Approaching Disappearance. Anne McConnell

Chapter 1: Approaching Disappearance

      In an essay in The Book to Come, Blanchot writes, “literature is going towards itself, towards its essence, which is disappearance.”⁷ The rest of the essay develops what he means by this statement, building upon Hegel’s famous assertion that art is “a thing of the past.” Interestingly, Blanchot does not disagree with Hegel on this point, but he comes to vastly different conclusions about what the end of art would suggest about the status of art and literature beyond this terminus. Hegel dismisses art from the realm of history and truth, which, from his perspective, pronounces its end.⁸ Blanchot, on the other hand, sees this end as a sort of beginning—one which does not have the power to begin or the power to end, but which slips into the movement of its own disappearance. He writes, “Only the work matters, but finally the work is there only to lead to the quest for the work; the work is the impulse that carries us toward the pure point of inspiration from which it comes and which it seems it can reach only by disappearing” (200). Not only does Blanchot’s argument demonstrate his characteristically atemporal and circular notion of the approach to the work (the work has its origin at the point it aspires to reach), but it also reveals an important paradox that travels the length of his discussion of writing, reading, and the literary work in The Space of Literature. In order for the work to come forward in some sense, it must be allowed to disappear—toward itself, its “essence.” For Blanchot, this disappearance depends upon a radical reversal where ends open onto an excessive remainder which eludes our power to negate, and therefore necessarily eludes our ability to grasp, perceive, complete, or make appear. With this idea in mind, we can turn to The Space of Literature and trace the process of disappearance, as it relates to the writer, the reader, and the work.

      Before looking at the first section of The Space of Literature, I would like to begin with one of the appendices to this section, “The Essential Solitude and the Solitude of the World.” Blanchot reflects upon the separation of “myself from being,” as “I” function within the world, negating being in order to make the world appear to me, to my understanding. He explains, “What makes me me is this decision to be by being separate from being—to be without being, to be that which owes nothing to being, whose power comes from the refusal to be” (SL 251). Following Hegelian logic, Blanchot asserts that the power to negate constitutes man’s accomplishment and activity in the world, but he brings attention to the lack of being and to the question of what remains when being lacks.⁹ In other words, Blanchot wonders if this activity of negating the world, of refusing being, does not encounter, at the limit of its power, an essential inability to make nothing of the lack of being. He asks, “When being lacks, does this mean that this lack owes nothing to being? Or rather does it mean perhaps that the lack is the being that lies deep in the absence of being—that the lack is what still remains of being when there is nothing?” (253). Blanchot brings us to the question of disappearance here, in the sense that disappearance indicates the process of becoming nothing. And, further, disappearance places emphasis on the inability to see, on the recession of the world from our vision, beyond the power to bring it to light. Disappearance, like negation, can be understood in terms of man’s power—as giving rise to the appearance of something that would be available to comprehension—but, again, Blanchot’s interest concerns the remaining trace of disappearance itself, when the power to make disappear has been exhausted:

      When beings lack, being appears as the depth of the concealment in which it becomes lack. When concealment appears, concealment, having become appearance, makes “everything disappear,” but of this “everything has disappeared,” it makes another appearance. It makes appearance from then on stem from “everything has disappeared.” “Everything has disappeared” appears. This is exactly what we call an apparition. It is the “everything has disappeared” appearing in its turn. (253)

      For Blanchot, the apparition, the appearance of “everything has disappeared,” characterizes the literary work (though the work exceeds categorization in its very disappearance).¹⁰ Writers and readers are pulled into a space in their approach to the work that can only be affirmed in the depth of its concealment. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot explores this approach and examines the risk of disappearance involved for those who experience the inability and anonymity of the work’s invisible space.

      When Blanchot discusses the “essential solitude” in the first section of The Space of Literature, he clarifies that this solitude does not result from a writer’s empowered choice to sequester him or herself from the world in favor of the work. Blanchot explains, “He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed. He who is dismissed, moreover, doesn’t know it. This ignorance preserves him. It distracts him by authorizing him to persevere” (21). There seems to be something about the work that resists, or even prevents, relation, even if the writer depends upon a relation with the work to write. The writer perseveres because the work is never finished, and it is never finished, first of all, because one cannot determine or define any criteria that would make it so. And the work thus draws the writer into an infinite process at the same time that it dismisses his or her participation in the process. The writer gives him or herself over to the work, but the work always recedes beyond the “giving over,” which affirms its essential solitude, and the writer’s. Blanchot writes, “He whose life depends on the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work” (22). The writer’s relation to the work arises out of his or her inability to bring it to expression, which becomes an affirmation of the work’s solitude and disappearance.

      Blanchot explains that the writer grapples with certain illusions about the ability to write, or to produce work. With words at his or her disposal, the writer sometimes feels mastery over language, manipulating it as a tool of expression. “But his mastery only succeeds in putting him, keeping him in contact with the fundamental passivity where the word, no longer anything but its appearance—the shadow of a word—never can be mastered or even grasped” (25). Blanchot uses the example of a writer who clings to a pencil, not able to let it go, but also not able to grasp it. The hand that writes cannot stop writing because it engages in an incessant movement where it does not have the power to stop. The writing hand (Blanchot calls it the “sick hand”) depends upon the other, masterful, hand to interrupt the writing—to seize the pencil in its empowered grasp and to put an end to that which has no beginning or end. In this way, the mastery of the writer does not consist of writing, but of the power to stop writing. This mastery betrays the infinite movement of the work, bringing it out of the realm of shadows, but also, in doing so, marking the moment of its essential disappearance. Turning away from the approach to the work, in an act of betrayal (Blanchot will later call it impatience), the writer reveals the impossibility of the work, its refusal and exclusion of both writer and reader. And so the writer returns to work:

      The obsession which ties him to a privileged theme which obliges him to say over again what he has already said [ . . . ] illustrates the necessity, which apparently determines his efforts, that he always come back to the same point, pass again over the same paths, persevere in starting over what for him never starts, and that he belong to the shadow of events, not their reality, to their image, not the object, to what allows words themselves to become images, appearances—not signs, values, the power of truth. (24)

      The interruption of the writing does not cure the sickness, but suspends it, affirming the impossibility of the task and the interminability of the process.

      One way in which Blanchot considers the decisive moment when writing stops, if only to start again, concerns the distinction of the book and the work. The writer opens himself or herself to the approach of the work, relinquishing power and activity, risking solitude and disappearance—but this movement is ultimately substituted by the book. “The writer belongs to the