never been interrupted" and a rupture: "Large blank sheets brought her replies" (J-A, 86). Continuity is established precisely through rupture, a discontinuity engaged in a continuous mulling over of its own movement. The articulation of this movement in Aely passes through one particular key sentence: "In the word eye [oeil] there is the word law [loi]. Every look contains the law" (J-A, 22). The fact that the word loi is contained in the word oeil carries significance for Jabès beyond the seemingly arbitrary and coincidental level. Indeed, the reader is invited to "decode the book under the look of Aely who is the eye of All and Nothing, and also the inextinguishable look of the law to which life and death are subject" (J-A, "prière d'insérer"). To enter Jabès's text is thus to encounter a law intimately related to a visual economy that watches over the book. It is a vigilance that is never assuaged, conferring new verbal energy on the metaphor "in the eyes of the law." Helena Shillony points out this rhetorical revitalization and suggests that "in Jabès we find the characteristic attempt of all poetry to give life back to fossilized metaphor that has become cliché." 17 Although this is not necessarily unique to Jabès, Shillony continues, "Jabès's metaphor has cut its links with the world of the senses. Similarity, if there is any similarity, is always abolished in a movement of rupture, obliteration, and negation."18 Hence, although "Every look contains the law," Jabès can equally assert that "there would be a detached look from every eye" (J-A, 31). The law, then, is both connected and disconnected, visible and invisible. The infinite reading that Jabès would establish through this law places the law under a watchful eye while simultaneously removing it from the visual field (we cannot see the infinite). Jabès sets up this field of vision in the opening lines of Aely: "Do you know . . . that the final dot of the book is an eye and that it has no lids?" (J-A, 7). Without eyelids the eye cannot close, like the book that cannot end. By placing this question at the beginning of his book, Jabès disrupts teleology so that the end of the book always falls short of its ending, which always precedes its beginning. The law of Jabès's book is intimately related not only to the eye, but to a problematic of finitude. Hence, to question the book is to bring to bear upon it the watchful eye "All questioning is linked to the look" (J-A, 34) and linked, therefore, to the law.

< previous page

page_79

next page >

< previous page

page_80

next page > Page 80

The law in Jabès is interrogation, a ceaseless questioning of its own commentary: '''The commentary', he said, 'is the underlying universe of the question'./'We will question the commentary'./One tear, and the eye becomes a question mark" (J-A, 71). Crossing the threshold of the book is to engage in this vertiginous questioning, to skirt the chasm at the heart of the law "The o in the word Loi is the chasm, the center" (J-A, 10) to lose oneself in a labyrinthine world where all ingress is in fact marginal, the center decentered, deserted, situated, precisely, in the desert "between All and Nothing" (J-A, 119). The law of Jabès's book, "law of the infinite, law of what has always been blank, law of hospitality and silence" (J-A, 26), occupies this deserted landscape, like the word: "The word will start from Nothing and dissolve in the All./Likewise all law" (J-A, 33). And like Jabès's errant words, moving across the white of blank pages, hesitantly, tentatively, Jabès's law moves across the sand of the desert, ever shifting with the wind, no sooner effaced than retraced. Hence, in Jabès, as in Lévinas, it is not a law of perfection, but one of perfectibility, not a law of the finite, but of the infinite, of constant potential. But whereas Lévinas employs these notions to extricate an explicit ethical relation between human subjects, Jabès centers the relation wholly on the capacity of the text to give rise to infinite interpretation. The ethical in Jabès, thus far at least, is subordinate to the aesthetic. This essential difference between Lévinas and Jabès in their approaches to the notion of the infinite can also be traced in their respective uses of the name of God. Lévinas meditates at length on the various names of God in talmudic texts in order to engage with a thought intimately related to responsibility and justice. Jabès, on the other hand, employs the name of God solely as a generator of void and absence. Hence, we understand the significance of Jabès's comment that "God resembles his Name to the letter, and his Name is the Law" (J-A, 7), for the law in Jabès is God only insofar as it resembles God by passing through his Name, of which there are many, but of which the most important is the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton (written with the letters yod, he, vav, he). The law thus remains law for Jabès, indeed finds its condition, because of the inability to articulate it: "Because the divine Name wanted its surface legibility to be unpronounceable, every word was fatally destined to the anonymity of his absence" (J-A, 171). Inasmuch as the law is one of these words, for all its obsessive presence in Jabès's book, like God, it remains conspicuously absent. Thus, in Jabès the law is proscriptive rather than prescriptive. All who come to seek protection under the law are banished by law to its confines. The law of the book of the law is one of exile; the book is beyond the law,

< previous page

page_80

next page >

< previous page

page_81

next page > Page 81

an ''out-law," an étranger, like the Jew: "I repeat: the sign is Jewish./The word is Jewish./The book is Jewish./The book is made of Jews;/for the Jew has for centuries wanted to be a sign, a word, a book. His writing is errancy, mistrust, waiting, confluence, wound, exodus,/exile, exile, exile" (J-A, 114). When Jabès therefore affirms that "the law is objective" (J-A, 31), he is simultaneously asserting that the law is not subjective. That is, the law cannot be the object of an individual subjective consciousness. He who desires most to approach it subjectively, to see it through his own eyes, is he who can never gain access to it. The law thus invites individual interpretation and simultaneously eschews reduction to one exclusive exegesis. It is hospitable only to whoever assumes the law's objectivity, that is, to whoever becomes the object of the law's scrutiny rather than attempting to scrutinize the law itself. And as an object of the law, subjectivity must be surrendered. To approach the law, therefore, is like writing the book: both demand impersonality. In Jabès, then, the law/eye is inextricably linked to the written word, where, "unawares, the writer has been chosen to formulate the law" (J-A, 12). To write is an "act of submission to the law" (J-A, 19), but it is only in submitting to it that the writer formulates the law. Yet, as Warren F. Motte, Jr., suggests, "instability and vanity are the laws of the word, laws imposed upon the poet, which he in turn, through writing, formalizes in the text: 'The law is in the word./I write. I apply the law' (J-LY, 58)." 19 The law needs the writer, but it dismisses him when he comes. The writer's effacement from the book is the price paid for writing the law, like the lawgiver effaced by the law he has given, as if a further commandment should run thus: "Thou shalt not exist before the Law." Such a commandment would effectively formulate a law of death. Hence, the expulsion, reduction, and death of God that Jabès's book effects are mirrored in the metaphorical death of the writer, which abolishes the presence of the book: "There is a law which governs the absence of the book, one which the book announces and to which it refers in order to be book" (J-A, 115). And in the absence of the book, the law is null and void. Caught up in the constant to and fro of these internal contradictions, Jabès's fragmentary law sees the transgression of itself as legally sanctioned in order to prevent the law from becoming rigid and fixed. This law, Jabès insists, is Jewish: "I say that this law of the book is Jewish./I say that this law of God, in the book, is Jewish./I say that this law of man, in the book, is Jewish, for every letter of the book is the skeleton of a Jew" (J-A, 23). This insistence on the Jewish nature of the law may seem as problematic as Jabès's identification of the writer and Jew. Yet by pursuing an "absolute

< previous page

page_81

next page >

< previous page

page_82

next page > Page 82

deconstruction,'' 20 which prevents the law from becoming dogmatic, Jabès is not in fact completely at odds with the place of the Law in Judaism, as our previous section on Lévinas demonstrated. The Law, or the Torah, is something divinely ordained and absolutely authoritative; at the same time, not even the wisest of commentators can exhaust it. The Law, both written and oral, needs constantly to be interpreted, explained, and applied. The Torah, given for all time, permits exegesis to be legally binding only in the light of inexhaustive interpretation. The Law, then, is an authoritative book that nevertheless never discloses a full and final meaning. Of course, Jewish law regulates a community as well as the individual Jew's existence, while Jabès's law regulates nothing outside its own internal use as a generator of texts. Nevertheless, Jabès's articulation in Aely of a law revolving around a problematic of the visual, of finitude, and of the written word finds common ground with Judaism in the revelation of the Law to Moses. Moses the Lawgiver In the previous section on Lévinas, we concluded by briefly sketching how the figure of Moses is brought into the economy of Lévinas's thought concerning the Revelation, law, and the face-to-face. Jabès, for his part, provides his reader with a Moses replete with Jewish significance and simultaneoulsy divested of any sacrosanct meaning. That the Bible (and hence its protagonists) for Jabès is a collection of profane texts made sacred by man a bone of contention subtending the relation between Jabès and Lévinas is made quite clear in an interview published in 1989: "what is a sacred text? When we say: it is the word of God, we are indicating the word of a man who declared: God said that. For centuries all we have done is to regard profane texts as sacred."21 Yet as his books progress, Jabès replaces the earlier named characters such as Sarah and Yukel, and the host of imaginary rabbis who comment on the book in (de)composition, not only with anonymous masters and disciples, but also with the biblical figures of Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and, in particular, Abraham and Moses. By performing his own Midrash on the relationship of these figures to God, the word, the book, and silence, Jabès's texts paradoxically retain a problematical sense of the religious. Hence, Susan Handelman can see Jabès as "precariously balanced between faith and heresy, probing the heresy within faith, and the faith within heresy,"22 while Edward Kaplan talks in terms of Jabès's "atheistic theology."23 Certainly, it would seem far too unequivocal to dismiss the problem of Jabès's position by describing him as "radically atheist,"24 as does Adolfo Fernandez-Zoïla, or as a "convinced atheist,"25 as does Joseph Guglielmi. It would perhaps be more appropriate to see Jabès as ar-

< previous page

page_82

next page >

< previous page

page_83

next page > Page 83

ticulating an atheology in which the only proper response to the vacancy of God is the vacancy of the self. One is left, in Jabès, with the obsession: of God, of the loss of identity, of the book-always-yet-to-be-written, like the obsession of the other in Lévinas, which persecutes my subjectivity and cracks it open, the same obsession located in the textual call to exegesis. In Jabès, then, the allusions to biblical figures indicate on the one hand a point of convergence between his own themes and those native to the sacred text, while suggesting on the other that Jabès will move beyond the constraints of biblical referents. As far as Moses is concerned, Jabès returns over and over to certain constant points of reference within which he elaborates his books. That direct references to Moses do not begin until immediately after Aely, that is, with the final volume of the first cycle, El, ou le dernier livre, is not without significance. Moses the Lawgiver comes to incarnate many aspects of the law as we have hitherto seen them expressed. Jabès's first exploration of Moses, then, concerns the name of God as mentioned in Exod. 3:14. Moses, anxious to know God's name, receives the following reply: ''EHEYE ASHER EHEYE (I will ever be what I now am). . . . Thus shalt thou say to the children of Yisra'el, EHEYE (I am) has sent me to you." For Jabès, one of the standard French translations of God's words opting for the verb "to be" in the present tense is not tautological or ambiguous, but lends itself to a phonetic pun: "God repeats: I am He who is. I hear: I am [follow] I have followed, against wind and sea, I shall follow he who is. Now, is not he who is created being, all-powerful master of the world?/God repeats: I am He who I am. And again I hear: I am [follow] He who follows. I am [follow] the Follower of the Follower./Man traces the divine path, as the words trace the path of man" (J-EDL, 93). Jabès's pun on the first-person present of the verbs être (to be) and suivre (to follow) both conjugate as je suis permits him to inscribe God's response to Moses within the thematic concern of the inversion of creator and creature. God follows man who follows God. God thus remains an unknown quantity in a circular relationship: "What does God's I am He who I am signify if not: I am Light for some, Obscurity for others, and the unknown for everyone?" (J-LD, 91). Consequently, God's revelation of His name carries with it the very absence of that name: "'What is Your name?' Moses might have asked God in despair. What is Your name, in other words, what is Your glory? Whereas where man awaited to be named, divine truth could only assert itself in the absence of name" (J-EDL, 11819). It is this glory indeed that Moses desires to see in Exod. 33:18: "I pray thee, show me thy glory." Jabès focuses on the same biblical verse as Lévinas, but with a different lens. In Lévinas, we saw that God's refusal to reveal

< previous page

page_83

next page >

< previous page

page_84

next page > Page 84

himself completely to man (''Thou cannot see my face; for no man shall see me, and live" [Exod. 33:20]) nevertheless reveals the trace of the infinite. In other words, the infinite reveals its glory without ever appearing, and its trace is the election of the subject opened up to the other. Hence, Lévinas is not designating a religious experience, but disturbing the hierarchy of Being and being, breaking God and man from the ontological in order to unveil the ethical horizon of infinite responsibility, where the appearance of God's trace is what summons man to appear before his neighbor (in the sense of appearing before justice). In Jabès, on the other hand, the absence of God's face reinforces the absence of his name so that the law of God's revelation is distance rather than proximity, withdrawal rather than approach (J-SD, 8889). This distance does not open to any realm of the Good, as in Lévinas, but to falsification. Jabès's intent, that is, is not just to cut the roots of the ontological, but to explore the absence unveiled by the word or law, and in this he is more akin to Blanchot than to Lévinas. Hence, for Jabès, Moses, whose wholly human dimension is fundamental in Judaism, is condemned, as it were, to falsifying God's truth by writing the law revealed to him by God: "'And you shall write My Book by falsifying it, and this falsification will be the torment that will give you no rest./My falsified book will inspire another and so on till the end of time; for your line of descendants will be long. / O sons and grandsons of the sin of writing, the lie will be your breath, and truth your silence'. / Thus God might have spoken to Moses. / And Moses might have replied: 'Why, Lord, why condemn Your creatures to lying?' / And God might have added: / 'So that each of your books should be your truth and that, faced with Mine, this unworthy truth should crumble and fall into dust. / There is My glory'" (J-LP, 33). Jabès's imagined dialogue here between God and Moses the explicit formulation of the sin of writing as the glory of the Infinite finds an echo in Blanchot's Le Très-Haut, where the eponymous protagonist confides to Bouxx: "I beg you to understand that everything that comes to you from me can be for you only a lie, because I am the truth" (B-TH, 171). For Jabès, the torment that arises from this situation places the writer in the position of someone who can understand truth only as a lie, someone for whom, in fact, the door to the law will always be closed. By positing God's glory as the condemnation of man to the realm of the lie, Jabès shifts the significance of the encounter between Moses and God from the face-to-face (Lévinas's perspective) to the book (the law) through which it passes: "Did Moses suspect that by handing down the decalogue to the Hebrew people, they would apply themselves in their conscious fervor to discovering the words that might have still to be written by the hand of

< previous page

page_84

next page >

< previous page

page_85

next page > Page 85

Yahweh? As if the will of God's silence were but the invitation addressed to this people to make up for the divine absence of word through a human word of resemblance'' (J-LR, 115). God's silence, in other words, serves as a challenge to the Hebrew people to compensate for His absence by substituting their own words inevitably absent by their resemblance with those of God. Hence the silence of God, as Jabès points out, is followed by the silence of Moses: "The Hebrew people read the book of Moses as we would read a work of which we are given only extracts. / Once the book was entirely transmitted, Moses fell silent. / In this silence, the Jew recognized his God" (J-LP, 31). For Jabès, what is at stake in the encounter between Moses and God is the book itself: "Dazzled by God's Book, had Moses forgotten that he was its author? / By punishing in God's name those men found guilty of idolatry, was it not in his own name that Moses struck them? And was it not less for offending God than for the offence they caused him that he took vengeance? / Thus the book remains the true stakes. / Book of God and of man" (J-II, 83). Yet if Moses is the author of God's book, he nevertheless produces a book to which he, as well as God, is subordinate. Hence the Jewish normative role of Moses as the intermediary between the Hebrew people and God is marginalized: "The Hebrew learned to read in the Book bequeathed by the most illustrious of his prophets. / The Jew henceforth demanded for himself the face-to-face Moses had with God. / No intermediary between letter and creature. God, having become Text, can have only one reader at a time" (J-II, 7879). In demanding the privilege of their own encounter with God through the sacred text, the Jewish people effectively reduce God and Moses to the level of a book from which both are paradoxically effaced: "The absence of Moses is the truth of the Law. / God writes Himself on this absence" (J-LD, 93). Thus the relation between the Jew and God, for Jabès, is regulated solely through the word, as if this double absence of God and Moses is the necessary effacement to bring the white page to the fore on which the Jew's freedom to write can be exercised. Jabès's insistence on the position of Moses as (abolished) intermediary between God and the Jew clearly extends the tripartite relation of étranger-writer-Jew that we saw in chapter 1. By being expulsed from a book that is constantly writing and unwriting itself, Moses figures as a surrogate writer, and, as such, an étranger: "[The étranger] sometimes liked to rank himself behind the revered figure of Moses, the étranger par excellence, whose five books had become the permanent place of assembly for a new people who had issued from the reading of them and who continued to read them. / 'Doubly étranger', he said, 'as the author of a book he did not write and the reader of a book that writes him. Etranger to the book, and to himself'" (J-

< previous page

page_85

next page >

< previous page

page_86

next page > Page 86

UE, 111). As an étranger, Moses becomes impossible to locate in the book, and this inability is reflected in the Jewish tradition in the unknown location of his final resting place: ''And [the Lord] buried him in the valley in the land of Mo'av, over against Bet-pe'or; but no man knows his grave to this day" (Deut. 34:6). This, for Jabès, inevitably has consequences for the book: "If no one has ever known where Moses was buried, is it not because there cannot be one unique place for the Book?" (J-LP, 27). This question posed by Jabès is glossed by Lévinas in a brief 1989 talmudic reading in which he evokes Heideggerian terminology in order to make a distinction between, on the one hand, the book's "being-there" and the writer's "being-in-the-world" and, on the other, the "beyond" and the "over-there" of the biblical verse and word. The former would root meaning in time and place; the latter would call for incessant exegesis and exegesis of exegesis. There is no fixed resting place for the servant of God; the life of the letter can know no death; the book is always "outside-of-itself." 26 Jabès, extending his own meditations and as if picking up on Lévinas's gloss, develops the following exchange between Moses and God: "And Moses . . . might inevitably have said:/'Lord, do You lack generosity to such a degree as to have me die separated from my people and from myself? With no burial place?' . . . /And, once more addressing Moses, God might have said: / 'I have made you intimate with the Book, for in this intimacy, I am'" (J-LH, 66, 67). This intimacy, it goes without saying, is founded on absence: "People of the Book / of which Moses, after God, / was the letter / through which God was, / having ceased to be. / Holy intermediaries. / Ratify the divine / absence. Write the text / of this absence we read" (J-LP, 34). Both Lévinas and Jabès, then, converge on the same point absence but draw different conclusions. For Lévinas, the absence is the access to the beyond, the trace of the Infinite, while for Jabès, it is what makes writing possible. Lévinas might call this the glory of the Saying; Jabès would perhaps term it the freedom of the said to be unsaid and said again. Moses, then, figures in Jabès's texts as both receiver and giver of the Law; but he is also the breaker of the tablets he brings down from Mount Sinai, and in this act "Moses suddenly scared God. / He incarnated subversion" (J-P, 63). By conceiving of the breaking of the tablets, however, in terms of the dialectic of creation (the book) and destruction (silence), where the destruction of the book (the law) is initiated by the chosen people, Jabès would also suggest that Moses himself is subverted by the Jewish people, taught a lesson that nothing can precede writing. Hence the Jewish people have the freedom to read the book that dictates laws that are undermined by interpretation: "By turning away from the Tablets, the chosen people gave Moses a magisterial lesson in reading. . . . The destroyed book gives the book to be

< previous page

page_86

next page >

< previous page

page_87

next page > Page 87

read'' (J-EDL, 4748). This destroyed book has important implications for the very concept of Jabès's book: "Did God know that in inciting Moses to break the Tablets of the Law, He would see Himself constrained to picking up the pieces, every fragment, every shard, responding to a wound of His people? To unite, at the heart of His Word, creature to creature, and to consign this Word to the Book. Man helped God in his divine task." 27 For Jabès the breaking of the tablets into an infinite number of fragments initiates fragmentary writing itself, a form of nonformal writing that escapes generic classification by undermining the very notions of genre. God's attempt to unify the fragmentary, Jabès would argue, is the significance of the renewal of the tablets in Exodus 34, which Jabès interprets in terms of resemblance: "The second Tablets could not be the same as the first, for they were born from the breaking of the latter. Between them bleeds the abyss of the wound. / The first Tablets emerged from the divine abyss; the second, from the red abyss of man. Shall we have the impudence to assert that the second resemble the first, knowing that all resemblance marks the difference we would have abolished?" (J-LR, 87). The second set of tablets that God is constrained to give to Moses permits the reading of the first set, which only Moses had read, while maintaining the break that is their difference. Jabès's book can be situated in this break, in a sort of nonplace that he characterizes as the desert, the place where God himself chooses to give the Torah to his chosen people. It is a book whose law is the written word, not for its evident material status as book but for its primacy over the spoken word (an important difference from Lévinas, who tends to privilege the spoken). Reflecting on this notion that before the law nothing exists, Blanchot also refers to the two sets of tablets: "It is very striking that in a certain tradition of the book (such as we have it from the formulations of the Kabbalists, even if this means giving credit to the mystical signification of literal presence), what is called the 'written Torah' preceded the 'oral Torah', the latter subsequently giving rise to a version written down, which alone constitutes the Book. There is an enigmatic proposition to thought in this. Nothing precedes writing. Yet the writing of the first tablets becomes legible only after and through their having been broken after and through the resumption of oral decision, which refers back to the second writing, the one we know, rich in meaning, capable of commandments, and always equal to the law it transmits" (B-EI, 63031). If Blanchot finds in the kabbalistic tradition of the book a resemblance with his own concepts of writing, Jabès also draws upon the same tradition but permits the tradition to inscribe itself in his book rather than vice versa. Through his questioning, then, of the law of the book, of the book as law,

< previous page

page_87

next page >

< previous page

page_88

next page > Page 88

and of the position of Moses within such a questioning, Jabès centers his interpretations around the notion that nothing precedes writing, neither God nor man nor the writer. This notion of antecedence, of a disoriginated origin for the word, also lies behind Lévinas's formulations of a beyond in which responsibility is inscribed (and not chosen) as the break with being-as-presence and the reconstitution of subjectivity-for-the-other. In Blanchot, however, although the law is word and the word is law, nothing preceding it and nothing escaping it, we will find it circulating neither as freedom nor as responsibility, but as suffocation and epidemic. Blanchot and the ''I" of the Law Aminadab and Le Très-Haut If Lévinas poses the question of transcendence in relation to the law, and Jabès the question of the law itself: "What is the law?" (J-LD, 98), Blanchot shifts the emphasis of the questioning. Rather than seeking to prove how the law and hermeneutics are intractably intertwined in the Jewish tradition, or how the law of the book constitutes a perpetual abyss of negation and absence, Blanchot circumscribes it by questioning the law's location and function: "Where is the law? What does the law do?" (B-TH, 218). And if the law in Lévinas is the difficult path to freedom and in Jabès solely a matter of the book, Blanchot's law, as abstract as it may initially appear, nevertheless possesses a social and indeed political order administered by bureaucratic institutions. The two questions he poses thus become the pretexts, the spirit and the letter of his novels Aminadab (1942) and Le Très-Haut (1948). Aminadab is Blanchot's second novel and, like Thomas l'Obscur, has a character named Thomas as the main protagonist. Responding to what he reads as a sign from a woman at an upstairs window, Thomas enters a boarding house and is immediately brought into contact with numerous lodgers and servants engaged in divergent interpretations of the law that governs the house. Thomas is accompanied in his fruitless search to gain access to the upper floors by a mysterious companion who is quite literally chained to him. This companion, Dom, reveals to Thomas at the end of the novel that Thomas has chosen the wrong path. He should have directed all his energies toward the subterranean levels of the house, not the upper floors, which are empty. At this point, Thomas, drained of physical strength, is consumed by the night that invades the house. Le Très-Haut, Blanchot's third and final novel, is a complex interweaving of an absolutist State, an epidemic that threatens its stability, and the revolutionaries who would overthrow the government in power. Against this

< previous page

page_88

next page >

< previous page

page_89

next page > Page 89

background moves Henri Sorge, one of the State's functionaries, ''a man like any other" (B-TH, 9). At the end of the novel Sorge, who has been contaminated by the epidemic, is revealed as the Most-High of the title and is summarily shot by his nurse. This diptych of novels of the law is much more sophisticated than these simple and inadequate scenarios suggest. Indeed, Lévinas quite rightly points out that "to broach the poetry of works as complex as, for example, Aminadab or Le Très-Haut, considerable, perhaps enormous, intellectual resources would be needed" (L-SMB, 5758). My intention in what follows is not to take up the challenge of Lévinas's modest disclaimer, but to suggest that Blanchot's novels, like the State in Le Très-Haut, absorb and internalize all "outside" interpretation while simultaneously maintaining their distance from it. By positing the law as the key to their narrative structure, by responding to the attraction and fascination of Blanchot's law, I shall show briefly that Blanchot's novels in fact resist recuperative procedures (including my own) in a manner very much akin to that of the books of Jabès, and in a way that corresponds to the notion of revealment-concealment in Lévinas. The Thomas who enters the house at the beginning of Aminadab initially shares much in common with the étranger of L'Idylle. Far from developing in any psychological way, Thomas is determined to be recognized as a subject capable of asserting his "I": "I am still an étranger" (B-Amin, 65), as if his status as a new arrival should privilege him in some way. He thus refuses throughout to believe he cannot reach the upper floors of the house and is intent on retaining a certain freedom of action: "He just wanted to recognize the path on his own and not be constrained to following the others blindly" (B-Amin, 5556). The impatience and arrogance that he manifests toward the servants and lodgers are immediately seen in his reaction to the guardian, whose hair, Thomas notices, is unkempt: "What, is this the man I've been sent?" (B-Amin, II). The guardian gets so close to Thomas that "they could have been confused" (B-Amin, II), a confusion subsequently played out on the level of nomination, where the guardian is referred to successively as Thomas's "companion," "tormentor," and "executioner" (B-Amin, 12, 22, 23), thus clearly prefiguring Thomas's own situation. For Thomas soon finds himself handcuffed and then shackled to Dom, and he is consequently drawn into an unstable position as he too becomes both a servant and a lodger, slave and master, victim and executioner. This relation between Thomas and Dom draws the attention of Lévinas in a number of passing but illuminating remarks on Aminadab. Toward the conclusion of De l'existence à l'existant, Lévinas recapitulates his views concerning the asymmetrical space of the intersubjective relation that makes of

< previous page

page_89

next page >

< previous page

page_90

next page > Page 90

the proximity of the other the necessary distance permitting transcendence. Rejecting the reciprocity of relations characteristic of civilization where each individual is both an ends and a means, preventing true fraternity, Lévinas comments in a footnote: ''In Maurice Blanchot's book Aminadab, the description of this situation of reciprocity is pushed to the point of the loss of personal identity" (L-DEE, 164). Since Lévinas claims in his preface to the text to have composed the major part of his work in captivity, his reference to Blanchot's novel was clearly added at a later stage in order to emphasize the criticism he is voicing. The loss of personal identity he identifies would be the very negation of the possibility of asymmetrical intersubjectivity. In the work that closely followed this essay, Le Temps et l'autre, Lévinas similarly interpolates references to Aminadab, but this time in the body of the text. In the context of the material existence where the self is riveted to itself, this crushing weight of the presence of being to itself that we saw in the first chapter, Lévinas states: "The return of the ego to self is precisely not a peaceful reflection, nor the result of a purely philosophical reflection. As in Blanchot's novel Aminadab, the relation with self is the relation with a double chained to me, a viscous, heavy, stupid double, but with which the ego is precisely because it is me" (L-TA, 37). The remainder of Lévinas's text is the attempt to demonstrate that the alterity of the other represents the possibility of escaping this situation. No escape, however, is possible, Lévinas points out toward the end of the essay, if the other is regarded as an other self, an other myself, an alter ego. Here Lévinas once more refers to Blanchot's text: "In Blanchot's novel Aminadab, this situation is pushed to the point of absurdity. Between the characters circulating in the strange house where the action takes place, where there is no work to pursue, where they just live, in other words, exist, this social relation becomes total reciprocity. The beings are not interchangeable but reciprocal, or rather they are interchangeable because they are reciprocal. And from that point on, the relation with the other becomes impossible" (L-TA, 75). In conclusion, Lévinas adds, "The Other as other is not only an alter ego; he is what I am not. . . . The intersubjective space can be said not to be symmetrical" (L-TA, 75). It is clear that Lévinas reads Blanchot's novel as the staging of the predicament from which his whole philosophical undertaking is bent on escaping. Blanchot, for Lévinas, has succeeded in portraying how subjectivity when chained to itself can open only onto the aberrant path of violence. Of course Blanchot has in no way simply transposed Lévinas's ideas into fiction, but Lévinas's insights do indicate some of the complex issues at play within the novel. Thomas does turn to violence toward his companion, treating him with disdain throughout and hitting him "to shut him up" (B-Amin, 33). In the episode in which Thomas has conferred upon him the status of

< previous page

page_90

next page >

< previous page

page_91

next page > Page 91

witness to the two men to be punished, Thomas is addressed as ''the born executioner, who says: 'It's still not too late', while his knife has already cut the guilty party's throat" (B-Amin, 141). Thomas, accordingly, proceeds to beat them. Finally, after his long illness and before the return of Dom, Thomas is reduced to the status of a servant. This evolution, in which Thomas changes functions but not personality (he does not possess one), undermines Sartre's comparison of Blanchot's novel with Kafka: "The same meticulous and courteous style, the same polite nightmare, the same straitlaced and peculiar ceremonial, the same vain quests, since they lead nowhere, the same exhaustive reasonings which get nowhere, the same sterile initiation, since they initiate into nothing." 28 If in Kafka's novels the heroes get nowhere, in Aminadab Thomas does reach the upper floors, since the final scene takes place "in the final room, at the top of the house" (B-Amin, 224). But Lucie claims she is not the woman who signaled to him (B-Amin, 220), and Dom's revelation of the subterranean world in fact reveals nothing. For even if Thomas had made his way underground, he would merely have ended up digging his way back to the surface. The ending proves to be an illusion. Even the guardian Aminadab exists only, as Dom puts it, in the "imagination of the tenants" (B-Amin, 213). Thomas does then fail to achieve communication with those he believes live above. He finds no salvation, and the upper floors might as well have been deserted, as Barbe points out to him: "nothing can be found there except emptiness and desert. . . . there's nothing nor anyone up there" (B-Amin, 170). Thomas is finally stripped of his presence (the loss of personal identity referred to by Lévinas) and granted by the house a "legal absence" to correspond with his now "real absence" (B-Amin, 201). As he grows weaker, Dom grows stronger, speaking in his place. The law in Aminadab triumphs over Thomas by consuming him as darkness descends. The clarity he still seeks in his final question, "Who are you?" (B-Amin, 227), is swallowed by the obscurity of the night. In his reading of Aminadab, Foucault claims that the eponymous guardian means "given by the Lord" and asks whether Dom is not this gift,29 a claim repeated by Ann Smock.30 The name can be translated literally, however, as "my people is willing." Moreover, Aminadab figures both in the last verse of "The Spiritual Canticle" by St. John of the Cross, where in the dialogue between the Bride and Bridegroom he is associated with disruption and conflict,31 and in the Christian Bible as part of the genealogy of Christ (Matt. 1:4), while Marie-Anne Lescourret points out that Aminadab was the name of one of Lévinas's younger brothers who perished in the Shoah.32 It would seem that, like Alexandre Akim, whose nominal significance resonates in Dostoyevsky, not in its etymology, Aminadab's name is

< previous page

page_91

next page >

< previous page

page_92

next page > Page 92

more important for the network of allusions Blanchot wishes to set up. The detour Thomas should have taken toward (the imaginary) Aminadab would merely have constituted a further error (that is, Blanchot's Aminadab fails to function as an origin; he is subverted from his privileged status as part of the lineage of the Savior). Although Thomas's situation in the house as a possibly threatening étranger resembles the relation of Alexandre Akim to the hospice (Thomas is informed by Jérôme that he will be given more information about the house when he is no longer an étranger [B-Amin, 65]), this house, in fact, like the book that subverts Jabès's Moses, neutralizes Thomas by being a much greater element of subversion: ''What is useful to remember from these discussions is that no one can appropriate the house for themselves, nor use it as an argument in a disagreement. Wherever it is introduced, it explodes everything" (B-Amin, 115). Such subversion leads to an interminability of interpretation, which is the essence of the relation between the law and writing in Aminadab. Dossiers pile up but are never consulted; nobody is sure of the significance under the eye of the law of any actions carried out. As Ann Smock suggests: "the law governing the boarding house in Aminadab is tirelessly, indeed tiresomely clarified, as though there were no end to the sentences concerning it, for even the most contradictory do not rule each other out but expand at great length to accommodate each other." 33 Accordingly, Thomas is given divergent accounts of the law by Jérôme, Barbe, Lucie, and Dom. "A lot gets written down here," confesses Jérôme, ". . . the lack of agreement and the diversity of interpretations are another of the house's vices" (B-Amin, 92). Writing propounds interpretation; interpretation propounds writing. Indeed, everything that happens in the house is "a matter for interpretation" (BAmin, 110). By the end of the novel, Thomas can no longer resist the process of effacement operated by the house's law of interpretation, and his ability to affix only the initial letter of his name to the declaration that Lucie drafts for him (B-Amin, 196) is followed by his imminent disappearance into the night. Aminadab, then, clearly bears witness to the triumph of the house over Thomas's subjectivity. In Le Très-Haut, however, the loss of personal identity, the failure of communication, and the nefarious effects of a law commanding submission to its inherent mutability are extended into a more overtly social and political sphere in which society is revealed as too sick to be governed by anything but the Most-High made flesh and thus destined to decomposition. But while an explicitly Jewish perspective remains absent from Blanchot's metaphysical fiction confirmation, one might add, of Lévinas's critique of metaphysics as ontology in the six years that separate the publications of Aminadab and Le Très-Haut, Blanchot reads Kafka, and

< previous page

page_92

next page >

< previous page

page_93

next page > Page 93

this discovery, as we saw in the introduction, helps Blanchot to crystallize his ideas concerning the meaning of Judaism and being Jewish. Two ideas arise from Blanchot's reading of Kafka that may help us in approaching Le Très-Haut: (1) Blanchot's identification of transcendence as affirmation through negation in which a dead God provides an impressive revenge: ''For his death deprives him neither of his power, nor of his infinite authority, nor of his infallibility: now he is dead he is all the more terrible, all the more invulnerable, in a combat with no longer any possibility of defeating him. We are at grips with a dead transcendence" (B-PF, 1415); and (2) Kafka's initiation into literature as the movement from "I" to "He," which Blanchot admits as true but suggests should go further: "the transformation is much more profound. The writer belongs to a language that no one speaks, that is addressed to no one, that has no center, that reveals nothing. He may think that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self" (B-EL, 17). Blanchot's Le Très-Haut, then, as I shall argue, negates negativity itself, and while on the surface its first-person form seems to stand in opposition to Kafka's literary initiation and Blanchot's third-person novel Aminadab, in fact Le Très-Haut dissimulates an impersonality insisted upon throughout. The opening lines of Le Très-Haut "I was not alone, I was a man like any other. How can this expression be forgotten?" (B-TH, 9) present Henri Sorge to us as our representative. He could be everyone and is no one in particular: "I see everybody willingly, I have no preferences. . . . I am not alone, I lead a regular life. . . . My face was a face amongst thousands of others" (B-TH, 15, 61, 77). According to his mother, this faceless face has become "indifferent . . . étranger" (B-TH, 11). Yet Sorge's indifference is to be revealed precisely as his difference, for Sorge is also "the Unique, the Supreme One" (B-TH, 224). Sorge, however, is both "like any other" and "Unique" simultaneously. He is not transformed into the Most-High, but revealed as such by Jeanne Galgat. Although Blanchot holds the revelation of this "supreme truth" (B-TH, 26) in reserve until the end of the novel, Bouxx remarks to Sorge that "there is something in you that is quite distinctive, I mean not at the moment, but perhaps still to be born" (BTH, 20), while Sorge's sister Louise "sees nothing above [him]" (B-TH, 87). Commenting on the name of Henri Sorge itself (it appears only four times in the entire novel), Pierre Klossowski picks up on the Heideggerian terminology and reads the narrator as the metaphysical "care" ("Die Sorge"), turned not toward authenticity as in Heidegger but into nothing: "Hence God would know the condition that Blanchot gives to literature. God would be this abyss (Ungrund) that demands to speak, nothing speaks, nothing (the Ungrund) finds its being in the word and the being of the word is

< previous page

page_93

next page >

< previous page

page_94

next page > Page 94

nothing.'' 34 Jeanne's deicide (or Sorge's suicide) would thus silence Sorge's final words ("Now, it is now that I speak" [B-TH, 243]) as final words, thereby returning us to the beginning of his story and the narration of the events that lead, eternally, to his death. Klossowski, moreover, points out that Jeanne's "face to face" with Sorge as the "Unique" can be read as that of an inverted Mary Magdalene in her encounter with Christ (John 20:17): "Jeanne the nurse behaves like an inverted Magdalene. If Magdalene finds the signification of existence in the emptiness of the tomb, Jeanne needs to see existence descend into the tomb in order to know its signification."35 Blanchot's negative version of the Gospel holds the divine logos (Sorge's last words: "I speak") not as a creative but as a destructive act. Jeanne would return Christ (God incarnate) to the tomb, a putrefying corpse like Lazarus before his resurrection, which elsewhere Blanchot considers the very desire of literature: "the Lazarus of the tomb and not the Lazarus brought back to the day, the one who already smells bad, who is Evil, the Lazarus who is lost and not the Lazarus who is saved and resuscitated" (B-PF, 316). This passage suggests the "ontological decomposition" that Klossowski notes in relation to Sorge. Sorge's revelation, then, is not a moment of transcendence, not a moment of a divine "I." In his 1961 dialogical essay revolving around Lévinas's Totalité et infini, Blanchot suggests, with a conscious selfreference, that the Most-High as the other can be revealed only in a social relation. While he accepts the title of a philosophy of separation for Lévinas, Blanchot demonstrates how this separation, far from moving toward any form of unity, represents metaphysical desire: "Metaphysical desire is the desire for that with which one has never been united, the desire of the ego, not only separated but content in its separation that makes it an ego, and yet having a relation with that from which it remains separate, for which it has no need and which is the unknown, the étranger, the other" (B-EI, 76). In Le Très-Haut such alterity is revealed precisely through Sorge's relations with various other characters, but it takes the form particular to Blanchot, that is, in a number of doubling procedures (in which Lévinas's ethical horizon is absent). Hence, Sorge sees his own words in those of Bouxx: "It is quite clear that all your words are allusions. . . . You teach me nothing, you are just expressing what I think, and when you speak, it is not you but I who speak. . . . You are like me" (B-TH, 47, 49). Even more revealing, however, are Sorge's encounters with the female characters Marie and Jeanne. With Marie, for example, Sorge has an intimation that if he were to touch her he would be in contact with the law itself (that is, himself) (B-TH, 35). When he does eventually seize her, their

< previous page

page_94

next page >

< previous page

page_95

next page > Page 95

sexual contact intimates the revelation of Sorge as the immediate presence of separation, which in fact prevents presence from manifesting itself. The encounter is worth quoting in full:


Her eyes never left me. She got up, and as I got up too I seized her hands. I shook her violently. She was rigid, as rigid as a hammer. Suddenly the material of her dress thickened in my fingers. It was something strange, an irritating, smooth surface, a kind of black flesh that slipped and stuck, and unstuck, as it rose. That is when she was transformed. I swear, she became other. And I too became another. Her breathing swelled up. There was a change in every part of her body. Up till now, a bizarre thing to say, we had had the same body, a truly common body, intangible and clear. With an overwhelming rapidity this body broke in two, disappeared, and in its place a burning thickness took shape, a sweaty, hungry strangeness that saw and recognized nothing. Yes, I swear, I became an étranger, and the more I squeezed her, the more I felt her becoming étrangère, intent on giving me someone and something else. No one will believe me, but at that moment we were separated, we felt and breathed this separation, we gave it a body. It was obvious. We finally stopped touching each other. (B-TH, 44, my emphasis)

7d5aff9

Far from accomplishing a union of their bodies, which Sorge claims they already had, their intimacy becomes a moment of violent alterity, as in the relation between Sorge and Jeanne. Yet in this latter relation, Jeanne's shooting of Sorge produces what Allan Stoekl calls a ''single moment of communication," 36 revealing that "Le Très-Haut all along has been narrated by a language of 'non-sense', and by a 'dead' man. Only a 'dead' narrator respeaking himself as a living narrator could work to a climax in which language itself in its embrace of death defies the State. If he were not dead, not the speaking sacrificial victim, Sorge would only speak the infinite and eventless nonhistory of the State as absolute knowledge."37 Breaking the Law Stoekl raises here the question of the nature of this State that Sorge, as its functionary, represents. In one respect, Blanchot transforms the house of Aminadab into the absolutist State that absorbs all negativity. The State and its law are indissoluble in Le Très-Haut from that which would contest it: the epidemic (hence, the inveterate humanism that surfaces in defeating the plague in Camus' La Peste [The Plague, 1947], to which Le Très-Haut offers itself as a response, is entirely evacuated by Blanchot). The fact that the

< previous page

page_95

next page >

< previous page

page_96

next page > Page 96

epidemic breaks out in the West part of the town suggests that Le Très-Haut is an allegory of the destruction of Western power structures or at least of the desire for that destruction. Clearly, in 1948 Blanchot would have had in mind the totalitarian states of the recently defeated Germany and the recently consolidated Soviet Union (''It was becoming visible to everyone that, as had always been the rule, the epidemic, declining in the West, had made its appearance in the East" [B-TH, 191]). Stoekl, who concentrates on this interpretation, suggests that Blanchot parodies the Hegelian notions of totality, absolute knowledge, and the end of history. Certainly, as Sorge points out to Bouxx, the leader of the insurgents, the law survives as law through the opposition it absorbs: "The truth is that all these criticisms are breathed to you by the law itself: it needs to, it is grateful to you; otherwise everything would come to a halt" (B-TH, 53). Because the law is everywhere and has no preferences, all that contests it can only confirm it. Bouxx himself is subsumed by Sorge, who incarnates the law of the State in which absolute unrecuperable negativity simply cannot exist. Bouxx (whose name, Blanchot admits, is phonetically "Bouks" but is unpronounceable and purely graphic in its double consonant) 38 is reduced to "an out-of-date and dateless book" (B-TH, 47), inexistent (B-TH, 54), effaced before Sorge: "when you speak, it is not you but I who speak" (B-TH, 47). Like the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name Bouxx is thus dissimulated in language, the presence of the "Most-High" revealed in the "like any other," which has nothing of the divine, but is the eternal absence of divinity. Hence, Bouxx's revolution is destined to failure because, although the rebels gain victory over the State, they become merely the new organs of the law, represented by Sorge. Bouxx, in these terms, is not a real revolutionary. Moreover, Bouxx fails to grasp that the law and the epidemic are inseparable and that, as Georges Préli puts it, "the exercise of power, both for the public powers and the revolutionary organization, passes through the use they make of the sickness."39 On the one hand, the State uses the epidemic in order to reinforce its authority by leaving its mark on the citizens. It demands that vaccinations be carried out on the whole town and that everyone carry proof of having been vaccinated. Those who have not are segregated (like Sorge himself, who suffers directly from this "police state" by being beaten up [B-TH, 114]). The law is thus inscribed in the body. Conversely, the rebels use the epidemic in order to overthrow the State. Yet, if the epidemic becomes the privileged instrument of the subversive organization, the rebels (who represent the epidemic) are also locked in a fight against the epidemic. When they finally defeat it, their most effective weapon against

< previous page

page_96

next page >

< previous page

page_97

next page > Page 97

the State is rendered ineffectual. The illness can thus be regarded as subversion itself, preventing both the State (Sorge) and Bouxx from becoming the law's representative. Klossowski refers to the epidemic as ''a perfect image of contemporary thought and its literary expressions," 40 while Préli notes how neither Bouxx, Sorge, nor indeed Sorge's stepfather, can appropriate the epidemic and make it adopt their point of view: "All points of view that appear in the novel, and even those of the central character, which are also those of the reader, are demolished by what is neither a point of view nor an object either seen or to be seen, but which is the outside of all points of view the epidemic."41 Like the house in Aminadab ("it explodes everything"), like the self-destructive book in Jabès's Aely ("the book is destroyed by the book"), the epidemic in Le Très-Haut lies beyond appropriation. Sorge can thus write that the law is infected and that "the spirit of illegality" (B-TH, 192) has become law; that is, the law is exercised as a law subverted by the virus, a contaminated law. Préli calls this "the time of illegality" and suggests that "it is a question of the law prolonging illegality as such. The law must be a practice of insurrection without seeking to signify and trap itself in law. The law must not transform itself into a body of edicts and dogmas. . . . To maintain its high level, the revolution cannot end. It is incomplete-incompleteable. It must be permanent."42 Yet if it is true that Bouxx is not a real revolutionary, Stoekl points out that Sorge is not a real writer either: "Sorge is no more a writer than Bouxx is a revolutionary: to really write or reflect would be somehow to distance oneself from others, or from the State. That distance is impossible; all writing is of the State."43 When, at the end of the novel, that distance is granted Sorge, the transgression of the law becomes a moment of defiance. It is also the sole moment of negation in the novel, when Sorge as the Most-High negates himself, as the jacket insert to the new edition points out: "The Most-High can be only its own negation. In a perfect society, where the plague declares itself, in such a way that the plague-ridden become the only rebels, where AIDS endangers the supreme law, the Most-High, beyond all divinity, is nothing but a sick person who dies without dying" (B-TH, "prière d'insérer"). In this interesting reappraisal of his novel (the jacket insert is not signed, but its style is pure Blanchot), the author would seem to see AIDS as a new possibility of bringing down "the supreme law": the State, God, all that would hold power. If Sorge, moreover, becomes "a sick person who dies without dying," it is because the radical negativity of death is inscribed within the experience of eternal repetition. The possibility of the use of language,

< previous page

page_97

next page >

< previous page

page_98

next page > Page 98

Sorge's ''it is now that I speak" that perpetuates the story/history (the novel before us), becomes the impossibility of an end to literature (the negation of Hegel's end of history). The reader, however, is directly addressed in the jacket insert and told to "forget all that, for it is also Antigone, the pure virgin, coupling with her dead brother so that the taboo of incest, now suspended, ruins both the ideal law and the natural law" (B-TH, "prière d'insérer"). The reference here is clearly to Sorge's sister Louise, with whom Sorge is united through Jeanne: "she resembled my sister" (B-TH, 232). Louise can thus be deciphered as both Antigone and Electra, urging her brother Sorge/Orestes to avenge their father usurped by the chief of State. 44 Yet if the supreme law of incest is violated (by proxy at least), its transgression, the unity found in death, is an absence of unity, incapable of reforming the homogeneity of the law. In Sorge's death, the secret of his identity is guarded by Jeanne, but the law is ruined, broken, its silence implacable. In this, Jeanne's gesture can be compared in Jabès to God's unifying gesture of the fragmented tablets, where the second set maintains the break of the first, or in Aminadab to the unification in which Dom becomes Thomas and Thomas is united with Lucie, who "now resembled the house" (BAmin, 226), but where all are plunged into darkness. Blanchot's rewriting of Greek myths is peripheral to my present argument, as are his negative readings of the Gospels: the doubting Thomas, the imaginary Aminadab, the inverted Mary Magdalene, the putrefying corpses of Christ and Lazarus. For coextensive with these Greek and Christian allusions is a third set of referents identified through the house in Aminadab and the epidemic in Le Très-Haut that places the novels at the crossroads of our concerns with law and exegesis. As elements of subversion, the house and the epidemic function as metaphors, as it were, for ceaseless interpretation, the infinite hermeneutics that Jabès reveals as inherent in the Jewish tradition. "Subversion is the very movement of writing: that of death" (J-PLS, 7), notes Jabès, a movement that translates Blanchot's two novels in which the death or disappearance of the protagonists guarantees the prolongation or repetition of the fictions. Writing, for Blanchot and Jabès, would thus be the revelation of death and its simultaneous concealment in the word, which would be law itself. In this way we return to the perspective sketched out by Lévinas's analysis of the Revelation, but whereas Lévinas was concerned with tracing out the implications of the idea of the Infinite and the creative possibilities opened up for a true sociality, Blanchot and Jabès present us with the destruction at the heart of every act of creation, whether it be the book, law, God, or man.

< previous page

page_98

next page >

< previous page

page_99

next page > Page 99

Nevertheless, it is around the figure of the law that we have been able to see at work a number of common preoccupations: a problematic of (in)finitude; an infinite hermeneutics; and, more particular to Blanchot and Jabès, the dissolution of the subject and the subversion of the very law articulated. We have seen, too, that Lévinas's reading of Blanchot's novel Aminadab figures that novel as the very antithesis of his own philosophical project, and that Blanchot's reading of Lévinas's Totalité et infini throws light on the alterity articulated in his own earlier novel Le Très-Haut, even if that alterity is itself other to the way in which Lévinas thinks it. Moreover, if Blanchot depicts fictional worlds in which power, violence, and totality circulate freely as the law, his novels nevertheless point toward the (potentially political) possibility of a new relation of man to the world/word based on nonpower and impersonality. For Jabès, such a new relation is explored in terms of fragmentation, a continuous and discontinuous movement of creation and destruction. Lévinas, for his part, does not dismiss subjectivity, but redefines it in its relation to infinity. The rhetoric of subversion, finally, operating in Blanchot's and Jabès's incessant reposing of questions concerning the law what is it? where is it? what does it do? despite the radically different forms it takes (Moses/the book, Thomas/the house, Bouxx/the epidemic), conjoins Lévinas's analysis of the fundamental trait of Jewish law: it is not static but mutable, not dogma but constant potential.

< previous page

page_99

next page >

< previous page

page_100

next page > Page 100

3 From Abram to Abraham, from Dialogue to Silence This chapter continues to circumnavigate a problematic of language and silence, but it does so by reversing, so to speak, biblical history and moves back from the first prophet Moses to the great patriarch Abraham. In Lévinas, the Greek-Jew distinction returns, but the Jew is here figured as an Abraham always outward bound. Similarly, in two of the four books that compose Jabès's third cycle, Le Livre des limites, Jabès makes reference to God's command to Abram (as he is then called) to leave his country and venture into distant lands. In Blanchot's work, as we cross into the fruitful period of his major récits of the 1950s, we find in Au moment voulu (1951) a more mature and serene Abraham, called upon to commit the ultimate sacrifice (that of his son Isaac), figuring very briefly as a metaphor for the events related by the récit. With cursory reference to the Abrahams of André Neher, Kierkegaard, and Kafka, the chapter traces the migratory movement of the Abram of Genesis 12 (departure, addressed by Lévinas and Jabès) to the Abraham of Genesis 18 (hospitality, addressed by Lévinas) and finally to the Abraham of Genesis 22 (sacrifice, addressed by Blanchot). As we shall see, what is at stake in figuring Abra(ha)m is the questions of errancy and exile, language and dialogue, silence and solitude. Lévinas, Dialogue, and the Figuring of Abraham Abra(ha)m and Ulysses In his essay ''La Trace de l'autre" we saw Lévinas sketch out a difference between the Greek Ulysses and the Hebrew Abraham, a difference he links to the wider issue of the Western philosophical tradition and his own position of ethics as first philosophy. The God of the philosophers, Lévinas argues, leaves the autonomy of consciousness untroubled; the departure of

< previous page

page_100

next page >

< previous page

page_101


identity from self-identification is revealed as an illusion, and the self reflexively returns to self, like Ulysses returning to his native island. This use of Ulysses to figure a self-reflexive movement for subjectivity can be found elsewhere in Lévinas's work, such as in Difficile liberté, where Ulysses appears in the similar context of Western philosophy and the Greek injunction of ''Know thyself" as the source of all knowledge (L-DL, 2), and in Totalité et infini, where "Ulysses's ingenuity" (L-TI, 248) is related more specifically to violence, war, and ruse. Ulysses, then, represents the autonomy of self-enclosed thought that is exploded by Lévinas's notions of transcendence (L-TI, 1213) and the erotic union seen not as a loss of duality but as that which liberates the subject from self-identification with the other to reveal a subjectivity that "no longer has the structure of the subject who returns to his island after every adventure, like Ulysses. The ego is hurled out, with no return, to find itself the self of an other" (L-TI, 304). The subjectivity defined by Lévinas is thus a radical move outwards, an exteriority constituting a different history from that inherited by the West of the adventures of Ulysses, who merely ends up at his own point of departure (that is, the end is the beginning, teleology an ontology: a closed circle or totality). This different history is figured in particular for Lévinas by the Abram of Genesis 12 (at this point his name has not yet been changed, and I shall henceforth refer to him as such in relation to his departure from his homeland): "Now the Lord said to Avram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, to the land that I will show thee." Abram unquestioningly submits to the command and departs, "as the Lord had spoken to him." In contradistinction to the odyssey of Ulysses, who returns enriched but basically unchanged, Abram goes out to unknown lands never to return. "The difference," to quote Adriaan Peperzak, "between the Greek conception of life as an odyssey that ends at the Ithaca from whence it began and the adventure of a subject such as Abraham or Moses, who began their journeys in order to lose their country and the treasures in which they rejoiced" is the difference between "the exodus of the just" and "the odyssey of the hero; it leads toward a land promised rather than possessed." 1 In other words, this is the difference between ontology and ethics. In L'Exil de la parole (Exile of the word) André Neher reveals himself to be equally sensitive to this difference when he writes that "the first word [Abram] had received from God was the signal to depart: Lekh-lekha, get thee out, rupture, uprooting, casting out, Exodus."2 This rupture is to initiate a series of trials and tribulations in which Abram is to encounter the other: the world, fellow men, his other self (as Abraham not an alter ego, but other). Moreover, in L'Existence juive Neher extends his analysis of

< previous page

page_101

next page >

< previous page

page_102


Abram's passage from the familiar to the unfamiliar the Midrash relates that Abram's father, Terah, was a maker of idols so that Abram's departure would also be the break with idolatry, paving the way for Jewish monotheism by suggesting that the very meaning of the Jew's Hebraism is the acceptance of the condition of the Hebrew in its etymological signification: ''Hebrew: ivri, implies an experience of passage. Abraham has passed by, he has passed from one world to another, from one bank to another. The Jew is he who passes by. . . . Jewish man is he who passes by, going from one bank to another, and consequently, like Abraham the Hebrew, Jewish man as a Hebrew is in exile. A permanent and necessary exile in order to play the missionary role." 3 This missionary role is not that of proselytism but the humanizing of humanity, the introduction or rather the meaning of ethics, the consideration and responsibility for the other, justice itself, in a world that has so far known only the iniquities of disobedience (Adam and Eve), fratricide (Cain and Abel), and idolatry (Abram's forefathers). Both Lévinas and Neher, then, would identify a heteronomous experience in Abram's migration, an experience Lévinas has previously described as the transcendence of the infinite cracking the imperturbable shell of being and opening it to the human other. But this purely philosophical experience is now evoked by Lévinas as the historical experience of Judaism. For if the human for Lévinas is to be found not in the reflexive movement of self to self but in the movement of response to the call of alterity, disturbing the quietude of the self, uprooting it from the land it thought it possessed, and signifying that the real homeland is not being but the other side of being, or otherwise-thanbeing, then Lévinas would see in Abram's obedience to God's call to leave his land this primordial experience of transcendence, the idea of the infinite. Within this perspective I wish now to extend our analysis in order to see how the otherwise-than-being revealed by Lévinas's concept of transcendence creates the possibility of dialogue (or rather language as a saying) that is not just a simple interchange or exchange of ideas. Abra(ha)m and Dialogical Philosophy Again Neher permits ingress into this aspect of Lévinas's work when he establishes Abram as what he calls the founder of the horizontal dialogue, that is, the dialogue between man and man (as opposed to the vertical dialogue between man and God). For Neher, Abram introduces "the Word into History"4 by being the first man in the Bible to address another person as "thou," namely, first his wife Sarai (Gen. 12:11) and then his brother's son Lot (Gen. 13:8). This, Neher contends, is in strong contrast to Adam, who does not address Eve directly, and to Cain, whose merely reported (and

< previous page

page_102

next page >

< previous page

page_103


suppressed) dialogue with Abel ends in the latter's death (Gen. 4:8). ''By inventing the horizontal dialogue," Neher concludes, "Abraham atones in a way for the 'sins of silence' of the first married couple and the first couple of brothers. He hangs the horizontal dialogue on conjugal agreement and fraternal harmony; he establishes communication through the fundamental forms of the intimate 'thou' of love." 5 These comments are not without relevance to Lévinas (nor indeed to Jabès), even though Lévinas does not focus on dialogue in relation to Abram and conceives of dialogue in diametrically opposed terms to those put forward by Neher. For Lévinas, it is not the "thou" that I can address to another person that constitutes the true dialogue, but a "you" (not the familiarity of the "tu" but the distance of the "vous"), and this, moreover, in an asymmetrical relation based on absolute inequality. It is difficult to understand the meaning of these apparently extreme ideas, with their familiar connotations of hostility and the domination of one interlocutor by another, without taking into account the context in which they are articulated. Here we therefore need to turn momentarily, but completely, from Abram to the thinker Martin Buber (and peripherally, Gabriel Marcel), a move which will nevertheless occasion a return to Abram. Lévinas's notions on dialogue, or rather his critique of it, take their point of departure from the ideas elaborated in Buber's Ich und Du (I and thou, 1923) and Marcel's Journal métaphysique (Metaphysical journal, 1928). In Lévinas's analysis Buber in particular bases his philosophy of the Other on the fact that the presence of an interlocutor to Me cannot be reduced to the presence of an object that my glance or look determines and on which predicative judgments are pronounced. This relation of presence, irreducible to the subject-object relation, Buber calls "Encounter" or the I-Thou relation. Through this interpersonal relation the whole of being for Buber takes on signification. The problems of knowledge and truth must therefore refer to the event of the Encounter and Dialogue. Lévinas then suggests that the history of the philosophy of dialogue from Plato onwards is an attempt to avoid violence; in other words, in dialogical speech the violence inherent within each of us is raised to the level of the universal, where violence as such is subsequently overcome. Understood as the passage to the universal, dialogue thus traces the Hegelian path culminating in the institution of universal rights and the homogeneous State. For Lévinas, however, Buber breaks new ground by conceiving of dialogue as anterior to this universality of the political dialogue: "Buber seeks the dialogue that permits us to enter into dialogue. The 'I' calling out to the 'Thou', rather than considering it as an object or as an enemy, is the main act" (L-

< previous page

page_103

next page >

< previous page

page_104


HS, 29). For Lévinas, Buber's major contribution to Western thought (and Marcel's in the same domain, though Lévinas tends to focus on Buber as the more radical thinker of the two) is this irreducibility of the I-Thou relation of the Encounter to all relation with the determinable and the objective. Lévinas's praise of Buber and Marcel, however, is not without reservations, and his critique is essentially threefold. First, Lévinas reproaches their affirmation of the encounter for remaining too formal. Hence, the dialogue between man and God can be approached in a similar way to that between man and man (what Neher calls the vertical and horizontal dialogues) in other words, on the model of the I-Thou relation. By suggesting that behind every thou there is an eternal Thou, Buber in particular fails to formulate what for Lévinas is proper in thinking of the relation that is oriented toward God, which is the idea of the infinite. Buber's formalism, indeed, is not consonant with ''Jewish genius" (L-HS, 32); that is, it lacks the ethical dimension that for Lévinas is inherent to Judaism. Second, Lévinas suggests that although through the description of the Encounter and the Relation Buber and Marcel break with an ontology of the object and substance, they nevertheless characterize the I-Thou relation in terms of a mode of being. This means that being and presence remain the ultimate references of meaning, whereas for Lévinas, as we have seen, the encounter with the other has to be freed from all submission to being and thought as a disinteres[se]-tedness, as an otherwise-than-being that comes to the human as an interruption of being through goodness. As his third critique, Lévinas identifies in the dialogical relation of the I-Thou a reciprocity to which he takes exception: "in the encounter between me and thee in which the call is articulated, the relation is reciprocity itself: the I says 'thou' to a thou in as much as this thou is an I capable of answering 'thou'. There would thus be an initial equal status, as it were, between the caller and the one who is called" (L-HS, 36). It is not difficult to see why Lévinas proffers an objection to this notion of equality and its implications of a symmetry between an I and a thou mutually responsible for one another. Lévinas's whole philosophical enterprise as a correlative of the interruption of being is to see in the relation between self and other an asymmetry that alone founds responsibility. And this, as we have seen, is the crucial point that correlates the relation with God and opens up for Lévinas the perspective and very possibility of justice. Lévinas's ethical asymmetry (the move from the ipseity of subjectivity to the illeity of transcendence) necessitates my fear and concern for the other without expecting or being dependent upon anything in return. Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, my responsibility extends to the other even

< previous page

page_104

next page >

< previous page

page_105


if the other does not know me or is absent. Lévinas's ethics uproots me from expectations of reciprocity, or rivalry for recognition. The other concerns me, worries me, obsesses me, and summons me to recognize my responsibility. Such responsibility is signified in the nakedness of the face that is not to be understood in concrete physiological terms but as a nonphenomenon that resists phenomenological appropriation. The face of the other introduces a dissymmetry or inequality into the relation between self and other and reveals to me an awareness that I always have one responsibility more than the other and am indeed responsible for the other's responsibility. For Lévinas, then, the interpersonal or intersubjective space is not dialogical in nature, but is based on the simultaneous proximity and distance of the other, signified not in language as communication (the said) but as saying. In opposition, therefore, to Buber's and Marcel's ''Thou," Lévinas proposes the "You" as signifying the irreducibility of the alterity of the other. Although the "Thou" would appear to open up a space of familiarity, confidence, and friendship, designating the "You" as a token of reserve and self-enclosedness, keeping the other at a distance, Lévinas would expose the illusion of this position in order to suggest that, on the contrary, the "Thou" runs the risk of forgetting the alterity of the other while the "You" prevents the transparency of communion and upholds distance not in negative terms but precisely as proximity and as the source of all justice. As Lévinas puts it in Totalité et infini: "The interlocutor is not a Thou but a You. He reveals himself in his lordship. Exteriority coincides therefore with a mastery" (L-TI, 104). To address the other as "You," then, and not as "Thou" is to assert the inequality of relation crucial to maintaining the separation between self and other required by the idea of the infinite, where Desire remains unfulfilled and obligation an unpayable debt. What emerges from Lévinas's studies on Buber and Marcel, and indeed from the frequent barbed remarks concerning dialogue that one can find throughout his work (particularly in Autrement qu'être), is that Lévinas does not in fact adhere to a dialogical philosophy at all. The radical inequality of the infinite responsibility for the other is not manifested for Lévinas in the opening of a dialogue between interlocutors, but in the difference he makes in discourse between the saying and the said: "That saying must entail a said is a necessity of the same order as that which is imposed by a society, with its laws, institutions, and social relations. But the saying is the fact that before the face I do not simply remain in contemplation of it but respond to it" (L-EI, 82). In the saying the response of responsibility is awakened and heard, and the horizon of justice unfurls. Radical inequality, therefore, does not exclude justice but founds it. In

< previous page

page_105

next page >

< previous page

page_106


other words, justice and morality begin with the welcoming of the other in an address of ''You," where the other is treated with the reverence, deference, and distance due to the master. It is only through such a welcome that the stranger is my neighbor for whom I am infinitely responsible. This is exactly how Lévinas characterizes the optic that is ethics in Totalité et infini when he claims to be writing a defense of subjectivity: "This book is presented as a defense of subjectivity, but not by taking hold of it at the level of its purely egoistic protests against totality, nor by its anguish before death, but by its being founded in the idea of the infinite. . . . This book will present subjectivity in its welcoming of the Other, in its hospitality" (L-TI, 11, 13, my emphasis). Abraham and the Strangers This welcoming and serving of the other Lévinas frequently characterizes in biblical terms as the responsibility due to the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, and such hospitality brings us back to the figure of Abraham, this time in Genesis 18. In the previous chapter in Genesis, God establishes his covenant with Abram, henceforth to be called Abraham, and the latter and all the male members of his household are circumcised as a token of the covenant. According to traditional commentary, Abraham is still recovering from his circumcision when he encounters three strangers and immediately has a meal prepared for them (Gen. 18:15). Abraham is unaware that the three strangers are in fact angels (on their way to Sodom to assess the situation before God enacts his judgment on the city), and despite his present discomfort, he does not for a moment neglect the duty of hospitality that in the Jewish tradition is to mark the morality of the descendants of Abraham. In his talmudic reading "Judaïsme et révolution" Lévinas makes explicit reference to this notion of the descendants of Abraham (Isaac and Jacob) in the context of Genesis 18 via a discussion of the Mishnah in the tractate Baba Metzia 83a83b. Lévinas notes that whenever the Talmud speaks of Israel and its election, there is no idea of racism; rather, "Israel signifies a people that has received the Law, and consequently a humanity that has reached the plenitude of its responsibilities and self-consciousness. The descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob constitute the humanity that is no longer a child" (L-DSS, 18). Lévinas, however, pursuing his ideas further, wonders whether the descendants of Abraham may not also signify more than just a highly educated humanity capable of organizing itself into a hierarchy of employers and employees, a ruling class and a proletariat. "What else can the descendants of Abraham signify?" asks Lévinas:

< previous page

page_106

next page >

< previous page

page_107



Let us recall the biblical and talmudic tradition concerning Abraham. The father of believers? Indeed. But above all Abraham is the one who knows how to receive and feed men, the one whose tent was open to the four winds. Through all these openings he watched out for passers-by he could welcome. The meal offered by Abraham? We know of one above all: the meal he had offered to the three angels. Without being aware that they were angels. . . . Abraham must have taken the three passers-by for three Bedouins, three nomads from the Negev desert three Arabs indeed! He runs to meet them and calls them ''My Lords." Abraham's descendants are men to whom their ancestor bequeathed a difficult tradition of duties toward the other, which we have never finished fulfilling, an order from which we are never released, but where duty takes on above all the form of obligations toward the body, the duty to feed and shelter. Defined as such, Abraham's descendants are men of all nations: every man who is truly a man is probably a descendant of Abraham. (L-DSS, 19)

7d5aff9

Lévinas's interpretation of Genesis 18 indicates (1) that the other I welcome may also be my enemy (the strangers as three Arabs resonates with the allusion to the Arab-Israeli problem); (2) that the difficult tradition of respect and duty due to the other is not just spiritual, but concerns also the physical welfare of the other, an infinite obligation to extend concrete hospitality to the stranger, to feed and to shelter him; and (3) that only such a lofty definition of obligation and responsibility qualifies a man as truly human and worthy of the title of a descendant of Abraham (Lévinas's concluding remark once more demonstrates the way in which Jewish specificity in his work is translated into a universal language). As an oblique extension of these ideas arising from Abraham's hospitable welcome of the three angels, Lévinas comments in another talmudic reading that "kingship in Israel is always Joseph feeding the people. To think of men's hunger is the first function of politics" (L-ADV, 34; L-BTV, 18). The bread Joseph distributes to the people and Joseph is a true descendant of Abraham is the bread I can offer to the stranger, the very act of hospitality that for Lévinas is of greater value than the dialogue I can install with my neighbor and that is capable of masking empty promises. This may strike us as manifestly Lévinas the moralist rather than Lévinas the philosopher, but a philosophy without morality for Lévinas is in any case an ontology and not an ethics. Here Lévinas emphasizes that the infinite obligation I have toward the other, overflowing my capacities and exceeding my ability to release myself from it, is not just an idea. It is the source of humanity and

< previous page

page_107

next page >

< previous page

page_108


justice and defines a sociality where each man has his share of bread, or, as Lévinas puts it in two of his contorted neologisms in Autrement qu'être: ''being-torn-from-self-for-an-other-in-the-giving-to-the-other-the-bread-from-hismouth, or the-ability-to-give-up-one's-soul-for-an-other" (L-AQE, 126). Abraham and the Just We have seen, then, that Lévinas highlights two episodes concerning Abra(ha)m that are in fact loaded with signification and reflect a number of his philosophical preoccupations: (1) Abram's departure from Ur to the promised land furnishes Lévinas with a metaphor to represent the break with subjectivity as a self-reflexive autonomous consciousness (the Greek tradition in general, represented by the figure of Ulysses), an image that has permitted us to explore the heteronomous encounter in opposition to more influential dialogical philosophies; and (2) Abraham's welcoming of the strangers represents for Lévinas the very meaning of the new definition of subjectivity proposed: infinite responsibility toward the other as a concrete option (not to be confused with free choice) capable of giving reality to the ethical imperative. But there is one more Abraham, so to speak, to whom I would like to turn, also in Genesis 18, although curiously Lévinas makes no specific reference to the episode. The scene follows immediately on from the meal Abraham and his wife have offered to the three strangers. After promising a child (Isaac) to Sarah, the strangers continue on their way to Sodom. In a quite unprecedented manner God decides to reveal to Abraham his intentions in destroying the city, and in an even more unprecedented manner Abraham intercedes in favor of the just who risk being destroyed along with the wicked. Abraham, conscious that he is "but dust and ashes" (Gen. 18:27), bargains with God to save the whole city if there can be found within it just fifty righteous people, or forty-five, or forty, or thirty, or twenty, or even only ten, a seemingly arbitrary number at which Abraham falls silent and "returns to his place" (Gen. 18:33). God destroys the city anyway and saves only Lot and his family. Traditional rabbinical commentary tends to emphasize the theoretical nature of Abraham's intervention, since at no point does he attempt to discover the real number of righteous people in the city. Nor indeed is Abraham unaware of the injustices and iniquities committed by Sodom. The point of his interceding with God, therefore, would seem to be an extreme consciousness of the need for the descendants of Abraham to defend justice against criminal behavior and to advocate the principles of

< previous page

page_108

next page >

< previous page

page_109


equity and freedom in the face of a perverted society an extreme consciousness, therefore, of which the model is divine justice. For Neher in L'Exil de la parole, the episode is important because it not only represents the introduction of the vertical dialogue into humanity, but it is marked also by Abraham's brusque silence that Neher interprets as Abraham's abrogation of responsibility. Moreover, Neher places the dialogue in the context of the mutation of Abraham's name from Abram to Abraham, which is enacted in Genesis 17 when God establishes his covenant and initiates the practice of circumcision. I reproduce here somewhat schematically Neher's comments as a means of concluding with Lévinas in this section and as an opening onto the horizon of Jabès and Blanchot, whose respective uses of Abraham are situated precisely on either side of the mutation. The Metamorphosis of Abram Abram's metamorphosis, Neher contends, carries with it two distinct characteristics that transcend the personal existential stages of Abraham's life. The first is a cosmic one, the passage from Abram to Abraham allowing the world access to a new dimension of creation. According to the Masorah (the body of traditional information and comment on the text of the Hebrew Bible), the letter (he) in the word (behibaram) (''when they were created") in Gen. 2:4 is of small calligraphy. This verse embraces creation on two levels: (1) the immediate past: "Those were the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created . . ."; and (2) the immediate future: "These are the generations. . . ." The word behibaram can be read as a corrective of the word bereshit ("in the beginning") with which the world had begun. The secret of the creative act, revealed by bereshit, "it is by means of a reshit, an initiator, that God created the world," is corrected by another secret, behibaram, "it is by means of a hibaram that the world, created by God, possesses a history." The Masorah exegesis becomes clearer when it points out that the five letters of the word hibaram are the anagram of the five letters of the name Abraham It is thus not through Abram's static existence that the world possesses a history (implied in the word "generations"), but by the dynamic mutation of the four letters Abram into the five of Abraham The unexpected introduction of the small (he) explodes the dimensions of the world. In the movement from Abram to Abraham, it is the whole universe that takes a leap, the leap from being to becoming. Creation, from now on, is History. Hence, the second characteristic of the mutation, Neher notes, is that it is

< previous page

page_109

next page >

< previous page

page_110


completely irreversible. The name of Abram never appears again in the Bible: ''Abraham has completely cast off Abram. He has left his own ego in order to acquire another. Abraham is the fulfillment of the alteration, the absolute irreversibility of time, history advancing without return." 6 In conclusion, Neher points out that as a kind of prologue to the mutation, Abram receives not a simple Lekh-lekha, "Get thee out" (Gen. 12:1), but a veritable hithalekh lephanay, "walk before Me" (Gen. 17:1).7 The man of Exodus, therefore, does not just walk with God (as did Noah in Gen. 6:9), but walks before God, and this is immediately preceding God's covenant with Abram and the transformation of the latter's name. A permanent distance is thus established between God and man, where the apparent "dis-appearance" of God is in fact one of the corollaries of the "dis-parity" between the rhythms of God's pace and those of man. The two rhythms being unequal, since man must walk before, the human vocation is never centered on the encounter; it is a pro-vocation, and carries with it, necessarily, moments of discrepancy. Thus the word of God reaches man only through silence, like a lost echo, or a distant inaudible call. We shall find echoes of Neher's comments on Abraham in the following sections on Jabès and Blanchot, but here at the close of this section on Lévinas it is worth sketching out some points on which Neher's thoughts and those of Lévinas might accord. Although Lévinas does not comment on the episode, Abraham's interceding with God on behalf of the just in Sodom would be in Lévinas's thought a logical step from the acquisition of the covenant and the infinite responsibility it entails (before even the revelation of the Law to Moses), which Abraham demonstrates humbly yet magisterially when he welcomes and feeds the three strangers. Abraham's falling silent, however, would not be the temporary relieving himself of responsibility as it is for Neher, but a purely symbolic display that justice is the domain of the human (even if modeled on divine justice), which humanity is in the process of learning. Moreover, the introduction of history into creation implied by the metamorphosis of Abraham's name the fact that from now on being is conceived of not as static but in the dynamism of becoming is resonant in Lévinas when he thinks temporality in terms of the dia-chronic break in the synchronous affected by transcendence where the same is nonindifferent to, noncoincidental and nonsimultaneous with the other. In other words, the way in which Lévinas conceives of time, particularly in Le Temps et l'autre, not as the ontological horizon of the being of being but as the mode of the beyond of being, as the relation of thought to the other, can be compared to this radical mutation of Abraham where the Infinite explodes the finite to

< previous page

page_110

next page >

< previous page

page_111


open it to infinite obligation. Finally, the analogy Lévinas draws between the transcendence that signifies dia-chrony and the distance of the alterity of the other, and the radical inequality he establishes in the asymmetry of the relation between self and other, are echoed by Neher's comments on the inequality of the rhythms between God and man, where God's ''dis-appearance" for Neher is for Lévinas the measure of the infinite distance evoked in the proximity of the face of the other. Jabès and the Figuring of Silence Abram and the Discovery of Alterity As my starting point for the present section, I return to the point which in fact knows no return: the moment of Abram's departure from his native land, the Lekh-lekha privileged by Lévinas: "Now the Lord said to Avram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, to the land that I will show thee" (Gen. 12:1). Toward the end of Le Petit livre de la subversion hors de soupçon (1982), Jabès makes reference to this biblical verse: "He who goes out Abram where does he go? Having set off in search of his identity, it is the other he discovers. He knows in advance that he will perish from this other in the immense distance separating him from himself and in which the face of his solitude emerges" (J-PLS, 87). In Jabès's work, God's command to Abram to leave all that is familiar to him and to journey to a foreign land (which turns out to be Canaan) functions as a further metaphor for the writer of the book. According to Jabès's Midrash, Abram's rupture with his past loosens the stability of fixed identity as Abram is thrust into the world and faced with otherness. This discovery of the other, however and Jabès suggests that Abram would be fully conscious of the implications of his departure not only leads to the effacement (or metaphorical death) of Abram's identity as he is separated irrevocably from himself, but also confronts him with "the face of his solitude." Solitude and separation thus become the necessary adjuncts of the movement from the familiar to the unfamiliar, the known to the unknown, which for Jabès is the movement of writing itself. Significantly, this movement from interiority to exteriority is not simply a move into a beyond of the text (Lévinas), or an outside or step beyond (Blanchot). It carries aspects of these, but it is also a fundamental wandering into the desert, a primordial landscape at once metaphorical (the book) and real (Egypt). Hence, one of the preliminary passages preceding Jabès's comment on Abram indicates the terms in which Jabès would have us to understand Abram's gesture: "There were my books, written not in the sand

< previous page

page_111

next page >

< previous page

page_112


or with the sand but through and for the sand./Books whose destiny I have embraced motionless adventure by deciphering them as I identified with them to the point of no longer being anything but their very writing. A miracle made possible at the cost of my own dissolution'' (J-PLS, 79, my emphasis). Abram's own dissolution into the desert sands, into the infinite nothingness, is the prerequisite preparation for the encounter with alterity. "In the desert," Jabès says elsewhere, "one becomes other: one who knows the weight of the sky and the thirst of the earth; one who has learned to reckon with his own solitude. Far from excluding us, the desert envelops us" (J-DL, 36). The desert, then, is the privileged place of depersonalization as well as the place or space in which the self meets the face of the other. Certain of these comments are reminiscent of Abraham as the Jewish figure in opposition to the Greek Ulysses, ethics as opposed to ontology. But Lévinas sets out to reconstitute subjectivity, not to dissolve it. Moreover, alterity in Jabès is intimately linked to his views on dialogue, and this constitutes an important difference between him and Lévinas, who, as we have seen, is highly suspicious of the dialogical form. The Dream of Dialogue In a number of stimulating articles, Richard Stamelman points out that certain theoretical parallels exist between Jabès's statements on dialogue and Bakhtin's studies on the dialogical principle and Paul Celan's views on poetry. 8 Bakhtin, for example, contends that the most constitutive moments of our lives can be experienced only through the forms they take in another consciousness, in the reflecting mirror of otherness. It is impossible to conceive of being outside the relations that link it to the other. According to Bakhtin, everything that constitutes what we consider to be our identity is given to us from birth by others. In his study of Dostoyevsky, moreover, in whom he sees the dialogical principle to be at work more than in any other writer, Bakhtin writes: "Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life."9 Referring to this passage, Stamelman claims, "Sartre was wrong then. Other people constitute not hell but life."10 This is a too simplistic and somewhat dubious appraisal of Sartre's own complex philosophy of alterity, although from Stamelman's viewpoint certainly Jabès would concur with Bakhtin: "The dialogue is vital. The book of the living can be only the book of dialogue" (J-P, 89). This position, moreover, is echoed in Neher's view of

< previous page

page_112

next page >

< previous page

page_113


Abraham's ''invention" of the interhuman dialogue as "the offering of a life-giving word through the discovery of the other." 11 Beyond the presence and participation of the other, consciousness and knowledge are not possible, as Bakhtin points out: "I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. . . . To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. . . . I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself."12 Bakhtin's analysis of dialogue would of course be entirely unacceptable to Lévinas. The notions of the reflecting mirror of otherness and the constitution of identity through the other would ground Bakhtin's views in the ontology of being and presence, and in the symmetrical reciprocity of self and other, both of which Lévinas rejects. It is for the same reasons, as we have seen, that Lévinas ends up pointing out the insufficiencies of Buber's philosophy of the IThou relation. Both Bakhtin and Buber, for Lévinas, would fail to provide a model of human intersubjectivity capable of founding an ethics, capable of accounting for the experience of the idea of the infinite. Hence, if Stamelman is right and there are affinities between Bakhtin and Jabès, Lévinas would find a similar insufficiency in the latter. When Jabès, for instance, writes of the necessity to be "oneself in the other" (J-Y, 146), or poses the question "how does one speak to oneself without immediately turning the self into another?" (J-LD, 13), he would operate just that ontological move which for Lévinas blocks alterity and reduces it to the mere reflective play of two subjects, each seeing the self in the other or the other in the self. Even if Jabès goes on to point out that "This other is not myself nor my invention. It is my discovery of the other in me" (J-LD, 13), Lévinas would still respond that this is to interiorize exteriority and thus prevent any possibility of real encounter. If we turn, on the other hand, to Stamelman's reference to Paul Celan, we see that Jabès and Lévinas may concur on one essential point. Stamelman cites Celan's now well known description of the poem in his discourse Der Meridian (The meridian): "The poem goes out to an other, it needs this other, this opposite. It moves toward it, articulates itself in the movement. Every thing, every being, as it heads toward the other, is, for the poem, the face of this other."13 Even before it announces its theme or signified, the language of a poem is addressed to and for others. It installs what Celan calls the "Secret of the Meeting." Lévinas would formulate these views as the saying preceding and exceeding the said, calling to the other and establishing a relation. In Jabès, we find that writing also refers to a world of difference, of exteriority, where language pursues the other to whom it is addressed.

< previous page

page_113

next page >

< previous page

page_114


Operating on this principle dictated by the movement of writing itself Jabès's texts dialogue with exiled words: a nomadic writing, where erring and errant words dialogue incessantly with each other across the white spaces of an open book. In this book the other never ceases to be present, even when, as we shall see, he (or she) is absent. For, to return to my initial point of departure, Jabès's use of the figure of Abram does not remain solely within the context of Abram's discovery of alterity. If the encounter with the other renders Abram separated from himself and faced with ''the face of his solitude," it is at this point of solitude and separation that the dialogue really begins. Dialogue, in effect, for Jabès, does not break silence by inscribing the word into a communicative contract; rather it sustains and prolongs the silence that both precedes it and follows it ("One speaks to break the solitude; one writes to prolong it" [J-PLS, 36]), as if Jabès's "fore-dialogue" and "after-dialogue" were merely the silent brackets around a "silent dialogue with an absent interlocutor" (J-LD, 17). For in Jabès's poetics of rupture, exile, and absence, the truest dialogue is a hidden one, unconscious and deprived of words, a meeting in which paradoxically only what is mute can be heard. Silence dialogues precisely by that which is not said. This paradox receives particular elaboration in Le Livre du dialogue, in which a mysterious woman becomes a correlative to Abram as the figure of silence and as one of the many reduplicative figures of Jabès's absent interlocutor. Blanchot, as I argue later in this chapter, elaborates a more explicit analogy in his récit Au moment voulu, in which one of the female figures, Judith, silent and enigmatic, is compared to Abraham. In a section entitled "The Dream" in Le Livre du dialogue, Jabès's narrator recounts how every morning before beginning the task of writing, he would sit in his armchair in his study, release himself from his daily concerns, and let his thoughts flow freely. One day, he explains, plunged in his rêverie, he hears a knock at the door: "I saw a young woman appear to whom I dared not speak straightaway. Her conduct was so casual and she imposed such silence, a silence more demanding than the silence already reigning in the room./She sat down, opposite me, in the matching armchair to mine, looked at me for a brief moment and then, point-blankly, asked me kindly to reveal her name to her but with such a disenchanted smile, such a painful insistence in her look, that I shuddered./She sensed my distress, for she immediately got up, ashamed, it seemed, of herself, headed toward the hall she had left my door half-open when she came in and, without paying the least attention to my person, vanished" (J-LD, 3536). If this woman here desires to initiate a dialogue to discover a name and an iden-

< previous page

page_114

next page >

< previous page

page_115


tity the narrator can reply only by silence. Dialogue, in Jabès, is always in potential. For Stamelman, moreover, ''this phantom woman, whose mystery is alterity itself, represents in several ways Jabès's vision of the silent, absent, and unfinishable Book, emerging for a moment only to vanish immediately afterwards in a radiance that effaces everything, except perhaps the memory of its passing. The trace of the other is the trace of the book." 14 This trace of the other (Lévinas is clearly behind Stamelman's formulation) that cannot be effaced is echoed in the final lines of Jabès's book: "You cannot be forgotten. / That is the dilemma" (J-LD, 120). This is why the woman who disappears inhabits, for the narrator, the nonplace of separation in Blanchot, as we shall see, it is the in-between of any "entre-tien" and why the narrator, from that moment on, is haunted by the unpossessable "You," the irrecuperable image of an absent presence, a face and a voice all the more present for their absence: "About this woman of whom I know nothing except that one morning she suddenly entered my home only to vanish just as quickly, but whose incomprehensible request continues to plague my memory no particular mention will be made in this book; nor of the infinite softness of her voice, nor either of this incurable wound that she came to confront with my own; / but her face and her voice are, because of this, all the more present in these pages; her face, in order to nourish my imagination; her voice, as irrefutable proof of her reality" (J-LD, 36). Accordingly, no mention is made again of this spectre, but she becomes the absence to which Jabès's words are addressed, the sign of the loss to which all language is anchored. The presence and absence of the other are reflected in the dual movement inherent in Abram as the founder of dialogue and as the figure of silence. Dialogue is always fleeting, evasive, encircling communication rather than directly affecting it. In this exiled discourse, Jabès can thus state that "what is silenced in my books is much more important than what is said."15 In his movement outwards, Abram functions as a rhetorical device to suggest that dialogue can begin only in the wake of its own disappearance, in the state of solitude and separation to which Abram is reduced. Abram and the Silence of God In his first reflection, then, on Abram's departure from his homeland, Jabès concentrates on Abram himself and the discovery of alterity. As a correlative to Abram's migration, however, Jabès develops a second Midrash in which the focus of attention shifts from Abram to the source of the command, God. In other words, the line of dialogue shifts from the horizontal to the vertical. In Le Livre du partage (1987) Jabès thus writes: "What does

< previous page

page_115

next page >

< previous page

page_116


God's 'Get thee out' to Abram mean if not: 'May your errant presence hence-fourth be for your offspring the luminous pledge of My all-powerful Absence'? / Would I have been Jewish to the point of identifying myself with the venerated propagator of this terrible commandment? / The silence of God is the abyss of the word. / Ponderous infinite'' (J-LP, 69). Jabès's interpretation here takes the form of a pseudo-divine citation. Abram's "errant presence" (and that of all men as Abram's "offspring") is counterpointed by the all-powerfulness of God's absence. Indeed, the absence of God as a void within God (elsewhere Jabès uses the perhaps tenuous but nevertheless effective anagrammatic link "vide" and "Dieu") is central to Jabès's concerns. God is not just word, presence, law (all related to Greek ontotheological assumptions of unity, as Derrida's deconstruction is intent on demonstrating and from which Lévinas's own project is to release them); he is also, and more importantly for Jabès, silence and absence, and these are decisive realities, as we saw in the previous chapter in relation to Moses. As such, they resemble certain aspects of the powerful negativity that exists in the Kabbalah, as Derrida points out in his early seminal essay on Jabès: "The negativity of God, exile as writing, the life of the letter finally: these can already be found in the Kabbalah." 16 One particular kabbalistic doctrine that finds an echo in Jabès is Isaac Luria's theory of Tsimtsum.17 Luria (writing in the sixteenth century in Safed, Palestine, where he settled after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492) envisages the act of creation not as an expansive act but rather as a withdrawal and contraction of God into himself. The concept of Tsimtsum addresses the problem of how a finite, material, and differentiated universe could have been created by an infinite God, for if God is infinite and omnipresent, then there should logically be no room for the world. Creation ex nihilo can come about only if first there is nothing, a space opened up for creation. As Gershom Scholem comments, "one is tempted to interpret this withdrawal of God into His own Being in terms of Exile, of banishing Himself from His totality into profound seclusion."18 In this act of Tsimtsum, Scholem continues, "God sends out a ray of His light and begins His revelation, or rather His unfolding as God the Creator, in the primordial space of His own creation. More than that, every new act of emanation and manifestation is preceded by one of concentration and retraction. In other words, the cosmic process becomes two-fold. Every stage involves a double strain, i.e. the light which streams back into God and that which flows out from Him, and but for this perpetual tension, this ever repeated effort with which God holds Himself back, nothing in the world would exist."19 In this theory of creation, then, every

< previous page

page_116

next page >

< previous page

page_117


creative act requires negativity, withdrawal, and absence. This is precisely what Jabès suggests when he combines God's contraction into himself with the light emanating from him: ''May your errant presence henceforth be for your offspring the luminous pledge of My all-powerful Absence" (J-LP, 69, my emphasis). When read in conjunction, therefore, Jabès's Midrashim on Abram reveal a reciprocal silence and solitude on the part of man and God: "God's word is in that of man. Man's word, in the silence of God" (J-LD, 10). Thus, the void left by God's absence is not merely to be filled by the emergence of man's words, for, as Jabès points out in his Midrash, "The silence of God is the abyss of the word" (J-LP, 69). This is why Jabès interprets God's command to Abram, the Lekh-lekha, as a "terrible commandment" (J-LP, 69), for if the word is left to man, it is an inheritance that is constantly threatened by the abyss. And this, for Jabès, is exactly what is involved in writing the book, as the final lines of Le Livre du partage suggest: "From the heat of a first fire to the disfigurement of a dying fire, our glowing words will have set limits to the abyss" (J-LP, 143). One is reminded by these lines of Georges Bataille's metaphor concerning Blanchot: "For him literature is comparable to a flame in the lamp: what the flame consumes is life, but the flame is life to the extent that it is death, to the extent exactly that it dies, like the flame exhausting life as it burns." 20 This in its turn recalls the words from the tractate Bereshit Rabba (Midrash Rabba): "And the writing of God on the Tablets was 'black fire on white fire'." Jabès's texts can be read as a postmodern version of God's inscription. "Have you seen the book being made and unmade?" (J-LQ, 193), asks the voice that closes Jabès's inaugural book. It is this self-consuming act, incessantly at work (what Blanchot might call the "désoeuvrement*," the worklessness, or the unworking), that permits Jabès's books the freedom to recreate themselves, to continue asking questions that shy away from answers: "The answer lies in the question it conveys" (J-DDD, 88). To skirt the abyss, then, with the "orphaned, errant, exiled word" (J-LD, 21) is to dialogue with God, a silent dialogue with yet another absent interlocutor, which merely refers both participants back to their common solitude. "There is an audibility of silence, which is writing" (J-LP, 71), comments Jabès, and it is only through being attentive to this silence that Jabès's books can be read: "We can reach God's silence only through ourselves embracing this silence" (J-PLS, 50). Hence, Abram can furnish the passage from the inaudible to the audible: "Abraham, the errant word. Not a password, but the word of the passage from inaudibility to audibility" (J-UE, 111); he can invent the horizontal dialogue; he can initiate the Word into

< previous page

page_117

next page >

< previous page

page_118


History; but he cannot invent silence: ''We can invent everything, except silence. It invents us" (J-P, 13). If Jabès, then, would desire his books to be read as an "immense dialogue," 21 it is an immense dialogue through silence, an incessant questioning of absence, solitude, and lack. God functions as a metaphor for all of this: "What I mean by God in my work is something we come up against, an abyss, a void, something against which we are powerless. It is a distance . . . the distance that is always between things."22 God is the void encountered in the process of writing, the illegible blank spaces between the words, the condition of their legibility. For Jabès, God is a word that exists in order to impose a limit on man's knowledge, as an indicator that the unknown will always remain so: "God is saved by His absence of face" (J-LP, 113). The alterity of God can never be appropriated by language because silence recognizes only silence, and silence itself is the unconditional of writing, which does not surrender itself to expression. Jabès's interpretation of God's initial command to Abram therefore places man and God in a relation of proximity through infinite separation. Abram's "face of his solitude" is mirrored in God's "absence of face," and it is precisely because both are ultimately unknown and unknowable that it becomes impossible for there to be a mutual revelation, either on the horizontal or the vertical plane. (As we saw in the previous chapter, God's revelation of the Law to Moses is reinscribed by Jabès within a thematics of fragmentation, played out on the formal level, and preventing the law the law of the word from positing itself as dogma.) By suggesting, moreover, that "having denounced the origin, God renounced the name" (J-P, 25), Jabès is able to propose that with no origin, there is no beginning, and with no beginning, there is no end, intimating a movement in his work whose underlying premise is "in my end is my beginning." The commentary of the book is always yet to begin. For Jabès, the point of departure and the point of arrival are in fact the same point. It has merely been displaced: "Is it true', said the disciple, 'that whatever we do, wherever we go, we will always find ourselves back at our point of departure?'/ 'What is important', said the master, 'is to depart; the point of arrival only ever being the same point displaced'" (J-UE, 149). The issue of departure and arrival finally brings us back to that displaced Jew par excellence, Abram, the prototype of every migration. Yet Abram's radical dispossession has consequences beyond merely renouncing his homeland, or the fatherland, the self, and, as we have seen, God. Abram's migration, one might argue, is also a cutting himself off from "being-Jewish" and from the language that would interpret the meaning of such being. God's

< previous page

page_118

next page >

< previous page

page_119


command to Abram is pure and simple: ''Get thee out," and Abram cannot obey unless he relinquishes all property (including the claim to his own identity) and all possession. Only when this is accomplished can Abram be free to obey God's command and walk out into the desert. Hence, despite what appear as relentless attempts on Jabès's part to define the Jew throughout his work, perhaps the closest he can get is the following chiasmus: "Being-Jewish is but the Jewishness of being" (J-P, 84). Jabès thus does not merely interpret Abram's migration; his writing enacts it. Free from the constraints of idolatry fatherland, God, self, language Jabès's writing radically dispossesses itself. Thus, his books are not merely self-reflexive, as a cursory glance might suggest, but fundamentally allocutionary, discourses that depart from the egocentricity of the self even when, paradoxically, the self, or an "I," is being addressed and journey across the desert toward the enigmatic other: "Every text, every discourse bears witness to the final triumph of the other" (JDDD, 98). This triumph ultimately belongs also to God, "the wholly Other of the other" (J-DDD, 72). For Abram, the man of Exodus, is also the man of Promise: the promised land is not given to Abram, but through him to the generations of the world. For Jabès, however, this promise finds its realization not in Canaan but in Auschwitz, and it is no small irony that one of the consequences of that leap into History that the transformation of Abram into Abraham signifies, as we saw in Neher's analysis, is soon followed by the call for Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. God demands a burnt offering, or, to be more precise in biblical terms, a "holocaust." But for Jabès, no angel of the Lord descends to stay the hand of Abraham, and the "holocaust" takes its irrevocable course. In Jabès, the self is sacrificed for the book to exist; the book is sacrificed to release the word into silence; silence is prolonged in a dialogue that never takes place and yet is never interrupted. Such paradoxes find no resolution in Jabès's book, which moves not toward synthesis and unity, but toward dispersal, displacement, and dislocation. In this book, Abram the writer Jabès himself never ceases "going out," never stops becoming, nomadically existing in the beyond of his words. Jabès's reading of Abram is clearly in the last resort diametrically opposed to that of Lévinas. Both admittedly recognize a founding event in Abram's departure, but whereas Lévinas sees this as the very possibility of establishing a new relation of the one-for-the-other, infinite responsibility, and justice, Jabès interprets Abram as an errant word establishing nothing but the pure nomadism of the desert in which the book is written, unwritten, and rewritten, incessantly. Hence God's promise to Abram, for Jabès,

< previous page

page_119

next page >

< previous page

page_120


can be only what God himself is empty. For his part, Blanchot, to whom I shall now turn, takes the reading of Genesis a little further than both Lévinas and Jabès, to the Abraham of Genesis 22 and to the problematic of sacrifice. Blanchot's Au moment voulu and the Self-Sacrificial Text In his recent spate of activity on Blanchot's récit Au moment voulu, Brian T. Fitch examines the temporal and spatial dimensions of Blanchot's text and their effect on the hermeneutic code. 23 The temptation to allegorize Blanchot's récit, Fitch claims, is the reader's failure to interpret the work on the hermeneutic level.24 Steven Shaviro likewise proposes that Blanchot's fictions, and in particular L'Arrêt de mort and Au moment voulu, do not seem to be appropriate subjects for interpretation: ''Not because they are 'undecidable', so that interpreting them would be an endless process, but because the seriousness of the labor of interpretation seems oddly beside the point. . . . There is simply no place for hermeneutical or rhetorical considerations."25 Yet if the problematization of the fictive referent in Blanchot's text does frustrate the interpretative act, the text nevertheless offers many clues to interpretation that Fitch presents as no more than suspended in a perpetually promised meaning, while Shaviro proceeds in his own argument to offer the "clue for entering . . . the labyrinth of this 'intrigue'."26 What I shall propose here is a reading of Blanchot's text in the light of the concerns of the present chapter, in other words, the biblical reference to Abraham hitherto only skirted by Blanchot's critics. If I succumb to the temptation to allegorize, it is less in recognition of an interpretative failure or excess than an indication of the extent to which Blanchot's récit simultaneously invites and frustrates contradictory yet coextensive readings of it, while itself revealing its own secret in the mirror of the metadiscourse it contains. In Au moment voulu, then, a first-person narrator visits a woman, Judith, whom he has apparently not seen for some time. Judith is now living with her friend, Claudia, whom the narrator does not know and who does not know Judith as "Judith." Judith, moreover, claims to know neither the narrator nor Claudia. Into this disconcerting text, in which "no one wants to be linked to a story" (B-Amv, 108), Blanchot somewhat intriguingly interpolates the reference to Abraham and the journey to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22). Fitch, not wrongly, claims that, like all Blanchot's récits, Au moment voulu is really concerned with language, while Shaviro suggests that Blanchot "is concerned less with language and signification than with joy and pain, affect and passion."27 I would propose, however, that Au moment voulu is in fact concerned with what is revealed to be

< previous page

page_120

next page >

< previous page

page_121


of absolute equivalence to language: silence. It is within this narrative perspective that the reference to Abraham and sacrifice is to be understood. In order to determine more precisely the function of this explicit analogy, and to see how the figure of Abraham constitutes part of a thematics of silence, as with Jabès's Abram, I wish to consider briefly some of the shared traits of Blanchot's récit with his other fiction of the 1950s, before tracing a number of the récit's important moments. Writers and Self-Deprivation Blanchot's Au moment voulu is the second récit in a triptych that includes L'Arrêt de mort (1948) and Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas (1953), while also sharing much in common with the récit Le Dernier Homme (1957). The three récits of the 1950s, which, with L'Arrêt de mort and L'Attente l'oubli (1962), represent the height of Blanchot's fiction are stripped of all the extraneous material that characterizes his earlier novels (hence the difficulty of an imaginary universe being concretized in the reader's imagination). Locatable predominant themes nevertheless do exist, shifting in emphasis from one récit to the other, but remaining closely interrelated. Hence, Au moment voulu is largely ''about" silence, while Celui qui can be read as a further exploration of alterity and the impossibility of its appropriation to the self, and Le Dernier Homme as an extended reflection on the peculiar form of death that Blanchot makes his own. But, more importantly, in their problematical status as first-person narratives, all three are very much concerned with writing (literary language), and more specifically, the writing of the very récits before us. Hence, the narrators are explicitly presented as writers, and as such are caught within the process of their own depersonalization, the selfeffacement of writing that takes them into the "He" of neutrality (the voice that neither affirms nor denies). Their attempts to counter such self-annihilation by persistently trying to establish communication with the other fail because language is revealed to belong neither to self nor to other, but to inhabit the in-between, so that unlike the heteronomous encounter we have located in Lévinas, in Blanchot the two subjects in intersubjective discourse meet in the neutral realm of effacement (where "no one" actually meets, the récit's present abolished). Writing becomes an unconditional aporia: to write is not to be. Working with language thus opens up the narrating subject to his existence in the space between, between himself as producer of words and himself as produced by words, and therefore, until the end, which never arrives, deprived of himself. In Au moment voulu in particular, then, a drama of silence and language

< previous page

page_121

next page >

< previous page

page_122


is played out among the triad of figures. The narrator would establish with the two women an intersubjective relationship (understood here as the relation of two subjects giving undifferentiation and therefore an affirmation of identity, free of anxiety) that would return him to the state of happiness found in the silence he believes himself to have broken in the necessity of writing. Hence, Georges Bataille underpins the notions of ''pain" and "anguish" by claiming that "not only is Au moment voulu a happy book, but there is no novel that describes happiness more." 28 That this is a happy text is perhaps not the most immediate impression experienced by many readers, but Bataille goes on to qualify this happiness as wholly attributable to silence: "For the author nothing is comparable to silence. In silence, he is profoundly absorbed, effortlessly, painlessly; the effort and pain began only at the moment he began to speak."29 Yet silence and solitude, as in Jabès, are not in fact broken in Blanchot, for writing always leaves a trace that leads back to them. Hence, the universe of Au moment voulu in which the encounters between the women and the narrator take place is one of silence, a universe in which noises (cries, songs, doors shutting) serve to reinforce the all-pervading silence rather than rupture it. Such a paradoxical narrative perspective is identified by Gerald Prince as the récit's articulation of its own point of narrative: "It does not develop from (a) beginning to (an) end: the beginning is the end and such a development can only be illusory. It will not bring answers to the questions it has raised: these questions have already been answered. It cannot satisfy our waiting (or its own): we are waiting for what has already passed. Now is then, indeed. Here is there."30 Prince is quite right, of course. Both the temporal and spatial dimensions of the text are disrupted, displaced; the characters, though they live in the same apartment, are strangers to each other, and indeed to themselves. Hence, the diaphanous presence, or absence, of Judith and Claudia makes it impossible to state categorically who these female figures are. It does remain possible, however, to trace their functions in the récit. Judith's silence, for example, initially places her in opposition to Claudia, who sings and enters into dialogue with the narrator. But Judith's silence is punctured by cries, and though Claudia may sing, she sings in German (and "blankly" [B-Amv, 69]), in the unintelligibility of a foreign tongue (the narrator informs us that she is indeed foreign); even the title of one of her songs, "Es fällt kein Strahl" (a Lied by Schumann), evokes silence in admitting of an absence (of rays).31 Claudia, then, possesses the insufficiency of song that is the quality of the song of the Sirens, as Blanchot elaborates it in "Le Chant des Sirènes" (B-LV, 918), and that the narrator either does not

< previous page

page_122

next page >

< previous page

page_123


trust or is disappointed by: ''song had long been a place of disappointment for me" (B-Amv, 69). But, as we shall see, it is an insufficiency from which Claudia, like the Sirens, derives a certain power. Silence, in Blanchot, as I suggested previously, is by no means subordinate to language, but proves to be its absolute equivalent. Hence, the narrator can state that he had allowed himself "to be caught between two silences, one separate, exiled, lost in a distance without resources [Judith], the other intense, jealous, implacable [Claudia]" (B-Amv, 51). The Four Moments Despite the difficulty in establishing "the continuity of things" (B-Amv, 8) in Au moment voulu, the relationship between the narrator and Judith and Claudia emerges somewhat more clearly if we discern four stages or "moments" that lead up to the "desired moment" of the title: (1) the initial meeting between the narrator and Judith; (2) the entrance of Claudia, leading to a preliminary contact between herself and the narrator, and the establishing of their respective solitudes; (3) "a thought" (Judith) that opens the door, disturbing the conversation between Claudia and the narrator, and the latter's recognition that he is caught between the two silences; and (4) Judith's words of negation, "Nescio vos," that precipitate the "desired moment" and open onto the denouement and onto Blanchot's reference to Abraham. In the first stage, then, the narrator attempts to establish communication with Judith, whose extraordinary youthfulness evokes in him "a terrible distant memory" (B-Amv, 9) and takes him back "toward another life" (BAmv, 10). The imbrication of temporal frames opens up a duality that the narrator perceives in Judith (in which she paradoxically resembles herself), and this itself is mirrored in his own duality, so that this initial splitting of the self prefigures his self-effacement: "my life was going on elsewhere and . . . here, all that was left of me was this eternal immobility" (B-Amv, 19). Within this atemporality neither the narrator nor Judith are capable of situating themselves. Claudia's arrival thus presents the narrator with an opportunity to assert himself in a way that Judith's "absence" has prevented: "Claudia returned shortly afterwards. I did not know her. . . . once more everything was put back into play" (B-Amv, 25, 27). Claudia's role in this game, however, is the paralysis of time (B-Amv, 29), and once more the narrator struggles to assert his presence as incontrovertible evidence that something has happened and that time has not stood still: "'Something has happened'. 'Something?' 'Yes, just now, I am here!'" (B-Amv, 42). But by classifying him in

< previous page

page_123

next page >

< previous page

page_124


the ''daily order," Claudia merely devalues his poetic licence and immobilizes him in a rigid structure. Moreover, the fact that her "cold gaiety rendered her ungraspable" (B-Amv, 31) and her refusal to believe that the narrator could tell the truth ("all men are false and lie" [B-Amv, 45]) suggest that any approach toward intersubjectivity between these two is likely to fail. Disturbing this dissymmetrical relation is the opening of the door by "a thought" (B-Amv, 48) Judith and the narrator finds himself engaged in the intersubjective realm existing not between himself and Claudia, but between the two women, the two silences. The narrator's engagement with this thought is the realization of his own disappearance: "effaced, effacing the eternal: alone? alone! My decline was enough for everything" (B-Amv, 53). But, as he discovers, effacing the eternal merely turns death into an eternal dying: "Death! but to die I needed to write The end! and to do that, to write until the end" (B-Amv, 87). Needless to say, the text's temporal entropy prevents such closure so that even Claudia's final attempt to gain mastery over the narrator by asserting her dialogical superiority over his written word ("I am speaking . . . I am speaking!" [B-Amv, 120]) is an impetuosity that precipitates her own downfall, for such words necessitate the self-effacement from which she had earlier protected herself by asserting that "no one here wants to be linked to a story" (B-Amv, 108). Consequently, Claudia is returned to a state of nonfamiliarity that signals a return to beginnings: "Claudia returned shortly after me. I may add that these words that had once inaugurated in my eyes Claudia's life and made of her the person who comes afterwards, also returned and led me toward the same truth: I did not know her. So the whole cycle started again" (B-Amv, 136). The cycle that is about to begin again is, in fact, instigated by the savagery of Judith's words addressed to both the narrator and Claudia: "Nescio vos, 'I don't know who you are'" (B-Amv, 137), followed by her apparent death in which she collapses into the narrator's arms (B-Amv, 137). It is the "desired moment" of return, the point at which a scene in which the narrator watches one of the women sitting at the foot of the stairs one night in the South is placed alongside an identical scene in the apartment (B-Amv, 13739). For Larysa Mykyta this "desired moment" concerns Judith, basing her assumption on the difference between Claudia, who by paralyzing time would assert her "control over what threatens the unity, presence, and permanence of the self," 32 and Judith, who represents "the fascination of the source of appearance"33 and thus the space of writing. For Georges Préli, on the other hand, the "desired moment" concerns Claudia, arguing that the relation of

< previous page

page_124

next page >

< previous page

page_125


ignorance existing between the narrator and Claudia reaches its culmination in the moment in which time, characters, and the end are all obliterated. 34 What neither Mykyta nor Préli note, however, is that the paragraph introducing the ''desired moment" begins with an italicized direct object pronoun: "I saw her watching me through the open door of the hallway . . ." (B-Amv, 137) and is thus open to considerable ambiguity. In its proximity to "Claudia," the "her" would refer back to her, but it might just as well designate another "her," that is, Judith. Claudia comes back, and the narrator sees the image of Judith (who has died). Moreover, in the passage referring to the woman in the South, Blanchot's narrator states: "I had the impression that she too was seated at the foot of the stairs . . ." (B-Amv, 138, my emphasis). Claudia's action of sitting down doubles Judith's anterior action. What is clear, at least, is that this "desired moment" is a moment of infinite separation, a moment in which two subjectivities fail to interrelate. This failure of intersubjectivity is due ultimately to the insufficiency of intersubjectivity itself. Since it requires the subject to remain subject, it cannot accommodate communication when the person stating and what is being stated, signifier and signified, are no longer clearly separated as subject and object, but are both in themselves subject and object, or indeed when subjectivity itself is ousted by a narrative voice belonging to no one. Such a conclusion would suggest an alignment with Lévinas's critique of intersubjectivity as reciprocity in favor of intersubjectivity as asymmetry, although Blanchot's text would perhaps define the asymmetrical in terms of radical ignorance rather than Levinas's inequality. But at all events, whether we read the "moment" in terms of Claudia or of Judith (Mykyta suggests that Judith "is perhaps an aspect of Claudia,"35 which would simplify the problem), it is a moment that can never be present. Its very repetition abolishes its presence in the "now," the possibility of eternal return negated by its own accomplishment. Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac The moment of eternal return nevertheless precedes one other moment, for it is here after Judith's words "Nescio vos," her death, and the "desired moment" that Blanchot interpolates the reference to Abraham almost as a Midrash on the récit itself:


I met this woman whom I have called Judith: she was not related to me through friendship or as an enemy, nor through happiness or distress. She was not a disincarnate instant, she was alive. And yet, as far as I can

< previous page

page_125

7d5aff9

next page >

< previous page

page_126



understand it, something happened to her that resembled the story of Abraham. When Abraham returned from Moriah, he was not accompanied by his child, but by the image of a ram, and it was with a ram that he had to live from then on. Others saw the son in Isaac, for they were unaware of what had happened on the mountain. But Abraham saw the ram in his son, for he had turned his son into a ram. An excruciating story. I think that Judith went up the mountain, but of her own free will. No one was more free, no one cared less about powers and associated less with the world of facts. She might have said: ''God desired it," but for her this amounted to saying: "I alone did it." An order? Desire pierces through all orders. (B-Amv, 14748)

7d5aff9

Blanchot's analogy would leave little doubt that the narrator intends Judith to be seen as the figure of Abraham, but certain questions are nevertheless begged. Who exactly is Isaac? The narrator or Claudia? Who exactly is God? Claudia or the narrator? Who does Judith (not) sacrifice and to whom (as God)? For Evelyne Londyn, "Judith (Abraham), having sacrificed the narrator (Isaac) to Claudia, since Judith permits their relation, lives henceforth as Abraham with Isaac who has become a ram. For if it is the ram and not Isaac that has been sacrificed, the sacrifice has been so real and painful that Abraham is left only with the image of his sacrificed son, the ram. And the silence of Moriah up which Judith climbed, if it is the silence Kierkegaard sees in the legend, is also the silence of Judith in Au moment voulu." 36 Although Londyn acknowledges that her interpretation may perhaps be "naive," her identification of the narrator as Isaac necessarily posits Claudia as God, and Londyn seems reluctant to draw out the implications. Nevertheless, her reference to Kierkegaard strengthens the association of Judith with silence. This is the Kierkegaard of Fear and Trembling, in which Abraham's trial is the focus of attention for a narrator (Johannes de silentio) who simply cannot understand Abraham. Two quotations should suffice to indicate that Blanchot may well have had Kierkegaard's Abraham in mind when writing the passage in Au moment voulu: "Abraham is silent but he cannot speak, therein lies the distress and anguish. For if when I speak I cannot make myself understood, I do not speak even if I keep talking without stop day and night. This is the case with Abraham. He can say what he will, but there is one thing he cannot say and since he cannot say it, i.e., say it in a way that another understands it, he does not speak. . . . Though he himself understood all the tongues of the world, though the loved ones understood them too he still

< previous page

page_126

next page >

< previous page

page_127


could not talk he speaks a divine tongue he 'speaks with tongues'.'' 37 Françoise Collin glosses this passage and claims that to "speak in tongues" (1 Cor. 14:23), "like Abraham or Blanchot's Judith, is not to possess several tongues but to possess none and to go from one to the other without any of them being referential. It is never to be able to pronounce the thing, the thing itself, but just to speak. The gift of tongues that is concerned here is in no way the access to a common tongue but the test of the tongue's impossibility. The word is variation and alternation. This alternation is the récit's; it can also be called dialogue."38 As we have seen, Judith says very little throughout the récit, and it is Claudia who dialogues with the narrator. Judith's dialogue is thus one of silence, "separate, exiled, lost in a distance without resources" (B-Amv, 51). For Mykyta, however, Judith "no longer possesses that plenitude of being that guarantees the identical self-presence to itself of every human subject," and the comparison of Judith with Abraham would thus be a description of "her conscious acceptance of this loss of self-consciousness."39 What for Londyn is the sacrifice of Isaac (the narrator) is for Mykyta the self-sacrifice of Judith: "Judith willingly sacrifices not her life but life-as-presence. She wills her passing away not in the sense of dying or being 'open to death' but in the sense of changing and losing one's self, one self. She becomes for herself what Isaac became for Abraham."40 The importance of this self-sacrifice nonetheless lies in the effect it has on the narrator. Referring to Judith's words of negation, "Nescio vos," Mykyta claims that "in this moment of love, instead of trying to possess the narrator, she decapitates him like the Biblical Judith. She causes him to lose his head and his identity by making him resemble her in her resemblance. She thus makes him reflect the essence of a resemblance that is without essence."41 Mykyta here moves beyond the Abraham reference and suggests a second biblical analogy: the Judith who saves her people (Israel) from the Assyrians by decapitating their leader, Holophernes (in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical book Judith). Blanchot's Judith, whose name significantly means "Jewess,"42 dies as she utters the words that lead to the "desired moment." But how is it exactly that Judith can force the narrator to resemble her in her resemblance to nothing? Blanchot's essay "Les Deux Versions de l'imaginaire" (1951) permits ingress into this question, since it is here that Blanchot investigates the nature of the literary image: "But what is the image? When there is nothing, the image finds in this nothing its condition and disappears into it. The image demands the neutrality and the effacement of the world" (B-EL, 345). This effacement for Blanchot is brought about by death, yet "the image does not, at first sight, resemble the corpse, but the cadaverous

< previous page

page_127

next page >

< previous page

page_128


strangeness might also be that of the image'' (B-EL, 348). It is the dialectical function of the cadaverous image to mediate between the "here" and "nowhere." Hence, the corpse is not the person who has "departed" but comes to resemble that person, and what it resembles, moreover, is nothing. "Certainly," Blanchot admits, "dying is an incomparable event, and he who dies 'in your arms' is in a sense your neighbor forever. But now, he is dead" (B-EL, 349). Alluding to Gen. 1:26 ("And God said, Let us make Mankind in our image, after our likeness"), Blanchot concludes that "man is made in his image: this is what the strangeness of cadaverous resemblance teaches us. But this formula must first be understood as follows: man is unmade according to his image" (B-EL, 354). Blanchot's essay (contemporaneous with the composition of Au moment voulu) reads like an oblique commentary on the significance of Judith's death. It is through dying ("she collapsed in my arms" [B-Amv, 137]) that Judith, as Mykyta suggests, forces the narrator to reflect her in her resemblance, which is the resemblance of nothing. The narrator is "unmade according to his image," left in the world on condition that he is "no one . . . , with no name and no face" (B-Amv, 161), reduced "to the transparency of a being that one does not encounter. . . . A face, but enveloped and enclosed in the eternity of a reflection" (B-Amv, 16465). The following scenario for Blanchot's analogy now emerges: Judith (Abraham) resembles the narrator (Isaac) who resembles an image (the sacrificed ram). But where is Claudia? An answer to this question may be furnished by another essay contemporaneous with the récit, entitled "Kafka et l'exigence de l'oeuvre *" (1952). Here Blanchot would seem to support the reading of the narrator as sacrificed by Judith in an act of self-sacrifice, while also providing a possible explanation for Claudia's role in the analogy. Commenting upon Kafka's readings of Kierkegaard's Abraham, Blanchot suggests that "what is demanded of Abraham is not only the sacrifice of his son, but God himself: the son is the future of God on earth, for it is time which is truly the Promised Land, the true, the only dwelling place of the chosen people and of God in his people. Now, Abraham, by sacrificing his only son, must sacrifice time, and time sacrificed will certainly not be given back in the eternity of the beyond. The beyond is nothing other than the future, the future of God in time. The beyond is Isaac" (B-EL, 6566). In Au moment voulu, then, the analogy with Abraham (Judith) signals the point at which the narrator (Isaac) is "decapitated" and passes "beyond," to the transparency of an image, outside time (the writing of the récit). Included in this sacrifice is God himself, Claudia, whose attempts to hold things in a permanent immediacy would prevent the eternal return that Judith

< previous page

page_128

next page >

< previous page

page_129


accomplishes by removing both herself and the narrator from the ''presentness" of time. Hence, the narrator's récit has both always already happened and has not yet happened. It is, like Blanchot's cadaver, here and nowhere. For this reason the ending of Au moment voulu becomes merely a tempting illusion to which the narrator would like to succumb but cannot. In his attempt to break through the circle at whose center he recognizes himself to be "the point where the intrigue constantly returns to the present, where I can no longer forget or remember, where human events, around a center as unstable and immobile as myself, indefinitely construct their return" (B-Amv, 165) his own return is already conditioned. For he cannot efface the eternal with his final words, "Now, the end," because they are the evocation of the absence of end, and paradoxically he must be thrown back to the future of the (re-)beginning of his récit. The writer, as in Jabès, returns to the point from which he was in fact never distanced, the point he never left and cannot leave for time is distinctly absent. Blanchot's Jewess, Judith, is a silent figure, a female Abraham on the journey to Mount Moriah. At the end of this journey, all three participants are sacrificed: Abraham himself (Judith), his son Isaac (the narrator), and God (Claudia). The depersonalization of the narrator and Judith's silence place them in a state of reciprocal solitude and separation, the same state of affairs we located in Jabès's Midrashim on God's command to Abram and Abram's subsequent discovery of the other. Blanchot's récit thus provides both a literal and metaphorical "mise-en-abyme" of writing: narrator, characters, story, history, beginning, end are all put into the abyss, the depth and the irreducible secret of the text itself. Hence, the irrevocable estrangement between the narrator and the two women once the moment of return has arrived is the discovery of a radical alterity, for the eternal return is the return of the same, but the same that has become other through its very return. The use of Abraham to represent the writer's sole attributes of silence and solitude is far from misplaced in this text that also locates the "monumental event" in history in which no rams appeared to replace the blood sacrifice of future generations: "I sometimes stared at length through the window at the mutilated façade of the synagogue (the bomb is still remembered): the black wall, the beams holding up or closing off the entrance, a pitiless image. Most certainly the truth does not die easily" (B-Amv, 75, my emphasis). This phrase surges forward in the récit without precedent. It hangs in the text as a disquieting reminder of the war and, in particular, of the fate of the Jews. The narrator later comments: "When man has lived through the unforgettable, he locks himself up with it to regret it, or he begins to wander

< previous page

page_129

next page >

< previous page

page_130


to find it again; he thus becomes the phantom of the event'' (B-Amv, 135). Although this event is death, of course, Blanchot later more explicitly terms it the disaster, and its disastrous encounter with the literary space eventually leads Blanchot beyond the purely fictional discourse, as we shall see in the following chapter. Au moment voulu, however, remains Blanchot's most eloquent testimony of the self-sacrificial text in which the phantom of the event is, quite literally, a voice from beyond. It is not surprising that the figure of Abra(ha)m in the works of Lévinas, Jabès, and Blanchot should reflect their own respective philosophical or literary concerns. In relation to subjectivity, alterity, exile, errancy, dialogue, silence, death, and sacrifice, Abra(ha)m has permitted us to extricate further some of their differences and resemblances, and to prolong the direction in which their thought moves. The subject of my final chapter locates a crossroads in their work, which is more than just a rhetorical figure, even if Jabès, for example, problematically figures it as metaphor. It is the event evoked momentarily in Blanchot's Au moment voulu; it is the wound of the word in Jabès; and it is the culmination of Lévinas's critique of ontology: the Shoah.

< previous page

page_130

next page >

< previous page

page_131


4 Auschwitz and the Limits of Dis-Course Writing on the Shoah presents the most forceful challenge imaginable to the question of representation. Even those works that have become modern classics on the subject (such as Wiesel's La Nuit [Night] or Levi's If This Is a Man) are by no means comfortably positioned within the mimetic contract. The inevitable and intractable problem of the interference between the testimonial and the fictional raises questions of the ineffable and unnameable, which critical discourse all too often turns into cliché and the commonplace. Through whichever medium thought chooses to express itself on the Shoah the literary, the critical, the philosophical, the plastic, or the cinematic there comes a point when silence seems to impose itself and expression founders. This does not mean that language should fall silent and tacitly affirm Wittgenstein's famous dictum: ''What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." 1 Blanchot too suggests that silence is not the option: "Wittgenstein's all too famous and too often repeated precept, 'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence' given that by enunciating it he has not been able to impose silence on himself does indicate that in the last analysis one has to speak in order to fall silent. But with what kind of words?" (B-CI, 92). What words indeed are to measure up to the incommensurable when survivors themselves are at a loss for words? One recalls in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah how the Chelmno survivor Simon Srebnik's moving testimony is broken with interruptions and choked silence: "One cannot recount that. / Nobody can / picture what happened here. / Impossible. And nobody can understand it. / And even me, today. . . ."2 The present chapter does not attempt to offer an overview of the huge field of the problematics of writing on the Shoah, but it does address the questions of how precisely the recounting, representation and comprehension of the Shoah are figured in the works of Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès. The following preliminary sections

< previous page

page_131

next page >

< previous page

page_132


are thus a sketch both of each writer's personal relation to the Shoah and of certain theoretical positions adopted by each. I shall then turn to the various ways in which the experience of the Shoah is assimilated (or not) into aspects of a number of specific works. Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès, and the Shoah Lévinas In his brief autobiographical essay ''Signature," which closes the second edition of the volume of essays Difficile liberté, Lévinas sketches his personal and professional path in one page and concludes that this disparate inventory of his life constitutes a biography "dominated by the premonition and the memory of the Nazi horror" (L-DL, 406). We have already seen this presentiment in Lévinas's articles of the 1930s for Paix et Droit, and, as we shall see shortly, the memory of the Shoah filters through all of Lévinas's subsequent work. But in "Signature" Lévinas summarily dismisses his own wartime experiences when he merely mentions renewing friendships in Paris "after a long captivity in Germany" (L-DL, 405), a captivity during which, moreover, Lévinas wrote De l'existence à l'existant (LDEE, 10). It is not until his interview with François Poirier in 1986 that Lévinas evokes more explicitly the stalag in which he was a prisoner of war and thus protected by his French uniform from deportation to the concentration camps, unlike the rest of his family, who died in Auschwitz. Lévinas recounts in particular the story of a small dog that attached itself to the work detail and greeted them on their return with barks and leaps. "In this corner of Germany," comments Lévinas, "where, as we went through the village, we were regarded by the inhabitants as Juden, this dog evidently took us for men. Admittedly, the inhabitants never insulted us or did us any harm, but their looks spoke volumes. We were condemned, or contaminated, germcarriers. And the little dog welcomed us at the entrance to the camp, barking happily and jumping around us like a friend" (L-QEV, 8586). This oral reflection on the paradox of the dog incapable of not seeing the human in the Jew and the bystanders whose indifference saw only the pestiferous Jew and not the human is given a slightly more philosophical treatment in an earlier written piece entitled "Nom d'un chien ou le droit naturel." Lévinas opens that essay with a quotation from Exod. 22:30 "And you shall be holy men to me: neither shall you eat any meat that is torn of beasts in the field; you shall cast it to the dogs" from which he extrapolates the spectacle of the horrors of war, where members of the same species tear each other apart. 3 In other words, the verse presents an image of the sur-

< previous page

page_132

next page >

< previous page

page_133


vival of the species, where the law of force reigns and resorts to violence to maintain itself, where the animal strength of man gives itself up to conflict. Allegorical interpretations aside, however, Lévinas cites the venerable rabbinical hermeneutic that the dog of the verse is quite literally a dog whose natural right as a dog is to eat its fill of what is not fit for human consumption. Lévinas then links this dog to the dogs mentioned in a subordinate clause in an earlier verse (Exod. 11:7), which relates the most terrible of God's plagues visited upon the Egyptians, the deaths of all the firstborn, and adds that while there will be a great uproar among the people of the land, ''against any of the children of Yisra'el not a dog shall move its tongue, neither against man or beast: that you may know that the Lord differentiates between Mizrayim [Egypt] and between Yisra'el." For Lévinas, the silence of these dogs testifies to man's dignity at the moment in which the slaves who served the slaves of the State are enfranchised, retaining the memory of their servitude and showing solidarity with all the oppressed throughout the generations (L-DL, 215). These apparently rhetorical excursions into violence and slavery are then brusquely contextualized when Lévinas evokes the stalag in which he was a prisoner of war. The bystanders encountered by the Jewish prisoners on their way to work in the surrounding forest "stripped us of our human skin. We were almost nonhuman, a group of monkeys" (L-DL, 215), whereas the dog, nicknamed Bobby, recognized in them their irreducible humanity: "For him we were incontestably men" (L-DL, 216). Lévinas moves from the biblical to the personal and finally, as he concludes, to the Greek, where he once more resorts to the image of Ulysses in order to set up, as we saw in the previous chapter, his favored opposition between the Hebraic and the Hellenic: "Was the dog who recognized the disguised Ulysses on his return from the Odyssey related to our dog? No! absolutely not! That was Ithaca and the homeland. Here, it was nowhere. The last Kantian of Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize the maxims of his impulses, he was a descendant of the dogs of Egypt. And his friendly bark an animal faith was born in the silence of his ancestors on the banks of the Nile" (L-DL, 216). Bobby the dog, then, is transformed into a metaphor for the resistance to the dehumanization of the Jew willed by Nazi Germany and raised to a universal maxim. It is not mere coincidence, therefore, that we once more find Ulysses and his dog in Autrement qu'être in the context of vulnerability. Here vulnerability, exposure to others, and responsibility in the proximity of others are recurrent leitmotifs of material acts of the giving of oneself that articulate the noncoincidence, nonsymmetry, and nonreciprocity of self and other. Iden-

< previous page

page_133

next page >

< previous page

page_134


tity as ''signification of the one-for-the-other," in which the "deposition that is the incarnation of the subject" (LAQE, 127) gives significance, carries with it, Lévinas suggests, an ambiguity that he expresses through the image of maternity (the gestation of the other in the same, where the self incarnates the other). The ambiguity lies in the fact that the incarnated self (of flesh and blood) is capable of losing its signification (of the one-for-the-other) and asserting itself animalistically in its conatus. Lévinas comments: "It is a dog who recognizes as his own Ulysses who has come to take possession of his own goods. But this ambiguity is the condition of vulnerability itself, in other words, of sensibility as signification. It is the extent to which sensibility delights in itself 'enwrapped in itself', 'is me' that in its benevolence for the other, it remains for the other, despite itself, a non-act, the signification for the other and not for self" (L-AQE, 127). Slave and master, child and mother, each contest the property of self while the self is breached by the other. The all too real vulnerability of the Jewish prisoners of war and the denial of humanity refused through Bobby the dog are thus linked through the figure of Ulysses and his dog to the new definition given by Lévinas to the subject-for-the-other as vulnerability itself. It is not surprising, then, that Autrement qu'être, the actual articulation of an otherwise-than-being, should be placed under the shadow of the Shoah, as Lévinas indicates in his two dedications at the beginning of the text. The first is dedicated "To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National-Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-Semitism" (L-AQE, 5). The second, written in Hebrew, evokes the purely personal memory of Lévinas's parents, brothers, and parents-in-law, who perished in the Shoah. The notion of anti-Semitism structured on the model of the hatred of the other man (precisely what is analyzed by Blanchot in L'Entretien infini) 4 permits André Neher to speak of a "meta-Jewish participation" in the Shoah. Like Lévinas, Neher asserts the unique and specific nature of the Shoah as the deliberate destruction of European Jewry, while including within it the millions of other victims (gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents, for example). Writes Neher: "Auschwitz is a brutal failure whose absolute bitterness is underlined by what was universal in it. The meta-Jewish participation in the death of Auschwitz the physical participation of the whole Gypsy people, of so many non-Jewish individuals, Christians or Marxists, who died with the Jews, of the death of the Jews; and the moral participation of the whole of humanity through the density of what Auschwitz introduced into history this participation founds the universal character of the

< previous page

page_134

next page >

< previous page

page_135


failure of Auschwitz.'' 5 This failure, and in particular the cultural failure, is the main thrust of Adorno's damning assertions that "Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed" and "All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage."6 For many commentators, then, the Shoah must call into question the fundamental beliefs of a humanistic culture. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, for example, asserts: "the implementation of the Final Solution not an eruption of the chaotic forces of violence but a systematized, mechanized, and socially organized program was a mockery of the very idea of culture that had survived into the twentieth century. No symbolic universe grounded in humanistic beliefs could confront the Holocaust without the risk of being shaken to its foundations."7 Shmuel Trigano too directs his attack specifically at Western culture and discourses that led the Jew to Auschwitz: "Auschwitz has inexorably put its signature to the impossible normalization of the diaspora. . . . The diaspora in fact failed historically at Auschwitz. . . . Auschwitz is this giant gaping hole in Jewish (and universal) consciousness, the giant Interdiction, the Meaning of meanings through which all Jewish consciousness passes today. . . . The whole universe still lies at Auschwitz."8 In his assault on Western discourse and the negative alterity of the Jew, Trigano states that "the Western idea died at Auschwitz, but the West's temptation is great to drag humanity down into this death at the heart of a universal cataclysm" and that "Auschwitz, the unthought, is the sole horizon of Jews today."9 It would not be difficult to argue that Lévinas's philosophical enterprise can be situated on the horizon evoked by Trigano. But for Lévinas, if the Shoah calls humanism into question, it is because humanism revealed itself during the Shoah not to be human enough (L-AQE, 203). The nuance is important, for it places Lévinas in a position separate from many other postmodern thinkers for whom humanism and its return into thought would merely be an outmoded label of a bourgeois culture clutching at straws after the cataclysm of the Shoah. It is also what lies behind the difference between those structuralists and poststructuralists who cry the death of the author and of subjectivity (and here one might add the names of Blanchot and Jabès) and Lévinas, who, in the words of Susan Handelman, "deconstructs the subject but saves the person."10 In the light of the Shoah, then, Lévinas would humanize humanism, not dismiss it; give a meaning to ethics, not abandon it. His philosophy of alterity, even as it makes its first tentative steps toward evasion, would recognize that the political totalitarianism of Hitler is not without its correlative in the ontological totalitarianism of Western philosophy culminating, for Lévin-

< previous page

page_135

next page >

< previous page

page_136


as, in Heidegger. Ethics, therefore, would be both prior to politics and the first philosophy, the move from the egology of the ontological and its bent toward violence and war (the recuperation of otherness to the same) to the otherwise-than-being as subjectivity-for-the-other. From the personal experience of dehumanization, Lévinas seeks the ethical in the interpersonal, not in anonymous and impersonal linguistic structures or tropes. This is why he does not agonize over whether one should or should not philosophize after Auschwitz, but instead sets out to show how after Auschwitz philosophizing is still possible on the condition that it is no longer the philosophical vehicle of the violence he locates in the Western tradition. Blanchot Like Lévinas, Blanchot was also actively thinking about the situation of the Jews in the 1930s, but from the other side, as it were. As we saw in chapter 1, Blanchot's calls for a national and spiritual revolution for a politically and socially degenerate France found expression in his journalistic contributions to a number of right-wing reviews in which he directed his verbal violence against the Jews. Yet we also saw that Blanchot was simultaneously anticapitalist, anti-Communist, antidemocratic, and, importantly, antifascist and that from the Munich pact onwards he withdrew from active political and public life and refused to collaborate with the Vichy regime after France's defeat. Our knowledge of his actual wartime activities, other than his literary writings, remains nevertheless restricted. Lévinas, for example, tells us that Blanchot ''lived through the Occupation in an extremely acute and painful way; in particular he saved my wife during the war while I was in captivity" (L-QEV, 71), while Maurice Nadeau somewhat enigmatically recounts: "During the war Blanchot is appalled first at Hitler's infamous acts against the Jews, and then at Vichy's. He is taken hostage in a town in the Midi where he is staying, and is about to be shot. He miraculously escapes death in circumstances which he describes to me but which he alone has the right to reveal." 11 This would certainly be dramatic evidence of what Roger Laporte refers to as Blanchot's "fight under the Occupation,"12 while Blanchot's silence regarding his rumored activities in the Resistance was broken in a most startling manner by Blanchot himself in his recent récit L'Instant de ma mort (1994), of which I shall say more later. This work notwithstanding, Blanchot's detractors for his prewar political engagements have frequently been discreetly referred to his postwar texts on Judaism and what he calls the "disaster." Moreover, on the political balance sheet, reading from Right to Left, Blanchot's rare political writings

< previous page

page_136

next page >

< previous page

page_137


since the war certainly demonstrate a commitment to largely left-wing causes: his stand against De Gaulle in 1958, his part in the ''Manifeste des 121" against the war in Algeria, 13 and his participation in the events of May 1968. As for Blanchot's actual meditations on the Shoah, one particular fragment or aphorism in L'Ecriture du désastre (1980) will permit us to begin to trace the framework in which Blanchot positions writing after Auschwitz: "He who has been the contemporary of the camps is forever a survivor: death will not make him die" (B-ED, 217). In a letter of the same year, Blanchot expands on this notion of being someone's contemporary (he is referring to Lévinas), but this time he explicitly evokes Auschwitz: "To be a contemporary is not just the marvel of an undeserved happiness, it is to share without sharing the most unhappy and the most tragic events of history where the element in them that surpasses time is retained in Auschwitz a name that can hardly be pronounced."14 Four ideas emerge from these comments: (1) as contemporaries, we are all, Jews and non-Jews alike, survivors of the Shoah; (2) death has lost the ability to bring an end to life; (3) life is a living-on (a "sur-vival"); and (4) death is an infinite dying. As we have seen in the previous chapters, death has never, in fact, been absent from Blanchot's thought or fiction, but now, after the Shoah, those who survived (all of us) find themselves bearing witness to the impossible without the ability to do so: "The necessity of testifying is the obligation of a testimony that alone may be provided, each in his singularity, by the impossible witnesses witnesses of the impossible. Some have survived, but their sur-vival is no longer life; it is the rupture with living affirmation, the proof that what life is (not narcissistic life but for the other) has suffered the decisive violation that leaves nothing intact. From that point onwards it may be that all narration, indeed all poetry, has lost the basis on which an other language would arise, through the extinction of the happiness of speech, which is awaited in the most mediocre silence" (B-AC, 98). The necessity of testimony, then, is coupled with the conviction that an other language which can but advance in silence cannot be called either narrative or poetry. Hence, the attempt to write about the Shoah provides Blanchot with confirmation that writing within a traditional, conventional form writing "stories" is no longer possible: "A récit? No, no récit, never again" (B-FJ, 38). If Blanchot therefore is to write about the Shoah, it cannot be a question of a récit or, more paradoxically, it cannot be a question of the Shoah. In all events, the writing that will attempt to say the unsayable will be rigorously nonrepresentational, straining to express an essential inexpressibility.

< previous page

page_137

next page >

< previous page

page_138


Blanchot, of course, is not the first to call into question the mimetic properties of language. Nevertheless, if the Shoah marked for such writers as Adorno and Trigano the failure of Western civilization and culture, Blanchot identifies the failure quite specifically in thought and language itself. On both counts Blanchot, like Lévinas, locates the wound in Heidegger's involvement with Nazism. In a parenthetic comment in his essay on Lévinas, Blanchot writes: ''Nazism and Heidegger: a wound of thought"; 15 and on a number of occasions in L'Entretien infini, Blanchot refers to Heidegger as having compromised writing itself, particularly in his address to the University of Freiburg on taking up the rectorate in 1933 (B-EI, 4, 210). In an article for Débat (1984), moreover, Blanchot expresses the need to elucidate Heidegger's political engagement with the Nazi party, while stating: "Heidegger's political pronouncements with which he concurs with Hitler are inexplicable and indefensible. . . . there was a corruption of writing, an abuse, travesty, and misappropriation of language. Henceforth, this language will be under suspicion."16 And in the heated debate following the publication of Victor Farias's book Heidegger et le nazisme (1988), Blanchot suggests that "it is in Heidegger's silence on the Extermination that his irreparable fault lies."17 This suspicion that weighs on language and Heidegger's unpardonable silence invite one correlative question concerning Blanchot's own work, namely, the extent to which his récit L'Instant de ma mort can be read as an indirect act of erasing his own culpability. I wish to suspend this question for the moment in order to see how Blanchot in his article for Débat qualifies the revelation of the intellectual to himself (Blanchot's own transition from right-wing to left-wing?) as a direct consequence of anti-Semitism: "From the Dreyfus affair to Hitler and to Auschwitz, anti-Semitism (with racism and xenophobia) confirmed itself as having most forcefully revealed the intellectual to himself: in other words, it was this revelation of the concern for others that forced him (or not) to leave his creative solitude. The categorical imperative, losing the ideal generality that Kant had given it, became Adorno's imperative, which he more or less formulated as follows: 'Think and act in such a way that Auschwitz is never repeated'; this implies that Auschwitz must not become a concept and that an absolute was reached there, faced with which other rights and other duties are judged."18 Two central ideas arise from this passage: (1) if Auschwitz is not to become a concept (that is to say, an abstract idea availing itself to thought, and thus potentially repeated in the thinking), then it must be thought in ways that are nonconceptual; (2) if Auschwitz represents an absolute, then it is unqualified, unconditional, absolutely different. As such, thought, and the language that registers it, cannot know Auschwitz.

< previous page

page_138

next page >

< previous page

page_139


For Blanchot, the very notion of knowledge is brought into question: ''Knowledge that goes so far as to accept horror in order to know it reveals the horror of knowledge, the squalor of knowledge, the discreet complicity that maintains it in relation to what is most insupportable in power" (B-ED, 130). Yet, Blanchot concludes, "how, in fact, can one accept not to know? We read books on Auschwitz. The wish of all, in Auschwitz, the last wish: know what happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know" (B-ED, 131). Two issues are at stake here: (1) the idea of knowledge as complicitous with power and violence and (2) the paradoxical imperative of Blanchot's closing lines (reiterated in relation to Lévinas and Jabès). 19 Blanchot is not advocating a policy of disregarding the Shoah, of continuing to live as if it never happened simply because we can never understand it (even if we read eyewitness accounts). Rather, he is suggesting that what did go on at Auschwitz has altered the way in which we can comprehend the phenomenon. The Shoah unthinkable will surrender to thought (or knowledge), not through "the search for knowledge" (B-ED, 131), from which Blanchot balks because of the idea that knowledge is power, but through an entirely new language that undoes knowledge (when knowledge is power). This language is intimately related in Blanchot's thought to the problematics of remembering and forgetting: "the war (the Second World War) was not just the war, an historical event like any other, circumscribed and limited with its causes, its episodes and results. It was an absolute. This absolute is given a name whenever one pronounces the names of Auschwitz, Warsaw (the ghetto and the struggle for the city's liberation), Treblinka, Dachau, Büchenwald, Neuengamme, Oranienburg, Belsen, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, and so many others. What happened there the holocaust of the Jews, the genocide against Poland, and the formation of a concentrationary universe is, whether we speak of it or not, the depths of memory in the privacy of which each of us, the youngest and the mature, henceforth learns to remember and to forget" (B-Am, 12829). We need to pay careful attention to Blanchot's words here (I shall return to them): war, absolute, Auschwitz reverberating as synonyms to the point that whoever says one says the other. For Blanchot, then, whether we speak of the Shoah or not, it is impossible to speak of it. And yet unable to speak of anything but the Shoah, we are constrained to speaking this impossibility: "Impossible therefore to forget it, impossible to remember it. Impossible also, whenever one speaks of it, to speak of it and finally, since there is nothing to say except this incomprehensible event, it is the word alone that must bear it without saying it" (B-

< previous page

page_139

next page >

< previous page

page_140


EI, 200, my emphasis). Such paradoxes are not a subtle means for Blanchot to avoid talking about such disagreeable issues as war guilt, responsibility, and anti-Semitism. For Blanchot, the Shoah is the issue, the point at which all his preoccupations intersect, as he indicates in a letter to Bernard-Henri Lévy in 1989: ''Today, I have no other thought than for Auschwitz." 20 Blanchot, then, opts for seeing the Shoah as the expression of the inexpressible, as a rupture in thought, and indeed as a rupture in history: "the infinite violence of pain: the rupture of violent power that has tried to make and mark an era" (B-Am, 253). Jabès, too, identifies the Shoah as a rupture or interruption in history: "Six million burned bodies divide our century in two with the terrible image they perpetuate" (J-DDD, 82). It is not surprising that it is precisely in relation to Jabès that Blanchot develops his thoughts concerning the interruptions of discourse. The first is the necessary interruption that permits the exchange between two or more interlocutors, while the second introduces the waiting that measures an irreducible distance between them. In this second interruption, the "interruption of being" (B-EI, 109), Blanchot indicates three possible forms of cessation: "one where the void becomes work; the other where the void becomes tiredness, misery; and another ultimate, hyperbolic one where worklessness (perhaps thought) is indicated" (B-EI, 112). Blanchot locates these forms of cessation in Jabès's Le Livre des questions, modifying Jabès's discourse to "discourse" and indicating by this a move into discontinuity: "And this dis-course makes the poet responsible for the interruption on all its levels as work; as tiredness, pain, misery; as worklessness of the work's absence and thus constantly calling him to break (a rupture that is the skill of rhythm), for he knows that the word, too, can become power and violence, a power, even though forbidden and bearing interdiction, that forbids (as perhaps happens in all ethical systems)" (B-Am, 256). Blanchot once more notes here how the word can be in a relation to power and violence (Heidegger lending his philosophical discourse to Nazism, for example). One way of breaking (or interrupting) such a relation is to respond to a fragmentary demand that Blanchot characterizes as the space in which "an other word" is at work, "separated from the discourse, not denying and in this sense not affirming, and yet, between the fragments, in the interruption and the break, permitting the play of the unlimited of difference" (B-EI, 231). This "unlimited of difference" arising from Blanchot's "other word," or more exactly "word other," would be the means of expressing (without mastery, power, or authority) what is fundamentally "other" and "different" in Auschwitz. It is a word that causes dispersal and dislocation (B-EI,

< previous page

page_140

next page >

< previous page

page_141


30), so that erring and detour become the writer's only course of direction (B-EI, 36). This erring movement does not go back and forth in a dialectic, refusing, instead, to submit to the optical metaphors of clarity and lightness that regulate the Western metaphysical modes of truth or falseness and preferring to remain perpetually in error (B-EI, 38). Blanchot's writing word thus moves discontinuously, not toward unity and totality (or truth) but toward infinity (in a relation of alterity behind which clearly lies Lévinas). It cannot be tied down or possessed by a transcendent subject. In Lévinas's terminology, it ruins the subject, denuding it of its subjectivity, depriving it of its ability to affirm its ''I": "the 'I' ceases to be sovereign; sovereignty is in the Other who alone is absolute" (B-EI, 9495). 21 This relation, then, both attracts and repulses all "I," forcing it out of its place in order to become "nomadic and anonymous in a space-abyss of resonance and condensation" (B-EI, 96). This inability to hold onto and express identity is precisely what Blanchot locates in the concentration camp experience of Robert Antelme's L'Espèce humaine (The human species): "The man of the camps is the closest one can get to powerlessness. All human power is outside him, and outside him too is existence in the first-person, individual sovereignty, the word that says 'I'" (B-EI, 194). Personal consciousness is lost, replaced by "pain," "tiredness" and "misery," establishing an infinite void between beings, such that "this void is perhaps what is most important to bring to expression as emptiness to the point that speaking with tiredness, pain, or misery could be speaking according to the dimension of language in its infinity" (B-EI, 111). To speak according to this infinite dimension of language is to respect the infinite alterity of the other, whereby man remains man by being other. It is the alterity of the Jew, for example, that Blanchot suggests was such anathema to the Nazis that they required their complete annihilation (B-EI, 190), yet it is precisely this alterity that makes the Jew, like any other man, a member of the "human species." This is the fundamental lesson that Antelme learns from his concentration camp experience: "there is no ambiguity, we remain men, we will end as men. . . . It is because we are men like them that the SS will finally be powerless before us. . . . We are forced to say that there is only one human species. . . . the power of the executioner can be none other than man's: the power of murder. He can kill a man, but he cannot change him into something else"22 Hence, as Blanchot comments, "man is indestructible, which means that there is no limit to man's destruction" (B-EI, 200). Blanchot's new language, his fragmentary word, is intimately related to this paradoxical "indestructible disappearance" (B-EI, 234), and in the aftermath of the

< previous page

page_141

next page >

< previous page

page_142


Shoah, man, for Blanchot, is caught in the realm of an infinite dying, ''where dying, losing the time in which one can still come to an end, is to be engaged in the infinite 'present' of death as an impossible dying, a present toward which the experience of suffering is clearly turned. The experience leaves us with no time to put an end to it, even by dying, since we have lost death as an end" (B-EI, 64). All the narrators of Blanchot's récits "after Auschwitz" can be seen to express this notion of sur-vival after a lost death, while the texts themselves call into question their own status as récits. Sarah Kofman elaborates that "there is no récit possible on Auschwitz and after Auschwitz, if by récit one understands the recounting of a history of events that make sense." 23 The events of Auschwitz are simply unimaginable, a term "too weak, still too reassuring, to say what cannot be said and yet must be said, following an ethical demand that communicates with the highest demand of writing, and breaks with all idyllic language."24 This idyllic language is also the speculative rational discourse that would attempt to understand and make sense of Auschwitz. Commenting upon Adorno and Lyotard, David Carroll claims that "'after Auschwitz', all discourse is delegitimized, all philosophical and historical claims to rationality are suspect. Auschwitz, a name that has a particular and horrible historical signification and determination, puts the entire historical genre into question."25 For Blanchot, however, this applies equally, and in his case more urgently, to the fictional genre, his own idyllic language. Blanchot states this quite categorically in Après coup when, alluding to William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice, he notes that "there can be no fictional account of Auschwitz" (B-AC, 98). This is why, in his study of Antelme, Blanchot concentrates on the fact that L'Espèce humaine is an eye-witness account. As Alexandre Leupin suggests: "Auschwitz cannot be the object of literature but only of a testimony, for it (dis)severs our capacity to think fictively."26 By subscribing to the belief that only a testimony can speak of Auschwitz, Blanchot neglects the extent to which such eye-witness accounts can also be read as fiction, the potential for interference I mentioned earlier. For Blanchot, it is enough that the interruption in history caused by the Shoah has brought about the interruption of fiction. Hence, for any fiction to be written today, it must paradoxically be written before the Shoah: "No matter at what date it may be written, every récit is henceforth from before Auschwitz" (B-AC, 99). In other words, for the récit to exist, it must forget Auschwitz. Forgetting becomes the prime condition for remembering: "No doubt forgetting does its work and permits work still to be done. But to this forgetting, the forgetting of an event in

< previous page

page_142

next page >

< previous page

page_143


which all possibility has foundered, there responds a failing memory, without recall, haunted in vain by the immemorial. Humanity in its entirety was obliged to die through the trial it suffered in the few (those who incarnate life itself, almost the totality of a people promised to a perpetual presence)'' (B-AC, 9899). Blanchot clearly succumbs here to what Trigano identified earlier as the temptation to drag down the whole of humanity into "this death at the heart of a universal cataclysm." This universal cataclysm, in Blanchot's terms, is a veritable disaster, and all discourse for Blanchot after Auschwitz is disastrous, precisely the name he gives to our modern nonrelation to cosmological existence (or a-cosmic relation, detached from any fixed reference to a star: "dis-aster"). This disastrous situation begins to find expression in Blanchot's fictional work in L'Attente l'oubli (1962), his last identifiable récit (I am leaving aside for the moment L'Instant de ma mort), in which the structures of language are undone by the fragmentary word. "In its lucid incoherence and acosmic ability to disorient," 27 as one critic puts it, it is both the culmination of Blanchot's narrative work in the reaching of its own limits, and, more importantly, a text that meditates on the Shoah while never once mentioning it. I shall not be claiming that L'Attente l'oubli is about the Shoah indeed this would be inconsistent with Blanchot's remarks we have analyzed but that the Shoah can be read as the thought behind it that does not permit itself to be thought. Paradox, as we have learned in reading Blanchot, is never alien to his text. The Shoah, then, can be posited as the unnarrated experience that fragments Blanchot's text from within. Jabès The notion of the unthought that I shall posit in relation to Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli finds its correlative in Jabès's work: "One does not think death, the void, the nothingness, the Nothing; but their innumerable metaphors: a means of skirting the unthought" (J-PLS, 77). In Jabès, however, one of the innumerable metaphors for circumventing, or tracing out, the unthought is the explicit word "Auschwitz" itself, and its use poses a number of questions. As a synecdoche of the Shoah, for example, what guarantees the inscription of Auschwitz from being reduced to a meaningless (extravagant) rhetorical trope? Are the traces of Auschwitz in Jabès's work illegible and unintelligible? Does its metaphorical status signal more than its naked signification does its saying exceed its said, as Lévinas would put it or does the meta-phora fail to transfer, to carry behind, beyond or with it, that which Jabès consciously silences? Is Auschwitz a "meaningful metaphor," in the sense in which George Steiner speculatively suggests is

< previous page

page_143

next page >

< previous page

page_144


not possible: ''It may be that the Shoah has eradicated the saving grace, the life-giving mystery of meaningful metaphor in Western speech and, correlatively, in that highest organisation of speech which we call poetry and philosophical thought"? 28 The aim of the subsequent section on Jabès will be to disentangle his references to Auschwitz within the economy of a number of his more recent texts, and to suggest the ways in which Auschwitz escapes the grasp of textual containment. Here, however, I wish to look at a number of circumstantial comments by Jabès in which he explicitly indicates the orientation of his writing in relation to Auschwitz. Like Lévinas and Blanchot, Jabès was physically untouched himself by the Shoah, but like Blanchot Jabès nevertheless considers himself a survivor: "I told you that I considered myself a survivor. Every Jew can say the same thing, and this is not just from a sense of solidarity" (J-DL, 93). Such solidarity is nonetheless in evidence both before and after the war, with Jabès actively militating in Italian antifascist leagues and in 1934 cofounding the "Youth League against racism and anti-Semitism" (J-DL, 45). From 1957 onwards, however, Jabès abstained from overt political activity, while never ceasing to consider himself "a man of the left" (J-DL, 46). As a metaphorical survivor, then, Jabès permits himself to speak of "our flayed sensibility after Auschwitz" (J-DL, 93), an event through which all questioning must pass: "all questioning that avoided Auschwitz would miss the essential" (J-DL, 92). These remarks to Marcel Cohen in 1980 are the first instances in which Jabès breaks his previous reserve in using the word Auschwitz to refer to the landscape of his books. In an interview published in 1989, Jabès comments on his exile from Egypt in 1957 and elaborates that Le Livre des questions is first and foremost "the brutal rupture with a country. From one day to the next I was no longer 'Edmond Jabès, Frenchspeaking writer'; I was 'Edmond Jabès, Jew'. On an individual, human, scale, even if it drastically changed my life at the age of forty-four, it was a small drama. But it awakened something much more serious which is, shall we say, 'Auschwitz'. Whether you are Jewish or Christian, whether you lived through this experience or not, there was 'that'. And starting from then, our writing has changed."29 For Jabès, personal and ontological exile thus become allied with the historical condition of the Jew, the diaspora and the Shoah. His assertion that Auschwitz has irremediably changed our writing does not, however, align him with Adorno's oft-quoted (and misinterpreted) "No poetry after Auschwitz," to which Jabès categorically refuses to subscribe: "To Adorno's statement that 'One can no longer write poetry after Auschwitz', inviting a global questioning of our culture, I would be tempted to answer: yes, one can.

< previous page

page_144

next page >

< previous page

page_145


One has to write out of that break, out of that unceasingly revived wound'' (J-DL, 93, my emphasis). Jabès introduces here a morally prescriptive position ("one has to"), and he unceasingly maintains this attitude both toward Adorno and toward the idea that the word since Auschwitz has been wounded: "You know Adorno's phrase that 'one cannot write a poem after Auschwitz'. That means that one can no longer vibrate lyrically; we are dry. . . . Before such an event, our culture has failed. We are faced with a word that has lied. But we still have to try to live with this word, the sole property of the writer, even if we know that this word is wounded." 30 Auschwitz, then, according to these formulations, is a metaphor for the wounded word, the sole property of the writer, and Jabès will claim the right to express this wound without in fact speaking of Auschwitz at all: "It is not for me to bear witness. Elie Wiesel can bear witness because he was in the camps, I never knew the camps, but this doesn't prevent me having the right not to speak about the camps but to say what we have become after the camps. What language has become for me. I read a sentence, and I see the wound of the sentence."31 Yet despite the insistence of these statements on the difference between those who use the word to bear witness to Auschwitz (Wiesel) and those for whom the word bears the traces of Auschwitz (Jabès), Jabès's writing remains no less problematic. On the one hand, there are the critics who see Jabès's books as intimately related to Judaism and the history of the persecution of the Jewish people, and, on the other, there are those who see Jabès articulating a distorted view of Judaism coupled with an objectionable use of the Shoah. Blanchot's early reading of Jabès in which, as we have seen, he locates the various interruptions at work (writing, Judaism, the catastrophe) has perhaps been the most influential in voicing the former position. For the critic Berel Lang, however, Jabès's strategy of "writing-the-Holocaust" means that Jabès "fails" the Jew, language, and the Shoah by perpetuating a distorted view of Judaism (the negative image of the Jew as a wanderer in exile) and by elaborating innumerable paradoxes in which the Shoah is dissolved in generalization. Lang concludes that the "measure of history" in Jabès fails to convince and returns to the moral (im)propriety of writing about the essentially unsayable.32 Yet Jabès's decision to write obliquely on the Shoah does not necessarily lessen the impact of his discourse. If Jabès is arguably a writer of the Shoah, and this in itself would seem to reduce his books to a common denominator to which they are fundamentally opposed, he is most certainly a post-Shoah writer. Between Le Livre des questions and his third major cycle, Le Livre des limites, however, there is a distinct change in the way in which Jabès writes in the assumed presence of the Shoah. As the lovers Sarah Schwall

< previous page

page_145

next page >

< previous page

page_146


and Yukel Serafi disappear, as the imaginary named rabbis give way to anonymous sages and disciples, so Jabès's books shift their ground from the Shoah as an all-pervading presence, an unnarrated background, to the very word Auschwitz as a more concrete, typographical, interruption, disturbing, deranging, and decentering Jabès's texts. In Le Parcours (1985) Auschwitz thus traces its name for the first time: ''In every name there is a disturbing name: Auschwitz" (J-P, 43). But by italicizing the name Auschwitz, Jabès deanchors it, destabilizes it at the very moment of its inaugural inscription in the book. Auschwitz here disturbs the Jabès text, disrupting the logos that would name it. Auschwitz is not scattering and deferring meaning in an endless play of dissemination; it overflows the name that would contain it: "One does not recount Auschwitz. Every word recounts it to us" (J-DDD, 82). Auschwitz in Jabès's economy thus points toward an irreparable crisis in language the wound of writing that prevents the negativity of absence from being taken up and maintained in the discourse of presence. Auschwitz does not so much name absence as present itself as a trace. Auschwitz, for Jabès, is of an-other order altogether. Hence Helena Shillony can register the "referential shock" 33 in glossing the emergence of the word Auschwitz in Le Parcours, but we are not so much shocked into referentiality where the limits of representation are surpassed as reminded of the shocking inability of poetry (and philosophical thought) to organize itself around it. Jabès intimates this when the word Auschwitz upsurges once more in Le Parcours in the context of the two limits between which the writer moves: "I write out of two limits. / Beyond, there is the void. / On this side, the horror of Auschwitz. / Reallimit. Reflected-limit. / Read only the incapacity / to strike a balance" (J-P, 95). The impossibility in Jabès of finding a balance between the two limits, between the void and Auschwitz, is expressed, according to Shillony, in negative metaphors and chiasmic constructions. But these negative metaphors (absence, nothingness, abyss, God) are not the moment in which oppositions are collapsed into a synthesis. Though there may be little to choose between the void and Auschwitz, the two limits reflecting each other in an all too abject reality, Jabès's poetics resists the work of dialectical reduction. The unthought is not given as thought. Hence, Auschwitz in Jabès's texts is the locus of an alterity, a nonplace that is not the negation of place, but the place's vertiginous dis-location. In other words, Jabès (tendentiously) posits Auschwitz as a support for the nonrepresentational nature of his writing. When he speaks of the "nonplace" of the book, the inscription of Auschwitz within it is that of a nonevent: not the opposite of an event, but an event that causes a schism in oppositional thought.

< previous page

page_146

next page >

< previous page

page_147


Auschwitz, for Jabès, is always both centered and marginalized. It cannot take a place in Jabès's book at all. The word Auschwitz and the reality of Auschwitz are incommensurate. Jabès's professed right to inscribe the wound of the latter in the word itself is the measure of a broken silence that reverberates unknowingly. Hence, for Jabès, as for Blanchot and Lévinas, to know Auschwitz took place is to think the knowledge that allowed it to do so. Not to sink into silence, but to write the silence of Auschwitz otherwise than in knowledge. It is not to Jabès's texts, then, that we would turn to learn what Auschwitz was, no more, in fact, than we could expect to gather from a reading of Blanchot and Lévinas. Lévinas, Testimony, Suffering, and the Shoah The Witness and the Face In his essay on Lévinas, ''Notre compagne clandestine," Blanchot ends his trenchant analysis by adding that "the book Emmanuel Lévinas has entitled 'Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence' is a philosophical work. It would be difficult not to consider it as such. Philosophy, even one of rupture, calls to us philosophically." 34 This is an important reminder: Lévinas's reflections on the Shoah are philosophical, not theological, even when, as we shall see, he deals with the question of theodicy. Hence, unlike many theologians of the Shoah, and even though he does not hesitate to use the word "God" in his discourse, Lévinas by no means sets out to discuss the existence or nonexistence of God (L-AQE, 151). To pose the problem of the existence of God, Lévinas argues, would be to remain within the unity of being or within the univocity of its esse, whereas his whole philosophical project is precisely to move beyond the interestedness of the ontological to the disinterestedness of the ethical subject as deposed sovereign, as one-for-the-other and not as autonomous self-enclosed totality. Rather, then, than delivering himself up to the interminable and irresolvable question of God's existence during and after the Shoah, Lévinas prefers to speak philosophically, and yet as a man of faith, of "a religion without promise" (L-QEV, 130). It is a religiosity Lévinas acknowledges is incapable of possessing a kerygmatic allure. On the other hand, it is an attempt to give meaning to the otherwise meaningless, just as his ethics as first philosophy is a reinvestment of ethics and philosophy as both utopian (the injunction "Thou shalt not kill" is moral, not real) and practical (the statement "After you" to allow someone to pass first through a doorway is an ethical act).35 Although the Shoah, moreover, undoubtedly governs the horizon of Lévinas's thought, he does not offer a systematic exposition of its occurrence.

< previous page

page_147

next page >

< previous page

page_148


Indeed, this would be inconsistent with his mature philosophy, which moves away from the said systematization, conceptualization, and thematization to a saying that locates the interpersonal, the ethical, in language as proximity overflowing in a signification incapable of being reduced to the said. Yet if Lévinas's meditations on the consequences of the Shoah both for philosophy and for Judaism exclude concrete representations of it, references to the Shoah frequently interrupt his talmudic readings, and these are more than just the anachronistic traces of history within the talmudic texts themselves (for example, L-QLT, 5960). Likewise, many of Lévinas's essays dealing with specific Jewish issues are also written with the Shoah as a focal point both for the culmination of the history of anti-Jewish propaganda and concrete anti-Semitic persecution and for the beginning of a new history for the Jewish people with the creation of the State of Israel. In the philosophical texts proper, on the other hand, such references, if no less pervasive, are by and large hidden or oblique and indirect. One might suggest, indeed, that the themes overflowing thematization of witness, the face, persecution, the hostage, and responsibility do not fail at times to evoke the spectre of the Shoah. In other words, the source of aspects of their formulation is to be found not just in a philosophical critique of the language of phenomenology and ontology, but in the real experience of deprivation, persecution, dehumanization, abandonment, and suffering. Linking together Lévinas's notions of witness, the ''Here I am," and the face, for example, Susan Handelman suggests that the "witness of the Holocaust" in Lévinas enters the "reason of philosophy." 36 What she terms the "force" of Lévinas's argument finds its source, Handelman continues, "in the appeal of Lévinas's own 'face', Lévinas in the first person as well as Lévinas the philosopher; it is Lévinas's own 'here I am' not only as witness of the horror and catastrophe of this century, but as his prophetic appeal and imperative to the reader."37 Handelman rightly points out, however, that the rhetoric of witness in the philosophical works is indirect, Lévinas evoking neither his personal experiences nor specific historical events. "The most profound signification of these events for him is not their specificity for any one nation or group,"38 suggests Handelman. This is perhaps more of a half-truth; the dedication to Autrement qu'être would certainly support the statement, but it is clear too that Lévinas highlights the Jewish specificity of the Shoah: "Among the millions of human beings who found misery and death, the Jews had the unique experience of a total dereliction" (L-DL, 25, my emphasis). This unique experience is not confined to those who died during the Shoah, but extends to the survivors as well. The physical and moral dereliction of the victims is exacerbated later by

< previous page

page_148

next page >

< previous page

page_149


the dereliction of the language called upon to express it (a view clearly shared by Blanchot and Jabès). Hence, the obliqueness of Lévinas's rhetoric concerning the Shoah in his philosophical texts may be, according to Handelman again, ''an inevitable part of the language of the survivor, one who comes from the 'other' side indeed who must bring the indescribable to description, who tries to say the unsayable, who speaks for the impossible and says the unthinkable by speaking his own vulnerability and exposure." 39 To bear witness, then, in Lévinas's sense, is not to confess what one has experienced, either directly or as a contemporary of the event, but to testify for the other. Lévinas's notion of witness would be modeled on precisely the structure of subjectivity as one-for-the-other and thus would be inseparable from the way in which he presents both the face and responsibility. As we have seen, the face in Lévinas's thought cannot be approached phenomenologically, either by knowledge or by an observer's glance (both represent forms of adequation). To describe a face, to visualize it noting the color of the eyes, the size of the nose, the disposition of other physiological characteristics would be to seize it, to grasp it, to do violence to it by treating it as an object of perception. For Lévinas, however, the face is not reducible to such appearances. Rather, the face signifies ethically because it is the most naked and vulnerable part of the body. It is, in Lévinas's terms, an essential poverty, exposed and threatened, inviting us to an act of violence against it at the very same time as signifying the interdiction of murder. One cannot help reading into such ideas by antithesis the experience of anonymity undergone by victims of the Shoah, the process of dehumanization, the robbing of one's face, of one's identity and identification (precisely those traits Blanchot locates in Antelme's L'Espèce humaine). Lévinas is far from making such connections explicit, but they are implicit in his critique of the philosophy of totality. The ethical that is signified in the poverty and nakedness of the face signifies precisely the idea of the Infinite, of the Unequal, which contrasts sharply, for Lévinas, with the notion of Equality inherent in the truth sought, promised, or privileged by philosophy where the other is adequated to the same. This is why the face for Lévinas is not what I can know but the access to the idea of the Infinite as Desire which, as we have seen, differs from need by virtue of the fact that it cannot be satisfied and is described by Lévinas as the paradoxical structure of the more in the less, of a thought thinking more than it can think, of the very presence of the Infinite in the finite, or transcendence within immanence remaining transcendent. To be confronted with the proximity of another's face, then, is to be transpierced by a presence of the Infinite that tracks down and wounds subjectivity, cracking it like a shell to open it to the other. It is what Lévinas calls

< previous page

page_149

next page >

< previous page

page_150


the ''obsession" of the other. Handelman notes in this context that the "imagery of wounding describes the way obsession by the other puts the self in question as a radical denuding and shattering of egoism" and links such imagery to the image of the hounded Jew: "Lévinas describes the self as 'shattered, hunted, persecuted, hemorrhaging', and the image of the Jew as exile, homeless, hunted, bleeding hovers behind these descriptions like a saying behind the said, leaving only its traces." 40 The ego is persecuted by the other to the extent that it becomes the other's hostage and becomes responsible even Lévinas is aware of the apparent scandal of the claim (L-EI, 95) for the persecutions it suffers. We have already examined Lévinas's notion of responsibility, and it is clear that such ideas as persecution and hostage have as a source the condition of victim, particularly in relation to the Shoah. Lévinas is not afraid to employ such highly charged terms, and it is easy to misunderstand them out of context. But they are integral to approaching, and indeed describing, the primal experience of subjectivity in which the essential structure Lévinas sees is the responsibility incumbent upon me for the other, a responsibility I quite literally suffer. I wish to close these comments, and also my all too brief introduction to aspects of Lévinas's thought, by examining this notion of suffering and its relation to the Shoah. I shall do this through a reading of the powerful and difficult analysis of suffering delivered by Lévinas in his provocative essay "La Souffrance inutile." Useless Suffering and the Shoah Lévinas begins his essay with a phenomenological analysis of suffering, which he presents as a given in consciousness, similar to the sensations arising from other lived experiences such as color, sound, and touch. But he qualifies suffering as unique in that it is unassumable, and this unassumability is caused not by an intensity of sensation, but by a "too much" inscribed in sensorial content. Hence, unlike the Kantian "I think," which would reunite and embrace the most heterogeneous of givens into order and meaning under its a priori forms, suffering is both a given refractory to synthesis and the way in which the refusal that opposes the assembling of givens into a meaningful whole is opposed to it. This categorial ambiguity of suffering the way the unbearable is not borne by consciousness and the way the not-being-borne is itself a sensation or a given represents a paradoxical structure whose contradiction is not dialectical but sensory. Suffering, then, Lévinas announces, is passivity. In other words, I am not conscious of suffering, but conscious of the adversity of suffering to consciousness. This passivity of suffering exposes the vulnerability of sensation

< previous page

page_150

next page >

< previous page

page_151


prior to perception (L-EN, 108). Moreover, suffering is not caused just by having one's freedom limited; rather, it is the evil or pain that tears open the humanity of the suffering person more violently and cruelly than nonfreedom. The undergoing of suffering represents absolute negation, the negativity of evil, which is a non-sense in that it articulates the absurdity and the impasse of life and being. Suffering is therefore useless, ''for nothing," sense-less because it is capable of escaping consciousness by isolating or absorbing itself in it. Through the evil of suffering, then, "by virtue of its nonintegration into the unity of an order and a sense" (L-EN, 109), there comes a groan or a sigh that calls for help from the other ego. Hence, pure suffering does not just call out to medicine and technology for a relief of pain, but through its intrinsic meaninglessness constitutes a beyond in the inter-human (as ethical call to the other person). In this context Lévinas can thus claim that if civilization is called upon to nourish people and to alleviate their sufferings, it is the honor of an uncertain and blinking modernity "coming at the end of a century of nameless sufferings, but in which the suffering of suffering, the suffering for the useless suffering of the other man, the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other, opens upon suffering the ethical perspective of the interhuman" (L-EN, 11011). Lévinas differentiates suffering in the other, which for me is unforgivable and solicits and calls me, from suffering in me, which is my own adventure of suffering, whose congenital uselessness can take on a meaning by becoming a suffering for the suffering of someone else. This attention to the other affirms the very bond of human subjectivity, despite and because of the cruelties of the century, an attention that is more imperious than a confidence in any kind of theodicy (a belief in transcendent ends, a metaphysical order, or an ethics that would compensate for the suffering of humanity). Of course Lévinas is far from unaware of the possible objection to the latter points, namely, the indifference shown by huge sections of the civilian populations of numerous European countries to the fate of the Jews before and during the war. Here, the call to the other was clearly not heeded, and the bond of human subjectivity as defined by Lévinas was revealed to be fragile at the very least. But such objections would not change the nature or the structure of the phenomenality of suffering as Lévinas has described it, and the suffering of Auschwitz is precisely the central concern of the rest of the essay. The supra-sensible perspectives of theodicy, then giving to gratuitous and absurd suffering the arbitrary appearance of signification and order, rendering suffering bearable constitute, for Lévinas, an important compo-

< previous page

page_151

next page >

< previous page

page_152


nent in the self-consciousness of European humanity. He locates it, for example, in both the Christian notion of original sin and in the Jewish history of the diaspora, which would reflect the sins of Israel. But with the twentieth century such theodicy comes to an end. The suffering and evil of the twentieth century can no longer be weighed against the explicit or implicit assumptions of theodicy in Western thought. This is the century, Lévinas states, of two world wars, of the totalitarianisms of Right and Left, of Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, Auschwitz, and Cambodia. Lévinas's analysis of useless suffering now finds its concrete transposition into history: ''Among these events the Holocaust of the Jewish people under the reign of Hitler seems to me to be the paradigm of this gratuitous human suffering, where evil appeared in its diabolical horror. This is perhaps not a subjective sentiment. The disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz with glaringly obvious clarity. Its possibility puts into question the multi-millennial traditional faith. Did not the word of Nietzsche on the death of God take on in the extermination camps the signification of a quasi-empirical fact?" (L-EN, 11415). That the Jewish people are the central protagonists in this drama of Sacred History, as he calls it, reminds Lévinas of a passage from the Canadian philosopher Emil Fackenheim concerning the lack of precedent for the Nazi genocide both within and outside Jewish history. Fackenheim's central claim for uniqueness concerns the perpetrators: "The Nazi murder . . . was annihilation for the sake of annihilation, murder for the sake of murder, evil for the sake of evil"; and the victims: "The more than one million Jewish children murdered in the Nazi holocaust died neither because of their faith, nor despite their faith, nor for reasons unrelated to the Jewish faith [but] because of the Jewish faith of their great-grandparents [who brought] up Jewish children." 41 Lévinas immediately comments that "the inhabitants of the Eastern European Jewish communities that constituted the majority of the six million tortured and massacred represented the human beings least corrupted by the ambiguities of our world, and the million children killed had the innocence of children. Theirs is the death of martyrs, a death given in the incessant destruction by the executioners of the dignity that belongs to martyrs" (L-EN, 116). The claims of revisionists and negationists, Lévinas adds, are the final act of this destruction, where pain would take on its modality of undiluted malignity, suffering for nothing. No theodicy, then, would be adequate to an explanation of the Shoah, and the end of theodicy reveals the unjustifiable character of suffering in the other person, "so that the very phenomenon of suffering in its uselessness is, in principle, the pain of the other" (L-EN, 116). Ethical sensibility would

< previous page

page_152

next page >

< previous page

page_153


thus confer the title of immorality upon any attempt to justify the pain of one's neighbor, and what Lévinas calls the most profound adventure of subjectivity would be the one-for-the-other where I accuse myself in the suffering of the other person. But if the twentieth century has reached the end of theodicy through the fundamental malignancy of useless pain, what meaning can be retained by religiosity and the human morality of goodness? Are these also at an end? In response to these questions, Lévinas once more cites Fackenheim and implicitly refers to the notion of the 614th commandment to the post-Shoah generation, which is not to hand posthumous victories to Hitler by deserting Judaism. 42 There is here an obligation for Jews to live as and remain Jews, not to abandon God, in order not to be an accomplice of Nazism's project of extermination. But Lévinas, typically, gives a universal signification to Fackenheim's formulations and suggests that there are only two alternatives facing humanity at the close of the twentieth century: either to abandon the world in indifference to useless suffering or to continue Sacred History, in a difficult faith without theodicy (terms reminiscent of his notion of a religion without promise), by responding in suffering to the suffering of the other person: compassion, love, justice, morality. A true humanity a truly human humanism, the very meaning of the inter-human has to be pledged, for Lévinas, to the latter alternative.43 The fact that Lévinas's phenomenological analysis of suffering and his observation of the end of theodicy after Auschwitz leads him to formulate his position within the ethical perspective of subjectivity as one-for-the-other, invested with nonreciprocal responsibility for the neighbor, demonstrates the overall perspective from which Lévinas writes: the rupture in Western thought caused by the Shoah. Although he does not explicitly express it in such terms, speaking here of the ''paradigm of gratuitous suffering," it is clear that the event of the Shoah represents a point of convergence for all his major concerns the escape from being (written with the presentiment of the Shoah); the meaning of revelation, obedience, and responsibility; the face-to-face, exile, hospitality, and justice. Lévinas's essay, then, constitutes a kind of optimism. One can and must learn from the Shoah, even if in the same context elsewhere Lévinas declares almost in despair that the world has learned nothing and forgotten everything (L-DL, 202). Despite this and history would support his misgiving the meaning Lévinas gives to ethics, the task of philosophy, represents a teaching, a saying and not just a said. Hence, Lévinas would propose that what is said in his philosophy must be unsaid; what is thematized, unthematized, started again, perpetually. The optimistic or utopian thought that attempts to es-

< previous page

page_153

next page >

< previous page

page_154


tablish its position in relation to the Shoah, from out of the Shoah, is undoubtedly a difficult task, as difficult as a religion without promise, a faith without theodicy. But it is a position, in the last resort, that categorically refuses nihilism. It is a critical thought grounded in disaster and seeking a reason to continue, a way to escape. Lévinas finds this in ethics as first philosophy and Judaism as humanizing religion. As I shall now demonstrate, the optimistic step beyond in Lévinas is absent in Blanchot's own endeavor to circumnavigate the Shoah, while Jabès's position oscillates in the ambiguity of the poetic. Blanchot, Waiting, Forgetting, and the Subjectless Subject The Fragmentary Demand In light of the thoughts we have previously traced in Blanchot concerning the Shoah, I now wish to turn to his difficult and unsettling récit L'Attente l'oubli. It surrenders only to the most inadequate of synopses. Reversing the opening situation of Aminadab, here we have a man, a writer, who signals from his hotel room to a woman on a neighboring balcony. She responds to his call, enters his room, and they begin a dialogue. The remainder of the text is devoted to the nature of their relation. Blanchot employs the personal pronouns ''he" and "she" in order to designate his interlocutors, a device that by 1962 had already become conventional (with the French New Novelists, in particular). But all is not so simple. For no sooner have we reached page 13 of the text, than an "I" appears for the first time outside quotation marks. One may justifiably wonder whether this is a third-person or a first-person récit, and whether the painful subtext constraining the text to think the unthinkable and unthought, remaining unspoken and unspeakable, bears any relation to the problematic of the Shoah as we saw it in his critical writings. Both these questions can initially be approached through one further question formulated in L'Entretien infini: "how can one write in such a way that the continuity of writing's movement can permit the fundamental intervention of interruption as meaning and rupture as form?" (B-EI, 9). L'Attente l'oubli can be read, in retrospect, as Blanchot's own response to this question. Interruption as meaning, rupture as form. For Seán Hand, in L'Attente l'oubli "an anonymous witness attempts to convey, in a cold, neutral language, the one and only truth, that of absence and death. It is a truth which, of course, is precisely inexpressible." 44 Yet it is by no means certain that absence and death constitute the same truth, nor is Blanchot's text about truth. Rather, if L'Attente l'oubli does attempt to express an inexpressible,

< previous page

page_154

next page >

< previous page

page_155


it is one that is the absolute of death and absence: the Shoah. ''Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed" (B-AO, 35). Every word would be an attempt to reply to this exigency: "In every word, a reply to the unexpressed, the refusal and attraction of the unexpressed" (B-AO, 135). This simultaneous rejection and attraction, the impossibility to express and the desire to express, are like the forgetting and remembering of a "thought one must not think" (B-AO, 133). If Blanchot, therefore, posits (or can be seen to posit) the Shoah in his text as an unsayable, inaccessible, and incomprehensible event (not so much beyond understanding but beyond the very categories with which rational thought orders and makes sense of the world), it is because it constitutes for him the interruption in history after which all discourse has been irremediably broken down into "dis-course." Interruption as meaning, rupture as form. This ruptured form that constitutes L'Attente l'oubli is a response to Blanchot's fragmentary demand articulated, according to the original jacket insert, through "a certain rupture of internal relations," where "it matters little to remember or forget, but, in remembering, to be faithful to forgetting in the space of which one remembers, and, in forgetting, faithful to what comes to make us remember." 45 The paradox and oxymoron of Blanchot's language here govern much of the movement of L'Attente l'oubli, so that remembering and forgetting do indeed become the faithful reflections of each other. Hence, there is the memory of a time before, "a magnificent era where all still seemed possible and where he took no precaution, always haphazardly noting down with sovereign rectitude the essential detail, and trusting for the rest in his memory, which was never at fault" (B-AO, 15). But now, after, in the present of the récit, memory is in default: "she had lost the center from which events radiated and which until now she used to hold so firmly. . . . In her memory, nothing but sufferings incapable of being remembered" (B-AO, 8, 19). The nature of these sufferings is not disclosed. The referent simply never materializes. We are told only that, for the male interlocutor, "it was as if he had introduced inside her thought a suffering that, as soon as she awoke, forced her not to think about it" (B-AO, 3233). If it is impossible on the evidence of the récit to attach to this suffering any direct cause, it is because the space of thought itself has become precisely such suffering: "As if pain had thought for its space" (B-AO, 23). The text is the space in which this pain speaks, creating an all-pervasive void that neither interlocutor can escape (B-AO, 32), but to which "both of them, in their own way, are witnesses" (B-AO, 142). The interlocutors thus bear witness to a void that has invaded their thought (turning it into a "non-

< previous page

page_155

next page >

< previous page

page_156


thought'') and that the text introduces from the very beginning: "Here, and on this phrase that was perhaps also intended for her, he was constrained to stop" (B-AO, 7). The adverb "here" brings with it no immediate referent other than the presence of the sentence before us, the opening sentence thus intimating a point ("here") beyond which it cannot go. Hence, the beginning reveals itself to be wholly illusory: "in place of a beginning, a sort of initial void, an energetic refusal to let the story begin" (B-AO, 22). Thus Brian Fitch can argue that in this empty space "language takes place" because "it is language alone that speaks here," 46 while Claude Lévesque suggests that the dialogue instigated is grounded in anamnesis (the recollection of previous experience): "Well before the récit opens up, an 'anamnesic' dialogue was long being pursued in the vertiginous space of waiting and forgetting, allowing itself to be dispossessed, from the 'origin', of all plenitude, all continuity and all authenticity, by the corrosive power of the mark, by the force of rupture and the effacement of the inscription."47 Yet it would seem that the dialogue is grounded more in amnesia than in anamnesis. Daniel Wilhem can thus refer to the beginning as opening up a "hole of legibility" that engulfs the text as soon as it would speak and suggest that "in this way the récit, by the denial of a beginning, can henceforth be written only in and from this hole, designating it is making a hole."48 Thus, the void of the opening passage becomes the space of the dialogue that takes place (painfully) in the void of the room: "the characteristic of the room is its emptiness" (B-AO, 17). This emptiness blocks description and representation, such that "the voices echo in the immense void, the void of the voices and the void of this empty place" (B-AO, 1819). This all-consuming void finally contaminates the ending of the récit, where the beginning is merely reiterated, as if the end remembers its beginning and forgets the text in between: "Not here where she is and here where he is, but between them'. 'Between them, like this place with its great fixed air, the reticence of things in their latent state'" (BAO, 162, my emphasis). The beginning is thus in relation to the unexpressed (the missing referent), which is paradoxically continuously referred to throughout (the present, the "here" rendered nowhere by the act of writing), so that the meaning of the whole is dependent on the end, which is then infinitely deferred: "The meaning of the whole of this story was a long indivisible sentence, which would find meaning only at the end and which, at the end, would find only a sort of breath of life, the immobile movement of the entirety" (B-AO, 25). In his own reading of Blanchot's text, Lévinas idiosyncratically argues that the language of L'Attente l'oubli is one which "can give sign above and beyond all signification. The sign is made from afar, from beyond and in the

< previous page

page_156

next page >

< previous page

page_157


beyond. Poetic language gives sign without the sign being a bearer of signification through relinquishing signification'' (L-SMB, 39). It is not signification that is at stake in L'Attente l'oubli, for Blanchot "calls into question the seemingly incontestable claim of a certain kind of language to be the privileged bearer of what is meaningful, to be its wellspring, its mouth and its riverbed" (L-SMB, 3233). Rather, Blanchot's text "signals," as does the male interlocutor to the female, "without this being for something" (L-SMB, 39). I shall return to Lévinas's reading shortly, but his comments here illustrate how the story of Blanchot's text cannot be constructed from such nonsignifying gestures: "'Where has the story got to?' 'There must not be much left of the story at present'" (B-AO, 153). And if there is no story, there can be no récit, and if there is no récit, there is simply no fiction: "It is not a fiction" (B-AO, 13). This disruption of fiction, the interruption of discourse that in "L'Entretien infini" (a dialogue that in many respects continues the dialogue of L'Attente l'oubli) Blanchot characterizes as "the eternal speaking pulse stopping" (B-EI, xxvi), is brought about by the female interlocutor's intrusion into the text at the very beginning. For it is the female who introduces the waiting that measures the infinite distance between herself and the male interlocutor. Her interruption into the text (preceding the text's opening) removes herself and her interlocutor not only from the bonds of a common memory (B-AO, 68), but also from their common spatial and temporal locations. Hence, "there is no real dialogue between them. Waiting alone maintains a certain relation between what they say, words said in order to wait, waiting for words" (B-AO, 52). This is a waiting, then, of motionless movement that creates dispersal and dislocation: "she allows herself to be borne by the dispersal of the word in her" (B-AO, 159). In L'Attente l'oubli the space of writing is opened up from the very beginning to the movement of detour and discord. Traditional dialogue, which advances by the reciprocation and reconciliation of points of view, working toward agreement and unification, no longer operates. Instead, an asymmetrical relation is inscribed by interrupting itself, causing distanciation and splitting into two. Language becomes radical separation and difference. It divests itself from all notions of unity, including that of possession by personal consciousness: "With what melancholy, with what calm certainty he felt that he could never again say: 'I'. . . . She has always already detached from him, himself. . . . They pressed against each other again, both deprived of themselves. . . . 'We have become very distant from one another'. 'Together'. 'But also one from the other'. 'And also from ourselves'" (B-AO, 34, 44, 66, 137).

< previous page

page_157

next page >

< previous page

page_158


It is because Blanchot's personal pronouns are in fact impersonal pronouns that language in L'Attente l'oubli, according to Foucault, is one ''which belongs to no one, which belongs neither to fiction nor to reflection, nor to the already said, nor to the never yet said, but 'between them, like this place with its great fixed air, the reticence of things in their latent state'." 49 The word in this text is precisely in between the two, where being in two might desire its identity but is certainly refused it. Unity-identity is broken by irreducible difference. As Mike Holland puts it, "the Subject no longer occupies a dominant, omniscient position: its identity fragmented, it simply endures as the asymmetrical space waiting forgetting across which a multiplicity of subjects and objects are distributed, capable at any given moment of communicating with each other."50 The two interlocutors are thus divested of their subjectivity and supplanted by the entities "waiting" and "forgetting," which signal the intrusion of Blanchot's narrative voice, the neuter, the relationship of the third kind where the "he" is not a third person at all, but, as Lévesque puts it, "the neutralizing movement of writing in its senseless play."51 But there is more at play here simply than Blanchot's attempt to create an impersonal or a-personal discourse. It is intimated in the "prayer" that dominates the first part of L'Attente l'oubli "Arrange for me to be able to speak to you" (B-AO, 14, 24, 25, 26, 57) and that reaches its conclusion in the following invocation: "'Arrange for me to be able to speak to you'. 'Yes, now speak to me'. 'I cannot'. 'Speak without being able to'. 'You ask me so calmly for the impossible'" (B-AO, 86). For Blanchot, to speak without being able to ("parler sans pouvoir") is to speak without power, and to do this is not to take the side of violence. Sarah Kofman applies this notion directly to the concentration camp experience: "How can one speak of that before which all possibility of speaking ceases? . . . [How can one] speak one must without being able to: without the all too powerful and sovereign language mastering the most aporetic situation, absolute impower and distress itself, without this language enclosing it in the clarity and happiness of the day? And how can one not speak of it, when the wish of all those who came back to us was to recount, to recount endlessly, as if only an 'infinite conversation' could measure up to the infinite destitution?"52 This imperative of "Speak one must without being able to" is Blanchot's attempt to separate the word from its totalitarian relation to power and violence, but it does not imply speaking powerlessly, that is, speaking in terms of the opposition powerless/powerful. It is not a matter in Blanchot of replacing, for example, continuity with discontinuity, plenitude with interruption, union with dispersal. Rather, Blan-

< previous page

page_158

next page >

< previous page

page_159


chot's writing enacts a self-renewing interruption interrupting itself at every turn, preventing affirmation and negation from canceling each other out: ''And each time he was ready to begin this movement again: against his will and yet willingly; not willingly: against his will only. . . . Without patience, without impatience, neither consenting nor refusing, abandoned without abandonment, moving in immobility" (B-AO, 34). While it may therefore be impossible to designate L'Attente l'oubli as fiction, it is not a matter of truth either, as I suggested earlier: "It is not a fiction, although he is not capable of pronouncing the word of truth concerning this. Something has happened to him, and he cannot say that it is true, nor the contrary. Later, he thought that the event consisted in this way of being neither true nor false" (B-AO 13). Blanchot is clearly not concerned with dialectical opposites, the one demanding the suppression of the other (such as true/false, light/dark, Aryan/Jew-other), but with a word that carries things into a state that is neither visible nor invisible, sayable nor unsayable: "There is a word in which things are not concealed, not revealing themselves. Neither veiled nor unveiled: that is their nontruth" (B-EI, 41). By introducing waiting into their relation, the waiting that is "foreign to the concealing-revealing movement of things" (B-AO, 136), the female interlocutor ineluctably attracts the male into "this void between seeing and saying, where they are borne illegitimately toward each other" (B-AO, 141). This void between them is thus "a separation that is not a separation, a rupture all the same, but allowing itself to be neither glimpsed nor truly betrayed, for it is presumed to introduce an interval between the visible-invisible and the sayable-unsayable" (B-AO, 142). As Holland comments, what is essential in the relation between the interlocutors is not so much what they say but "the interval which separates them, the interruption which generates their repeated affirmations and their fragmentary identity." 53 Although the affirmations to which Holland refers are arguably lost in the fragmentary process, it is this interval that prevents the reader from "making sense" of the text in a far more radical manner than in Blanchot's earlier récits. Yet the knowledge that the text refuses such sense, that it does not reduce the diverse to unity, or identify that which is different, seems of little compensation to the frustrated reader, in whom the temptation to read and understand is strong. This strain on the reader, however, is in the text's very subject, as Wilhem indicates: "the subject of the récit is empty, unnameable, unthinkable."54 This difficult and complex aspect of Blanchot's text is explained by Lévinas as the perpetual attempt to have noesis without noema that is, the act of thinking without the object of its thought (L-SMB, 38). In his own termi-

< previous page

page_159

next page >

< previous page

page_160


nology Lévinas suggests that poetic Saying (''le Dire") would exceed that which is Said ("le Dit"). The movement of the Saying causes thought to let go immediately of what it thinks, transforming words as moments of a totality into signs of infinity. According to Lévinas, such a movement is radically opposed to ontology. Instead of confirming itself in discourse, this movement unfolds as a sovereign waiting and forgetting, and these entities "loosen up the ontological field" (L-SMB, 36), while opening up the ethical horizon of the "beyond being . . . , equality, justice, the caress, communication, and transcendence" (L-SMB, 38). The ontological categories of being or nothingness (seen as the negation of being, its very opposite, and therefore still a modality of it) are thus replaced by a waiting that is not a waiting for anything and a forgetting that is, above all, a forgetting of self (what Lévinas calls ipseity). Blanchot's interlocutors, brought together in a room, are thus infinitely separated, from each other and from themselves: "In proximity, touching not presence, but difference" (B-AO, 116). It is this difference that brings them together. In what Lévinas calls a "discontinuous and contradictory language of reconciliation" (L-SMB, 39), there can be no identity, no presence, no Cartesian subjectivity, no immediacy. The "thought one must not think" (B-AO, 133), with which Blanchot confronts his interlocutors (Fitch calls them "dislocutors") 55 and the reader, becomes the only subject of the text, and remains such in its latent state: unthought. Lévinas is perhaps not so much misreading Blanchot here (in reducing the text to his own position of the heteronomous discourse of alterity) as failing to see how Blanchot is moving beyond even Lévinas's radical relation of self and other. In his own persuasive reading of L'Attente l'oubli, Timothy Clark points this out by showing how Blanchot conflates both Heidegger and Lévinas in his text, but in the end endorses neither one. Blanchot would argue, for example, that Heidegger fails to usurp the postulate that being is essentially unified and continuous, so that Blanchot's notions of discontinuity, multiplicity, and alterity move away from Heidegger's "dichotomy of revealing and concealing [that] suggests a privileging of the metaphorics of light and the correponding postulate of unity."56 Lévinas, of course, offers a similar reproach to Heidegger, but his own idea of the face-to-face relation with the other as a nonrepresentational and nonthematizable encounter is not reflected in Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli, as Lévinas would have us believe. Clark here proposes that Blanchot does not necessarily take up "another conceptual stance," but that he thinks through "the relations at issue in Lévinas more fully."57 In other words, the dissymmetry and irreducibility

< previous page

page_160

next page >

< previous page

page_161


of the other in Blanchot is released from the transcendence it retains in Lévinas's thought (as I shall argue later, Jabès performs a similar move in his reading of Lévinas's face). Blanchot opens up an alternative space through the neuter rather than the Other. Clark rightly points out Blanchot's rejection of Lévinas's ''Other," 58 but he omits to make explicit that Blanchot is not rejecting alterity, but rather the transcendence connoted in the capitalization of "Other." Likewise, Clark gives us to understand that Blanchot's neuter "designates language in the mode of a double, even multiple irreciprocity. There is no equality between I and other."59 Again, Clark is right, but he also fails to note that Lévinas, too, develops extensively a radical inequality between self and other, an inequality, moreover, that for Lévinas is the very basis of equality as justice. Nevertheless, Clark correctly asserts that the basic difference between Lévinas and Blanchot as borne out in L'Attente l'oubli is that "Lévinas eschews the dialogue form," while Blanchot affirms it "as a considerable body of the récit": "The necessity of thinking the relation of language itself in a way that denies Lévinas' concept of an alterity absolved from relationship, affirms the relating itself as a dis-location. . . . It is not the alterity of an otherness transcendent to relationship. Hence, in Blanchot, Lévinas' conception of language as a relation to transcendence is rewritten in terms of the realm he names elsewhere 'writing' or the 'space of literature'."60 Lévinas, then, in his reading of L'Attente l'oubli is somewhat too hasty to locate his own ethical horizon in Blanchot's undoing of the structures of thought and language. It is not Lévinas's relation that Blanchot establishes, but the relation without relation, the relating itself. This is why L'Attente l'oubli is a dialogue on the impossibility of dialogue, and an encounter in which only absence and emptiness are met. Nothing happens, because nothing is happening all the time, and this happens because something has happened, which is the space of infinite dying. The Obliteration of Time: The Infinite Dying The skewed temporality of L'Attente l'oubli, which constitutes its detours as the approach to the encounter, turns the present into infinity so that waiting introduces the absence of time: "In waiting, the time that permits him to wait is lost in order better to reply to the waiting. / The waiting that takes place in time opens time to the absence of time where there is no place to wait. / It is the absence of time that lets him wait" (B-AO, 99). Waiting is therefore infinite, where even death is unable to put an end to it: "A strange opposition: waiting and death. He awaits death, in a waiting indifferent to death. And, likewise, death does not allow itself to be awaited" (B-AO, 56).

< previous page

page_161

next page >

< previous page

page_162


This effacement of time and death should in no way strike us as simply fanciful, for we have seen how Blanchot attempts to do this in previous fictional works such as Le Très-Haut and Au moment voulu. But the negativity of the former and the silence of the latter are surpassed in L'Attente l'oubli by the dis-location of relating, where the seemingly absurd logic that posits the idea that in dying we cease to be mortal (being dead), and therefore, ceasing to be mortal, we lose the ability to die takes on uncanny undercurrents. If all life for Blanchot (in writing) is a sur-vival, a living-on, L'Attente l'oubli intimates the despair and suffering to which the inability to die gives rise: ''The dead came back to life, dying. . . . They always possess the strange desire to die, which they were unable to satisfy in dying. . . . It was as if they had lost the idea that they could die. Hence the desperate tranquillity, the unbearable day. . . . Speaking instead of dying. . . . They cannot die, for want of a future" (B-AO, 56, 77, 95, 140). Blanchot's speakers are caught in that realm of infinite dying that he explicitly relates elsewhere to the concentration camp experience. Weariness, pain, and fear characterize this movement of dying, this living-on (man's indestructible disappearance), as can be seen in the closing statements of the second part of L'Attente l'oubli: "'I'm afraid, I remember fear'. 'It doesn't matter, have confidence in your fear'. And they continued advancing" (B-AO, 160). This final act of remembering signals, in fact, the text's limits: it cannot remember what must be remembered. But neither can it forget. Like two camp survivors, Blanchot's interlocutors deliberate on remembering and forgetting, and on the risk of oblivion: "'Do you think they remember?' 'No, they forget'. 'Do you think forgetting is the way that they remember?' 'No, they forget and they retain nothing in forgetting'. 'Do you think that what is lost in forgetting is preserved in forgetting forgetting?' 'No, forgetting is indifferent to forgetting'. 'Then we shall be wonderfully, deeply, eternally forgotten?' 'Forgotten without wonder, without depth, without eternity'" (B-AO, 62). We have seen in Blanchot's thought that the Shoah is an event impossible to forget and equally impossible to remember. The Shoah posits itself as an absolute unknown, and to posit it in L'Attente l'oubli is to underscore the incessant movement of the text to encounter an alterity that is the encounter itself. As I suggested earlier, when nothing happens something is happening, something has happened, but neither the speakers nor the reader know what it is: "'Is it happening?' 'No, it is not happening'" (B-AO, 15152). If it has not in fact happened at all, it is because it has interrupted history, the past, the future, the present, the memorable itself. Beyond memory the event lies beyond representation (it cannot be re-presented, brought into

< previous page

page_162

next page >

< previous page

page_163


the fictive present of the récit). And yet L'Attente l'oubli informs us, ''Something is coming however" (B-AO, 153, 158), and what "comes" here is Blanchot's word of writing, a fragmentary word no longer subordinate to the mind's organizing rational faculties behind which lies a transcendent subject confident in its ability to know and understand the world. Instead, a void is opened up, an asymmetrical space, in which pain and suffering circumscribe the unsayable, detaching the word from all notions of power, so that the language speaking in the text speaks in the service of a nonpower, a nonviolent relation. If Lévinas, according to Blanchot, "is suspicious of poems and poetic activity" (B-EI, 76), Blanchot mistrusts the ethical transcendence of the other related in Lévinas's work. Ultimately, Blanchot gives us a dialogical poem, not an ethic. In other words, the dis-astrous consequences of the Shoah which, I have suggested by interference with his critical pronouncements, lie behind the unthought of L'Attente l'oubli do not lead Blanchot to the working out of an ethical position as in Lévinas. This does not, of course, mean that Blanchot's work is unethical, merely that the literary space is not primarily concerned in Blanchot's view with ethics, but with a transcendental model where writing is occupied with its own conditions of possibility rather than the transcendence of an ethical stance. Nevertheless, if Blanchot, in his later work, time and again calls for a meditation on Auschwitz, one suspects that this is to be a ruinous mediation on thought itself. The inveterate humanist within Lévinas is entirely evacuated in Blanchot. As Clark puts it, "Blanchot's concerns are incompatible with any species of humanism." 61 The Torment of Injustice I wish to end this section on Blanchot with a kind of postscript to the above remarks by turning to the extraordinary gesture of the publication in 1994 of a small text, to which I referred earlier, entitled L'Instant de ma mort (despite the lack of generic designation, it bears all the hallmarks of the récit as Blanchot defines it in "Le Chant des Sirènes"). Barely twenty pages long, it concerns the events related by Nadeau in his memoirs and confirmed more recently to the critic Philippe Mesnard by Dionys Mascolo and Pierre Prévost namely, that Blanchot was captured during the war for Resistance activities, was about to be shot, and was "miraculously" saved at the last moment.62 This event may well have been behind the enigmatic remarks in La Folie du jour as early as 1949: "Shortly afterwards, the madness of the world was unleashed. I was put against the wall like many others. Why? For nothing. The guns never went off. I said to myself: God, what are you do-

< previous page

page_163

next page >

< previous page

page_164


ing? Then I stopped being senseless'' (B-FJ, 11). But why should Blanchot now, fifty years after the event, explicitly break his previous silence? In response to this question, I shall suggest that the ambiguity the récit contains (one would expect nothing less of Blanchòt) reflects a transformation in Blanchot's approach to his obsessive preoccupation with death, which, as with his first récit, L'Idylle, is not as innocent as it may seem. We have seen throughout the present work that the narrators of Blanchot's récits are like survivors of their own destruction, that writing leads to a self-effacement, leaving behind it the traces of the effacement, traces bearing witness to the condemnation of survival. The substance of L'Instant de ma mort follows this trajectory, yet it does so in a much more recognizable narrative form. It is even placed under the most conventional sign of the memoir, as its opening lines make clear: "I remember a young man . . ." (B-IM, 7). This is a récit, then, written in the first person, already announced in the title. It is a matter precisely of "my death," either Maurice Blanchot's or that of a fictive person created by the signatory of the text, but, in any case, death in the first person, the death of "I." This is evident in the final line of the récit, which explicitly identifies the subject of the narrator with the subject of the narration: "There remains only the feeling of lightness, which is death itself or, to be more precise, the instant of my death henceforth always pending" (B-IM, 20). According to the anecdote reported by Nadeau, then, the text would be the dramatization of a personal experience written against the background of the war. And yet our whole reading of Blanchot, the lesson of his literary theory, is that "the writer belongs to a language that no one speaks, that is addressed to no one, that has no center, and that reveals nothing. He may think he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is completely deprived of self" (B-EL, 17). We would be much wiser to suspect that the récit is placed under the sign of the impersonal, the anonymous, the neuter, and that the recollection announced at the beginning does no more than dissimulate the oblivion at work. For we have seen that in Blanchot whoever speaks in the first person, whoever thinks that memory is at work, opens the literary space to forgetting, and is thus deprived of the power to say "I." Whoever recounts the instant of his death would therefore undergo a double event of "passivity": (1) on the level of the story: the young man who does not seek to escape, passive, frozen before the firing squad, a realfictive event, real because supposedly experienced, fictive because related; and (2) because that relating is the experience, the narrator passive before his own event, the récit itself, deprived of his "I" in remembering his "self."

< previous page

page_164

next page >

< previous page

page_165


The ''torment of injustice" (B-IM, 16) to which the narrator refers toward the end of the text would thus be the torment of survival; the torment of the injustice of the war ("That is what war was: life for some, the cruelty of murder for others" [B-IM, 16]); of the resistant consciously risking his life but escaping death, and the young farmers, "entirely foreign to all combat" (B-IM, 13), whose only error is their youth, but who are killed by the Germans battling on "in vain with useless ferocity" (B-IM, 7). This would certainly be a strange récit, which reads like a confession but is not one and which testifies to an impossible double death where the young man is "prevented from dying by death itself" (B-IM, 7), while the narrator is already dead in an interminable dying: "the instant of my death henceforth always pending" (B-IM, 20). The center of the récit, then, if there is one, is not the moment of execution and the fortuitous intervention of the Russian, but the feeling experienced at the very moment that death encounters death, a feeling qualified by Blanchot as an untranslatable and unanalyzable lightness. In our previous section on Blanchot, we traced the way in which the impossibility of dying is put into relation with the impossibility of writing on the Shoah and how the fragmentary demand can be seen to respond both to the historical event rupturing history and to the interruptions at work in Blanchot's plural word as he develops it in L'Entretien infini and places it in the realm of the encounter in L'Attente l'oubli. The interferences between the two orders in Blanchot's thought permitted us to read the latter as a text in which the Shoah is neither present nor absent but "neutralized," so to speak, into the deferred event about which nothing can be said, but which interrupts thought at every turn. In the light of this reading it may be possible to suggest tentatively what is at stake in the redaction of L'Instant de ma mort, to read it in the secret folds of its enigma, and to see how it extends ideas we have already encountered in Blanchot, while offering an interesting reappraisal of the crucial notion of death. If the text, then, is undoubtedly a récit in the way in which Blanchot would define it (the relation of an event, the relating as the event), it is also a "récit from before Auschwitz," since, as he puts it in Après coup, "all récits from now on will be from before Auschwitz" (B-AC, 99). In order to qualify as a récit, in other words, L'Instant de ma mort will have had to "forget" Auschwitz in order to "remember" and to be written. Such forgetting, it may seem almost superfluous to add, means that the text will be about neither the Jews nor the Shoah. On the other hand, it is quite clearly a question of "this year of 1944" (B-IM, 15) and this "war which had lasted" (B-IM, 13).

< previous page

page_165

next page >

< previous page

page_166


And yet we have learned from Blanchot himself that whoever says war says absolute and that this absolute is pronounced Auschwitz. What is more, whoever says absolute in the philosophical domain also says the philosopher of totality, the philosopher who brings together all instants, Hegel, the very Hegel who figures in Blanchot's text. It is Hegel, we learn, who sees in Napoleon, in the famous year of 1807, the ''soul of the world" (B-IM, 14), at the same time as the French plunder and lay waste to his home. But here, in 1944, with the ironic reversal common to the spirit of war, it is the Germans who have gained the upper hand and plunder and lay waste to the home of the French. Would not Hegel, who, according to Blanchot, "knew how to distinguish the empirical and the essential" (B-IM, 15), nevertheless be conceding to the entire consumption of the soul of the world in the crematoria? Is this not the essence of Lévinas's critique of "the ontology of totality that has issued from war" (L-TI, 7) in its capacity for reversal (war issuing from the ontology of totality)? Moreover, the process of duplication we have seen operating throughout Blanchot's fiction would permit us in L'Instant de ma mort to read both Hegel and Napoleon, the philosopher and the soldier, in the Nazi lieutenant, with his "shamefully normal French" (B-IM, 8), his cultured character (B-IM, 14), and his "useless ferocity" (B-IM, 7). But of course, and it must be stressed, the récit does not speak of the Shoah, being incapable of speaking of it. It speaks rather Blanchot speaks of a young man, apparently the head of a group of resistants, whose friends in the Maquis would risk their lives to save him (B-IM, 11) and who himself intercedes with the German officer to save the women of his own family (B-IM, 10). It may well seem therefore somewhat strange and even extreme that Blanchot speaks of a resistant and war and that I hear Jew and Auschwitz. But, as we have seen, Blanchot claims to have no thought other than for Auschwitz, and, as I argued in relation to L'Attente l'oubli, the detour of his thought, the dispersion of his word, is precisely to express the Shoah without expressing it, to speak of it without speaking of it, to forget it to remember it, and to remember it to forget it. What is more, the subtle slippage of the loss of "I" in literary language, located by Blanchot in his earlier work in, amongst others, Mallarmé and Kafka, to the member of the human species, Robert Antelme, deprived of his individual sovereignty, the word which says "I," can be seen too in L'Instant de ma mort. The young man is to be shot and is miraculously saved at the last moment because his executioners are not, in fact, Germans at all, but rather Russians who take him, as the text suggests, for a nobleman, the lord of the Château. He is left with "the feeling of lightness, which is death

< previous page

page_166

next page >

< previous page

page_167


itself'' (B-IM, 20) and "the torment of injustice" (B-IM, 16). On the one hand, the narrator admits that this feeling of lightness is untranslatable (B-IM, 16). But on the other, he gropes around to translate it with a pseudoreligious vocabulary: it is a question of "a kind of bliss," of "a sovereign light-heartedness," of "a feeling of compassion for suffering humanity," and of an "infinite that opens" (B-IM, 10, 11, 16). It is as if this young man who in his perpetual death is suffering for humanity is transformed into the martyr of a death greater than himself, but which he would contain, the martyr of the Shoah, which for Blanchot echoes eternally behind the word "war." It is a troubling moment, for one locates a usurpation of the specificity of the Shoah, placed even, one might argue, under a christology, even if this christology suffering humanity concentrated into the suffering of a single man, "a man like any other," "the Most-High" is stripped of transcendence. Contrary to the position adopted by, for example, Lévinas or Wiesel, in whom there exists an opening on to humanity in Jewish suffering, contrary even to Blanchot's own previous position in Après coup, where we read that "humanity in its entirety was obliged to die through the trial it suffered in the few" (B-AC, 98), we find in L'Instant de ma mort a movement that would see in the suffering of one non-Jew the death of the Jewish people in the Shoah. This recuperation of the sufferings of others as it happens, the Jews in the solitary figure of the living-dead resistant, this substitution of one death for another, as if one were equal to the other, is not, it goes without saying, in L'Instant de ma mort. But it is written in the margins of the text, in Blanchot's reflections on the récit and on Auschwitz, in the interference of referents behind the récit, making it the nonplace of memory. The torment of injustice would reveal itself in the end to be not just the "survivor guilt" of one who should have died but escaped, but also the sur-vival of one who, precisely because he did not die, would expiate his death in the death of the Jews. Perhaps it is appropriate that if the torment of the guilty conscience that many detractors of Blanchot would have us believe has haunted him since the war finally finds expression in L'Instant de ma mort, it should be in the highly ambiguous form peculiar to Blanchot, a means of neither revealing nor concealing, but of remaining within the neuter of the narrative voice. Jabès and the Wound of Writing To move from the way in which the Shoah figures as the horizon of Lévinas's thought and as the unthought in Blanchot's later work to the way in which Jabès broaches the subject is to explore the middle-ground, or the no-man's-

< previous page

page_167

next page >

< previous page

page_168


land, between the ethical position of Lévinas and the ruinous position of Blanchot. Jabès, as we shall see, conflates aspects of both Blanchot and Lévinas, but endorses neither, opening up a third space consistent with the preoccupations of his own book. I suggested earlier that Jabès poses Auschwitz as a support for the non-representational nature of his writing. Of all Jabès's texts in which the word Auschwitz traces a passage, Un Etranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (1989) is the most explicit in correlating it with his implicit questionings of and meditations on the dialectical appropriation of contradiction, the face, responsibility, and the wound of writing itself, questionings that evidently dialogue with Blanchot and Lévinas. What I shall do in the remainder of this chapter is to look once more at the way Jabès thinks the étranger within his poetic discourse and then consider the way in which Auschwitz interrupts this very discourse to turn it into dis-course. The notions of interruption and dis-course refer us back, of course, to Blanchot. But in the opposition Blanchot sketches out between the interruptions of dialectic (movement toward unity) and those of the nondialectic (movement toward discontinuity), and in particular in locating the latter to be at work in Jabès, where the interruption of being, according to Blanchot, is at the basis of Jabès's heteronomous dis-course, Blanchot adds in parenthesis a reservation in relation to ethics (in which the word, while breaking with power and violence, risks conjoining power as the power of interdiction [B-Am, 256]). This is undoubtedly the reservation Blanchot would hold in relation to Lévinas, but I shall suggest here that the interruptions of Auschwitz in Un Etranger undo even Blanchot's insights in that they do move toward the articulation of an ethical position, and one in dialogue with Lévinas rather than with Blanchot. The Poetic Discourse Although Jabès specifically states in an interview that Un Etranger differs from all the fourteen volumes that make up his three previous cycles, calling it ''isolated and pathetic," 63 the typographical layout is essentially the same as the four volumes that constitute Le Livre des limites. In Un Etranger, then, there are seven numbered parts, with at the end of parts one to five a kind of epilogue, entitled "Pages of the exhumed book." These seven major parts are bracketed by an opening untitled section (with significant citations from the section "The Etranger" in Le Parcours) and a final section entitled "The Eclipse." Each section is further subdivided into two parts, the first being in small script, a sort of mini-prologue, the second in normal typeface. Finally, the actual text of each section is broken up by the use of a

< previous page

page_168

next page >

< previous page

page_169


star, very much like the texts of Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli and L'Ecriture du désastre. The whole can thus be read as a series of interrelated fragments in which Jabès cultivates a dialogue (J-UE, 114) through sages and disciples, and through two anonymous interlocutors discussing a third person: the étranger. In a play of refractory mirrors, these two interlocutors gradually identify with the étranger cited and referred to throughout the text, such that, as André Velter suggests, they are ''three reflections of the same being, three echoes of the same absence." 64 In contradistinction to his earlier works, however, in which the étranger is evoked in terms similar to those employed by Lévinas and Blanchot, that is, as the other, the other being "étranger" and unknown, Jabès here rethinks his approach, intimated in the jacket insert when he refers to the book as the "portrait, in some way, of an Etranger whose trace one day I lost but which, although imaginary, might, without me knowing, also be mine" (J-UE, "prière d'insérer"). For this étranger is no longer the other but none other than I, yet an "I" that is effaced as I say it and that gives me up to an unsayable, strange "I": "The 'I' alone designates the étranger. We say: 'I' and this pronoun effaces us in favor of an unsayable 'I' of which we are the authentic and invigorating stakes. We cannot even say 'We', which would possibly be acceptable were it not to suggest the other; étranger, already, to self as it is to the other" (J-UE, 47). Hence, Jabès is quite explicit that the "prototype of the crude idea one might have of the étranger concerns, above all, us. Us, as innumerable and unique Me. . . . Henceforth we need to admit the status of the new name of the étranger: the strange I [l'étrange Je]" (J-UE, 87). As if in direct confrontation with Rimbaud's celebrated "I is an other," Jabès states: "'I' is not the other. It is 'I'. To dig deeply into the 'I', that is the task incumbent upon us" (J-UE, 26). In signaling the syntactical rupture by the inverted commas, however, Jabès would risk raising this "strange I" to the level of a concept; a risk immediately countered, therefore, by the identification of "I" with the étranger-writer-Jew-nomad-sage: appellations undefinable in their ceaseless demand for redefinition. Hence, just as the book has no generic classification, so the étranger escapes, in the end, definition: "What is his name? . . . Perhaps a name of oblivion in the eternal oblivion of the world. . . . 'Who is he?' 'An étranger, no doubt, with a small book under his arm'" (J-UE, 137, 144). For the exigency of writing one's life in the book, as we saw Jabès express it in Le Livre du partage, is to efface the life one writes: "Introduce autobiography into the Jewish text, rehabilitate the 'I' the particular whence emerges the universal assert the face, then proceed to the slow effacement of the assertion" (J-LP, 14). Hence, the bio-

< previous page

page_169

next page >

< previous page

page_170


graphical details belong to him, and yet they are those of an other who is not Jabès's ''I." Jabès is and is not the étranger of the title, despite his insistence in a number of interviews in which he overtly identifies himself as the étranger. 65 Paradoxically, in submitting to this identification, Jabès would deny the internal logic created by his own book: for the law of the book is precisely to efface any movement toward personalization, to render "I" anonymous. "In the book," as one critic puts it, "it is the written alone that has the word."66 Jabès is thus the étranger of the title only insofar as the étranger is "étranger" to Jabès: "Is not the étranger determined according to the strangeness of the other?" (J-UE, 121). Jabès books would thus stand as an eloquent testimony to the struggle of contradictions and the power of the book to repudiate totalizing synthesis by maintaining these contradictions in perpetual nonresolution. As in the self-affirming, self-negating syntax of Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli, the force or power of the text is a nonpower whose subversive authority lies in the question. In Jabès this questioning necessitates a veritable struggle, reminiscent indeed of Jacob's with the angel-étranger (the comparison between the étranger and an angel is suggested by Jabès himself, as I shall show shortly). The emphasis, however, is placed not so much on victory as on the obstinate refusal of the angel to disclose its name ("And Ya'aqov asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Why is it that thou dost ask after my name?" [Gen. 32:29]). In Jabès's book, such a refusal rescues the étranger from the temptation of unity-identity. His nonidentity his "strange I" and "positive difference" (J-UE, 87) is the price paid for the struggle involved in writing the book in which all is consumed and nothing retained. The book is subtended by this nothing, just as the void subtends L'Attente l'oubli. It is in this desert of silence and nothingness that Jabès effects a depersonalization and a selfabandonment that are an unconditional risk of his writing: "To be, finally, no one" (J-UE, 49). It becomes inexorable, therefore, that the writer should return to silence in the final section, significantly entitled "The Eclipse": "And everyone knew that a man, on the tip of his toes, had emerged one morning from the silence of the book, and that since no word or letter had been retained as he gradually progressed, he had, without nevertheless hurrying, reached the last page where, with resignation, he disappeared" (J-UE, 147). It is the point at which the book reaches its apogee in a vision of Genesis proceeding not from the divine Word, but from divine silence, an idyllic precondition of a fiat liber that guarantees the book's infinite prolongation. Between God's silence and the book's becoming, Jabès employs his re-

< previous page

page_170

next page >

< previous page

page_171


markable rhetorical devices in which the transformation of thoughts engenders a polymorphic truth: ''To think metamorphosis is to think the Truth" (J-UE, 98). Hence, an initial detail concerning the "rounded back" (J-UE, 31) that has afflicted the first-person narrator is followed by a reference to the angel that the writer has saved: "Angel with broken bones, with providentially intact wings; creature of fantasy, engendered by sky and desert for flight and the dust; guardian angel of life and death, of the infinite and ephemeral instant, of eternity and the breath I came to your aid when you fell and you have never left me since" (J-UE, 41). This in turn gives rise to a fragment that associates the étranger with the angel: "'Angels', he added, 'are sometimes above and sometimes below; attracted as much by the chasms as by the peaks. / Always in exile from God whose kingdom is at the center. / The étranger, like them a creature from nowhere, admires them. He envies their wings. / Theirs, the welcoming immensity of the sky. His, the narrow furrows of subterranean worlds'" (UE, 105-06). Finally, the étranger, the hump, and the image of the angel's wings come together in a melancholic note on the nature of Jabès's writing: "'To create, to love makes your wings grow, but one day one notices that having long since ceased to beat, they form no more than a hump, one laid across the other, impossible to separate'. / And he added: 'Is it not curious that wings are the prerogative of the back, as if, with foresight, they sought in advance to conceal from sight their inexorable destiny?'" (J-UE, 123). Jabès uses such extended metaphors in order to create analogies and parallels that become the very landscape of his text. The étranger, for example, is also compared to the nomad and sailor (J-UE, 18), while metaphors of the desert run concurrently and interconnect with images of the sea (J-UE, 29, 142). Similarly, Jabès dramatizes the risks involved in the writer's engagement with his book (self-effacement) through a number of metaphors in which the spider (the book's blank page) consumes the fly (the word) (J-UE, 67, 141). By pursuing such metaphors of errancy, creation, and destruction, Jabès generates a text of considerable negative capability in which God, man, and words are perpetually being engulfed and once more thrown out in a dynamics of becoming. The Dis-course of Auschwitz If Jabès's reflections on the étranger and the small book under his arm instigate a series of metaphorical and verbal images whose acrobatics constitute the poetic dimension of the text, Jabès inscribes one further dis-course whose words complement the melancholic tone of pain and suffering, but overflow the poetic by their very fragmentary presence. Hence, in the untitled

< previous page

page_171

next page >

< previous page

page_172


opening section of Un Etranger, the following fragment is presented: ''Invisible Auschwitz, in its visible horror. / Nothing remains to be seen that has not already been seen. / Serenity of evil" (J-UE, 14). What is Jabès indicating here in the antinomy of the visible and invisible? Like the word in Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli, Jabès's statement on Auschwitz makes no move toward a reconciliation of contradictions. Their opposition is suggested in terms that elicit the notion of vision, while moving outside visual perception. The relation between the visible and invisible would be beyond or before the formal relations of logic, or concepts that would reduce Auschwitz to a knowable event. In other words, vision as a form of adequation the metaphorics of light we have seen both Lévinas and Blanchot move away from is inadequate to Auschwitz. The cognizing consciousness that would make sense of this statement is confronted with a breach in the referential order. With the succeeding proposition, that breach of the nonthematizable event is located in temporality. The future is the perversion of the supremacy of the past. The third section of the fragment implicitly posits Auschwitz as an absolute of evil whose serenity lies in the fact that it is its own excess: it cannot be surpassed. This is a familiar truism to those for whom the Shoah is unthinkable, escaping the grasp of cognition, and in Jabès's context here the serenity of evil bears the anarchic traces of the moment in which phenomenological thought (where the object appears to vision, permitting noesis to hold noema) is substituted for, displaced with, a thought outside any dialectical system. This is precisely the thought Lévinas reads into Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli, the thought I argued is the unthought of the Shoah. In Jabès's fragment, however, Auschwitz, present as word, may be metaphorically invisible, but the rhetoric is nevertheless contaminated with concrete evil. And if evil is imperturbed, serene, calm, confident in its knowledge that with Auschwitz it has reached an absolute, then Jabès's utterance is to seek in the wounded word the ambiguity that can break knowledge from violence and find in it the uncertainty of consolation: "The pain is in the word. / Word which causes pain and which strangely consoles. / The mystery is in its strangeness" (J-UE, 43). The strangeness, or estrangement, of the word is thus born of the irreducible otherness of the event (Auschwitz). This evocation of otherness connects with Jabès's second reference to Auschwitz: "The true face is an absence of face: the face of the one whose face has been torn away the absence of face that has become the face of my responsibility. / The faces of the deportees of Auschwitz and of all the camps of humiliation and extermination scattered throughout the world. / The face of the nonface. / The nonface of the Face" (J-UE, 6162). Again,

< previous page

page_172

next page >

< previous page

page_173


he presents a series of antinomies: the face of the nonface, the nonface of the Face. Jabès's meditations on the face here cannot fail to recall Lévinas. As we have seen in previous chapters, Lévinas employs this key notion of the face as part of his critique of Western metaphysical, ontotheological thought. The face, for Lévinas, is the ethical relation itself. In the encounter with the face of the other, there is the revelation of positive transcendence (the idea of the Infinite) that breaks with the order of the phenomenon the irreducible presence of the other's face refuses itself to me. What is revealed is a responsibility of the self to the other that is prior to the freedom to choose and beyond or before essence. In Lévinas's otherwise-than-being the face of the other reveals to me a responsibility-for-the-other that is preoriginal, an-archic. My responsibility for the other is an asymmetrical relation, and Lévinas connects the notion of the trace of the face as that of a radical nonsynchronous diachrony, disrupting any self-enclosed system by refusing to be contained (being uncontainable) by any form or comprehension. Lévinas's face is the very opposite of an impersonal, anonymous being the very opposite of Blanchot's notion of the neuter and its trace is the means through which the otherwisethan-being relates to, or passes by, the finite, immanent present even as it disrupts such immanence in the process. The expression of the face, then, is not to be found, for Lévinas, in visual perception, but in language as communication, a discourse in which I respond to and am responsible for the other even as the other is beyond the capacity of my ego. We have seen how Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli evacuates the ethical from Lévinas's relation in order to open up the space in-between, that of pure relating. As far as Jabès is concerned, Massimo Cacciari suggests that Jabès ''reads Lévinas and reformulates his questions in a form that entirely deconstructs his discourse." 67 Yet it is more appropriate to see how Jabès indicates, with almost self-evident simplicity, a shift in focus rather than a deconstruction of Lévinas's terms. Jabès thus differs from Lévinas's ideas on responsibility on four counts: (1) how can I be responsible for the other if I do not know who I am or what "I" is? That is, Jabès is not ready to accept Lévinas's responsibility-for-the-other as the essential structure of subjectivity; (2) I cannot be responsible for the other if the other rejects my responsibility. Here, Jabès would agree with Lévinas that responsibility is a nonsymmetrical relation (Jabès: "If I am responsible for you, then you are responsible for me. Do I have the right to impose this constraint upon you? Our common freedom would be affected by it" [J-UE, 61]; Lévinas: "I am responsible for the other without expecting it to be reciprocated, even if it were to cost me my life. Reciprocity is his concern" [L-EI, 9495]), but

< previous page

page_173

next page >

< previous page

page_174


Jabès would not continue to assert responsibility in the face of its rejection; (3) for Jabès, to be responsible for the racist or anti-Semite, for example, would be to reject myself; and (4) responsibility for Jabès can come only after dialogue has been installed, the dialogue form being a notion we have seen Lévinas eschewing. While Jabès would agree, therefore, with Lévinas that the other presents her- or himself to us in the form of a face, one that is irreducible to our knowledge, beyond appropriation, Jabès would also suggest that ''the other being a face, or rather always presenting himself to us in the form of a face, my responsibility toward him in the end is only the responsibility for personalized features thanks to which I can get an idea of the man features that are not necessarily his own face" (J-UE, 61). How can I be responsible, Jabès asks, for a face that may only be the resemblance to the face that I have attributed to it? In this case, he replies, I would be responsible for a face that is not hers or his and that could very well be my own. It is in this context that Jabès interpolates the reference to Auschwitz. If the absence of face becomes the face of my responsibility, that responsibility is oriented toward the face of that which has no face, the depersonalized, anonymous faces of the deportees, victims of the violence directed against that which escapes all grasp and hold: the other. Jabès would seem to be suggesting that the face of the other is unknowable in a way that is different from that conceived of by Lévinas. For Jabès, the epiphany of the face in Lévinas would still be rooted in the metaphysics of revelation and presence. Even though for Lévinas the face is not "seen" as such that is, it cannot be reduced to its image for Jabès this image cannot but manifest itself in the encounter with the other, and the risk encountered is that the unknown face of the other is merely the resemblance of the unknown face of the subject. The shift in alterity here is from Lévinas's absolutely-other-to-the-self to Jabès's absolutely-other-of-the-self (what we have seen him term the "strange-I" [J-UE, 65]). Jabès is not reasserting the primacy of subjectivity identity is subverted throughout his work but he is placing alterity within the self as a positive difference (J-UE, 87). The other of Jabès's étranger is not the other whose recuperation, negation, suppression, and elimination traditional Western philosophy would work toward. Nor is the other simply the "I," as we have seen: "'I' is not the other. It is 'I'" (J-UE, 26). The face of Jabès's other is what reveals my own alterity to myself, and to be myself is to be alone (J-UE, 26). It is my unique, positive difference that guarantees the irreducible difference of the other. When Jabès, therefore, refers to the absence of the face of the deportees he is asserting their deaths as the result of the negation of their difference,

< previous page

page_174

next page >

< previous page

page_175


but he is also blocking the transcendence of the absolutely Other the Infinite which can be discerned in Lévinas, a move similar, in fact, to that which we have located in Blanchot. If the absence of the face of the deportees reflects the absolutely absent face, that of God, in the dialogue between the sage and his disciples that immediately follows the reference to Auschwitz, God's responsibility toward his Creation, the injustice inflicted upon it, is annulled by God's withdrawal from the universe. God is an ''infinite Oblivion" (J-UE, 62), which thus pushes responsibility squarely back onto the shoulders of man. Ultimately, the responsibility toward the victims of Auschwitz becomes my responsibility, which is the responsibility of all (metaphorical) survivors not to forget. Jabès's "true face" is simultaneously absolute and relative. I can assert my absolute difference only by asserting that of the other. But the traces of Auschwitz here indicate a lack of confidence in the other to which Lévinas, for Jabès, subscribes I remain, potentially, the victim of the other who refuses to accept my difference. Jabès cannot coordinate Lévinas's face to the intolerability of Auschwitz. It is this intolerability that focuses Jabès's third and final reference to Auschwitz in Un Etranger: "One can only ever say the beginning of the intolerable, the beginning, O bracing ingenuity, of a word that refuses itself to itself; that falls silent to be captured silent. / 'Auschwitz', he had noted, 'escapes this beginning, will always remain anterior to it; the wound of an unsayable name, rather than the name of an incurable wound'" (J-UE, 95). In Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli we presented the Shoah as a word that refuses to divulge or identify itself and that retains silence to offer itself silently. In many respects, the Shoah was also present in Jabès's earlier work only through its relative absence. But here it is as if Jabès gives his own reason for this absence even as he writes the word Auschwitz into his text. Auschwitz, Jabès notes, is anterior to any attempt to explain what is intolerable in it because as an absolute the word itself is self-sufficiently expressive. In other words, Auschwitz is disproportionate to any attempt to define it. Its selfsufficiency is an insufficiency. Its status as a sign reveals or illuminates nothing. We can say "Auschwitz," we can circumscribe its pain and horror, we can speculate on its repercussions, but we cannot know what it is, like the imperative cited by Blanchot: "know what happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know" (BED, 131). In his fragments on Dante's Inferno, Jabès seems to approach the limits of the infinite interrogation his books purport to be: "AUSCHWITZ, this area of suffering, this delimited place of unlimited horror, this hell, precisely, where pain questions pain only to render all questioning vain" (J-EDD, 20). Jabès may employ the word Auschwitz, but for him it remains essentially

< previous page

page_175

next page >

< previous page

page_176


unsayable, the ''wound of an unsayable name." Writing from this wound both keeps the wound open and bleeding (lest we forget) and permits the hope of building anew (lest remembrance is accompanied by the repetition of the atrocities). This is why for him Auschwitz is not a wound that can never be healed, as deep and as painful as it is, but an indication of the distance yet to travel before despair turns to hope. That distance places Jabès in a post-Shoah atheistic position: God and Auschwitz are constitutive of a void, Jabès's "two limits" thus coming full circle without offering foreclosure. In the fragments in L'Enfer de Dante, Jabès seeks "a word of pain" that could contain all suffering: "Perhaps, like the word God, for example, an empty word, open onto the infinite to such an extent that the whole universe would have no difficulty in dwelling there" (J-EDD, 18). This "empty word," Jabès suggests, is Auschwitz, and, like God in Jabès's book, Auschwitz becomes the "ineffaceable name of an eternal effacement" (J-UE, 63). By thus inscribing Auschwitz as an ineffaceable name that effaces all attempts to describe it "Auschwitz, erasure of the Nothing, the ultimate erasure" (J-LH, 28) Jabès would indicate that despite the moral imperative of writing on the Shoah writing from the perspective of the Shoah Auschwitz cannot surrender itself to interrogation, cannot be thought other than in its own terms of reference: "Auschwitz might be thought only in relation to Auschwitz. Double confinement" (J-EDD, 24). Caught in this double bind, Jabès permits his silence to speak louder than words, his words silently offering Auschwitz not for passive contemplation, but for a moral engagement in what Blanchot terms "the unknown name, outside naming: the holocaust, the absolute event of history" (B-ED, 80). Nevertheless, Auschwitz in Jabès's texts does still remain a metaphor, and for some readers the traces of Auschwitz in those texts will be no more than an aesthetic gesture. Ethics will lie elsewhere than in poetry, a reservation Blanchot himself would express even as he renders highly problematic his own meditations on the Shoah: "There is a limit at which the practice of an art, whatever it is, becomes an insult to suffering. Let us not forget this" (B-ED, 132). Nonetheless, for Jabès, the unnameable absolute of Auschwitz, and its inscription in his book, operates as a resistance against totality, against moral turpitude, and against the oblivion of memory. The genesis of Jabès's book tells of a whole new history altogether: "Just as the stars emerged from the abyss of the night, man of the second half of the twentieth century was born from the ashes of Auschwitz" (J-DCASF, 15).

< previous page

page_176

next page >

< previous page

page_177


Toward a Conclusion Reading Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès through the configuration of the étranger, the Jew, exile, and the writer can inevitably have opened up only partial perspectives on the extreme diversity of their work, and I do not presume to have penetrated the depth of their thought in the space of these pages, nor to have done more than hint at their central yet paradoxically marginal positions within postmodern discourse. Yet it will have become clear that Lévinas's philosophy of alterity, for example, while continuing the philosophical tradition of Jewish thinkers such as Buber and Rosenzweig, bears inevitable comparison to that of Sartre. If for Sartre the other is the occasion of my original fall and puts me in constant conflict, for Lévinas the face-to-face with the other is first and foremost religion that is, a relation with and opening to the other. This call to the ethical horizon of justice and responsibility has exerted a profound influence not only on Derrida, but on a younger generation of French philosophers such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, Benny Lévy, and Alain Finkielkraut. It will have become equally apparent that Blanchot's fiction can be posited within the wider perspective of the twentieth-century concern with the problematization of representation, from Gide to Sartre, Camus, and the practitioners of the French New Novel such as Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet. But Blanchot is a much more profound and radical thinker of the purely literary space, and his texts call more to those of Bataille, Klossowski, and Leiris than to Sartre and Camus, to whose work he is constantly opposed by claiming that they would reduce to the same the alterity they would operate. And, finally, the inexhaustible and vertiginous questioning of Jabès's double condition as writer and Jew can be seen as both novel and ancient. He continues the exploration of Mallarmean space largely indebted to Blanchot's readings of Mallarmé while extending it to the broader Jewish tradition of the book and exegesis. In doing so, Jabès has been instrumental in

< previous page

page_177

next page >

< previous page

page_178


pushing thought to its outermost limits and in provoking questions of Jewish identity. In my own exploration of the convergence of the thought of these figures of estrangement, I have aimed at all times to maintain the differences between them. Such notions as Lévinas's responsibility, Jabès's hospitality, and Blanchot's disaster, for example, are by no means easily reconcilable precisely because they cannot be detached from the particularity of the discourse in which they are inscribed. This is also the reason why their respective discourses of alterity remain irreducibly other to each other, despite their apparent affinities. Hence, Blanchot's notion of the neuter as the radical relation without relation of anonymity would have more in common with Lévinas's dreaded ''there is" than the latter's privileged illeity. Similarly, Jabès's own dispossession of subjectivity by the writing subject would be more akin to Blanchot's neuter than to Lévinas's transcendent third person that denudes the self of its ego. Lévinas's repeated claim of the necessity to think the tearing of the same by the other in an ethical manner is not adhered to by either Blanchot or Jabès, for whom the other is inseparable from the disastrous and abyssal detours of the literary and poetic spaces. Such particularity and difference is reflected, too, in the edifying perspective adopted by Lévinas. Drawing on his joint intellectual and spiritual heritages of the Greek and Jewish traditions, Lévinas's philosophy and his talmudic readings wish to impart lessons to be learned. Responsibility, justice, and the Good are recurrent notions in Lévinas precisely because he would humanize a humanity dehumanized in the Shoah. Lévinas refuses to fall into nihilism, proposing a nonindifference as he constantly seeks the escape from man's natural animal strength that would subjugate justice to truth and the rapacious self. It is not that Blanchot and Jabès are unconcerned with the ethical questions raised by Lévinas, but rather that they are essentially explorers of the literary space and of the word that inhabits it. Although the immense hospitality Jabès would claim for his books would seem absent from Blanchot's disturbing, glacial, yet lucid fiction, the dynamic of their writing finds a constant. From the positions of Jew and nonJew, Jabès and Blanchot play out an atheology that possesses a joint commitment to the workings of language and the exploration of the word's inherent silence, Blanchot by its paradoxical articulation, Jabès by a formal arrangement of interstices on which to predicate his words, providing them with the syntactical breathing space necessary for their flux and flow. Moreover, Blanchot's experience of a certain kinship with Jabès via an uninterrupted dialogue with Lévinas is in assuming the specificity of Judaism under a universal principle. The "writer" thus represents the "Jew"

< previous page

page_178

next page >

< previous page

page_179


who represents the étranger who represents the ''human." Blanchot recognizes that Jabès's acceptance of his Jewishness is more than simply ontological. It is literary, in the writer's struggle with his words, and historical, in the personal experience of political anti-Semitism. Writing, for Blanchot and Jabès, becomes not only postlapsarian, born from an irreversible loss of the possibility of plenitude and unity (a loss, moreover, which is far from grieved), but also (eventually for Blanchot) post-Shoah. Both are consequently concerned with the impossibility of writing and the undoing of subjectivity, whereby the putting into question of the latter necessitates the questioning of the former. The maintenance of this question constitutes the infinite errancy and ex-centricity of fragmentary writing. In Blanchot's fiction this finds its culmination in L'Attente l'oubli, but even in his preceding récits his narrators can be seen to achieve a transgression of their own inexistence brought about by the act of writing, their disappearance into the text that emerges, in order to emerge themselves as étrangers. In Jabès's terms, they arise from their own sacrifice, their own putting to death, as Jews in exile, and as such they stand on the threshold of perpetual interpretation of their own book. It is ultimately this open-endedness of Blanchot's fiction and Jabès's books that displays a paradoxical commitment to life as an infinite spiral of death's ceaseless unfolding. These, of course, are notions that it is not easy for Lévinas to accept. Not only does he refuse to see the Jew as a metaphorical figure of speech and to sink into the despair he would perceive in Blanchot, for example, he also fails to be able to extract an ethic from their work, and this provides an important reservation in his admiration of them. Subjectivity in Lévinas is not written out of his texts but reworked and redefined into a subject that responds to the call to the other even before it is called and is responsible for the other prior to any responsible choice made. This is what Lévinas terms an-archic responsibility, originating in a call from a voice beyond origin. It is this idea of the infinite that saves subjectivity for Lévinas by cracking it open and establishing it as the other's hostage, a subjectivityfor-the-other-through-the-other. Lévinas does not deny the utopian conception of the human that his philosophy would suggest, but he would also assert that this does not alter the nature of his phenomenological analyses of being. In affirming that the humanity of man is to be found in subjectivity's dedication to and responsibility for the other, Lévinas would also highlight the extreme vulnerability to which the subjectivity of the subject is exposed: "Etranger to self, obsessed by others, rest-less, the Ego is a hostage, a hostage in the very recurrence of an ego never ceasing to fail itself. . . . Without any rest in itself, without any foundation in the world in this estrangement from ev-

< previous page

page_179

next page >

< previous page

page_180


ery place on the other side-of-being beyond being: this is indeed its own kind of interiority! It is not some philosopher's construction, but the unreal reality of men persecuted in the daily history of the world, whose dignity and meaning metaphysics has never recalled, while philosophers hide from its truth'' (L-HAH, 110). As a philosopher Lévinas refuses to hide from this truth and would make of it the very necessity for an order of justice. This is what he is unable to locate in any straightforward way in the work of Blanchot and Jabès, primarily because, as I have frequently noted, Blanchot and Jabès do not surrender to an ethical injunction, but only to their own fragmentary imperatives. And again it should be stressed that this does not mean that Blanchot and Jabès are unconcerned with ethics, nor indeed that their literary spaces do not cross over into the political. In responding to the event that all three writers acknowledge as a radical break in humanity Auschwitz Lévinas's call to extreme vigilance is echoed in Blanchot's L'Ecriture du désastre: "to remain vigilant over the immeasurable absence is necessary, incessantly necessary, because what began again from this end (Israel, all of us) is marked by this end, from which we cannot come to the end of waking again" (B-ED, 134). Jabès too, commenting in Le Livre de l'hospitalité on the silence following the public indignation against the desecration of the Jewish cemetery at Carpentras in 1990, warns of the ever dangerous spectre of the anti-Semitic discourse: "How can such a discourse still establish itself? If the horror of Auschwitz was unable to break it, how can we think that Carpentras could?" (JLH, 36). Despite, then, the ambiguity of Blanchot's own plural word, both Blanchot and Jabès would separate the word from its inveterate allegiance to power, to release it into other discourses not regulated by appropriation, domination, and suppression. For Lévinas, such a move is to be commended, in as far as Blanchot's outside and Jabès's desert open out to the exteriority in which I would be truly capable of disinterested love and responsibility for the other.

< previous page

page_180

next page >

< previous page

page_181


Notes Introduction 1. In its overdetermination, the word étranger in the work of Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès is intimately related to the notions of being (''être"), estrangement, exile, exodus, exteriority, errancy, erring, and error and thus assumes, as I hope to show, an importance that I feel is not adequately reflected in the standard English translations of "stranger," "outsider," and "foreigner." I have thus retained the French word throughout this book, a way, too, of respecting the irreducible difference that the étranger figures. 2. Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture, 10. 3. Lévinas refers to Chouchani on numerous occasions throughout his talmudic readings as having taught him how to read the Bible and the Talmud properly. Elie Wiesel, a pupil of Chouchani at the same time as Lévinas, describes Chouchani in "Le Juif errant" (in Le Chant des morts) and "La Mort d'un juif errant" (in Paroles d'étranger). See also Salomon Malka's work of investigative journalism (including interviews with Wiesel), Monsieur Chouchani. 4. For a detailed biography of Lévinas, see Lescourret, Emmanuel Lévinas. 5. Peperzak gives a useful list of secondary works in English to consult as introductions to Lévinas's philosophical thought and his relations to other philosophers in his To the Other, 23940. For the more advanced reader, see the collections of essays in the following: Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Lévinas; Bernasconi and Wood, eds., The Provocation of Lévinas; Bernasconi and Critchley, eds., Re-Reading Lévinas. 6. See Blanchot's essays "Le Regard d'Orphée" (B-EL, 22734) and "Le Chant des Sirènes" (B-LV, 918). For an excellent analysis of this latter essay, see Sitney, "Afterword," 18792. 7. For a detailed year-by-year biography of Jabès, see Cahen, Edmond Jabès, 30341. 8. See "Book of the Dead," 22. 9. It includes three essays (dealing with L'Espace littéraire, L'Attente l'oubli and La Folie du jour) and an interview. I shall discuss Lévinas's reading of L'Attente l'oubli in chapter 4. Noteworthy in Lévinas's essay on La Folie du jour is his evocation of Auschwitz, which Davies discusses in "A Fine Risk," 21821. Lévinas also

< previous page

page_181

next page >

< previous page

page_182



makes passing reference to Blanchot's novel Aminadab in his early works, but I shall look at this in chapter 2.

10. Lévinas has written a second brief essay on Jabès entitled ''Le Hors-de-soi du livre" in Instants. I shall address this text in chapter 2. 11. "Une lettre," 67. 12. "Discours sur la patience," 29; B-ED, 34. 13. "Notre compagne clandestine," 83. 14. Lévinas's essay, actually entitled "Le Dit et le Dire," first appeared in Le Nouveau Commerce 1819 (1971), 2148; reprinted in L'Intrigue de l'infini, 16593. 15. "Notre compagne clandestine," 83. 16. "Notre compagne clandestine," 87. 17. "Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui," 51. The fragments were republished in Le Pas au-delà in a somewhat modified form, and scattered at different intervals. In the order that they appear in Les Nouveaux Cahiers, the fragments are distributed as such: B-PAD, 156, 170, 5657, 49. Jabès in the original fragments is referred to only in the title: "For Edmond Jabès / so that friendship / the infinity of friendship / is named." 18. "L'Ecriture consacrée au silence," 23940. 19. "L'Ecriture consacrée au silence," 241. 1 Differing Alterities: The Etranger, the Jew, and the Writer 1. For a succinct summary of Lévinas's position on this subject, see "L'Ontologie est-elle fondamentale?" (L-EN, 1324). 2. Lévinas's articles from the period 193539 are reprinted in Cahier de l'Herne: Emmanuel Lévinas under the general title "Epreuves d'une pensée (19351939)" with a brief introduction by Catherine Chalier, 14253. These articles are not reproduced in the "Livre de Poche" edition of the Cahier de l'Herne. 3. Nakedness is a theme Lévinas develops in his mature philosophy in relation to the face and responsibility. See the subsection entitled "Visage et éthique" (L-TI, 21142). 4. In his autobiographical essay, "Signature," in Difficile liberté, Lévinas comments wryly: "No generosity apparently contained in the German term of 'es gibt', corresponding to there is, appeared between 1933 and 1945. This must be said!" (L-DL, 407). I shall return to Heidegger and Nazism in relation to Blanchot and Lévinas in chapter 4. 5. Catherine Chalier, L'Utopie de l'humain, 42. 6. L'Idylle precedes Le Dernier Mot in this edition, but the dates of composition are given at the end of Le Dernier Mot as 1935 and 1936, respectively, the possible implications of which I shall draw out later. 7. Paul Davies also comments on this exceptionality in "A Fine Risk." As Davies points out, in fact, "the title of the afterword becomes the title of the book, Après coup" (203). 8. Latteur, "La Distraction," 899.

< previous page

page_182

next page >

< previous page

page_183


9. Sartre, ''Aminadab ou du fantastique," 149. I have found no direct reference for Sartre's claim. 10. Londyn, Maurice Blanchot romancier, 189. 11. To my knowledge, Steven Ungar is the first to note the affinity between Blanchot's Alexandre Akim and Dostoyevsky's Akim Akimytch, in his article "Night Moves," 127. Ungar, however, merely notes it in passing and draws no conclusions. 12. Dostoyevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, 167. 13. Jarrety, "Maurice Blanchot, Figures de la limite," 69. 14. Beitchman, "The Fragmentary Word," 66. 15. Latteur, "La Distraction," 902. 16. Latteur, "La Distraction," 903. 17. Wiesel, Paroles d'étranger, 137. 18. Wiesel, Paroles d'étranger, 137. 19. Wiesel, Paroles d'étranger, 137. 20. Wiesel, Paroles d'étranger, 143. 21. Wiesel, Paroles d'étranger, 13839. 22. Weber, Action Française, 513, 514. 23. Roy, Moi je. Essai d'autobiographie, 233. 24. Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-conformistes des années 30, 60, 75. 25. Holland and Rousseau, "Topographie-parcours d'une (contre-)révolution." 26. Alain David, "De l'idéalité au rapport extérieur," 15758. 27. Alain David, "De l'idéalité au rapport extérieur," 162. 28. Alain David, "De l'idéalité au rapport extérieur," 164. 29. Mehlman, Legacies of anti-Semitism in France, 16. 30. Mehlman, Legacies of anti-Semitism in France, 16. 31. Mehlman, Legacies of anti-Semitism in France, 117. 32. Holland, "Towards a New Literary Idiom," 32. 33. Ungar, "Paulhan before Blanchot," 77. 34. Ungar, "Paulhan before Blanchot," 78. 35. Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation, 22. 36. Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation, 109.

37. Todorov, Critique de la critique, 73. 38. This letter, so far unpublished to my knowledge, was ceremoniously read aloud by Laporte at an international conference on Blanchot held at the Architectural Association in London in January 1993. The letter concludes that "the name of Maurras is an indelible stain and the expression of dishonor." 39. Blanchot, "L'Infini et l'infini," 87. For a further discussion of Blanchot's attitude to anti-Semitism and its relation to the Shoah, see chapter 4. 40. Blanchot, "Penser l'Apocalypse," 79. 41. Catherine David, "Heidegger et la pensée nazie," 75. Lévinas, of course, who introduced Blanchot to Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, is not absent from this debate, stating that he discovered Heidegger's sympathy for National Socialism as early as 1933 ("Comme un consentement à l'horrible," 82). 42. Blanchot, "N'oubliez pas," 68, cited also by Lescourret in Emmanuel Lévinas,

< previous page

page_183

next page >

< previous page

page_184



370. Lescourret rightly points out that Blanchot's assertion is not at all borne out in his writings from this period.

43. Blanchot, ''Après le coup de force germanique," 59, my emphasis. Cited by Mehlman, Legacies of Anti-Semitism, 59. Between February 1936 and December 1937 Blanchot published a total of eight articles in Combat, cited in my bibliography. 44. The historian Julian Jackson in his book on the Popular Front gives such attacks on Blum as evidence of the "political polarization" of the time. "The anti-semitic theme," contends Jackson, "allowed the right to contrast its Frenchness with the foreignness of its opponents," while "the theme of the alien was linked to the fear of public disorder." See Jackson, The Popular Front in France. Defending Democracy, 193438, 25051. These are precisely the themes that I am suggesting are buried below the surface in Blanchot's L'Idylle. 45. Blanchot, "Le Terrorisme, méthode de salut public," 106. Reprinted in Gramma 5 (1976), 6163. Mehlman also cites this article in his argument. 46. Blanchot, "Le Terrorisme, méthode de salut public," 106. 47. Blanchot, "Le Caravansérail," 171. 48. Blanchot, "Le Caravansérail," 171. 49. Derrida, "Edmond Jabès et la question du livre," 100. 50. Derrida, "Edmond Jabès et la question du livre," 102. 51. Derrida, "Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui," 56. 52. Laruelle, "Edmond Jabès ou le devenir-juif," 57278. 53. Bounoure, Edmond Jabès, la demeure et le livre, 40. 54. Derrida, "Edmond Jabès et la question du livre," 104. 55. Macé, "La Poésie par défaut," 15. 56. Laruelle, "Edmond Jabès ou le devenir-juif," 577. 57. Blanchot, "Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui," 52. 58. Derrida, "Edmond Jabès et la question du livre," 112. 59. Bilen, "Le Comportement mythique," 84, 90. 60. Gray, "The World as Text," 435. 61. Agnès Chalier, "Le Chant de l'absence," 5556. 62. Boyer, "Point d'amure," 178. 63. Boyer, "Le Point de la question," 50. 64. Handelman, "'Torments of an Ancient Word'," 56. 65. Waldrop, "Edmond Jabès and the Impossible Circle," 184. 66. Finas, "Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui," 57. 67. Kaplan, "The Problematic Humanism of Edmond Jabès," 128.

68. Kaplan, "The Atheistic Theology of Edmond Jabès," 57. 69. Kaplan, "The Atheistic Theology of Edmond Jabès," 58. 70. Jabès, "On Dialogue and the Other," 33. 71. Trigano, La Nouvelle Question juive, 65. 72. Trigano, "L'Apostasie du Messie," 9. 73. Meschonnic, "Maurice Blanchot," 79. 74. Meschonnic, "Maurice Blanchot," 128.

< previous page

page_184

next page >

< previous page

page_185


75. Meschonnic, ''Maurice Blanchot," 129. 76. Kronick, "Edmond Jabès," 969. 77. Bilen, Le Sujet de l'écriture, 96. 2 Versions and Subversions of the Law 1. See Shillony, "Edmond Jabès." An extended discussion of this rhetoric of subversion in Jabès's work appears in book form in Shillony's Edmond Jabès: Une rhétorique de la subversion. 2. See Lescourret, Emmanuel Lévinas, 92109. 3. Aronowicz, "Translator's Introduction," ix. 4. Aronowicz, "Translator's Introduction," xiv. 5. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption, 264. 6. Aronowicz, "Translator's Introduction," ix, x. 7. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption, 314. 8. These readings were on the whole published subsequently in the proceedings of the conferences, and then regularly gathered together in book form by Les Editions de Minuit. Apart from two readings on Messianism in Difficile liberté, they can be found in the following works: Quatre lectures talmudiques (four readings); Du sacré au saint (five readings); L'Au-delà du verset (five readings); A l'heure des nations (five readings). 9. Derrida, "Violence et métaphysique," 226. For Derrida, Lévinas's attempt in Totalité et infini to break out of totality through the introduction of infinity into discourse and thought fails because of the language that Lévinas necessarily has to adopt: a philosophical discourse that works with concepts, even that of infinity. Lévinas's much more sustained response to this, beyond the short essay "Dieu et la philosophie," is precisely his next major work, Autrement qu'être. 10. See the section entitled "Proximité et obsession" (L-AQE, 13742). 11. For a detailed exposition of substitution, see chapter 4 of Autrement qu'être. 12. The Mishnah was composed by Rabbi Judah the Patriarch toward the end of the second century C.E.; the Gemara is the rabbinical commentary and interpretation of the Mishnah. Both Mishnah and Gemara constitute the Talmud, of which there are two: the Talmud Yerushalmi, or Palestinian Talmud, completed about the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century C.E. and the Talmud Babli, or Babylonian Talmud, completed about a century later. The latter, for complex historical reasons, takes precedence over the former in Jewish legal matters. Lévinas's talmudic readings are based on the Babylonian Talmud. 13. The Mishnah, 459. Lévinas employs these words as the epigraph to his book Difficile liberté. 14. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption, 289. 15. There is in fact one more aspect of Moses to which Lévinas turns his attention, namely, the absence of the location of the burial place for Moses as stated in Deut. 34:56. But Lévinas refers to this explicitly in relation to Jabès, and I shall return to it in more detail in the following section. 16. In his seminal essay "La Littérature et le droit à la mort," Blanchot para-

< previous page

page_185

next page >

< previous page

page_186



phrases the biblical verse as ''Whoever sees God dies" (B-PF, 316) and relates it to the absent idea of the bouquet of Mallarmé's flower in Crise de vers. In other words, Blanchot privileges absence and death as the essential traits of his theory of literary language, whereas Lévinas privileges the purely ethical implications of the verse.

17. Shillony, "Edmond Jabès," 9. 18. Shillony, "Edmond Jabès," 9. 19. Motte, Questioning Edmond Jabès, 75. 20. Laruelle, "Le Point sur l'un," 130. 21. "Dieu est le silence qu'il nous faut rompre," 18. See also Jabès's brief essay "Qu'est-ce qu'un livre sacré?" 22. Handelman, "'Torments of an Ancient Word'," 64. 23. Kaplan, "The Atheistic Theology of Edmond Jabès." 24. Fernandez-Zoïla, Le Livre, Recherche autre d'Edmond Jabès, 89. 25. Guglielmi, La Ressemblance impossible, 23. 26. Lévinas, "Le Hors-de-soi du livre." 27. Jabès, "En guise de clôture," 156. 28. Sartre, "Aminadab ou du fantastique," 149. For other objections to Sartre's negative comparison of Blanchot and Kafka, see Bousquet, "Maurice Blanchot," and Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'écriture, 14344. 29. Foucault, "La Pensée du dehors," 541. 30. Smock, "'Où est la loi?'," 99. 31. St. John of the Cross, "The Spiritual Canticle," in The Collected Works, 717. 32. Lescourret, Emmanuel Lévinas, 6869. 33. Smock, "'Où est la loi?'," 99. 34. Klossowski, "Sur Maurice Blanchot," 17172. 35. Klossowski, "Sur Maurice Blanchot," 181. 36. Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation, 27. 37. Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation, 28. 38. Blanchot, "Extrait d'une lettre," 107. 39. Préli, La Force du dehors, 97. 40. Klossowski, "Sur Maurice Blanchot," 174. 41. Préli, La Force du dehors, 101. 42. Préli, La Force du dehors, 107-8.

43. Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation, 27. 44. For readings of these allusions, see in particular Smock, "'Où est la loi?'," and Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation. 3 From Abram to Abraham, from Dialogue to Silence 1. Peperzak, To the Other, 6768. 2. Neher, L'Exil de la parole, 130. 3. Neher, L'Existence juive, 134. 4. Neher, L'Exil de la parole, 122. 5. Neher, L'Exil de la parole, 123.

< previous page

page_186

next page >

< previous page

page_187


6. Neher, L'Exil de la parole, 130. 7. Neher, L'Exil de la parole, 13031. 8. See ''Le Dialogue de l'absence" and "Le Miracle du 'tu'." See also Stamelman's interview with Jabès, "On Dialogue and the Other." 9. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, 293. 10. Stamelman, "Le Dialogue de l'absence," 202. 11. Neher, L'Exil de la parole, 125. 12. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, 287. 13. Celan, "Der Meridian," 144. Cited by Stamelman in "Le Dialogue de l'absence," 203. 14. Stamelman, "Le Dialogue de l'absence," 21011. 15. Jabès, "Edmond Jabès" (Michelle Porte). 16. Derrida, "Edmond Jabès et la question du livre," 111. 17. For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Handelman's erudite essay "'Torments of an Ancient Word'." 18. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 261. 19. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 261. 20. Bataille, "Maurice Blanchot," 219. 21. Jabès, "Edmond Jabès" (Michelle Porte). 22. Jabès, "Book of the Dead," 19. 23. See Fitch, "Un Référent fictif pas comme les autres"; "Temps du récit et temps de l'écriture"; "A Fictive Referent Unlike Any Other" (this is a reworking and extended version of the first article cited here); and the chapter entitled "Au moment voulu: Le secret s'efface," in Lire les récits de Maurice Blanchot, 3847. 24. Fitch, "Un Référent fictif pas comme les autres," 221. 25. Shaviro, Passion and Excess, 142. 26. Shaviro, Passion and Excess, 163. 27. Shaviro, Passion and Excess, 143. Shaviro, however, in his reading of Blanchot's fiction, comes dangerously close to writing him back into a Romantic perspective where excessive emotion and passion break out of the containable and become inexpressible. For Blanchot it is not any emotion that is at stake but the (im)possibilities of language itself. 28. Bataille, "Silence et littérature," 100. 29. Bataille, "Silence et littérature," 100. 30. Prince, "The Point of Narrative," 97. 31. Shaviro proposes Claudia's singing as the "clue" to entering Blanchot's text. See Passion and Excess, 163.

32. Mykyta, "Blanchot's Au moment voulu," 90. 33. Mykyta, "Blanchot's Au moment voulu," 91. 34. See Préli, La Force du dehors, 15558. 35. Mykyta, "Blanchot's Au moment voulu," 92. 36. Londyn, Maurice Blanchot romancier, 16869. 37. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 137, 138.

< previous page

page_187

next page >

< previous page

page_188


38. Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'écriture, 92. 39. Mykyta, ''Blanchot's Au moment voulu," 89. 40. Mykyta, "Blanchot's Au moment voulu," 89. 41. Mykyta, "Blanchot's Au moment voulu," 91. 42. In his doctoral thesis, "Towards a New Literary Idiom," Mike Holland refers to Judith as "Je dis" (108). This may seem tenuous but is not completely unlikely. However, in view of the explicit reference to Abraham, and of the general themes of the present book, I have preferred to look at Judith's "Jewishness." 4 Auschwitz and the Limits of Dis-Course 1. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 151. 2. Lanzmann, Shoah, 18, my emphasis. 3. Lévinas gives the reference as Exod. 22:31, which corresponds to the King James Version and the subsequent Revised Standard Version. 4. See B-EI, 18990, and my introduction. 5. Neher, L'Exil de la parole, 156. 6. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 366, 367. 7. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, 1. 8. Trigano, La Nouvelle Question juive, 23, 39, 67. 9. Trigano, La Nouvelle Question juive, 106, 275. 10. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption, 289. 11. Nadeau, Grâces leur soient rendus, 71. 12. Laporte, Maurice Blanchot, l'ancien, l'effroyablement ancien, 56. 13. The text of the "Manifesto of the 121," the original title of which is the "Declaration on the Rights to Rebellion in the War of Algeria," can be read in the review Gramma 3/4 (1976), 2731. Its authorship is clearly attributed to Blanchot. 14. In "Une lettre," 67. 15. "Notre compagne clandestine," 81. 16. "Les Intellectuels en question," 5, my emphasis. 17. "Penser l'Apocalypse," 79. 18. "Les Intellectuels en question," 25, my emphasis. 19. See the closing lines of "Notre compagne clandestine" (on Lévinas), 87, and "L'Ecriture consacrée au silence" (on Jabès), 240. 20. Cited in Lévy, Les Aventures de la liberté, 311.

21. See the introduction for a discussion of the "dialogue" between Blanchot and Lévinas in Blanchot's essays in L'Entretien infini. 22. Antelme, L'Espèce humaine, 22930. 23. Kofman, Paroles suffoquées, 21. 24. Kofman, Paroles suffoquées, 39. 25. Carroll, Paraesthetics, 170. 26. Leupin, "La Fiction et Auschwitz," 65. 27. Beitchman, "The Fragmentary Word," 68. 28. Steiner, "The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the 'Shoah'," 170.

< previous page

page_188

next page >

< previous page

page_189


29. In ''Sur le pétale de la parole," 24. 30. "Sur le pétale de la parole," 24, my emphasis. Adorno in fact offers his own corrective to his previous statement when he asserts in his Negative Dialectics that "perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems" (Negative Dialectics, 362). One could argue that Jabès's books offer themselves as the expression of this scream: "'What is the story of this book?' 'The awakening to a cry'" (J-LQ, 14). 31. In "Entretien avec Edmond Jabès," 69, my emphasis. 32. Berel Lang, "Writing-the-Holocaust: Jabès and the Measure of History." Lang's essay is reprinted in Writing and the Holocaust, Lang, ed., 24560. 33. Shillony, "Métaphores de la négation," 29. 34. "Notre compagne clandestine," 86. 35. For a brief description of the "Thou shalt not murder" and the "After you," see L-EI, 8384. 36. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption, 272. 37. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption, 27273. 38. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption, 273. 39. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption, 273. 40. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption, 272. 41. Fackenheim, God's Presence in History, 6970, cited in French by Lévinas (L-EN, 115, 116) from La Présence de Dieu dans l'histoire, M. Delmotte and B. Dupuy, trans. (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1980). One could add, in fact, a third factor contributing to the uniqueness of the Shoah: the bystanders. 42. According to traditional Judaism, there are 613 commandments in the Torah, the one added by Fackenheim being purely symbolic. 43. Blanchot, as we shall see, highly suspicious both of humanism and of the notion of ethics, explores the third alternative opened up by his literary discourse: a vigilance to worklessness, unworking self, and other that is the relation of their relation, an undoing of the word from its allegiance to power and politics. 44. Hand, The Lévinas Reader, Hand, ed., 150. 45. "Prière d'insérer," 106-7. 46. Fitch, Lire les récits de Maurice Blanchot, 74, 75. 47. Lévesque, L'Etrangeté du texte, 236. 48. Wilhem, Maurice Blanchot: La voix narrative, 139, 155. 49. Foucault, "La Pensée du dehors," 530. Foucault's citation is the final line of L'Attente l'oubli. 50. Holland, "Towards a Method," 14. 51. Lévesque, L'Etrangeté du texte, 245. 52. Kofman, Paroles suffoquées, 16; emphasis in original.

53. Holland, "Towards a Method," 15. 54. Wilhem, Maurice Blanchot: La voix narrative, 174. 55. Fitch, Lire les récits de Maurice Blanchot, 75.

< previous page

page_189

next page >

< previous page

page_190


56. Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, 95. 57. Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, 102. 58. Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, 103, commenting on Blanchot's words: ''The Other is admittedly not the word I would like to retain" (B-EI, 99). 59. Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, 104. 60. Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, 104. 61. Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, 66. 62. See Mesnard, "Maurice Blanchot, le sujet et l'engagement," 110. 63. "Edmond Jabès. De la parole au livre," 31. 64. Velter, "L'Etranger d'Edmond Jabès," 17. 65. See "Edmond Jabès. De la parole au livre" and "L'Etranger d'Edmond Jabès." 66. Fernandez-Zoïla, "Ecriture en-temps et dialogie dans le livre," 115. 67. Cacciari, "Edmond Jabès dans le judaïsme contemporain. Une 'Trace'," 67.

< previous page

page_190

next page >

< previous page

page_191


Bibliography This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive bibliography of the works of Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès, nor indeed of the extensive secondary material on them. It is divided into three principal sections, each of which rigorously includes only those works to which I have directly referred in the writing of this book. The first section contains the primary material published originally in French by Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès, including any English translations used. The second section contains the secondary material on the three writers concerned. The third section lists only those general works from which quotations have been taken or cited in the notes. Primary Material Lévinas Books (Dates in parentheses indicate original date of publication.) Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. 1930. Paris: Vrin, 1989. De l'évasion. 1935. Introduced and annotated by Jacques Rolland. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982. De l'existence à l'existant. 1947. Paris: Vrin, 1990. Le Temps et l'autre. 1948. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. 1949. Paris: Vrin, 1988. Totalité et infini. Essai sur l'extériorité. 1961. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1990, Coll. Le Livre de Poche, Biblio-essais. Difficile liberté. Essais sur le judaïsme. 1963. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1988, Coll. Le Livre de Poche, Biblio-essais. Quatre lectures talmudiques. Paris: Minuit, 1968. Humanisme de l'autre homme. 1972. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1987, Coll. Le Livre de Poche, Biblioessais. Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence. 1974. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1990, Coll. Le Livre de Poche, Biblio-essais. Sur Maurice Blanchot. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975.

< previous page

page_191

next page >

< previous page

page_192


Noms propres. 1976. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1987, Coll. Le Livre de Poche, Biblio-essais. Du sacré au saint. Cinq nouvelles lectures talmudiques. Paris: Minuit, 1977. L'Au-delà du verset. Lectures et discours talmudiques. Paris: Minuit, 1982. Beyond the Verse. Talmudic Readings and Lectures. Translated by Gary D. Mole. London: Athlone and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. De Dieu qui vient à l'idée. 1982. Paris: Vrin, 1992. Ethique et infini. Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. 1982. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1986, Coll. Le Livre de Poche, Biblio-essais. Hors sujet. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987. A l'heure des nations. Paris: Minuit, 1988. Entre nous. Essais sur le penser-à-l'autre. Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1991. L'Intrigue de l'infini. Edited and presented by Marie-Anne Lescourret. Paris: Flammarion, 1994, Coll. ChampsL'essentiel. Interviews and Articles ''Epreuves d'une pensée (19351939)." In Cahier de l'Herne: Emmanuel Lévinas. Chalier and Abensour, eds., 14253. Poirié, François. Emmanuel Lévinas: Qui êtes-vous? Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987. "Comme un consentement à l'horrible." Le Nouvel Observateur 1211 "Heidegger et la pensée nazie" (2228 janvier 1988): 8283. "Le Hors-de-soi du livre (En guise de lecture talmudique)." "Supplément" to Instants 1 "Pour Edmond Jabès" (1989). Blanchot Fiction Thomas l'Obscur. Paris: Gallimard, 1941. Aminadab. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. Le Très-Haut. Paris: Gallimard, 1948; references are to the L'Imaginaire edition, 1988. L'Arrêt de mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Thomas l'Obscur, nouvelle version. Paris: Gallimard, 1950. Le Ressassement éternel. Paris: Minuit, 1951; reprinted with Gordon and Breach, 1970; references are to this edition. Au moment voulu. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. Le Dernier Homme. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. L'Attente l'oubli. Paris: Gallimard, 1962.

La Folie du jour. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973; references are to the 1986 edition. Après coup précédé par le Ressassement éternel. Paris: Minuit, 1983. L'Instant de ma mort. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994.

< previous page

page_192

next page >

< previous page

page_193


Nonfiction Faux pas. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. La Part du feu. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. L'Espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955; references are to the idées edition of 1985. Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959; references are to the folio/essais edition of 1986. L'Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. L'Amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Le Pas au-delà. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. L'Ecriture du désastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. La Communauté inavouable. Paris: Minuit, 1983. Articles, Essays, and Letters ''La Fin du 6 février." Combat 2 (février 1936): 26. "La Guerre pour rien." Combat 3 (mars 1936): 4243. "Après le coup de force germanique." Combat 4 (avril 1936): 59. "Le Terrorisme, méthode de salut public." Combat 7 (juillet 1936): 106; reprinted in Gramma 5 "Lire Blanchot II" (1976): 6163. "La Grande Passion des modérés." Combat 9 (novembre 1936): 147. "Le Caravansérail." Combat 10 (décembre 1936): 171. "La France, nation à venir." Combat 19 (novembre 1937): 13132. "On demande des dissidents." Combat 20 (décembre 1937): 15455. "Manifeste des 121." 1960. Gramma 3/4 "Lire Blanchot I" (1976): 2731. "L'Infini et l'infini." In Cahier de l'Herne: Henri Michaux. Edited by Raymond Bellour, 7387. Paris: Editions de l'Herne, 1966, Coll. Le Livre de poche, biblio-essais, 1990. "Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui." Les Nouveaux Cahiers 31 "Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui" (hiver 197273): 5152. "Discours sur la patience." Le Nouveau Commerce 3031 (printemps 1975): 1944. "Notre compagne clandestine." In Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas. Edited by François Laruelle, 7987. Paris: JeanMichel Place, 1980. "Une lettre." Exercices de la patience 1 "Emmanuel Lévinas" (1980): 67. "Prière d'insérer." Exercices de la patience 2 "Maurice Blanchot" (hiver 1981): 1047. "Extrait d'une lettre." Exercices de la patience 2 "Maurice Blanchot" (hiver 1981): 107. "Les Intellectuels en question." Débat 29 (mars 1984): 328.

"Penser l'Apocalypse." Le Nouvel Observateur 1211 "Heidegger et la pensée nazie" (2228 janvier 1988): 7779. "N'oubliez pas." L'Arche 373 (mai 1988): 68. "L'Ecriture consacrée au silence." Instants 1 "Pour Edmond Jabès" (1989): 23941.

< previous page

page_193

next page >

< previous page

page_194


Jabès Books Je bâtis ma demeure (Poèmes 19431957). Paris: Gallimard, 1959; new revised edition, 1975. Le Livre des questions I. Le Livre des questions. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. II. Le Livre de Yukel. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. III. Le Retour au livre. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. IV. Yaël. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. V. Elya. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. VI. Aely. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. VII. · El, ou le dernier livre. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Le Livre des ressemblances I. Le Livre des ressemblances. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. II. Le Soupçon le désert. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. III. L'Ineffaçable l'inaperçu. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Le Livre des limites I. Le Petit livre de la subversion hors de soupçon. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. II. Le Livre du dialogue. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. III. Le Parcours. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. IV. Le Livre du partage. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Un Etranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Le Livre de l'hospitalité. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Le Livre des marges I. Ça suit son cours. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975. II. Dans la double dépendence du dit. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1984. Du Désert au livre: Entretiens avec Marcel Cohen. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1980; references are to the revised edition with L'Etranger, 1991. Désir d'un commencement Angoisse d'une seule fin. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1991. L'Enfer de Dante. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1991. Fragments and Interviews ''Qu'est-ce qu'un livre sacré?" In L'Interdit de la représentation. Edited by Adélie Rassial and Jean-Jacques Rassial, 1117. Colloque de Montpellier, 1981. Paris: Seuil, 1984. "Book of the Dead: An Interview with Edmond Jabès." (With Paul Auster.) In The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès. Gould, ed., 325. "On Dialogue and the Other: An Interview with Edmond Jabès." (With Richard Stamelman.) Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 12, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 2741.

< previous page

page_194

next page >

< previous page

page_195


''En guise de clôture." In Jabès le livre lu en Israël. Mendelson, ed., 15557. "L'Etranger d'Edmond Jabès." (With André Velter.) Le Monde (vendredi 28 avril 1989): 17, 21. "Edmond Jabès. De la parole au livre." (With Marie-José Rodriguez.) Le Magazine (du Centre Pompidou) 51 (15 mai15 juillet 1989): 2931. "Edmond Jabès." Film by Michelle Porte, screened in the series Océaniques on FR3, 29 May 1989. "Dieu est le silence qu'il nous faut rompre." (With Odile Quirot.) Le Monde (samedi 4 novembre 1989): 18. "Sur le pétale de la parole." (With Jean-Marc Adolphe.) L'Humanité (mercredi 8 novembre 1989): 24. "Entretien avec Edmond Jabès." (With Philippe de Saint Cheron.) La Nouvelle Revue Française 464 (septembre 1991): 6575. Secondary Material Lévinas Aronowicz, Annette. "Translator's Introduction." In Emmanuel Lévinas. Nine Talmudic Readings, ix-xxxix. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Bernasconi, Robert, and Simon Critchley, eds. Re-Reading Lévinas. London: Athlone Press, 1991. Bernasconi, Robert, and David Wood, eds. The Provocation of Lévinas: Rethinking the Other. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Chalier, Catherine. Lévinas. L'Utopie de l'humain. Paris: Albin Michel, 1993, Coll. Présences du Judaïsme. Chalier, Catherine, and Miguel Abensour, eds. Cahier de l'Herne: Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris: Editions de l'Herne, 1991; Le Livre de Poche, 1993, Coll. biblioessais. Cohen, Richard, ed. Face to Face with Lévinas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Davies, Paul. "A Fine Risk. Reading Blanchot Reading Lévinas." In Re-Reading Lévinas. Bernasconi and Critchley, eds., 20126. Derrida, Jacques. "Violence et métaphysique. Essai sur la pensée d'Emmanuel Lévinas." In L'Ecriture et la différence, 117228. Paris: Seuil, 1967, Coll. Points, 1979. Hand, Seán, ed. The Lévinas Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Handelman, Susan A. Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Lévinas. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Lescourret, Marie-Anne. Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris: Flammarion, 1994. Peperzak, Adriaan. To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1993.

< previous page

page_195

next page >

< previous page

page_196


Blanchot Bataille, Georges. ''Silence et littérature." Critique 8, no. 57 (1952): 99104. . "Maurice Blanchot." Gramma 3/4 "Lire Blanchot I" (1976): 21722. Beitchman, Philip. "The Fragmentary Word." SubStance 39 (1983): 5874. Bousquet, Joë. "Maurice Blanchot." In Joë Bousquet / Maurice Blanchot, 3150. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987. Clark, Timothy. Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Collin, Françoise. Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'écriture. Paris: Gallimard, 1971, Coll. TEL, 1986. David, Alain. "De l'idéalité du rapport extérieur (entre Blanchot et Céline)." Exercices de la patience 2 "Maurice Blanchot" (hiver 1981): 15565. Fitch, Brian T. Lire les récits de Maurice Blanchot. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. . "Un Référent fictif pas comme les autres: Au moment voulu de Maurice Blanchot." In Roman réalités réalismes. Edited by Jean-Bessière, 20921. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989. . "Temps du récit et temps de l'écriture dans Au moment voulu de Blanchot." Temps et récit romanesque. Cahiers de narratologie, Université de Nice (1990): 13749. . "A Fictive Referent Unlike Any Other: Blanchot's Au moment voulu." In Reflections in the Mind's Eye: Reference and Its Problematization in Twentieth-Century French Fiction, 92113. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Foucault, Michel. "La Pensée du dehors." Critique 22, no. 229 (juin 1966): 52346. Holland, Mike. "Towards a Method." SubStance 14 "Flying White: The Writings of Maurice Blanchot" (1976): 717. . "Towards a New Literary Idiom: The Fiction and Criticism of Maurice Blanchot from 1941 to 1955." Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1981. Holland, Mike, and Patrick Rousseau. "Topographie-parcours d'une (contre-) révolution." Gramma 5 "Lire Blanchot II" (1976): 843. Jarrety, Michel. "Maurice Blanchot, Figures de la limite." La Nouvelle Revue Française 397 (février 1986): 6072. Klossowski, Pierre. "Sur Maurice Blanchot." In Un si funeste désir, 15983. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Kofman, Sarah, Paroles suffoquées. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Laporte, Roger. Maurice Blanchot, l'ancien, l'effroyablement ancien. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987. Latteur, Jean-Paul. "La Distraction." Critique 293 (1971): 897909. Leupin, Alexandre. "La Fiction et Auschwitz (Hermann Broch et Maurice Blanchot)." L'Esprit créateur 24, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 5767. Lévesque, Claude. L'Etrangeté du texte. Essai sur Nietzche, Freud, Blanchot et Derrida. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1978, Coll. 10/18. Londyn, Evelyne. Maurice Blanchot romancier. Paris: Nizet, 1976.

< previous page

page_196

next page >

< previous page

page_197


Mehlman, Jeffrey. Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Meschonnic, Henri. ''Maurice Blanchot ou l'écriture hors langage." In Poésie sans réponse (Pour la Poétique V), 78134. Paris: Gallimard, 1978, Coll. Le Chemin. Mesnard, Philippe. "Maurice Blanchot, le sujet et l'engagement." L'Infini 48 (hiver 1994): 10328. Mykyta, Larysa. "Blanchot's Au moment voulu: Woman as the Eternally Recurring Figure of Writing." Boundary 2 10, no. 2 (hiver 1982): 7795. Préli, Georges. La Force du dehors. Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977, Coll. Encres. Prince, Gerald. "The Point of Narrative: Blanchot's Au moment voulu." SubStance 14 "Flying White: The Writings of Maurice Blanchot" (1976): 9398. Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Aminadab ou du fantastique considéré comme un langage." In Critiques littéraires (Situations I), 14873. Paris: Gallimard, 1947, Coll. idées, 1975. Shaviro, Steven. Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990. Sitney, P. Adams. Afterword. In Maurice Blanchot. "The Gaze of Orpheus" and other literary essays, 16397. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York: Station Hill Press, 1981. Smock, Ann. "'Où est la loi?': Law and Sovereignty in Aminadab and Le Très-Haut." SubStance 14 "Flying White: The Writings of Maurice Blanchot" (1976): 99116. Stoekl, Allan. Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Ungar, Steven. "Night Moves: Spatial Perception and the Place of Blanchot's Early Fiction." Yale French Studies 57 (1979): 12435. . "Paulhan before Blanchot: From Terror to Letters between the Wars." Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 10, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 6980. Wilhem, Daniel. Maurice Blanchot: La voix narrative. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1974, Coll. 10/18. Jabès Bilen, Max. "Le Comportement mythique dans l'oeuvre * d'Edmond Jabès." In Jabès le livre lu en Israël. Mendelson, ed., 8390. . Le Sujet de l'écriture. Paris: Gréco, 1989. Bounoure, Gabriel. Edmond Jabès, la demeure et le livre. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1984. Boyer, Philippe. "Point d'amure." SubStance 56 (WinterSpring 1973): 17779. . "Le Point de la question." Change 22 (février 1975): 4172. Cacciari, Massimo. "Edmond Jabès dans le judaïsme contemporain. Une 'Trace'." Instants 1 "Pour Edmond Jabès" (1989): 6173.

< previous page

page_197

next page >

< previous page

page_198


Cahen, Didier. Edmond Jabès. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1991. Chalier, Agnès. ''Le Chant de l'absence." Les Cahiers Obsidiane 5 "Edmond Jabès" (février 1982): 5459. Derrida, Jacques. "Edmond Jabès et la question du livre." In L'Ecriture et la différence, 99116. Paris: Seuil, 1967, Coll. Points, 1979. . "Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui." Les Nouveaux Cahiers 31 "Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui" (hiver 197273): 56. Fernandez-Zoïla, Adolfo. Le Livre, Recherche autre d'Edmond Jabès. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978. . "Ecriture en-temps et dialogie dans le livre, selon Edmond Jabès." In Ecrire le livre autour d'Edmond Jabès. Stamelman and Caws, eds., 10719. Finas, Lucette. "Edmond Jabès. aujourd'hui." Les Nouveaux Cahiers 31 "Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui" (hiver 197273): 57. Gould, Eric, ed. The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. Gray, Rockwell. "The World as Text." Book Forum 2, no. 3 (September 1976): 43437. Guglielmi, Joseph. La Ressemblance impossible: Edmond Jabès. Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1978. Handelman, Susan A. "Torments of an Ancient Word': Edmond Jabès and the Rabbinic Tradition." In The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès. Gould, ed., 5591. Kaplan, Edward. "The Problematic Humanism of Edmond Jabès." In The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès. Gould, ed., 11530. . "The Atheistic Theology of Edmond Jabès." Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 12, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 4363. Kronick, Joseph G. "Edmond Jabès and the Poetry of the Jewish Unhappy Consciousness." Modern Language Notes 106, no. 5 (December 1991): 96796. Lang, Berel. "Writing-the-Holocaust: Jabès and the Measure of History." In The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès. Gould, ed., 191206. Laruelle, François. "Edmond Jabès ou le devenir-juif." Critique 35, no. 38586 (1979): 57278. . "Le Point sur l'un." In Ecrire le livre autour d'Edmond Jabès. Stamelman and Caws, eds., 12132. Macé, Gérard. "La Poésie par défaut." In Bounoure, Edmond Jabès, la demeure et le livre, 916. Mendelson, David, ed. Jabès le livre lu en Israël. Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1987. Motte Jr., Warren F. Questioning Edmond Jabès. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Shillony, Helena. "Edmond Jabès: Une rhétorique de la subversion et de l'harmonie." Romance Notes 26, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 311. . "Métaphores de la négation." In Ecrire le livre autour d'Edmond Jabès. Stamelman and Caws, eds., 2330.

< previous page

page_198

next page >

< previous page

page_199


. Edmond Jabès: Une rhétorique de la subversion. Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1991. Stamelman, Richard. ''Le Dialogue de l'absence." In Ecrire le livre autour d'Edmond Jabès. Stamelman and Caws, eds., 20117. . "Le Miracle du 'tu'." Instants 1 "Pour Edmond Jabès" (1989): 2732. Stamelman, Richard, and Mary Ann Caws, eds. Ecrire le livre autour d'Edmond Jabès. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1989. Velter, André. "L'Etranger d'Edmond Jabès." Le Monde (vendredi 28 avril 1989): 17, 21. Waldrop, Rosmarie. "Edmond Jabès and the Impossible Circle." SubStance 56 (WinterSpring 1973): 18394. General Works Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Antelme, Robert. L'Espèce humaine. Paris: Gallimard, 1957, Coll. TEL, 1978. Babylonian Talmud. 34 volumes. Edited by Isidore Epstein. London: Soncino Press, 193552. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984. Barthes, Roland. Le Degré zéro de l'écriture. Paris: Seuil, 1953, Coll. Points, 1972. Jerusalem Bible. Translated by Harold Fisch. Jerusalem: Koren Publishers Jerusalem Ltd., 1992. Carroll, David. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. New York and London: Methuen, 1987. Celan, Paul. "Der Meridian." In Ausgewählte Gedichte, 13148. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. David, Catherine. "Heidegger et la pensée nazie." Le Nouvel Observateur 1211 "Heidegger et la pensée nazie" (2228 janvier 1988): 7576. Dostoyevsky, Fedor. Memoirs from the House of the Dead. Translated by Jessie Coulson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, Coll. The World's Classics. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Fackenheim, Emil. God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections after Auschwitz. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Jackson, Julian. The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 193438. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin, 1985. Lang, Berel, ed. Writing and the Holocaust. New York, London: Holmes and Meier, 1988.

< previous page

page_199

next page >

< previous page

page_200


Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah. Paris: Editions Fayard, 1985. Lévy, Bernard-Henri. Les Aventures de la liberté. Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1991. Loubet del Bayle, Jean-Louis. Les Non-conformistes des années 30. Paris: Seuil, 1969. Malka, Salomon. Monsieur Chouchani. L'énigme d'un maître du XXe siècle. Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1994. Midrash Rabbah. 10 volumes. Edited by H. Freedman and M. Simon. London: Soncino Press, 1939. The Mishnah. Translated and with an Introduction by Herbert Danby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. Nadeau, Maurice. Grâces leur soient rendues. Mémoires littéraires. Paris: Albin Michel, 1990. Neher, André. L'Existence juive. Solitude et affrontements. Paris: Seuil, 1962. . L'Exil de la parole: Du silence biblique au silence d'Auschwitz. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Roy, Claude. Moi je. Essai d'autobiographie. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. St. John of the Cross. The Collected Works. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1966. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. Steiner, George. ''The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the 'Shoah'." In Writing and the Holocaust. Lang, ed., 15471. Todorov, Tzvetan. Critique de la critique. Paris: Seuil, 1984. Trigano, Shmuel. La Nouvelle Question juive. Paris: Gallimard, 1979, Coll. idées. . "L'Apostasie du Messie. Le Paradoxe de l'emancipation." Esprit 5 (mai 1979): 618. Weber, Eugen. Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962. Wiesel, Elie. Le Chant des morts. Paris: Seuil, 1966. . Paroles d'étranger. Paris: Seuil, 1982, Coll. Points, 1984. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.

< previous page

page_200

next page >

< previous page

page_201


Index A Abra(ha)m, 8, 100;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Blanchot, 12021, 123, 12530, 188n.42;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Jabès, 21, 11120;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Kafka, 7, 128;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Kierkegaard, 12627;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Lévinas, 21, 62, 100111

Adorno, Theodor W., 135, 138, 142, 14445, 189n.30 Aggadah, 73 Albiach, Anne-Marie, 4 Alterity, 6, 8, 12, 14, 20, 21, 57, 59, 60, 62, 72, 90, 95, 105, 11112;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as the Jew, 58, 65;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as the neuter, 15.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also Other

Antelme, Robert, 141, 142, 149, 166 Anti-Semitism, 9, 2021, 26, 4454, 13435, 148, 179, 184n.44. See also Blanchot Aristotle, 62 Aronowicz, Annette, 6869 Artaud, Antonin, 2 Auschwitz, 16, 2122, 43, 64, 69, 119, 132, 13436, 137, 13840, 14247, 15154, 163, 16566, 16768, 17176, 180. See also Being; Language; Shoah B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 112, 113 Barthes, Roland, 3 Bataille, Georges, 2, 117, 122, 177 Baudelaire, Charles, 26 Beckett, Samuel, xii, 2

Being, 2333, 71, 84, 86;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and Auschwitz, 22;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif the Being of, 24;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as Dasein, 2425;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif denucleation of, 13, 72;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif escape from, 20, 2530, 60, 90;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as étranger, 20;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif ex-cendance of, 27, 41, 60;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Heideggerian, 2;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif -toward-death, 24

Beitchman, Philip, 3940, 50 Benjamin, Walter, 2 Bernanos, Georges, 46 Bernasconi, Robert, 181n.5 Bilen, Max, 57, 65 Blanchot, Maurice:


and anti-Semitism, 910, 2021, 4454, 138, 184n.44;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif background of, 23, 67;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and Judaism, 710;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and politics, 4554;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as reader of Jabès, 1618, 145;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as reader of Kafka, 78, 3435, 9293, 128;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as reader of Lévinas, 1316, 94, 147

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Works:


Aminadab, 7, 21, 32, 34, 67, 8892, 95, 97, 98, 154

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif L'Amitié, 7, 17, 139, 168


Après coup, 33, 34, 36, 4344, 45, 50, 137, 14243, 165, 182n.7. See also Le Dernier Mot; L'Idylle

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif L'Arrêt de mort, 7, 120, 121

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif L'Attente l'oubli, 7, 22, 121, 143,

< previous page

page_201

next page >

< previous page

page_202



15463, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 179


Au moment voulu, 7, 21, 100, 114, 12030, 162


Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas, 7, 121

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Combat, 4850, 51, 52, 184n.43

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif La Communauté inavouable, 131

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Dernier Homme, 7, 121

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Dernier Mot, 33, 50, 182n.6

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif ''Discours sur la patience," 14, 1516


"L'Ecriture consacrée au silence," 18, 188n.19


L'Ecriture du désastre, 1, 6, 7, 13, 16, 137, 139, 169, 175, 176, 180


"Edmond Jabès aujourd'hui," 1718, 56, 182n.17


L'Entretien infini, 7, 810, 1415, 3435, 41, 87, 94, 134, 138, 139, 14042, 154, 157, 163, 165, 188n.4, 188n.21


L'Espace littéraire, 7, 12, 93, 12728, 164, 181n.6

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "Extraits d'une lettre," 96

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Faux pas, 7, 46, 47

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif La Folie du jour, 137, 16364


L'Idylle, 910, 2021, 25, 26, 3354, 57, 59, 60, 89, 164, 182n.6

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "L'Infini et l'infini," 47


L'Instant de ma mort, 7, 22, 136, 138, 16367

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "Les Intellectuels en question," 138

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Livre à venir, 7, 122, 181n.6

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "Manifeste des 121," 137, 188n.13


"Notre compagne clandestine," 14, 16, 138, 147, 188n.19

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "N'oubliez pas," 48

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif La Part du feu, 7, 93, 18586n.16

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Pas au-delà, 7, 182n.17

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "Penser l'Apocalypse," 4748, 138

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "Prière d'insérer," 155

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Ressassement éternel, 33, 34, 50

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Thomas l'Obscur, nouvelle version, 7


Thomas l'Obscur, première version, 7, 35, 45


Le Très-Haut, 7, 21, 47, 67, 84, 8889, 9299, 162

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "Une Lettre," 1314, 137

Blondel, Charles, 5 Blum, Léon, 49, 51, 53, 184n.44 Bounoure, Gabriel, 10, 55 Bousquet, Joë, 186n.28 Boyer, Philippe, 58 Brasillach, Robert, 49 Breton, André, 34 Buber, Martin, 2, 1034, 105, 113 Butor, Michel, 177 C Cacciari, Massimo, 173 Cahen, Didier, 181n.7 Camus, Albert, 2, 10, 177;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif L'Etranger, 36;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif La Peste, 95

Carroll, David, 142 Cassirer, Ernst, 5 Celan, Paul, 10, 112, 113 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 47 Chalier, Agnès, 5758 Chalier, Catherine, 3132 Char, René, 2, 3, 10 Chouchani, Monsieur, 6, 181n.3 Clark, Timothy, 16061, 163 Cohen, Marcel, 144 Cohen, Richard, 181n.5 Collin, Françoise, 127, 186n.28

Critchley, Simon, 181n.5 D David, Alain, 4546 David, Catherine, 4748 Davies, Paul, 182n.7 Death, 15, 19, 27, 32, 4243, 53, 63, 81, 9798, 12728, 130, 137, 142, 16167, 179 Deconstruction:

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif of the book, 11, 54, 78, 8182;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as method, 12, 3, 173;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif of the ontotheological, 3, 116

De Man, Paul, 47

< previous page

page_202

next page >

< previous page

page_203


Derrida, Jacques, xii, 2, 3, 54, 55, 57, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73, 116, 177, 185n.9 Descartes, René, 2 Desert, 7, 19, 58, 60, 80, 87, 11112 Desire, 19, 7172, 105, 149;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif metaphysical, 14, 94

Désoeuvrement, 15, 117 Dialogue, 21, 100, 1023;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Blanchot, 15657, 161;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Jabès, 11215, 174;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Lévinas, 1036

Disaster, 13, 15, 130, 143, 178 Dis-course, 17, 168, 171 Dis-interestedness, 70, 71, 104, 147 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 53, 91, 112;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif The Brothers Karamazov, 5;


Memoirs from the House of the Dead, 3637, 183n.11

Duras, Marguerite, xii, 2 Dying. See Death E Eluard, Paul, 10 Escape. See Being Ethics, 6, 1415, 63, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 102, 1045, 149, 151, 163, 168, 176, 180;


as ethical encounter with the other, 2, 9, 106;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as first philosophy, 13, 100, 136, 147, 154;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Jewish, 21, 68;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as space, 12

Etranger, 1, 4, 16, 16771, 181n.1;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and the anti-Semite, 4448;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as being, 20;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Blanchot's Aminadab, 89, 92;


in Blanchot's L'Idylle, 9, 2021, 3334, 3545, 50, 5254;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as Jew, 33, 4044, 50, 5354;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as Lévinas's Other, 14;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as writer and Jew, 1112, 21, 85, 17879;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif -writer-Jew, Jabès's configuration of, 5466

''Ex-cendance." See Being Exegesis, 54, 80, 81, 82, 86, 92, 98, 120;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif call to, 67, 69, 7475, 78;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Jewish, 4, 21, 70

Exile, 1, 4, 79, 12, 13, 4445, 53, 54, 8081, 100, 102;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif myth of, 41, 5759, 60

Exteriority, 3, 89, 12, 13, 24, 35, 74, 105, 111, 113, 180 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 135 F Face, 6, 8, 9, 19, 62, 105, 148, 17275, 182n.3;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as face-to-face, 68, 76, 77, 160, 177;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as resistance, 14, 149

Fackenheim, Emil, 152, 153, 189n.42 Farias, Victor, 47, 138 Fernandez-Zoïla, Adolfo, 82 Finas, Lucette, 59 Finkielkraut, Alain, 177 Fitch, Brian T., 120, 156, 160 Flaubert, Gustave, 3435 Foucault, Michel, 3, 91, 158 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 3, 70 Gemara, 73, 185n.12 Gide, André, 177

God, 6, 89, 14, 15, 19, 55, 7678, 8388, 104, 11011, 147, 175, 176;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif death of, 56, 81, 152;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif of the Jews, 63;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as metaphor, 13, 118;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif name of, 80, 83;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif of the philosophers, 62, 100101;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and philosophy, 7073;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif silence of, 61, 11518

Good, 19, 7172, 84, 178 Gray, Rockwell, 57 Greek:

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif vs. Jewish, 16, 21, 68, 77, 100, 133.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also Ulysses

Grenier, Jean, 10 Guglielmi, Joseph, 82 H Halakhah, 7374, 75 Hand, Seán, 154 Handelman, Susan A., 59, 68, 74, 82, 135, 14849, 150 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 96, 98, 103, 166;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif dialectic of, 41;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and the unhappy consciousness, 55

Heidegger, Martin, xii, 6, 13, 25, 3031, 32, 70, 86, 93, 136, 160;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif metaphysics of, 27;


and Nazism, 4748, 138, 140, 182n.4, 183n.41;

< previous page

page_203

next page >

< previous page

page_204


continued Heidegger, Martin

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif ontology of, 20, 2425;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Sein und Zeit, 5, 23, 183n.41;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif thought of, 2;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif truth of being in, 12

''Here I am," 68, 69, 72, 76, 148 Hermeneutics. See Exegesis Hirsch, E. D., 6970 Holland, Mike, 45, 46, 158, 159, 188n.42 Hospitality, 21, 80, 1068, 178 Hostage, 15, 72, 148, 150, 17980 Husserl, Edmund, xii, 5;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif phenomenology of, 12, 6

I Identity, 5456, 71, 74, 111, 141, 170;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif of the ego, 27;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Jewish, 1;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as self-coincidence, 60;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as unity and subjectivity, 4, 158

Illeity, xii, 19, 62, 104, 178 Infinite, 68, 80, 86, 149, 175;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif idea of, 14, 7173, 173;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif revelation of, 7376, 84

Ingarden, Roman, 3 Insomnia, 7071 Intentionality, 2, 56, 7071 Interiority, 13, 60 Interpretation. See Exegesis

Interruption, 15, 16, 17, 104, 140, 142, 15455, 15859, 165, 168 Intersubjectivity, 6, 8990, 12122, 124, 125 Ipseity, 62, 72, 104, 160 Isaac, 100, 119, 12530 J Jabès, Edmond:


7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as reader of Blanchot, 1819;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as reader of Lévinas, 1920


7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Aely, 10, 21, 60, 67, 7882, 83, 97

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "Book of the Dead," 11, 118

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Ça suit son cours, 1819


Dans la double dépendance du dit, 1, 18, 19, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 117, 119, 140, 146


Désir d'un commencement Angoise d'une seule fin, 176


"Dieu est le silence qu'il nous faut rompre," 82


Du Désert au livre: Entretiens avec Marcel Cohen, 11, 18, 55, 58, 112, 14445


"Edmond Jabès. De la parole au livre," 168


"Edmond Jabès (Michelle Porte)," 115, 118

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif · El, ou le dernier livre, 83, 8687

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Elya, 64

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif L'Enfer de Dante, 17576

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "En guise de clôture," 87

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "Entretien avec Edmond Jabès," 145

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "L'Etranger d'Edmond Jabès," 169

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif L'Ineffaçable l'inaperçu, 62, 85

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Je bâtis ma demeure, 10


Le Livre du dialogue, 85, 88, 113, 11415, 117


Le Livre de l'hospitalité, 11, 86, 176, 180


Le Livre des limites, 11, 21, 100, 145, 168

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Livre des marges, 11


Le Livre du partage, 5556, 84, 85, 86, 11516, 117, 118, 169


Le Livre des questions, 10, 11, 12, 17, 21, 54, 55, 57, 59, 63, 64, 117, 140, 145, 189n.30


Le Livre des ressemblances, 11, 21, 6061, 63, 8485, 87

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Livre de Yukel, 1, 63, 81

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "On Dialogue and the Other," 62


Le Parcours, 26, 55, 58, 59, 60, 86, 112, 117, 118, 119, 146, 168


Le Petit Livre de la subversion hors de soupçon, 56, 98, 11112, 114, 117, 143


"Qu'est-ce qu'un livre sacré?," 186n.21

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Retour au livre, 54

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Soupçon le désert, 56, 58, 6162, 84

< previous page

page_204

next page >

< previous page

page_205


7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif ''Sur la pétale de la parole," 144, 145


Un Etranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format, 11, 22, 8586, 117, 118, 16876

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Yaël, 113

Jackson, Julian, 184n.44 Jacob, Max, 3, 10 James, Henry, 3 Jarrety, Michel, 38 Jew, 1, 78, 16, 21, 30;


as étranger, 2021, 33, 4041, 53, 5466, 81, 8586, 17879;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as metaphor, 13, 59;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as other, 4, 66;


persecution of, 20, 26, 41, 56, 63, 132, 133, 13435, 141, 145, 150, 152;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as writer, 1112, 5466, 85, 17879.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also Judaism

Judaism, 79, 13, 26, 5859, 6869, 70, 82, 154;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as rupture, 17;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as writing, 5456.


See also Jew; Obedience; Revelation; Transcendence

Jünger, Ernst, 3 Justice, 6, 8, 12, 21, 58, 63, 68, 77, 84, 102, 104, 1056, 1089, 110, 180;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif subordinated to truth, 14, 178

K Kabbalah, 17, 55, 87, 11617 Kafka, Franz, xii, 2, 7, 8, 12, 15, 3435, 91, 9293, 100, 128, 166, 186n.28 Kant, Immanuel, 138, 150 Kaplan, Edward, 60, 61, 82 Kierkegaard, Soren, xii, 2, 100, 12627, 128 Klossowski, Pierre, 2, 9394, 97, 177 Kofman, Sarah, 142, 158

Kronick, Joseph G., 65 L Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 66 Lang, Berel, 145 Language, 6, 14, 7273, 97, 100, 113, 115, 118, 119, 156, 15758, 161;


and Auschwitz, 22, 13738, 139, 14142, 149, 163;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and communication, 60, 105, 173;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as writing, 15, 35, 12123

Lanzmann, Claude, 131 Laporte, Roger, 47, 136, 183n.38 Laruelle, François, 55, 56 Latteur, Jean-Paul, 34, 40 Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), xii, 2 Law, 19;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Blanchot's novels, 8889;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in the book, 7982;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in the Jewish tradition, 21, 67, 7376;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and Moses, 8288;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif subversion of, 21.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also Revelation

Léautaud, Paul, 46 Leibniz, G. W., 62 Leiris, Michel, 2, 3, 177 Lescourret, Marie-Anne, xii, 91, 18384n.42 Leupin, Alexandre, 142 Lévesque, Claude, 156, 158 Levi, Primo, 131 Lévinas, Emmanuel:



as reader of Blanchot, 1213, 8990, 15657, 15961;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as reader of Jabès, 13, 86


7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif A l'heure des nations, 68, 185n.8


L'Au-delà du verset, xii, 71, 7378, 107, 185n.8


Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence, 6, 1516, 68, 71, 105, 108, 13334, 135, 147, 148, 185n.9


Beyond the Verse. See L'Au-delà du verset


"Comme un consentement à l'horrible," 183n.41

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif De Dieu qui vient à l'idée, 7073


De l'évasion, 5, 13, 20, 23, 24, 2530, 60


De l'existence à l'existant, 5, 23, 24, 3032, 7071, 8990, 132


Difficile liberté, 1, 6, 101, 13233, 148, 153, 182n.4, 185n.8

< previous page

page_205

next page >

< previous page

page_206


7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Du sacré au saint, 4546, 1067, 185n.8


Emmanuel Lévinas: Qui êtes-vous?, 14, 132, 136, 147


En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 24, 6263

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Entre nous, 15054

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif ''Epreuves d'une pensée," 26, 182n.2

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Ethique et infini, 13, 105, 150, 173

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif "Le Hors-de-soi du livre," 86

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Hors sujet, 1034

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Humanisme de l'autre homme, 17980

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Noms propres, 13, 55


Quatre lectures talmudiques, 148, 185n.8


Sur Maurice Blanchot, 12, 89, 15657, 15960

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Le Temps et l'autre, 6, 90, 110


Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, 5


Totalité et infini, xii, 6, 89, 16, 68, 101, 105, 106, 166, 182n.3, 185n.9

Lévy, Benny, 177 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 140, 177 Londyn, Evelyne, 34, 126, 127 Loubet del Bayle, Jean-Louis, 45 Luria, Isaac, 116 Lyotard, Jean-François, xii, 2, 66, 142 M Macé, Gérard, 56 Malka, Salomon, 48, 181n.3 Mallarmé, Stéphane, xii, 2, 4, 10, 12, 65, 166, 177, 18586n.16 Mann, Thomas, 3, 3435 Marcel, Gabriel, 1034, 105 Mascolo, Dionys, 163 Maurras, Charles, 47, 49, 183n.38

Mehlman, Jeffrey, 46, 48 Meschonnic, Henri, 65 Mesnard, Philippe, 163 Michaux, Henri, 3, 10 Midrash, 71, 82, 102, 111, 117, 125, 129 Mishnah, 73, 106, 185n.12 Moses, 63;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif breaking of the Tablets, 17, 8687;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Jabès, 21, 67, 8288;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Lévinas, 21, 67, 7678, 185n.15

Motte, Warren F., Jr., 81 Musil, Robert, 3 Mykyta, Larysa, 12425, 127, 128 N Nadeau, Maurice, 136, 163, 164 Nakedness, 28, 182n.3 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 66 Nausea, 29 Negativity, 3;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and the death of God, 56, 93

Neher, André, 8, 100, 1012, 10911, 11213, 13435 Neuter, 15, 35, 39, 158, 161, 167, 178 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xii, 2, 152 Nomadism, 8, 39;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif vs. Heidegger's truth of being, 12;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as truth, 41, 5759, 60

Nothingness, 19, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 112 O Obedience, 102;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif to the Most-High, 21, 67, 7376

Ontology, 4, 6, 14, 2324, 25, 30, 57, 60, 68, 70, 84, 101, 104, 107, 113, 148, 160, 166. See also Being Other, 2, 15, 90, 101, 1078, 111, 11314, 13334;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and anti-Semitism, 9, 134;


being-face-to-face-with-the-other-through-language, 32;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif being-for-the-other, 32;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as Jew, 4, 5759, 66;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as the infinite, 25;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif love of, 75, 180;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif proximity of, 71, 72, 90, 111, 133;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as Other, 9, 14, 15, 66, 161;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif service of, 25;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif trace of, 6263;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as transcendence, 4, 7172;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as writer, 4.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also Alterity; Etranger; Responsibility

Outside, 78, 35, 60 P passivity, 15, 19, 71, 15051, 164 patience, 15

< previous page

page_206

next page >

< previous page

page_207


Peperzak, Adriaan, 101, 181n.5 Phenomenology: as method, 2 Plato, 2, 103 Ponge, Francis, 2 Pradines, Maurice, 5 Préli, Georges, 96, 97, 12425 Prévost, Pierre, 163 Prince, Gerald, 122 Proust, Marcel, 2, 5 Pushkin, Alexander, 5 R Rashi, 32 Responsibility, 6, 15, 19, 21, 68, 148, 17375, 178, 179, 182n.3;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif ethics of, 70;


for the other, 2, 16, 32, 7273, 75, 84, 102, 1045, 133, 173, 180;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif of responsibility, 7576, 105

Revelation, 8384;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in the Jewish tradition, 21, 67, 7376, 7778

Ricoeur *, Paul, 3 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 2 Rimbaud, Arthur, 169 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 177 Rolland, Jacques, 26 Rosenzweig, Franz, 2, 177 Rousseau, Patrick, 45 Roy, Claude, 45 Royet-Journoud, Claude, 4 S Sade, D-A. F., xii, 2

Said, 16, 105, 160 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 12, 112, 177;


and Blanchot's Aminadab, 34, 91, 183n.9, 186n.28;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif La Nausée, 29;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif Réflexions sur la question juive, 64

Saying, 16, 19, 34, 70, 7273, 86, 105, 148, 160 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 69 Scholem, Gershom, 2, 116 Shaviro, Steven, 120, 187n.27 Shillony, Helena, 79, 146 Shoah, xii, 6, 11, 15, 16, 1719, 22, 24, 69, 130, 178;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and Blanchot, 13643, 15467;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and Jabès, 14347, 16768, 17176;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and Lévinas, 13236, 14754;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif responding to, 4, 13132.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also Auschwitz

Silence, 10, 19, 21, 85, 100, 11418, 121, 12223 Sitney, P. Adams, 181n.6 Smock, Ann, 91, 92 Socrates, 14 St. John of the Cross, 91 Stamelman, Richard, 112, 113, 115 Steiner, George, 14344 Stoekl, Allan, 47, 95, 96, 97 Styron, William, 142 Subjectivity, 6, 69, 7172, 74, 101, 106, 108, 14950, 153, 178, 179, 180;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif dispossession of, 31, 56, 60, 71, 125, 134;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and the law, 81;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif loss of, 32, 92;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in the service of the other, 25;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif sovereignty of, 3;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif transcendence of, 13;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as unity-identity, 4.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also ''Here I am"

Subversion, 61, 92;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif of the law, 21, 67, 86, 97, 9899

Suffering, 22, 27, 15054 T Talmud, 6, 59, 6870, 106, 148, 185n.12 Testimony, 22, 73, 148, 149 "There is," 20, 25, 3033, 35, 57, 7071, 72, 178, 182n.4 "Thou shalt not murder," 68, 147 Todorov, Tzvetan, 47 Tolstoy, Leo, 5 Torah, 73, 7475, 76, 77, 82, 87, 189n.42 Trace, 19, 76, 78, 84, 86;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif of the other, 6263, 115

Transcendence, 4, 21, 24, 25, 90;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif of being, 13;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as God, 8, 70;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and immanence, 60, 62, 71, 149;


as the Infinite, 19, 7172, 7376, 102, 173, 175.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also Revelation

Trigano, Shmuel, 6465, 135, 138, 143

< previous page

page_207

next page >

< previous page

page_208 Page 208

U Ulysses, 21, 62, 100101, 112, 13334. See also Greek Ungar, Steven, 47, 183n.11 V Valéry, Paul, 5 Velter, André, 169 W Wahl, Jean, 6 Waldrop, Rosmarie, 59 Weber, Eugen, 45 Wiesel, Elie, 4041, 131, 145, 167, 181n.3 Wilhem, Daniel, 156, 159 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 131 Wood, David, 181n.5 Woolf, Virginia, 3 Writer, 1, 35, 79, 81, 97, 111;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as étranger, 40, 5466, 85, 17879;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as Jew, 4, 1112, 5466, 85, 17879;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Kafka, 7;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and self-deprivation, 12123.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also Writing

Writing, 1, 4, 12, 19, 92, 11314, 119, 121, 129, 159;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and exile, 53;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as the experience of language, 15, 35;


as fragmentary, 18, 87, 141, 143, 15455, 163, 179;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and Judaism, 5456;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif in Kafka, 7;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif and Moses, 21, 84;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as the neuter, 15;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as rupture, 1718;

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif as a theme of writing, 13.

7d5aff9271293f8e97aae442d6c8e113.gif See also Writer

< previous page

page_208

Levinas, Blanchot, Jabes: Figures of Estrangement (Crosscurrents : Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy)

Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression

The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Biblical Figures in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature

Philosophy and Tragedy (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion:

Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy

The Hypocritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

The Singer of Tales (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Martin Heidegger (Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought)

Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas

"Gypsies" in European Literature and Culture (Studies in European Culture and History)

Philosophy In Literature

''Gypsies'' in European Literature and Culture (Studies in European Culture and History)

The Challenge of Comparative Literature

The Challenge of Comparative Literature

Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

The Challenge of Comparative Literature

Philosophy and German Literature, 1700-1990 (Cambridge Studies in German)

Judging Lyotard (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Continental Crosscurrents: British Criticism and European Art 1810-1910

Comparative European Politics

Women, Philosophy and Literature

Studies in European Realism

The Living Eye (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Maurice Blanchot

The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction (Crosscurrents Modern Critiques)

Portuguese Syntax: New Comparative Studies (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

Levinas, Blanchot, Jabes: Figures of Estrangement (Crosscurrents : Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy)

Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression

The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Biblical Figures in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature

Philosophy and Tragedy (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion:

Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy

The Hypocritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

The Singer of Tales (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Martin Heidegger (Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought)

Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas

"Gypsies" in European Literature and Culture (Studies in European Culture and History)

Philosophy In Literature

''Gypsies'' in European Literature and Culture (Studies in European Culture and History)

The Challenge of Comparative Literature

The Challenge of Comparative Literature

Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

The Challenge of Comparative Literature

Philosophy and German Literature, 1700-1990 (Cambridge Studies in German)

Judging Lyotard (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Continental Crosscurrents: British Criticism and European Art 1810-1910

Comparative European Politics

Women, Philosophy and Literature

Studies in European Realism

The Living Eye (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Maurice Blanchot

The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction (Crosscurrents Modern Critiques)

Portuguese Syntax: New Comparative Studies (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

Recommend Documents