Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot

Six. Writing and Sovereignty: La folie du jour

178 six WRITING AND SOVEREIGNTY LA FOLIE DU JOUR Christopher Fynsk La folie du jour (The Madness of the Day) concludes with a statement of refusal, a “no” that counterbalances a prior acquiescence from which derives a large portion of the text that we read before those final words.1 From the present of this concluding refusal, the narrator’s avowed silence and the text’s own infinite recession are sealed: “A story? No. No stories, never again.” This refusal will suffer no compromise. Playful, almost irresponsible evasion has given way to the decision of an assumed will whose act interrupts, remarking and transmuting an interruption at the core of the text. The statement follows an admission of incapacity (shortly before, we read: “I had to acknowledge that I was not capable of forming a story out of these events. I had lost the sense of the story” [199]), but it is sovereign in its refusal. The future of this declarative act is to be read throughout the works that follow The Madness of the Day in Blanchot’s corpus, and special attention should be given to its echoes in the political texts, beginning, in particular , with the short essay of 1958 later included in L’amitié, entitled “Le refus.”2 The statement’s emergence from a situation of confinement, in response to a demand whose ground proves to be juridical, makes the po- Writing and Sovereignty 179 litical reference almost inevitable. But before leaping forward in Blanchot ’s oeuvre to consider the insistence of such forms of refusal, it is worthwhile to pause over the question of the sovereign character of this particular statement. For it emerges in a text that appears to bear a meditation on sovereignty and invites us to grasp refusal, a sovereign no, together with at least one form of sovereign yes. We hear this latter affirmation taking form in the opening words of the story as the narrator asserts his boundless contentment with life and his unlimited satisfaction at the prospect of dying. A yes to life, and a yes to death. They are doubled shortly thereafter with the following ecstatic statement: I am not blind, I see the world—what extraordinary happiness! I see this day, and outside it there is nothing. Who could take that away from me? And when this day fades, I will fade along with it [ce jour s’effaçant, je m’effaçerai avec lui]—a thought, a certainty, that enraptures me. (191) How do we understand the relation between the sovereign refusal and the no less sovereign affirmation that it appears to seal? And what may this text bring to us in terms of a thought of sovereignty? “Sovereignty,” I emphasize, must not be taken here as some form of interpretive key or philosophical operator that could give overall access to the text’s elusive meaning. The Madness of the Day disqualifies any such assumption, as we will see. Nor does the theme of sovereignty encapsulate the text in any sense. It should serve, rather, to help distinguish in the text four forms of relation to what we might call the “order of the day,” or simply the law. The fact that at least one of these four forms summons its name by reason of its powerful evocation of the thought of Georges Bataille will suggest why attention to this motif should carry more than thematic interest. But let us start from the text’s first explicit reference to this term, since it brings us quickly to a salutary warning that must be heeded and offers us a valuable point of entry. THE SOVEREIGNTY OF REASON Relatively early in a biographical account that seems constantly under a kind of mythopoeic pull and is not without traces of a “madness,” 180 Christopher Fynsk perhaps a psychosis, which may help account for the narrator’s incarceration —regarding his relation to others, the narrator remarks: “if I have to, I deliberately sacrifice them . . . (sometimes I kill them)” (192)—we learn that this “narrator” is a city-dweller who was, at one point, a public man: For a while I led a public life. I was attracted to the law, I liked crowds. Among other people I was unknown. As nobody, I was sovereign. But one day I grew tired of being the stone that beats solitary men to death. To tempt...