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Two: Dream and Writing in Blanchot
- Fordham University Press
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t w o Dream and Writing in Blanchot The Experience of Writing, ‘‘Impossibility,’’ and the Dream In his critical works, Blanchot often speaks of an ‘‘experience’’: The Experience of Mallarmé or The Experience of Igitur, The Experience of Proust and The Experience of Lautréamont.1 This ‘‘experience’’ is neither the extra-textual experience of a subject placed at the origin of writing nor the experience of a written object conceived as the product of the work of such a subject . Blanchot’s ‘‘experience’’—the experience of Blanchot—is the experience of writing understood, itself, as experience. Consequently, Blanchot’s re- flections on the ‘‘experiences of’’ other writers entangle themselves thoroughly in the reflexive webbing of the experience of the experience of writing.2 This entanglement begins in the impossibility of determining a subject when it comes to the experience of writing. ‘‘To write’’ says Blanchot, ‘‘is to pass from Je to Il, such that what happens to me happens to no one.’’3 This Il is not an identifiable third person to whom any writing that happens may be referred. Rather, it remains ‘‘uncharacterizable’’: If . . . to write is to pass from je to il, il, when substituted for je, does not simply designate another me any more than it would designate aesthetic 48 Dream and Writing in Blanchot 49 disinterestedness . . . what remains to be discovered is what is at stake when writing responds to the demands of this uncharacterizable il.4 Blanchot’s il is a ‘‘third person that is neither a third person, nor the simple cloak of impersonality.’’5 Nor does this neither . . . nor construction that structures all of Blanchot’s propositions concerning the il of writing map out any via negativa to the positing of a subject. Rather, it obeys the strange logic of ‘‘the neutral,’’ the term by which Blanchot names the impossibility of determining the il of writing as any subject, whether individual or collective:6 The narrative il . . . thus marks the intrusion of the other—understood as neutral—in its irreducible strangeness . . . The other speaks. But when the other is speaking, no one speaks because the other, which we must refrain from honoring with a capital letter that would determine it by way of a majestic substantive, as though it had some substantial or even unique presence , is precisely never simply the other. The other is neither the one nor the other, and the neutral that indicates it withdraws it from both, as it does from unity, always establishing itself outside the term, the act, or the subject through which it claims to offer itself. The narrative voice . . . derives from this its aphony. It is a voice that has no place in the work, but neither does it hang over it; far from falling out of some sky under the guarantee of a superior Transcendence, the il is . . . rather a kind of void in the work.7 ‘‘Neutral’’ rather than negative, the impossibility of determining the il as a subject indicates, for Blanchot, an experience that cannot be understood in terms of the traditional (Aristotelian) logic of possibility: But must we not also say: impossibility, neither negation nor affirmation, indicates what in being has always already preceded being and yields to no ontology? Certainly, we must! Which amounts to the presentiment that it is again being that awaits in possibility, and that if it negates itself in possibility, it is in order better to preserve itself from this other experience that always precedes it and is always more initial than the affirmation that names being. This would be the experience that . . . we are seeking to name . . . in speaking of the neutral.8 And this ‘‘other experience’’ is the experience of the other, on which, according to Blanchot, all experience depends: Impossibility is nothing other than the mark of what we so readily call experience, for there is experience in the strict sense only where something radically other is in play.9 [3.235.249.219] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:21 GMT) 50 Dream and Writing in Blanchot The strict sense of ‘‘experience’’ marked, throughout Blanchot’s writings , by ‘‘impossibility’’ departs from the familiar sense in which a subject , as subject, does its dance with an object or with its own subjectivity. Rather, experience of the other as other—‘‘experience’’ in Blanchot’s strict sense—is marked, fundamentally, by the impossibility of saying whether that genitive construction (‘‘experience of the other’’) is to be read as subjective or...