FW: Event Scene 121 - To Blanchot

Thu Mar 13 13:17:57 CST 2003

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  CTHEORY          THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE       VOL 26, NOS 1-2
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  Event Scene 121   03/03/13     Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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  To Blanchot
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  ~James Griffith~

  Only a writer can have friends in this way - sans lips, sans hands,
  sans eyes, sans everything.

  I am in mourning, yes, but I have always mourned Blanchot, have
  always felt he ended too soon, that I could have said something,
  anything (more? at all?) to him before it was too late. One always
  feels this way when reading, especially when completing a book, but
  the experience is doubled or halved when the text was Blanchot's.
  With him, the book was always more than complete, which essentially
  meant that it never could finish itself. It was complete in that
  nothing was left to say; he, Blanchot, had already written all that
  one could ever hope to read on friendship, on death, on the disaster.
  They were never finished to the extent that he always left me with
  the hope, an empty hope, but a hope nonetheless, that he had only
  hinted at the limit. Again, one always feels this way after every
  book, after great books, but Blanchot's gift was to take this sense
  of the limit to its own limit.

  Blanchot was able to reach such a limit of the limit because he never
  wrote. Always the perennial writer, Blanchot never wrote anything.
  His writing was always that of total effacement. "That is what is
  polite to say when some writer disappears: that a voice has fallen
  silent, a way of thinking has disappeared," he wrote. But Blanchot
  had no voice. His writing was, of course, unmistakable. His was a
  note, a tone, a disharmony. Blanchot never was and insofar as he
  never was, he spoke the words of a god, or the closest to such an
  experience as one could ever hope to read. His authority derived from
  the total lack of authorship he insisted upon and because of that his
  authority was total, absolute.

  All his writing, he said, was posthumous, as is all writing. The dead
  speak with the most radical authority, but they also speak with less
  than authority and for the same reason: they are dead, on the other
  side, the most other side. The most radical authority not only
  because of their perspective on life is derived from already having
  lived (which would suggest nothing more than maturity, implying
  another life, a destiny for being).  But also and mainly because the
  dead are not alive and therefore have the authority of those who have
  no experience of life...cannot understand it...can see it for what it
  is. And, like other others, this authority lacks any authority
  because it cannot understand what it feels like to be in that realm
  of experience. In life, that is how Blanchot wrote, from that most
  other side.

  To read Blanchot was to be displaced. Not placed somewhere else, but
  only displaced, taken away. This was no escapism but an experience of
  both a leaving-behind of the average everyday as well as to see both
  the average everyday and the exceptional anew with old eyes.

  Perhaps I have said nothing yet, but I do not know what to say about
  someone like Blanchot. When I read _Writing of the Disaster_ the only
  comment that seemed at all worthwhile was, "_The Writing of the
  Disaster_ is the writing of the disaster." Or was it "The writing of
  the disaster is the _Writing of the Disaster_?" In other words, is
  the book a demonstration of the disaster or is the disaster embodied
  in the text? I will never know nor do I believe it to be knowable, to
  the book's credit. Anything I write on this book can be found in the
  book already. Any authority, any originality I could hope to have is
  always derived from him, from his, which I know he would detest.

  It is that detestation that I love. That was Blanchot's gift, his
  gift to me who would accept it openly and without guilt. It is a gift
  I am always tempted to return because I do not want Blanchot's
  detestation for the temptation I always feel to acknowledge him,
  every time I sign anything - a check or a text. I should sign
  everything "James Griffith Maurice Blanchot" as if "Griffith" and
  "Maurice" were my middle names and Blanchot were my last, my final
  name. But Blanchot is not my name, not even close to my name, even
  though it should be. He signed everything he wrote in his own name,
  even though he desperately wanted to efface it. It is because of his
  unique signature that he was able to achieve such levels of
  self-effacement, an erasure of self by the self that never was,
  adding to the uniqueness that could only be Blanchot's. I should sign
  everything of mine over to him, write everything in his impossible
  name, if only to reach the limit with him once more. Again, Maurice
  would hate me for this.

  And I say Maurice in the name, in his name, of friendship. This
  friendship in which only I owe to him who never was. This friendship
  in which he whom I never met and of whose biography I know very
  little, owes me nothing. Only a writer can have friends in this way -
  sans lips, sans hands, sans eyes, sans everything.

  Now that he is gone I feel the most appropriate kind of grief for
  Blanchot: a radical nothing. Today was a brilliant, frigid March day
  in New York, which I feel he would have liked. I have been wearing
  all black for no other reason than they were the clothes that were
  clean and at the top of the pile. I bought The Book to Come on a whim
  and under the (always) mistaken impression it was new. When I got
  back to work, I typed "Maurice Blanchot" into Google and saw his
  obituary from March 1 in The Guardian. I was beyond speechlessness.
  The writing of the disaster. Friendship.

       Friendship is not a gift, or a promise; it is not a form of
       generosity. Rather, this incommensurable relation of one to the
       other is the outside drawing near in its separateness and
       inaccessibility. Desire, pure impure desire, is the call to
       bridge the distance, to die in common through separation. Death
       suddenly powerless, if friendship is the response that one can
       hear and make heard only by dying ceaselessly."

            _Writing of the Disaster_, Maurice Blanchot

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  James Griffith is a writer and editor living in New York City.
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