The Fragments of the Disaster: Blanchot and Galeano on Decolonial Writing

In his search for a community that does not rely upon the false unities of subjectivity or identity, Maurice Blanchot looks to literature and writing. To achieve the common in community, Blanchot argues for the development of unworking writing practices aimed at the silence anterior to language—a silence that constitutes authentic communication. Instead of abiding by the rules of grammar, Blanchot encourages writers to produce fragments. This fragmentation causes fissures in the structures of language, giving way to an original silence that has the potential to found our future communities absent principles of sovereignty. With a sensitivity to the ways that silence has been forced onto historically marginalized communities, I will explore Blanchot’s theory of unworking toward silence. Recognizing that there are undesirable modes of silence that cohere and sustain communities, I will offer an element of nuance to Blanchot’s strategy of fragmentary writing toward the silence anterior to language: the process of unworking in fragmentation, if it is to successfully avoid compounding forms of oppression, must first pass through silenced communities whose histories have been forcibly fragmented. The journey through oppressed communities requires that we reconstruct certain narratives before we fragment them.