The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett

Note

361 notes Introduction: “Why Do You Write?”—The Fault of Writing 1. Kafka, LFr 10. 2. From the flyleaf at the beginning of L’espace littéraire; this “author’s biography” was no doubt written by Blanchot himself. 3. From Rockaby (CSPl 282). 4. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, 38. The comment is made partly in reference to Blanchot. 5. J.-F. Fogel and D. Rondeau, eds., Pourquoi écrivez-vous? 400 écrivains répondent, 188. Kevin Hart cites this text and comments on Blanchot’s statement in The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, 204–205. 6. In the well-known letter to Max Brod (July 5, 1922) in which Kafka claims that “writing . . . is the reward for serving the devil” and an unleashing of the “evil powers.” LFr 332–335. 7. See Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Antigone,” in Essays and Letters on Theory, 113 (my emphasis); Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:395–396. Lacoue-Labarthe comments on this “singular theology” of Hölderlin’s in Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, 39. 8. Blanchot marks the trajectory or “itinerary” in question very explicitly in his essay “L’itinéraire de Hölderlin,” in EL 363–374. For Blanchot’s reading of Romanticism see also “L’Athenaeum,” in EI, 515–527. 9. Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, 86–87. 10. The discussion here and elsewhere in this study of the ethical ambivalence of the imperative, the insistent and intimate force it exerts on thought and language, owes a great deal to Jean-Luc Nancy, especially “Le Katègorein de l’excès” in L’impératif catégorique . The imperative, says Nancy, is what haunts and obsesses, it is a hantise that inhabits us in the register of the uncanny: “La proximité de l’impératif pourrait bien être l’ Un-heimlichkeit qui hante notre pensée . . . qui n’inquiète que parce qu’elle est si proche dans son étrangement . . . L’enjeu n’est pas un autre que celui de l’éthique—non cependant au titre d’une science ou d’une discipline, et pas non plus au titre d’un sens ou d’un sentiment moral, mais au titre, précisément, d’une hantise . . . Dans le temps de la hantise, il ne peut et il 362 notes to pages 4–6 ne doit y avoir qu’une pensée et qu’une éthique—si c’en est une—de la hantise (11) (The proximity of the imperative might well be the Un-heimlichkeit that haunts our thinking . . . What is at stake is none other than ethics—not however as a form of knowledge or a discipline , nor as a sense or a moral sentiment, but precisely as a haunting obsession. . . . In the time of hauntedness, there can and must be an ethics—if it is one—only of hauntedness ).” The imperative in question is thus one that demands what Avital Ronell has called “haunted writing”; see Dictations: On Haunted Writing. 11. This is one aspect of Jacques Derrida’s reading of Kafka in “Préjugés: Devant la loi,” in La faculté de juger. 12. Pourquoi écrivez-vous, 232. 13. I am referring to the well-known line in Hölderlin’s elegy “Brot und Wein” (“Bread and Wine”): “wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” What are poets for—what good are poets—in a time of distress? 14. For an interesting and pertinent discussion of the intersections between the sublime and the abject, see Claire Lozier, De l’abject et du sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett. 15. “Quand on s’écoute, ce n’est pas de la littérature qu’on entend.” Charles Juliet, Rencontre avec Samuel Beckett, 13. 16. The question of art’s poverty and its resistance to redemptive temptations is treated with perspicacity in Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. 17. Such a turning away, as a mode of critical dissatisfaction with the world as factually “given” and with its implicit imperatives of affirmation and consumption, receives a broad and nuanced philosophical treatment in the analyses of Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno. 18. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has linked Blanchot’s near-death narrative in L’instant de ma mort to the mythic schema of the nekuia, by way of an autobiographical tradition of “autothanatography” passing through Rousseau, Montaigne and Augustine, among others. See “The Contestation of Death,” trans. Philip Anderson, in Kevin Hart...