Clandestine Encounters : Philosophy In the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot (review)

This collection of essays identifies Blanchot as a "philosophical novelist." Arranged in chronological order of composition, the twelve essays comprising the collection follow Blanchot's narratives from his first récits written in the mid-1930s to L'Instant de ma mort written in 1994. While the entire collection focuses on the philosophical import of Blanchot's narratives, the perspectives and approaches through which this issue is explored are wide-ranging. All of the essays, however, rethink the relations between the philosophical and the literary, and in doing so, they further an understanding of how one might read Blanchot well.

In the introduction, we learn that Blanchot's philosophical ideas can be traced to Ancient Greek skepticism. The "philosophical," as Blanchot conceives it, is an unrelenting engagement in the act of questioning and a rigorous undoing of an apparent order. The philosopher, "the person of 'double speech'" (9) elaborates a discourse on a theoretical subject while also responding to a "dis-course" of the Outside which deeply challenges the discussion's foundations, forcing the philosopher to question the discussion's premises and conclusions. Skepticism, for Blanchot, is directly related to language, which is in and of itself aporetic. As Christopher Strathman notes in his essay on Aminadab, Blanchot identifies language as the primordial groundwork of reality, but he also examines how language calls into question the complex connection between being and nothingness.

The introduction identifies the Outside as a key concept in the works of Blanchot, and accordingly, the Outside is recurrently explored in the collection's twelve essays. While the Outside is an essential concept, Blanchot's varying descriptions of the Outside make it difficult to determine its exact meaning. The Outside is the neutral, passive language that holds an author between being and non-being. The Outside is the "something beyond or beneath being itself" (12) that the artist experiences through the act of creation, an act which entails the choice of nonbeing over being. In regard to the everyday, however, the Outside has political implications; it is what "makes the everyday a site of continuous contestation" (14). Most importantly, the Outside is what facilitates the writing of a récit. As opposed to a roman which consists of events that take place in time, a récit focuses on one event that has taken place. For the récit to begin, the artist must be "drawn to the point where being and image pass endlessly into one another" (18), the artist must come into contact with the Outside or that which "flows beneath being" (18). The récit is thus an ideal medium for the philosophical, because the philosophical is, in essence, a response to the "lure of the Outside." (18)

The first essay entitled The Glory and the Abyss, jointly written by Vivian Liska and Arthur Cools, explores the connection between politics, literature, and the Outside. The essay focuses on how Blanchot's first récits, "Le Dernier Mot" (1935) and "L'Idylle" (1936), fundamentally transform literary space. Although written in the mid 1930's, the récits were first published in 1947, and in 1951 they were assembled in a volume entitled Le Ressassement éternel. The ten-year gap between the completion and publication of the récits underscores an experience of estrangement in response to World War II. In his afterword to Le Ressassement éternel, "Après coup," Blanchot himself admits how he feels alienated from his own stories. Rupture and alienation come to characterize Blanchot's literary aesthetic after World II, "his poetics of impersonality, of the absent author and the disappearance of the narrator and the speaking subject itself" (33). Grouped together in reverse chronological order in Le Ressassement éternel, the récits highlight the breakdown of narrative and the initial encounter with the Outside. While the linear, cohesive narrative in "L'Idylle" presents a totalitarian society in which every trace of the outside has been erased, the disjointed narrative in "Le Dernier Mot" rebels...