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223 n i n e On Parole: Legacies of Saussure, Blanchot, and Paulhan Nous l’avons détruit, nous avons libéré l’étoile—sans rayon désormais; il roule obscur, l’astre du désastre, disparu, comme il le souhaitait, dans la tombe sans nom de son renom. — m a u r i c e b l a n c h o t , L’Écriture du désastre Nothing could be simpler, or so it might seem, than to know what it means to take someone at their word. But when that someone is a writer, and that writer is named Maurice Blanchot, then the question of his giving us his word, or of our taking him at his word, can become a source of genuine anguish, if not outright despair. “Reading is anguish,” Blanchot wrote, “and this is because any text, however important, or amusing, or interesting it may be (and all the more so that it gives that impression), is empty—at bottom it does not exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend.”1 Now among all the words Maurice Blanchot has given us, is there one from now on that is more likely to bring us face to face with the anguish and abyss of reading than that of disaster? Should we take him at his word, Blanchot gives us his word that writing is the disaster and that the disaster is writing. No wonder that reading would occasion anguish and despair at the instant we consider crossing the abyss that such a word gives us to take, grasp, or comprehend. Disappearing into the ruined space of disaster, catastrophe, calamity , the word that Blanchot gives us also marks the contours of a certain tomb, though a tomb whose proper name, either as origin or end, will always 224 The Irony of Tomorrow have been obscured by its being incessantly on the move, rolling unceasingly away from our anxious grasp.2 By the light of what kind of star would it now be possible to track the word that has been given in this way only through its unstoppable errancy, through its fall into a sepulchral space of separation from its own rays? And what kind of authority would we need at our disposal in order to grant the existence of such a disastrous parole in the first place? Nothing, or so it might seem, could be farther removed from the dark constellation of reflections enshrouding Blanchot’s writing of the disaster than the sunny atmosphere of clarity in which Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics makes its way from one didactic point to another in laying bare the hidden principles of language and the way that it functions. And yet, as is well known, it is precisely Saussure’s most original founding gesture that threatens to turn the entire semiological enterprise into a sterile science of dead-end fragments and simplifications. For, it should always be recalled, Saussure’s Course, like any text for that matter, is able to begin only by giving us its word, its own inimitable parole, though in such a way that it seems to be immediately and irremediably retracted from us. That luminous and now famous word that Saussure first gives us, of course, the one that will always have enabled his text to get underway as a systematic Course, is la langue. But have we ever adequately stopped to consider how la langue itself appears, only to withdraw from us in a mode of unthinkable obscurity? Before Saussure’s own text brings about this tectonic shift within the French language between la langue and la parole, la langue—as a system of purely formal conventions, which can subsequently be defined and then known only in its strict opposition to la parole, as a particular execution of these conventions—does not and cannot exist as such. It can only be la parole of Saussure’s own text, the active and idiosyncratic fact of the Course as a concrete instance of linguistic materiality , that releases la langue as a genuine force of semiological analysis and knowledge for the future. La langue is therefore not just a formal system whose empirical existence Saussure was able merely to observe or deduce; it is also, as testified by the neologism that it will become only in the wake of Saussure’s Course, a material event that his text has to inaugurate...

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