enhglish

The Space of Literature

Maurice Blanchot

Translated, with an Introduction, by Ann Smock

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln, London

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Introduction and English-language translation © 198 2 by the University of Nebraska Press

Originally published in France as L'Espace littéraire, © Éditions Gallimard, 1955

Manufactured in the United States of America First paperback printing: 1989

Most recent printing indicated by the first digit b elow:

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Blanchot, Maurice.

The space of literature.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Literature--Philosophy. 2. Creation (Literary, a rtistic, etc.) I. Title. PN45.B42413 801 82-2062

ISBN 0-8032-1166-X AACR2 ISBN 0-8032-6092-X (pbk.)

∞ +

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A book, even a fragmentary one, has a center which attracts it. This center if not fixed, but is

displaced by the pressure of the book and circumsta nces of its composition. Yet it is also a fixed

center which, if it is genuine, displaces itself, w hile remaining the same and becoming always

more central, more hidden, more uncertain and more imperious. He who writes the book writes

it out of desire for this center and out of ignoran ce. The feeling of having touched it can very

well be only the illusion of having reached it. Whe n the book in question is one whose purpose is

to elucidate, there is a kind of methodological goo d faith in stating toward what point it seems to

be directed: here, toward the pages entitled "Orphe us' Gaze."

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[This page intentionally left blank.] -vi-

Contents

Translator's Introduction

The Essential Solitude

Approaching Literature's Space

Mallarmé's Experience

The Work's Space and Its Demand

The Work and the Errant Word

Kafka and the Work's Demand

The Work and Death's Space

Death as Possibility

The Igitur Experience

108

Rilke and Death's Demand :

120

1. The Search for a Proper Death

121

2. Death's Space

3. Death's Transmutation

146

Inspiration

161

The Outside, the Night

163

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Orpheus's Gaze

171

Inspiration, Lack of Inspiration

177

Communication and the Work

189

Reading

191

Communication

198

Literature and the Original Experience

209

The Future and the Question of Art

211

Characteristics of the Work of Art

221

The Original Experience

234

Appendixes

249

The Essential Solitude and Solitude in the World

251

The Two Versions of the Imaginary

254

Sleep, Night

264

Hölderlin's Itinerary

269

Index

277

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Translator's Introduction

Why is it that, notwithstanding all the other means of investigating and ordering the world which

mankind has developed, and in spite of all the rese rvations great poets have expressed about their

own endeavor, we are still interested in literature ? What is literature, and what is implied about

our learning in general and about its history, if i t must be said at this late date that something we

call literature has never stopped fascinating us? M aurice Blanchot asks this question with such

infinite patience -- with so much care and precisio n -- that it has come to preoccupy a whole

generation of French critics and social commentator s. Hence Blanchot's imposing reputation.

The list of postwar writers in France who have resp onded to his emphasis on the question of

literature and its implications for all our questio ns is long and impressive. Their names are

associated with the most provocative intellectual d evelopments of recent times: not only have

Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Poulet, and Jean Starobin ski written about Blanchot, not only

Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Pierre Klossowski, but also Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. 1 One way of

indicating Blanchot's enormous importance in French thought during the last half century is by

reference to Jeffrey Mehlman's commentary in the pa ges of ModernLanguage Notes

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1A lengthy bibliography of Blanchot's works and of s tudies about him by others may be

consulted in Sub-stance, no. 14 ( 1976), an issue entirely devoted to his writing. Here, I

simply draw the reader's attention to essays by Geo rges Poulet, Jean Starobinski, Emmanuel

Levinas , Michel Foucault, and Roger Laporte, among others, which appeared in Critique, no.

229 ( June 1966). Jean-Paul Sartre commentary, "Ami nadab; ou, du fantastique considéré

comme un langage," appears in Situations I ( Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Roger Laporte and

Bernard Noël Deux lectures de Maurice Blanchot ( Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973), should

also be mentioned. Emmanuel Levinas book, Sur Maurice Blanchot

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Language Notes.

2 When Mehlman, certainly one of the most informed an d lively interpreters of

modern French letters to an American readership, un dertakes to bring this very modernity

radically into doubt, he begins with a reading of B lanchot's earliest publications: as though

Blanchot's work were a key -- the point to tackle. The present translation of L'Espace littéraire, a

book from the middle of Blanchot's career which ela borates many of the issues central to his

entire work, should serve to help Americans underst and what is at stake in an ongoing

assessment of contemporary French thought.

It would be wrong, however, to imply that Blanchot' s writing has escaped until now the attention

of serious readers in this country. In fact, his wo rk has influenced a good deal of recent

American criticism whose object is to question the critical enterprise itself and its relation to the

nature of writing. Blanchot provides a model of lit erary study because, as Geoffrey Hartman

says, his criticism always goes from the work under discussion to the problematic nature of

literature. "He illumines, therefore, the literary activity in general as well as in this or that

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( Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), is of particula r interest; Pierre Klossowski wrote an essay

of that same title which is printed in Un Si Funeste Désir ( Paris: Gallimard, 1963). For

Jacques Derrida's reading of Blanchot, the reader m ay wish to see "Living On," in

Deconstruction and Criticism ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979). Finally, I

note a volume to which Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, among others,

contributed, Misère de la littérature ( Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1978). Here, the essa ys

cannot be said to be on Blanchot. A short piece wri tten by him, "Il n'est d'explosion . . . ,"

opens the book, and by implication, the "literary s pace" to which the authors of the following

texts feel they belong.

2Jeffrey Mehlman, "Blanchot at Combat: Of Literature and Terror," Modern Language Notes ,

French Issue, 95 ( 1980): 808-29. Mehlman's essay d raws attention to Blanchot's political

writings during the 1930s. Indeed, between 1930 and 1940, Blanchot was an active

contributor to right-wing journals in France (see J ean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les

Nonconformistes des années 30 , Paris: le Seuil, 1969). The war ended this partic ular --

and, in

light of his subsequent reputation, surprising -- engagement, but not his attention to political

issues. Blanchot's literary reflections after the w ar led him to take, notably in 1958 and in

1968, a different sort of position entirely: a left ist one. He was, for example, one of the initiators of the manifesto called Le Manifeste des 121, supporting the right of Frenchmen to

refuse to serve in the army during the Algerian War (see the volume intitled Le Droit à

l'insoumission [ Paris: Maspéro, 1961], which assembles, around t he manifesto itself,

numerous texts attesting to the political debate it elicited). The relation between Blanchot's

initial political views and his later ones, and the connection between these views and his

critical and literary work, are very important and complicated problems which Mehlman

begins to elucidate. No doubt they have significant implications for contemporary French

thought in general. They require, in my view, a gre at deal of further consideration. I cite

Mehlman's text, not as the definitive word in this matter, but primarily in order to suggest

how much is generally recognized to hang upon Blanc hot's writing: the very character of

critical reflection in France today.

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text."

3 Paul de Man included in Blindness and Insight an important chapter on Blanchot's

reading of Mallarmé in which he examines central se ctions of L'Espace littéraire . 4 Edward Said,

to give another example, refers in Beginnings to Blanchot's reflections on the "origin" of

literature, and he too cites L'Espace littéraire.

In order to suggest the unusual character of Blanch ot's appeal and the unsettling force of his

writing, we ought to include here another statement of Hartman's: "Blanchot's work offers no

point of approach whatsoever"; or even this remark of Poulet's, which I translate somewhat

freely: "Blanchot is an even greater waste of time than Proust."

6 For, surely, the significance of a

book like L'Espace littéraire lies in its constant association of literature's purest and most

authentic grandeur with just such expressions as "w asted time." It presents the literary work as

that which permits no approach other than wasted st eps; it uninterruptedly expresses the

incomparable passion which literature commands.

Its purpose, even its mission -- for this is a term Blanchot somewhat startlingly employs -- is to

interrupt the purposeful steps we are always taking toward deeper understanding and a surer

grasp upon things. It wants to make us hear, and be come unable to ignore, the stifled call of a

language spoken by no one, which affords no grasp u pon anything. For this distress, this utter

insecurity, is, Blanchot states, "the source of all authenticity."

In dreams, Blanchot says, one sometimes thinks one knows one is dreaming, but only dreams

this. In the same way, the reader of L'Espace littéraire imagines that, alongside Blanchot, he is in

search of certain answers. He is aware, he thinks, of the difficulties, the dangerous confusions,

and therefore he is not at their mercy, but more th an likely to see the light eventually or, in other

words, to awaken. He has et, however, to begin the dream; he has yet to see that he is in the dark.

____________________

3Geoffrey Hartman, "Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-No velist," Beyond Formalism ( New

Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1970).

4Paul de Man, "'Impersonality in the Criticism of Ma urice Blanchot," Blindness and Insight (

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). This essay appeared first in French in Critique, no.

229 [ June 1966], as " La Circularité de l'interprétation dans l'oeuvre cr itique de Maurice

Blanchot ."

5Edward Said, Beginnings ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) . 6Hartman, Beyond Formalism , p. 93. Georges Poulet: aussi, beaucoup plus radicalement encore que Proust, Maurice Blanchot apparaît-il comme l'homme du'temps perdu'" ('Thus,

much more radically even than Proust, Maurice Blanc hot appears as a man of 'lost time'

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By the end, the reader is able to make out some imp ortant questions: What moves a writer to

write? What is the origin of his undertaking, and h ow does this origin determine the nature of his

creativity? What is the role of the reader? How is the work's meaning communicated? How do

reading and writing relate to other human endeavors ? How are literary, philosophical, social and

political history intertwined? Certainly, one does pursue these difficult questions in the pages of

L'Espace littéraire . One pursues them, moreover, through what are with out doubt some of the

most perceptive and engaging discussions in existen ce on Mallarmé, on Kafka, on Rilke, and on

Hölderlin. This gratifying process, however, leads to where one thought it began: to the

difficulties, the questions, as though they -- the very obstacles along the way, marking and

measuring the approach ( "l'approche de l'espace littéraire" ) -- had been the answers already,

wonderfully transparent, though now they arise opaq ue and strange, and as though one were just

now, when long departed deep within L'Espace littéraire, ready to begin approaching it.

Such paradoxes are characteristic of Blanchot's wor k. They present to the reader difficulties of an

unusual sort: difficulties which it is difficult to confront, to encounter, problems it is hard to

know one is having. Hence the uncanny ease which on e also experiences. I first discovered

Blanchot's critical work in a university course on fantastic literature. Ever since, it has seemed to

me that complaints about his abstruse qualities exp ress readers' premonition of the eeriest

limpidity, their foreboding sense of the incredible lightness of the task before them. The muscles

they have limbered up in readiness will not be nece ssary. To be sure, Blanchot's books take for

granted a considerable erudition on the reader's pa rt; he ranges familiarly over world literature

and philosophy. But they are not aimed at experts o r connoisseurs, just at readers. And reading is

the simplest thing, he says. It requires no talent, no gifts, no special knowledge, no singular

strength at all. But weakness, uncertainty -- yes, in abundance.

It calls upon uncertainty, I was suggesting, about uncertainty itself: uncertainty about limits such

as those that distinguish the dark and the light, t he obscurities of the work itself and its

elucidation, the inside and the outside of the text -- literature and criticism. Still,

____________________ 'temps perdu'" ('Thus, much more radically even tha n Proust, Maurice Blanchot appears as a

man of 'lost time'" ( "Maurice Blanchot, critique e t romancier," Critique, no. 229 [ June

1966]).

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L'Espace littéraire retains plenty of the outward signs of straightfor ward discussion. Among its

paradoxes, moreover, there are, not infrequently, a phorisms, pleasing in their definitive tone:

"Art is primarily the consciousness of unhappiness, not its consolation," for example. Or: "The

central point of the work of art is the work as ori gin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the

only one which is worth reaching." In fact, L'Espace littéraire is practically the last book in

which Blanchot allowed himself such resoundingly de finite postulates. It was published by

Gallimard in 1955 after a number of fictions (for e xample, Thomas l'obscur, L'Arrêt de mort, Le

Très-Haut ) and several critical works (notably Faux Pas, Lautréamont et Sade, La Part du feu).

7 Thereafter, the relation between critical discussion and its object becomes ever more problematic

and the distinction between Blanchot's own critical texts and his fictional narratives less

pertinent. From L'Attente l'oubli ( Paris: Gallimard, 1962) to La Folie du jour ( Montpellier: Fata

Morgana, 1973) and L'Ecriture du désastre ( Paris: Gallimard, 1980), it is increasingly doub tful

not only whether literature is something about whic h one can adequately speak but also whether

there is any such thing as the literature about whi ch we do, in any case, speak. In other words, it

is ever harder to be sure that questions such as "W hat is literature?" or even "Is literature?" are

not themselves already, or merely, literature. Is i t into literature at last, or finally out of its

shadowy domain, that Le Pas au-delà ( Paris: Gallimard, 1973) would step? It is not po ssible to

say; it is possible only to retrace the step which, repetitively marking their separation, renders

within and without indistinguishable. The reader of L'Espace littéraire will be in a good position

to understand why this is the case, even if he must remain inconsolable.

In L'Espace littéraire , as in Blanchot's work generally, there is a conti nually implicit, and often

explicit, reference to German philosophy: especiall y to Hegel, to Heidegger -- whose meditation,

through the works of Hölderlin, upon the essence of poetry is particularly significant

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7All the works cited here, with the exception of Lautréamont et Sade ( Paris: Editions de

Minuit, 1949), were published in Paris by Gallimard : Thomas l'Obscur in 1941, L'Arrêt de

mort and Le Très-Haut in 1948, Faux Pas in 1943, La Part du feu in 1949.

Both Thomas l'Obscur and L'Arrêt de mort have been translated into English. Robert

Lamberton is the translator of Thomas l'Obscur ( Thomas the Obscure [ New York: D. Lewis,

1973]) -- or, more precisely, of the "new version" of this narrative published by Blanchot in

1950, nine years after the first edition. Lydia Dav is translated L'Arrêt de mort ( Death

Sentence [ Tarrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1978]). The se are, so far, the only books by

Blanchot, besides the present volume, available in their entirety in English.

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or Blanchot -- and to Nietzsche. Blanchot's reading of Hegel bears the distinct mark of Bataille's;

likewise, he shares his approach to Heidegger with Levinas to a certain extent. And when he

quotes Nietzsche's hearty praise of suicide, we sho uld also hear an echo of Kirilov's vacillating

distress.

With Hegel, Blanchot recognizes negativity as the m oving force of the dialectic. It is the power

that informs history; it is death, creative and mas terful, at work in the world. Indeed, Blanchot

hails the impending completion of this labor which is the realization of human possibilities, the

unfolding of truth. And he acknowledges that this p rogress -- whereby meanings are determined,

values assigned, mysteries solved; whereby man libe rates himself from the unknown and

imposes his autonomous will in the clear light of d ay -- leaves art, the preserve of ambiguities

and indecision, behind, just as it suppresses and s urpasses the gods, the mysteries of the sacred.

The work attains its ultimate and essential form, n ot in the work of art, but in that work which is

the gradual achievement of human mastery and freedo m: history -- history as a whole, the total

realization of that liberating process. And yet, Bl anchot's attention is dedicated to that in the

work which does not fit into this whole, this culmi nation. He has given himself up to something

belonging only to art, which will not settle for th e status assigned to art by history's sovereign

movement (monument to man's creativity, repository of cultural values, or object offered up to pure esthetic enjoyment). In art Blanchot hears, murmuring with mute insistence, the very source

of creativity. And this source is inexhaustible. Tr uth and its satisfactions cannot finish off the

power of negativity.

This is the point at which we can grasp the importa nce of Bataille in Blanchot's thought. Indeed,

much of L'Espace littéraire reads like a conversation between Blanchot and Bat aille, a

conversation that continues in L'Entretien infini ( Paris: Gallimard, 1969), and L'Amitié ( Paris:

Gallimard, 1971). We hear it in works of Bataille a s well (in L'Expéience intérieure , for

example).

8 It is a conversation sustained by a common awarenes s of negativity as excess,

foreign to purpose. Death is an infinitely futile m ore, which will not serve to achieve anything.

Compared to this fruitless expenditure, the mastery which the use of death affords is perhaps a

poor thing; in any case, it cannot use death up. De ath subsists, and subsisting, proves itself to be

a source of power

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8Georges Bataille, L'Expérience intérieure, in Oeuvres complétes ( Paris: Gallimard, 1973),

vol. 5.

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that power is powerless to exhaust -- a nothing tha t exceeds everything. Never providing

anything like satisfaction, it is unspeakably desir able. Both Blanchot and Bataille tell of desire,

or the experience of the infinite remainder: power, reaching as high as it can, longs to reach its

own possibility -- death, its very source and essen ce -- by undergoing the measurelessness of

impotence. Both writers name the contradiction in s uch an alliance, or the intimacy of such strife,

"communication." It risks, with the unjustifiable a udacity Blanchot terms inspiration, all of

language, everything that might ever be communicate d, and the whole world that words put at

our disposal.

Thus when Blanchot borrows Hegel's perspective and addresses us as if from the end of history

when all that can be has been accomplished, he does so, not to announce the truth as it discloses

itself in its realized wholeness to the mind whose comprehension is likewise complete, but rather

in order to make us hear what Heidegger urges: let the sole being -- man -- whose being stems

from his capacity not to be, affirm that "not," the most proper of all his possibilities and the one

proper to him alone, the possibility of impossibili ty (see Being and Time , sec. 50). This is the

possibility which everything that is possible hides ; it has had, indeed, to be suppressed in order

that anything be possible, in order that there be a world and the history of this world. But it must

be resolutely acknowledged, if ever there is to be authenticity.

This demand is the one Blanchot associates with the work of art. The work requires death, the

source, to be in the work; it demands that in it the ending, whi ch initiates all beginnings, swell up

as the essence of all swelling, all unfurling and f lowering. It wants disappearance to come forth.

It asks in other words that Being, which by recedin g opens the space in which beings appear,

come into this clearing. The work asks that a retre at, an obscuring or effacement, show, or that

the forgetfulness which inaugurates thought return to it.

Whenever Blanchot speaks about this care, this conc ern in the work for the origin of the work,

we recognize his proximity to Heidegger. And all of L'Espace littéraire is imbued with care: le

souci de l'origine, le souci de l'oeuvre , anxious solicitude for a time before the time whe n beings supplant being and submit to the command of the objectifying, acquisitive subject; concern for a

time other than the time measured by the gradual re duction of the irreconcilably alien to the

homogeneity of all that is comprehensively mastered . To the extent that in the work of art the

impossible is realized as such, art alone answers, with true fidelity, to the requirement of

Heideggerian authenticity. Yet there is also in L'Espace littéraire, as in

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all of Blanchot -- and this accounts for Blanchot's kinship with Levinas -- concern for being's

effacement itself: concern, precisely, lest it show, lest being be robbed of that indefinitene ss, that

seclusion, that foreignness from which it is insepa rable. Together Blanchot and Levinas reverse

the terms in which Being and Time poses the question of authenticity. Their concern is not to fail

death through very resoluteness, forgetting that on ly forgetfulness keeps faith with it and that

estrangement is its unique intimacy. The unconcern, however, which Blanchot locates at the very

center of his concern, as well as his insistence up on the irreducibly impersonal character of the

origin and his paradoxical way of making breach or tear synonymous with intimacy, turn this

book more decisively in Bataille's direction than i n Levinas's.

The estrangement from death, moreover, which Blanch ot considers to be required of the writer

by literature, even as literature requires of him t hat he greet and affirm death, determines that the

writer never, properly speaking, be favored with an y requirement at all. He has no vocation; he is

one deprived of the very call that haunts him. That is why the quotations from Nietzsche in

L'Espace littéraire , which almost all express the admirably bold refus al to cringe and hide from

death, are presented with irony. The suicide manqué , indeed, even the baseness apparent in his

inability to face death honestly -- headon -- expre sses more truly, perhaps, than anything else the

essence of death, which is always to elude an authe ntic confrontation. It never presents itself for

a duel, but represents itself; it comes disguising its coming. In fact, its essence is not to come at

all -- ever -- but ever to come again. In later wor ks by Blanchot, the Nietzsche of the Eternal

Return is a constant reference. He is never cited i n L'Espace littéraire, but he is never far.

For when disappearance appears, it is its apparition. Likewise, when the end begins, when it

swells and blossoms as the truth of all beginnings (and that it should, we recall, is the demand

Blanchot hears the work making), it is not the end itself that starts, and it is no real start that

occurs. Rather, the impossibility of there ever bei ng a first time starts over again, in the guise of

an interminable ending. Then the work -- at the ver y instant of its apotheosis, its devastating

announcement that it is, and nothing more -- subsid es, engulfed in duplicity; it enters "the eternal

torment of dying"; it draws the writer with it into this error which sustains no resolute being-for-

death. It disguises what

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reveals it and only lets itself be discovered by wh at perverts it. Is that why it always seems to

have the innocence of something never exposed, perf ectly intact? Is it like a flower just on the

sheer verge of blooming because clouds of inauthent icity enfold and conserve it? No one knows,

as Blanchot regularly repeats.

His writing recedes toward such questions. They are the sole answers he presumes to propose.

"The authentic answer is always the question's vita lity," he writes. "It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open." Perhaps this is a

good way of suggesting once again the character of Blanchot's work which renders it somewhat

alien to us in this country, but also fascinating, like a mirror. The Anglo-American critical

tradition might be said to elucidate, and thus to h onor, the actual object which writers offer us.

We take the work to be what artists make in the cou rse of a labor, a struggle perhaps, to which

they alone are equal; or perhaps they bring it back to us from depths to which they alone

descend. Attentive to masterful technique and perfe cted form, we seek to comprehend the

profound achievement of the blackest text by Kafka, say. We try to do j ustice to its strong and

genuine character, even if we acknowledge shifty am biguity to be the necessary vehicle of this

authenticity, or recognize playfulness as the speci al grace of this rigorous perfection, or

understand that misery is what this treasure holds, weakness what this awesome manifestation of

strength has to express. But the Kafka that concern s Blanchot is the nameless young man who

cannot seem to write at all. He is reduced to lamen table games. The author of The

Metamorphosis had to suppress and surpass him. The profundity of The Metamorphosis is, for

Blanchot, the infinite depths of uncertainty and fu tility which its perfection masks -- which the

work shows only by masking -- but which we seem act ually to see laid bare sometimes when the

masterpiece, like Eurydice when Orpheus looks back, disappears.

To see something disappear: again, this is an experience which cannot actuall y start. Nor,

therefore, can it ever come to an end. Such, Blanch ot insists, is the literary experience: an ordeal

in which what we are able to do (for example, see), becomes our powerlessness; becomes, for

instance, that terribly strange form of blindness w hich is the phantom, or the image, of the clear

gaze -- an incapacity to stop seeing what is not th ere to be seen.

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I do not wish to overemphasize the problems of tran slation which I have encountered. By

comparison to many French critical texts currently being translated, this one appears quite

simple: word play, for example, is not striking in it, not immediately so in any event, and it does

not depend upon any unusual terminology. However, I would like to discuss here three

expressions in particular because they are somethin g like the key words of the book; they also

permit me to restate in more concrete terms some of the issues I have evoked above.

The first of these expressions appears in the title : L'Espace littéraire . The word espace recurs

regularly in the titles of chapters: " Approche de l'espace littéraire," "L'Espace et l'exigence de

l'oeuvre ," "L'Oeuvre et l'espace de la mort ." It means "space," the region toward which whoeve r

reads or writes is drawn -- literature's "domain." But, although words such as "region" or

"domain" or "realm" are often used to designate thi s zone, it implies the withdrawal of what is

ordinarily meant by "place"; it suggests the site o f this withdrawal. Literature's space is like the

place where someone dies: a nowhere, Blanchot says, which is here. No one enters it, though no

one who is at all aware of it can leave: it is all departure, moving off, éloignement. It is

frequently called le dehors, "the outside." Here we might think again of the dreamer we evoked

earlier in this discussion who, dreaming that he on ly dreams, falls back into the dream to the very

degree that he has the impression of freedom from i t: it could just as well be said that he never

enters the dream at all; he only ever dreams he doe s. Literature's "space" is likewise inaccessible

and inescapable; it is its very own displacement or removal. It is the space separating this space

from itself. In this strange ambiguity literature d wells, as in a preserve. Yet "in" must always be taken back, for literature's space shelters nothing within it: it is also

called le vide, "the void." Sometimes it is associated with the a nonymity of big cities, sometimes

with the gap left by the absence of the gods, but s ometimes, too, with what Rilke calls "the

Open," or the "world's inner space," the intimacy o f an expansive welcome, the inward yes

which death can say in the song of one who consents to fall silent and disappear. Or it is

connected with the interval, which for Hölderlin is the sacred, between gods that abandon the

world and men who, likewise, turn away from God -- the sheer void in between, which the poet

must keep pure. Almost always, it is the origin whi ch is anterior to any beginning, the image or

echo of beginning -- that immense fund of impotence , the infinitely futile wherewithal to start

over and over again. Literature's space, in other w ords -- the

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void which literature introduces in place of the pl ace it takes -- is analogous to the "other time" in

the time measured by achievements: sterile, inert t ime, "the time of distress." But the very

freshness of every dawn is safeguarded in this dist ress and nowhere else, which is why literature

demands that we return there (though this justifica tion is never granted), risking the clear light of

day in the name of sunshine, but more than just tha t: jeopardizing even this capacity of ours to

take risks in the name of something, for some purpo se.

With considerable regularity, literature's "space" is described as exile or banishment, and the

writer as one wandering in the desert, like Kafka f ar from Canaan, too weak to collaborate in the

active concerns of competent men; but then, too, th e desert is a privileged zone of freedom and

solitude, and if literature is exiled from the worl d of valuable achievements, it is also exempted

from the world's demands. It has to bear no respons ibility for anything; it is kept safe to itself:

the desert is its refuge. Or it would be, if to be so gratuitous were not a grave danger for

literature, and also if the desert were a here one could actually reach. Kafka is never quite

convinced that he isn't still in Canaan after all.

Thus, l'espace littéraire , or l'espace de l'oeuvre , is the "distance" of the work, or of literature,

with respect, not only to "every other object which exists," but with respect to itself. The work is

remote from itself, or not quite itself. For exampl e, when it isn't finished yet. But when it is done,

when it comes into its own, this distance persists: it constitutes the opening of the work onto

nothing but itself -- this opening, this vacancy. A nd since the work appears, then, as pure

deferral, a void or vacuum, it lends itself to bein g filled up with everything it isn't: with useful

meanings, for example, which multiply and change as history progresses. Or this void can

masquerade as the prestigious aura that surrounds t he timeless masterpiece in its museum case.

Yet these apparent travesties, these various ways i n which the work is misrepresented and

forgotten, sustain it; they protect its essence, wh ich is to disappear. They provide it with its

"space," which is not its location. But this is not to say that literatu re is to be found anywhere

else.

I had thought of proposing as a title for this book "Literature's Remove." I hoped thereby to

capture not only literature's distance from the wor ld, and not only this distance as literature's

preserve, but also that when "space" is literature' s, it is space opened by that opening's absence:

by the removal of that very interval, which is kept , as if for some other time, in reserve.

-11- "Remove" could suggest a reflective distance, and it might be thought that literature involves a

separation from the world permitting contemplation or critical interpretation of things and

events. This sense of the term "remove" is in fact operative in L'Espace littéraire . Or rather, its

mirror image is. For literature's "space," Blanchot emphasizes, is the resurgence of the distance

at which we must place anything we wish to understa nd or aim to grasp. Literature is this remove

coming back to us, returning like an echo; and now it is no longer a handy gap, a familiar and

useful nothing, but an unidentifiable something, th e strange immediacy, foreign to presence and

to any present, of remoteness itself. It grasps us, and it removes us from our power to grasp or

appropriate anything whatever -- especially literat ure.

I have, in fact, used "remove" in the body of the t ext as one translation of l'écart, of

l'éloignement , sometimes of la distance, occasionally of la réserve. But l'espace , which should

surely be understood as related to these terms indi cating separation (and linked thus to the

French word espacement), is always translated somew hat lamely as "space," primarily in the

interests of consistency. For the word espace is th e main constant in this book, and if, in order

not to sacrifice the significance of its repetition , I had translated it, each time it appears, as

"remove," there would have been certain inaccuracie s. "The Space of Literature," then, seeks to

preserve a semblance of what seems to have been on Blanchot's part a move to unify the book (to

give it the strangest unity): to associate in the t itle -- L'Espace littéraire -- "l'espace de l'oeuvre "

and " l'espace de la mort ," the work's space and death's.

The French text practically always distinguishes be tween the word oeuvre and the word travail:

between the "work of art" and "work" in the sense o f productive labor -- man's action upon

nature, his mastery and appropriation of the given. Thus, le souci de l'oeuvre , "concern for the

work of art" (which is also the work's own troubled concern), is regularly contrasted with le

souci réalisateur , "the concern for real achievements," which implie s effective action. This real

purposefulness is the process by which history unfo lds, by which darkness is made to recede

before the broad light of day. Man becomes free; he discovers his potentialities and fulfills them.

All this takes place in what Blanchot regularly ter ms "the world," or on the level he calls "the

worldly plane." The world is this historical proces s; it is its own gradual realization. But the artist

is ineffectual. He has no place in the world. It is not that he belongs to what we ordinarily think

of as the other world. If he is

-12-

allied to the sacred, this is because he belongs ne ither to this world nor to any other, but to the

"other of all worlds" in our own.

He is idle, inert, " désoeuvré." He is "out of work" to the very extent that his sole concern is for

the work. For l'oeuvre is impotence endlessly affirmed. Le travail, on the other hand, is

negativity in action, death as power and possibilit y.

L'oeuvre , then, immediately implies its revocation: perhaps one could say that in

Blanchot l'oeuvre and le désoeuvrement are translations of each other. The difference, in other

words, between l'oeuvre and le travail is that while le travail is diametrically opposed to inaction

and passivity, l'oeuvre requires them. Indeed, Blanchot frequently describ es l'oeuvre , not as the

union of contraries, but as their restless alliance , their torn intimacy. He treats the word oeuvre the way he treats the word inspiration: the title of the section of this book devoted to inspiration

is "Inspiration, Lack of Inspiration."

I have consistently used the English word "work" to refer to l'oeuvre, the work of art. For travail

I have used various expressions such as "productive or purposeful activity," "labor," "effort,"

"real endeavor," "effective or useful action." I ha ve most often translated désoeuvrement as

"inertia," thereby emphasizing the paradox whereby the artist's relation to the work, the demand

which he feels is made of him that there be a work, overwhelms him, not with creative powers,

but on the contrary, with their exhaustion. The app roach of the work does not elicit in him the

strength to reach and achieve it, but immobilizes h im. It calls upon his weakness, the incapacity

in him to achieve anything at all; it inspires in him a kind of numbness or stupefaction. When

Blanchot says of the writer that he is désoeuvré, I have written that the writer is idled or out of

work, thereby emphasizing how the work to be realiz ed requires nothing of him, gives him

nothing to do -- perversely demands that he do: nothing -- but also stressing how the work

excludes him, sets him outside it. He never knows the work except as the terrible immediacy of

this dismissal. It must also be understood that the work thus presents itself to him as its absence.

Le désoeuvrement is the absence of the work, " l'absence de l'oeuvre." I come closest to

expressing this when I translate désoeuvrement as "lack of work."

Occasionally, Blanchot does use the word oeuvre to refer to something other than the work of

art: notably, to history as a whole -- completed hi story as mankind's oeuvre, the total realization

-13-

human freedom and the ultimate goal of humanity. Th e phrase l'oeuvre humaine en général

recurs several times in section VII where, precisel y, Blanchot is stressing a tendency on the part

of the artist, who acknowledges only l'oeuvre as his task, to confuse this work with the work of

history. Or, if he doesn't make this mistake -- and to the very extent that he doesn't -- his

tendency to renounce his own task in favor of the o ther. I have translated l'oeuvre humaine en

général as "the human undertaking as a whole," or "the ove rall work of humanity."

Finally, in three or four spots, the expressions "t o be at work" (à l'oeuvre) and "to go back to

work" (se remettre à l'oeuvre ) appear in Blanchot's text. The writer, for exampl e, inasmuch as he

is "out of work," can only ever return to the work (se remettre à l'oeuvre ): reapply himself to it

tirelessly and uselessly, go back to what he cannot get to -- go back to work. Or the interminably

affirmative No, which keeps on revoking all achieve ments, is "at work" (à l'oeuvre) in the work -

- causing its presence endlessly to revert to absen ce, causing this regression infernally to emerge,

causing the inexhaustibly persistent presence of ab sence. These examples account, I believe, for

all departures from the general rule: "work" always means the "work of art," as opposed to le

travail , just as lucidity in the deep of night means the p hantom lucidity of the insomniac poet, as

opposed both to the good sense of broad daylight an d to the peaceful sleep, the honest oblivion,

which reason requires at regular intervals.

My translation of the recurring word exigence is aw kward. This word appears, for example, in

one of the section titles quoted earlier: "L'Espace et l'exigence de l'oeuvre"; another section is

entitled "Rilke et l'exigence de la mort." What is the demand of death? What does the work

want? L'exigence de l'oeuvre means not simply what is required of the artist in order to make a work of art -- the skill and patience that give form and coherence -- though the work does

demand these. Neither is l'exigence de l'oeuvre simply the demand that there be a work, although

the implications of this demand are certainly part of Blanchot's concern. L'exigence de l'oeuvre

does mean the peculiarly harsh demand that the work makes of the "creator," which is different

from the demands of any other task: that all his po wers be plunged in weakness, that he come

into an immense wealth of silence and inertia. But still more, the work's demand is this: that

Orpheus look back. That suddenly, desire should wre ck everything -- the desire to look at the

dark when this naked mask is showing , and not when, veiled by clarity, clothed in the l ight, it can

be seen.

-14-

No one begins to write, Blanchot says, who is not a lready somehow on the verge of this ruinous

look back, and yet the sole approach to that turnin g point is writing. The form of the work's

demand is circular. It is like the demand Blanchot imagines being made of Abraham: that, having

no son, he kill his son. And thus it is like l'exigence de la mort. What is one to do to die? More

than everything is required, less than nothing is c alled for.

Ann Smock

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The Space of Literature

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The Essential Solitude I

-19-

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It seems that we learn something about art when we experience what the word solitude is meant

to designate. This word has been much abused. Still , what does the expression to be alone

signify? When is one alone? Asking this question sh ould not simply lead us into melancholy

reflections. Solitude as the world understands it i s a hurt which requires no further comment

here.

We do not intend to evoke the artist's solitude eit her -- that which is said to be necessary to him

for the practice of his art. When Rilke writes to t he countess of Solms-Laubach ( August 3, 1907), "For weeks, except for two short interruptions, I haven't pronounced a single word; my

solitude has finally encircled me and I am inside m y efforts just as the core is in the fruit," the

solitude of which he speaks is not the essential so litude. It is concentration.

The Solitude of the Work

In the solitude of the work -- the work of art, the literary work -- we discover a more essential

solitude. It excludes the complacent isolation of i ndividualism; it has nothing to do with the quest

for singularity. The fact that one sustains a stalw art attitude throughout the disciplined course of

the day does not dissipate it. He who writes the wo rk is set aside; he who has written it is

dismissed. He who is dismissed, moreover, doesn't k now it. This ignorance preserves him. It

distracts him by authorizing him to persevere. The writer never knows whether the work is done.

What he has finished in one book, he starts over or destroys in another. Valéry, celebrating this

infinite quality which the work enjoys, still sees only its least problematic aspect. That the work

is infinite means, for him, that the artist, though unable to finish it, can nevertheless make it the

delimited site of an endless task whose incompleten ess

-21-

develops the mastery of the mind, expresses this ma stery, expresses it by developing it in the

form of power. At a certain moment, circumstances - - that is, history, in the person of the

publisher or in the guise of financial exigencies, social duties -- pronounce the missing end, and

the artist, freed by a dénouement of pure constrain t, pursues the unfinished matter elsewhere.

The infinite nature of the work, seen thus, is just the mind's infiniteness. The mind wants to

fulfill itself in a single work, instead of realizi ng itself in an infinity of works and in history's

ongoing movement. But Valéry was by no means a hero . He found it good to talk about

everything, to write on everything: thus the scatte red totality of the world distracted him from the

unique and rigorous totality of the work, from whic h he amiably let himself be diverted. The etc.

hid behind the diversity of thoughts and subjects.

However, the work -- the work of art, the literary work -- is neither finished nor unfinished: it is.

What it says is exclusively this: that it is -- and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever

wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life

depends upon the work, either because he is a write r 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 lan guage itself disappears into the silent void of

the work.

The solitude of the work has as its primary framewo rk the absence of any defining criteria. This

absence makes it impossible ever to declare the wor k finished or unfinished. The work is without

any proof, just as it is without any use. It can't be verified. Truth can appropriate it, renown

draws attention to it, but the existence it thus ac quires doesn't concern it. This demonstrability

renders it neither certain nor real -- does not mak e it manifest.

The work is solitary: this does not mean that it re mains uncommunicable, that it has no reader.

But whoever reads it enters into the affirmation of the work's solitude, just as he who writes it

belongs to the risk of this solitude. The Work, the Book

In order to examine more closely what such statemen ts beckon us toward, perhaps we should try

to see where they originate. The writer writes a bo ok, but the book is not yet the work. There is a

work only

-22-

when, through it, and with the violence of a beginn ing which is proper to it, the word being is

pronounced. This event occurs when the work becomes the intimacy between someone who

writes it and someone who reads it. One might, then , wonder: if solitude is the writer's risk, does

it not express the fact that he is turned, oriented toward the open violence of the work, of which

he never grasps anything but the substitute -- the approach and the illusion in the form of the

book? The writer belongs to the work, but what belo ngs to him is only a book, a mute collection

of sterile words, the most insignificant thing in t he world. The writer who experiences this void

believes only that the work is unfinished, and he t hinks that a little more effort, along with some

propitious moments, will permit him and him alone t o finish it. So he goes back to work. But

what he wants to finish by himself remains intermin able; it involves him in an illusory task. And

the work, finally, knows him not. It closes in arou nd his absence as the impersonal, anonymous

affirmation that it is -- and nothing more. This is what is meant by the observation that the writer,

since he only finishes his work at the moment he di es, never knows of his work. One ought

perhaps to turn this remark around. For isn't the w riter dead as soon as the work exists? He

sometimes has such a presentiment himself: an impre ssion of being ever so strangely out of

work.

Noli Me Legere

The same situation can also be described this way: the writer never reads his work. It is, for him,

illegible, a secret. He cannot linger in its presen ce. It is a secret because he is separated from it.

However, his inability to read the work is not a pu rely negative phenomenon. It is, rather, the

writer's only real relation to what we call the wor k. The

____________________

1This situation is different from that of the man wh o labors and accomplishes his task only to

have it escape him by being transformed in the worl d. What man makes undergoes

transformation, but it undergoes this change in the world, and man recaptures it through the

world. Or at least he can regain it if alienation i s not immobilized --

expropriated for the profit

of certain others -- but is pursued rather, right u p to the world's own full realization.

On the contrary, what the writer aims at is the wor k, and what he writes is a book. The book,

as such, can become an effective event in the world (an action, however, which is always

reticent and insufficient), but it is not action th at the writer aims at. It is the work. And what

makes the book the substitute for the work suffices to make it a thing which, like the work,

doesn't stem from the truth of the world, but is al most vain, inasmuch as it has neither the

reality of the work nor the seriousness of genuine tasks undertaken in the world.

-23-

abrupt Noli me legere brings forth, where there is still only a book, th e horizon of a different

strength. This Noli me legere is a fleeting experience, although immediate. It i s not the force of an interdict, but, through the play and the sense of words, the insistent, the rude and poignant

affirmation that what is there, in the global prese nce of a definitive text, still witholds itself -- the

rude and biting void of refusal -- or excludes, wit h the authority of indifference, him who, having

written it, yet wants to grasp it afresh by reading it. The impossibility of reading is the discovery

that now, in the space opened by creation, there is no more room for creation. And, for the

writer, no other possibility than to keep on writin g this work. No one who has written the work

can linger close to it. For the work is the very de cision which dismisses him, cuts him off, makes

of him a survivor, without work. He becomes the ine rt idler upon whom art does not depend.

The writer cannot abide near the work. He can only write it; he can, once it is written, only

discern its approach in the abrupt Noli me legere which moves him away, which sets him apart or

which obliges him to go back to that "separation" w hich he first entered in order to become

attuned to what he had to write. So that now he fin ds himself as if at the beginning of his task

again and discovers again the proximity, the errant intimacy of the outside from which he could

not make an abode.

Perhaps this ordeal points us toward what we are se eking. The writer's solitude, that condition

which is the risk he runs, seems to come from his b elonging, in the work, to what always

precedes the work. Through him, the work comes into being; it constitutes the resolute solidity of

a beginning. But he himself belongs to a time ruled by the indecisiveness inherent in beginning

over again. The obsession which ties him to a privi leged theme, which obliges him to say over

again what he has already said -- sometimes with th e strength of an enriched talent, but

sometimes with the prolixity of an extraordinarily impoverishing repetitiveness, with ever less

force, more monotony -- 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 th e shadow of events, not their reality, to the

image, not the object, to what allows words themsel ves to become images, appearances -- not

signs, values, the power of truth.

-24-

Tyrannical Prehension

Sometimes, when a man is holding a pencil, his hand won't release it no matter how badly he

wants to let it go. Instead, the hand tightens rath er than open. The other hand intervenes more

successfully, but then the hand which one might cal l sick makes a slow, tentative movement and

tries to catch the departing object. The strange th ing is the slowness of this movement. The hand

moves in a tempo which is scarcely human: not that of viable action, not that of hope either, but

rather the shadow of time, the hand being itself th e shadow of a hand slipping ghostlike toward

an object that has become its own shadow. This hand experiences, at certain moments, a very

great need to seize: it must grasp the pencil, it h as to. It receives an order, an imperious

command. This phenomenon is known as "tyrannical pr ehension."

The writer seems to be the master of his pen; he ca n become capable of great mastery over words

and over what he wants to make them express. But hi s mastery only succeeds in putting him,

keeping him in contact with the fundamental passivi ty where the word, no longer anything but its

appearance -- the shadow of a word -- never can be mastered or even grasped. It remains the

ungraspable which is also unreleasable: the indecis ive moment of fascination. The writer's mastery is not in the hand that writes, the "sick" hand that never lets the pencil go --

that can't let it go because what it holds it doesn 't really hold; what it holds belongs to the realm

of shadows, and it is itself a shade. Mastery alway s characterizes the other hand, the one that

doesn't write and is capable of intervening at the right moment to seize the pencil and put it

aside. Thus mastery consists in the power to stop w riting, to interrupt what is being written,

thereby restoring to the present instant its rights , its decisive trenchancy.

We must start questioning again. We have said that the writer belongs to the work, but that what

belongs to him, what he finishes by himself, is onl y a book: "by himself" corresponds to the

restriction "only." The writer is never face to fac e with the work, and when there is a work, he

doesn't know it; or, more precisely, even this igno rance is unknown to him, is only granted him

in the impossibility of reading, the ambiguous expe rience that puts him back to work.

The writer goes back to work. Why doesn't he cease writing? Why, if he breaks with the work, as

Rimbaud did, does this break strike us as a

-25-

mysterious impossibility? Does he just desire a per fect product, and if he does not cease to work

at it, is it simply because perfection is never per fect enough? Does he even write in the

expectation of a work? Does he bear it always in mi nd as that which would put an end to his

task, as the goal worthy of so much effort? Not at all. The work is never that in anticipation of

which one can write (in prospect of which one would relate to the process of writing as to the

exercise of some power).

The fact that the writer's task ends with his life hides another fact: that, through this task, his life

slides into the distress of the infinite.

The Interminable, the Incessant

The solitude which the work visits on the writer re veals itself in this: that writing is now the

interminable, the incessant. The writer no longer b elongs to the magisterial realm where to

express oneself means to express the exactitude and the certainty of things and values according

to the sense of their limits. What he is to write d elivers the one who has to write to an affirmation

over which he has no authority, which is itself wit hout substance, which affirms nothing, and yet

is not repose, not the dignity of silence, for it i s what still speaks when everything has been said.

This affirmation doesn't precede speech, because it prevents speech from beginning, just as it

takes away from language the right and the power to interrupt itself. To write is to break the

bond that unites the word with myself. It is to des troy the relation which, determining that I

speak toward "you," gives me room to speak within t he understanding which my word receives

from you (for my word summons you, and is the summo ns that begins in me because it finishes

in you). To write is to break this bond. To write i s, moreover, to withdraw language from the

world, to detach it from what makes it a power acco rding to which, when I speak, it is the world

that declares itself, the clear light of day that d evelops through tasks undertaken, through action

and time.

Writing is the interminable, the incessant. The wri ter, it is said, gives up saying "I." Kafka

remarks, with surprise, with enchantment, that he h as entered into literature as soon as he can

substitute "He" for "I." This is true, but the tran sformation is much more profound. The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center,

and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he a ffirms himself in this language, but what he

affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the exte nt that, being a writer, he does

-26-

justice to what requires writing, he can never agai n express himself, any more than he can appeal

to you, or even introduce another's speech. Where h e is, only being speaks -- which means that

language doesn't speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being.

If to write is to surrender to the interminable, th e writer who consents to sustain writing's essence

loses the power to say "I." And so he loses the pow er to make others say "I." Thus he can by no

means give life to characters whose liberty would b e guaranteed by his creative power. The

notion of characters, as the traditional form of th e novel, is only one of the compromises by

which the writer, drawn out of himself by literatur e in search of its essence, tries to salvage his

relations with the world and himself.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in

order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silen ce it. I bring to this incessant speech the

decisiveness, the authority of my own silence. I ma ke perceptible , by my silent mediation, the

uninterrupted affirmation, the giant murmuring upon which language opens and thus becomes

image, becomes imaginary, becomes a speaking depth, an indistinct plenitude which is empty.

This silence has its source in the effacement towar d which the writer is drawn. Or else, it is the

resource of his mastery, the right of intervention which the hand that doesn't write retains -- the

part of the writer which can always say no and, whe n necessary, appeal to time, restore the

future.

When we admire the tone of a work, when we respond to its tone as to its most authentic aspect,

what are we referring to? Not to style, or to the i nterest and virtues of the language, but to this

silence precisely, this vigorous force by which the writer, having been deprived of himself,

having renounced himself, has in this effacement ne vertheless maintained the authority of a

certain power: the power decisively to be still, so that in this silence what speaks without

beginning of end might take on form, coherence, and sense.

The tone is not the writer's voice, but the intimac y of the silence he imposes upon the word. This

implies that the silence is still his -- what remains of him in the discretion that sets him aside.

The tone makes great writers, but perhaps the work is indifferent to what makes them great.

In the effacement toward which he is summoned, the "great writer" still holds back; what speaks

is no longer he himself, but neither is it the shee r slipping away of no one's word. For he

maintains the authoritative though silent affirmati on of the effaced "I." He keeps the cutting

edge, the violent swiftness of active time, of the instant.

-27-

Thus he preserves himself within the work; where th ere is no more restraint, he contains himself.

But the work also retains, because of this, a conte nt. It is not altogether its own interior. The writer we call classic -- at least in France -- sacrifices within himself the idiom which is

proper to him, but he does so in order to give voic e to the universal. The calm of a regular form,

the certainty of a language free from idiosyncrasy, where impersonal generality speaks, secures

him a relation with truth -- with truth which is be yond the person and purports to be beyond time.

Then literature has the glorious solitude of reason , that rarefied life at the heart of the whole

which would require resolution and courage if this reason were not in fact the stability of an

ordered aristocratic society; that is, the noble sa tisfaction of a part of society which concentrates

the whole within itself by isolating itself well ab ove what sustains it.

When to write is to discover the interminable, the writer who enters this region does not leave

himself behind in order to approach the universal. He does not move toward a surer world, a

finer or better justified world where everything wo uld be ordered according to the clarity of the

impartial light of day. He does not discover the ad mirable language which speaks honorably for

all. What speaks in him is the fact that, in one wa y or another, he is no longer himself; he isn't

anyone any more. The third person substituting for the "I": such is the solitude that comes to the

writer on account of the work. It does not denote o bjective disinterestedness, creative

detachment. It does not glorify consciousness in so meone other than myself or the evolution of a

human vitality which, in the imaginary space of the work of art, would retain the freedom to say

"I." The third person is myself become no one, my i nterlocutor turned alien; it is my no longer

being able, where I am, to address myself and the i nability of whoever addresses me to say "I"; it

is his not being himself.

Recourse to the "Journal"

It is perhaps striking that from the moment the wor k becomes the search for art, from the

moment it becomes literature, the writer increasing ly feels the need to maintain a relation to

himself. His feeling is one of extreme repugnance a t losing his grasp upon himself in the

interests of that neutral force, formless and beref t of any destiny, which is behind everything that

gets written. This repugnance, or apprehension, is revealed by the concern, characteristic of so

many authors, to compose what they call

-28-

their "journal." Such a preoccupation is far remove d from the complacent attitudes usually

described as Romantic. The journal is not essential ly confessional; it is not one's own story. It is

a memorial. What must the writer remember? Himself: who he is when he isn't writing, when he

lives daily life, when he is alive and true, not dy ing and bereft of truth. But the tool he uses in

order to recollect himself is, strangely, the very element of forgetfulness: writing. That is why,

however, the truth of the journal lies not in the i nteresting, literary remarks to be found there, but

in the insignificant details which attach it to dai ly reality. The journal represents the series of

reference points which a writer establishes in orde r to keep track of himself when he begins to

suspect the dangerous metamorphosis to which he is exposed. It is a route that remains viable; it

is something like a watchman's walkway upon rampart s: parallel to, overlooking, and sometimes

skirting around the other path -- the one where to stray is the endless task. Here true things are

still spoken of. Here, whoever speaks retains his n ame and speaks in this name, and the dates he

notes down belong in a shared time where what happe ns really happens. The journal -- this book

which is apparently altogether solitary -- is often written out of fear and anguish at the solitude

which comes to the writer on account of the work. The recourse to the journal indicates that he who writes doesn't want to break with contentment.

He doesn't want to interrupt the propriety of days which really are days and which really follow

one upon the other. The journal roots the movement of writing in time, in the humble succession

of days whose dates preserve this routine. Perhaps what is written there is already nothing but

insincerity; perhaps it is said without regard for truth. But it is said in the security of the event. It

belongs to occupations, incidents, the affairs of t he world -- to our active present. This continuity

is nil and insignificant, but at least it is irreve rsible. It is a pursuit that goes beyond itself tow ard

tomorrow, and proceeds there definitively.

The journal indicates that already the writer is no longer capable of belonging to time through the

ordinary certainty of action, through the shared co ncerns of common tasks, of an occupation,

through the simplicity of intimate speech, the forc e of unreflecting habit. He is no longer truly

historical; but he doesn't want to waste time eithe r, and since he doesn't know anymore how to

do anything but write, at least he writes in respon se to his everyday history and in accord with

the preoccupations of daily life. It happens that w riters who keep a journal are the most literary

of all, but perhaps this is precisely because they avoid,

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thus, the extreme of literature, if literature is u ltimately the fascinating realm of time's absence.

The Fascination of Time's Absence

To write is to surrender to the fascination of time 's absence. Now we are doubtless approaching

the essence of solitude. Time's absence is not a pu rely negative mode. It is the time when nothing

begins, when initiative is not possible, when, befo re the affirmation, there is already a return of

the affirmation. Rather than a purely negative mode , it is, on the contrary, a time without

negation, without decision, when here is nowhere as well, and each thing withdraws into its

image while the "I" that we are recognizes itself b y sinking into the neutrality of a featureless

third person. The time of time's absence has no pre sent, no presence. This "no present" does not,

however, refer back to a past. Olden days had the d ignity, the active force of now. Memory still

bears witness to this active force. It frees me fro m what otherwise would recall me; it frees me

by giving me the means of calling freely upon the p ast, of ordering it according to my present

intention. Memory is freedom of the past. But what has no present will not accept the present of

a memory either. Memory says of the event: it once was and now it will never be again. The

irremediable character of what has no present, of w hat is not even there as having once been

there, says: it never happened, never for a first t ime, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely.

It is without end, without beginning. It is without a future.

The time of time's absence is not dialectical. In t his time what appears is the fact that nothing

appears. What appears is the being deep within bein g's absence, which is when there is nothing

and which, as soon as there is something, is no lon ger. For it is as if there were no beings except

through the loss of being, when being lacks. The re versal which, in time's absence, points us

constantly back to the presence of absence -- but t o this presence as absence, to absence as its

own affirmation (an affirmation in which nothing is affirmed, in which nothing never ceases to

affirm itself with the exhausting insistence of the indefinite) -- this movement is not dialectical.

Contradictions do not exclude each other in it; nor are they reconciled. Only time itself, during

which negation becomes our power, permits the "unit y of contraries." In time's absence what is new renews nothing; what is present is not contemporary; what is present presents nothing, but

represents itself and belongs henceforth and always to return. It isn't, but comes back

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again. It comes already and forever past, so that m y relation to it is not one of cognition, but of

recognition, and this recognition ruins in me the p ower of knowing, the right to grasp. It makes

what is ungraspable inescapable; it never lets me c ease reaching what I cannot attain. And that

which I cannot take, I must take up again, never to let go.

This time is not the ideal immobility which the nam e "eternal" glorifies. In the region we are

trying to approach, here has collapsed into nowhere , but nowhere is nonetheless here, and this

empty, dead time is a real time in which death is p resent -- in which death happens but doesn't

stop happening, as if, by happening, it rendered st erile the time in which it could happen. The

dead present is the impossibility of making any pre sence real -- an impossibility which is present,

which is there as the present's double, the shadow of the present which the present bears and

hides in itself. When I am alone, I am not alone, b ut, in this present, I am already returning to

myself in the form of Someone. Someone is there, wh ere I am alone. The fact of being alone is

my belonging to this dead time which is not my time , or yours, or the time we share in common,

but Someone's time. Someone is what is still presen t when there is no one. Where I am alone, I

am not there; no one is there, but the impersonal i s: the outside, as that which prevents, precedes,

and dissolves the possibility of any personal relat ion. Someone is the faceless third person, the

They of which everybody and anybody is part, but wh o is part of it? Never anyone in particular,

never you and I. Nobody is part of the They. "They" belongs to a region which cannot be brought

to light, not because it hides some secret alien to any revelation or even because it is radically

obscure, but because it transforms everything which has access to it, even light, into anonymous,

impersonal being, the Nontrue, the Nonreal yet alwa ys there. The They is, in this respect, what

appears up very close when someone dies.

When I am alone, the light of day is only the loss of a dwelling place. It is intimacy with the

outside which has no location and affords no rest. Coming here makes the one who comes

belong to dispersal, to the fissure where the exter ior is the intrusion that stifles, but is also

nakedness, the chill of the enclosure that leaves o ne utterly exposed. Here the only space is its

vertiginous separation. Here fascination reigns.

____________________

2When I am alone, it is not I who am there, and it i s not from you that I stay away, or from

others, or from the world. So begins the reflection which investigates "the essential solitude

and solitude in the world." See, on this subject, a nd under this title, certain pages in the

Appendixes.

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The Image

Why fascination? Seeing presupposes distance, decis iveness which separates, the power to stay

out of contact and in contact avoid confusion. Seei ng means that this separation has nevertheless

become an encounter. But what happens when what you see, although at a distance, seems to

touch you with a gripping contact, when the manner of seeing is a kind of touch, when seeing is

contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen impo ses itself upon the gaze, as if the gaze were seized, put in touch with the appearance? What happens is not an active contact, not

the initiative and action which there still is in r eal touching. Rather, the gaze gets taken in,

absorbed by an immobile movement and a depthless de ep. What is given us by this contact at a

distance is the image, and fascination is passion f or the image.

What fascinates us robs us of our power to give sen se. It abandons its "sensory" nature, abandons

the world, draws back from the world, and draws us along. It no longer reveals itself to us, and

yet it affirms itself in a presence foreign to the temporal present and to presence in space.

Separation, which was the possibility of seeing, co agulates at the very center of the gaze into

impossibility. The look thus finds, in what makes i t possible, the power that neutralizes it, neither

suspending nor arresting it, but on the contrary pr eventing it from ever finishing, cutting it off

from any beginning, making of it a neutral, directi onless gleam which will not go out, yet does

not clarify -- the gaze turned back upon itself and closed in a circle. Here we have an immediate

expression of that reversal which is the essence of solitude. Fascination is solitude's gaze. It is

the gaze of the incessant and interminable. In it b lindness is vision still, vision which is no longer

the possibility of seeing, but the impossibility of not seeing, the impossibility which becomes

visible and perseveres -- always and always -- in a vision that never comes to an end: a dead

gaze, a gaze become the ghost of an eternal vision.

Of whoever is fascinated it can be said that he doe sn't perceive any real object, any real figure,

for what he sees does not belong to the world of re ality, but to the indeterminate milieu of

fascination. This milieu is, so to speak, absolute. Distance is not excluded from it, but is

immeasurable. Distance here is the limitless depth behind the image, a lifeless profundity,

unmanipulable, absolutely present although not give n, where objects sink away when they depart

from their sense, when they collapse into their ima ge. This milieu of fascination, where what one

sees seizes sight and renders it interminable, wher e the gaze

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coagulates into light, where light is the absolute gleam of an eye one doesn't see but which one

doesn't cease to see since it is the mirror image o f one's own look -- this milieu is utterly

attractive. Fascinating. It is light which is also the abyss, a light one sinks into, both terrifying

and tantalizing.

If our childhood fascinates us, this happens becaus e childhood is the moment of fascination, is

itself fascinated. And this golden age seems bathed in a light which is splendid because

unrevealed. But it is only that this light is forei gn to revelation, has nothing to reveal, is pure

reflection, a ray which is still only the gleam of an image. Perhaps the force of the maternal

figure receives its intensity from the very force o f fascination, and one might say then, that if the

mother exerts this fascinating attraction it is bec ause, appearing when the child lives altogether in

fascination's gaze, she concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment. It is because the

child is fascinated that the mother is fascinating, and that is also why all the impressions of early

childhood have a kind of fixity which comes from fa scination.

Whoever is fascinated doesn't see, properly speakin g, what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an

immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draw s him close, even though it leaves him

absolutely at a distance. Fascination is fundamenta lly linked to neutral, impersonal presence, to

the indeterminate They, the immense, faceless Someo ne. Fascination is the relation the gaze entertains -- a relation which is itself neutral and impersonal -- with sightless, shapeless depth,

the absence one sees because it is blinding.

Writing

To write is to enter into the affirmation of the so litude in which fascination threatens. It is to

surrender to the risk of time's absence, where eter nal starting over reigns. It is to pass from the

first to the third person, so that what happens to me happens to no one, is anonymous insofar as it

concerns me, repeats itself in an infinite dispersa l. To write is to let fascination rule language. It

is to stay in touch, through language, in language, with the absolute milieu where the thing

becomes image again, where the image, instead of al luding to some particular feature, becomes

an allusion to the featureless, and instead of a fo rm drawn upon absence, becomes the formless

presence of this absence, the opaque, empty opening onto that which is when there is no more

world, when there is no world yet.

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Why? Why should writing have to do with this essent ial solitude, the solitude whose essence is

the dissimulation that appears it?

____________________

3We will not try here to answer this question direct ly. We will only ask: just as the statue

glorifies the marble, and insofar as all art means to draw into the light of day the elemental

deep which the world, in order to affirm itself, ne gates and resists, doesn't the language of the

poem, of literature, compare to ordinary language a s the image compares to the thing? One

likes to think that poetry is a language which, mor e than others, favors images. This is

probably an allusion to a much more essential trans formation -- the poem is not a poem

because it contains a certain number of figures, me taphors, comparisons; on the contrary, the

poem's particular character is that nothing in it f unctions as an image. So we must express

what we are seeking differently: in literature, doe sn't language itself become altogether

image? We do not mean a language containing images or one that casts reality in figures, but

one which is its own image, an image of language (a nd not a figurative language), or yet

again, an imaginary language, one which no one spea ks; a language, that is, which issues

from its own absence, the way the image emerges upo n the absence of the thing; a language

addressing itself to the shadow of events as well, not to their reality, and this because of the

fact that the words which express them are, not sig ns, but images, images of words, and

words where things turn into images.

What are we seeking to represent by saying this? Ar e we not on a path leading back to

suppositions happily abandoned, analogous to the on e which used to define art as imitation, a

copy of the real? If, in the poem, language becomes its own image, doesn't this mean that

poetic language is always second, secondary? Accord ing to the common analysis, the image

comes after the object. It is the object's continua tion. We see, then we imagine. After the

object comes the image. "After" seems to indicate s ubordination. We really speak, then we

speak in our imagination, of we imagine ourselves s peaking. Wouldn't poetic language be the

copy, the dim shadow, the transposition -- in a spa ce where the requirements of effectiveness

are attenuated -- of the sole speaking language? Bu t perhaps the common analysis is

mistaken. Perhaps, before going further, one ought to ask: but what is the image? (See, in the

Appendixes, the pages entitled "The Two Versions of the Imaginary." ) -34-

Approaching Literature's Space

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The poem -- literature -- seems to be linked to a s poken word which cannot be interrupted

because it does not speak; it is. The poem is not t his word itself, for the poem is a beginning,

whereas this word never begins, but always speaks a new and is always starting over. However,

the poet is the one who has heard this word, who ha s made himself into an ear attuned to it, its

mediator, and who has silenced it by pronouncing it . This word is close to the poem's origin, for

everything original is put to the test by the sheer powerlessness inherent in starting over -- this

sterile prolixity, the surplus of that which can do nothing, which never is the work, but ruins it

and in it restores the unending lack of work. Perha ps this word is the source of the poem, but it is

a source that must somehow be dried up in order to become a spring. For the poet -- the one who

writes, the "creator" -- could never derive the wor k from the essential lack of work. Never could

he, by himself, cause the pure opening words to spr ing forth from what is at the origin. That is

why the work is a work only when it becomes the int imacy shared by someone who writes it and

someone who reads it, a space violently opened up b y the contest between the power to speak

and the power to hear. And the one who writes is, a s well, one who has "heard" the interminable

and incessant, who has heard it as speech, has ente red into this understanding with it, has lived

with its demand, has become lost in it and yet, in order to have sustained it, has necessarily made

it stop -- has, in this intermittence, rendered it perceptible, has proffered it by firmly reconciling

it with this limit. He has mastered it by imposing measure.

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Mallarmé's Experience

Here we must appeal to references that are well kno wn today and that hint at the transformation

to which Mallarmé was exposed as soon as he took wr iting to heart. These references are by no

means anecdotal in character. When Mallarmé affirms , "I felt the very disquieting symptoms

caused by the sole act of writing," it is the last words which matter. With them an essential

situation is brought to light. Something extreme is grasped, something which has for its context

and substance "the sole act of writing." Writing ap pears as an extreme situation which

presupposes a radical reversal. Mallarmé alludes br iefly to this reversal when he says:

"Unfortunately, by digging this thoroughly into ver se, I have encountered two abysses which

make me despair. One is Nothingness" (the absence o f God; the other is his own death). Here too

it is the flattest expression that is rich with sen se: the one which, in the most unpretentious

fashion, seems simply to remind us of a craftsmanly procedure. "By digging into verse," the poet

enters that time of distress which is caused by the gods' absence. Mallarmé's phrase is startling.

Whoever goes deeply into poetry escapes from being as certitude, meets with the absence of the

gods, lives in the intimacy of this absence, become s responsible for it, assumes its risk, and endures its favor. Whoever digs at verse must renounce all idols; he has to break with everything.

He cannot have truth for his horizon, or the future as his element, for he has no right to hope. He

has, on the contrary, to despair. Whoever delves in to verse dies; he encounters his death as an

abyss.

The Crude Word and the Essential Word

When he seeks to define the aspect of language whic h "the sole act of writing" disclosed to him,

Mallarmé acknowledges a "double condition of the wo rd, crude or immediate on the one hand,

essential on the

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other." This distinction itself is crude, yet diffi cult to grasp, for Mallarmé attributes the same

substance to the two aspects of language which he d istinguishes so absolutely. In order to

characterize each, he lights on the same term, whic h is "silence." The crude word is pure silence:

"It would, perhaps, be enough for anyone who wants to exchange human speech, silently to take

or put in someone else's hand a coin." Silent, ther efore, because meaningless, crude language is

an absence of words, a pure exchange where nothing is exchanged, where there is nothing real

except the movement of exchange, which is nothing. But it turns out the same for the word

confided to the questing poet -- that language whos e whole force lies in its not being, whose very

glory is to evoke, in its own absence, the absence of everything. This language of the unreal, this

fictive language which delivers us to fiction, come s from silence and returns to silence.

Crude speech "has a bearing upon the reality of thi ngs." "Narration, instruction, even

description" give us the presence of things, "repre sent" them. The essential word moves them

away, makes them disappear. It is always allusive; it suggests, evokes. But what is it, then, to

remove "a fact of nature," to grasp it through this absence, to "transpose it into its vibratory,

almost-disappearance"? To speak, but also to think, essentially. Thought is the pure word. In

thought we must recognize the supreme language, who se lack is all that the extreme variety of

different tongues permits us to grasp. "Since to th ink is to write without appurtenances or

whispers, but with the immortal word still tacit, t he world's diversity of idioms keeps anyone

from proffering expressions which otherwise would b e, in one stroke, the truth itself materially."

(This is Cratylus's ideal, but also the definition of automatic writing.) One is thus tempted to say

that the language of thought is poetic language par excellence, and that sense -- the pure notion,

the idea -- must become the poet's concern, since i t alone frees us from the weight of things, the

amorphous natural plenitude. "Poetry, close to the idea."

However, the crude word is by no means crude. What it represents is not present. Mallarmé does

not want "to include, upon the subtle paper . . . t he intrinsic and dense wood of trees." But

nothing is more foreign to the tree than the word tree, as it is used nonetheless by everyday

language. A word which does not name anything, whic h does not represent anything, which does

not outlast itself in any way, a word which is not even a word and which disappears marvelously

altogether and at once in its usage: what could be more worthy of the essential and

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closer to silence? True, it "serves." Apparently th at makes all the difference. We are used to it, it

is usual, useful. Through it we are in the world: i t refers us back to the life of the world where goals speak and the concern to achieve them once and for all is the rule. Granted, this crude word

is a pure nothing, nothingness itself. But it is no thingness in action: that which acts, labors,

constructs. It is the pure silence of the negative which culminates in the noisy feverishness of

tasks.

In this respect, the essential word is exactly the opposite. It is a rule unto itself; it is imposing,

but it imposes nothing. It is also well removed fro m thought which always pushes back the

elemental obscurity, for verse "attracts no less th an it disengages," "polishes all the scattered ore,

unknown and floating." In verse, words become "elem ents" again, and the word nuit, despite its

brilliance, becomes night's intimacy.

In crude or immediate speech, language as language is silent. But beings speak in it. And, as a

consequence of the use which is its purpose -- because, that is, it serve s primarily to put us in

connection with objects, because it is a tool in a world of tools where what speaks is utility and

value -- beings speak in it as values. They take on the stable appearance of objects existing one

by one and assume the certainty of the immutable.

The crude word is neither crude nor immediate. But it gives the illusion of being so. It is

extremely reflective; it is laden with history. But , most often -- and as if we were unable in the

ordinary course of events to know that we are the o rgan of time, the guardians of becoming --

language seems to be the locus of an immediately gr anted revelation. It seems to be the sign that

truth is immediate, always the same and always at o ur disposal. Immediate language is perhaps

in fact a relation with the immediate world, with w hat is immediately close to us, our environs.

But the immediacy which common language communicate s to us is only veiled distance, the

absolutely foreign passing for the habitual, the un familiar which we take for the customary,

thanks to the veil which is language and because we have grown accustomed to words' illusion.

Language has within itself the moment that hides it . It has within itself, through this power to

hide itself, the

____________________

1Having regretted the fact that words are not "the t ruth materially" -- that jour, by virtue of its

sonority, is sombre and nuit brilliant -- Mallarmé finds in this shortcoming of our various

tongues the justification of poetry. Verse is their "superior complement." "Philosophically, it

remunerates the lack in languages." What is this la ck? Languages do not have the reality they

express, for they are foreign to the reality of thi ngs, foreign to obscure natural profundity, and

belong to that fictive reality which is the human w orld, detached from being and a tool for

beings.

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force by which mediation (that which destroys immed iacy) seems to have the spontaneity, the

freshness, and the innocence of the origin. Moreove r, this power, which language exercises by

communicating to us the illusion of immediacy when in fact it gives us only the habitual, makes

us believe that the immediate is familiar; and thus language's power consists in making the

immediate appear to us not as the most terrible thi ng, which ought to overwhelm us -- the error

of the essential solitude -- but as the pleasant re assurance of natural harmonies or the familiarity

of a native habitat. In the language of the world, language as the being of language and as the language of being

keeps still. Thanks to this silence, beings speak, and in it they also find oblivion and rest. When

Mallarmé speaks of the essential language, part of the time he opposes it only to this ordinary

language which gives us the reassuring illusion of an immediacy which is actually only the

customary. At these junctures he takes up and attri butes to literature the language of thought, that

silent movement which affirms in man his decision n ot to be, to separate himself from being,

and, by making this separation real, to build the w orld. This silence is the production and the

expression of signification itself. But this langua ge of thought is, all the same, "ordinary"

language as well. It always refers us back to the w orld, sometimes showing it to us in the infinite

qualities of a task and the risk of an undertaking, sometimes as a stable position where we are

allowed to believe ourselves secure.

The poetic word, then, is no longer opposed only to ordinary language, but also to the language

of thought. In poetry we are no longer referred bac k to the world, neither to the world as shelter

nor to the world as goals. In this language the wor ld recedes and goals cease; the world falls

silent; beings with their preoccupations, their pro jects, their activity are no longer ultimately

what speaks. Poetry expresses the fact that beings are quiet. But how does this happen? Beings

fall silent, but then it is being that tends to spe ak and speech that wants to be. The poetic word is

no longer someone's word. In it no one speaks, and what speaks is not anyone. It seems rather

that the word alone declares itself. Then language takes on all of its importance. It becomes

essential. Language speaks as the essential, and th at is why the word entrusted to the poet can be

called the essential word. This means primarily tha t words, having the initiative, are not obliged

to serve to designate anything or give voice to any one, but that they have their ends in

themselves. From here on, it is not Mallarmé who sp eaks, but language which speaks itself:

language as the work and the work as language.

-41-

From this perspective, we rediscover poetry as a po werful universe of words where relations,

configurations, forces are affirmed through sound, figure, rhythmic mobility, in a unified and

sovereignly autonomous space. Thus the poet produce s a work of pure language, and language in

this work is its return to its essence. He creates an object made of language just as the painter,

rather than using colors to reproduce what is, seek s the point at which his colors produce being.

Or again, the poet strives -- as Rilke did during h is Expressionist period, or as today perhaps

Ponge does -- to create the "poem-thing," which wou ld be, so to speak, the language of mute

being. He wants to make of the poem something which all by itself will be form, existence, and

being: that is, the work.

We call this powerful linguistic construction -- th is structure calculated to exclude chance, which

subsists by itself and rests upon itself -- the wor k. And we call it being. But it is from this

perspective neither one nor the other. It is a work , since it is constructed, composed, calculated;

but in this sense it is a work like any work, like any object formed by professional intelligence

and skillful know-how. It is not a work of art, a w ork which has art for its origin, through which

art is lifted from time's absence where nothing is accomplished to the unique, dazzling

affirmation of the beginning. Likewise, the poem, u nderstood as an independent object sufficing

to itself -- an object made out of language and cre ated for itself alone, a monad of words where

nothing is reflected but the nature of words -- is perhaps in this respect a reality, a particular being, having exceptional dignity and importance; but it is a being, and for this reason it is by no

means close to being, to that which escapes all det ermination and every form of existence.

Mallarmé's Experience Proper

It seems that the specifically Mallarméan experienc e begins at the moment when he moves from

consideration of the finished work which is always one particular poem or another, or a certain

picture, to the concern through which the work beco mes the search for its origin and wants to

identify itself with its origin -- "horrible vision of a pure work." Here lies Mallarmé's profundity;

here lies the concern which, for Mallarmé, "the sol e act of writing" encompasses. What is the

work? What is language in the work? When Mallarmé a sks himself, "Does something like

Literature exist?," this question is literature its elf. It is

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literature when literature has become concern for i ts own essence. Such a question cannot be

relegated. What is the result of the fact that we h ave literature? What is implied about being if

one states that "something like Literature exists"?

Mallarmé had the most profoundly tormented awarenes s of the particular nature of literary

creation. The work of art reduces itself to being. That is its task: to be, to make present "those

very words: it is . . . There lies all the mystery."

2 But at the same time it cannot be said that the

work belongs to being, that it exists. On the contr ary, what must be said is that it never exists in

the manner of a thing or a being in general. What m ust be said, in answer to our question, is that

literature does not exist or again that if it takes place, it does so as something "not taking place i n

the form of any object that exists." Granted, langu age is present -- "made evident" -- in it:

language is affirmed in literature with more author ity than in any other form of human activity.

But it is wholly realized in literature, which is t o say that it has only the reality of the whole; it is

all -- and nothing else, always on the verge of pas sing from all to nothing. This passage is

essential; it belongs to the essence of language be cause, precisely, nothing operates in words.

Words, we know, have the power to make things disap pear, to make them appear as things that

have vanished. This appearance is only that of disa ppearance; this presence too returns to

absence through the movement of wear and erosion wh ich is the soul and the life of words,

which draws light from their dimming, clarity from the dark. But words, having the power to

make things "arise" at the heart of their absence - - words which are masters of this absence --

also have the power to disappear in it themselves, to absent themselves marvelously in the midst

of the totality which they realize, which they proc laim as they annihilate themselves therein,

which they accomplish eternally by destroying thems elves there endlessly. This act of self-

destruction is in every respect similar to the ever so strange event of suicide which, precisely,

gives to the supreme instant of Igitur all its truth.

____________________

2A letter to Vielé-Griffin, 8 August 1891 : ". . . There is nothing in this that I don't tell myself,

less well, in the uneven whisperings of my solitary conversations, but where you are the

diviner, it is, yes, relative to those very words: it is; they are the subject of notes I have been

working on, and they reign in the furthest reaches of my mind. There lies all the mystery: to

establish the secret identities through a two-by-tw o which wears and erodes objects, in the

name of a central purity."

3We refer the reader to another section of this book , "The Work and Death's Space," the study specifically devoted to the Igitur experience. This experience can be discussed only when a

more central point in literature's space has been r eached. In his very important essay, The

Interior Distance , Georges Poulet shows that Igitur is "a perfect example of philosophic

suicide." He suggests thereby that for Mallarmé, th e poem depends upon a profound

-43-

The Central Point

Such is the central point. Mallarmé always comes ba ck to it as though he were returning to the

intimacy of the risk to which the literary experien ce exposes us. This point is the one at which

complete realization of language coincides with its disappearance. Everything is pronounced

("Nothing," as Mallarmé says, "will remain unproffe red"); everything is word, yet the word is

itself no longer anything but the appearance of wha t has disappeared -- the imaginary, the

incessant, and the interminable. This point is ambi guity itself.

On the one hand, in the work, it is what the work r ealizes, how it affirms itself, the place where

the work must "allow no luminous evidence except of existing." In this sense, the central point is

the presence of the work, and the work alone makes it present. But at the same time, this point is

"the presence of Midnight," the point anterior to a ll starting points, from which nothing ever

begins, the empty profundity of being's inertia, th at region without issue and without reserve, in

which the work, through the artist, becomes the con cern, the endless search for its origin. Yes,

the center, the concentration of ambiguity. It is v ery true that only the work -- if we come toward

this point through the movement and strength of the work -- only the accomplishment of the

work makes it possible. Let us look again at the po em: what could be more real, more evident?

And language itself is "luminous evidence" within i t. This evidence, however, shows nothing,

rests upon nothing; it is the ungraspable in action .

____________________ relation to death, and is possible only if death is possible : only if, through the sacrifice and

strain to which the poet exposes himself, death bec omes power and possibility in him, only if

it is an act par excellence:

Death is the only act possible. Cornered as we are between a true material world whose

chance combinations take place in us regardless of us, and a false ideal world whose lie

paralyzes and bewitches us, we have only one means of no longer being at the mercy either of

nothingness or of chance. This unique means, this u nique act, is death. Voluntary death.

Through it we abolish ourselves, but through it we also found ourselves . . . It is this act of

voluntary death that Mallarmé committed. He committ ed it in Igitur.

We must, however, carry Poulet's remarks further. Igitur is an abandoned narrative which

bears witness to a certitude the poet was unable to maintain. For it is not sure that death is an

act; it could be that suicide was not possible. Can I take my own life? Do I have the power to

die? Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard is something like the answer in which this

question dwells. And the "answer" intimates that th e movement which, in the work, is the

experience of death, the approach to it and its use , is not the movement of possibility -- not

even of nothingness's possibility -- but rather a m ovement approaching the point at which the

work is put to the test by impossibility.

-44- There are neither terms nor moments. Where we think we have words, "a virtual trail of fires"

shoots through us -- a swiftness, a scintillating e xaltation. A reciprocity: for what is not is

revealed in this flight; what there isn't is reflec ted in the pure grace of reflections that do not

reflect anything. Then, "everything becomes suspens e, fragmentary disposition with alternations

and oppositions." Then, just as the tremor of the u nreal turned into language gleams only to go

out, simultaneously the unfamiliar presence is affi rmed of real things turned into pure absence,

pure fiction: a glorious realm where "willed and so litary celebrations" shine forth their splendor.

One would like to say that the poem, like the pendu lum that marks the time of time's abolition in

Igitur , oscillates marvelously between its presence as la nguage and the absence of the things of

the world. But this presence is itself oscillating perpetuity: oscillation between the successive

unreality of terms that terminate nothing, and the total realization of this movement -- language,

that is, become the whole of language, where the po wer of departing from and coming back to

nothing, affirmed in each word and annulled in all, realizes itself as a whole, "total rhythm,"

"with which, silence."

In the poem, language is never real at any of the m oments through which it passes, for in the

poem language is affirmed in its totality. Yet in t his totality, where it constitutes its own essence

and where it is essential, it is also supremely unr eal. It is the total realization of this unreality, an

absolute fiction which says "being" when, having "w orn away," "used up" all existing things,

having suspended all possible beings, it comes up a gainst an indelible, irreducible residue. What

is left? "Those very words, it is." Those words sustain all others by letting themse lves be hidden

by all the others, and hidden thus, they are the pr esence of all words, language's entire possibility

held in reserve. But when all words cease ("the ins tant they shimmer and die in a swift bloom

upon some transparency like ether's"), "those very words, it is," present themselves, "lightning

moment," "dazzling burst of light."

This lightning moment flashes from the work as the leaping brilliance of the work itself -- its

total presence all at once, its "simultaneous visio n." This moment is the one at which the work, in

order to give being and existence to the "feint" -- that "literature exists" -- declares the exclusion

of everything, but in this way, excludes itself, so that the moment at which "every reality

dissolves" by the force of the poem is also the mom ent the poem dissolves and, instantly done, is

instantly undone. This is in itself extremely ambig uous. But the ambiguity touches something

more essential. For this moment, which is like the work of the work, which outside of any

-45-

signification, any historical or esthetic affirmati on, declares that the work is, depends on the

work's undergoing, at this very same moment, the or deal which always ruins the work in advance

and always restores in it the unending lack of work , the vain superabundance of inertia.

Inertia's Profundity

Here lies the most hidden moment of the experience. That the work must be the unique clarity of

that which grows dim and through which everything i s extinguished -- that it can exist only

where the ultimate affirmation is verified by the u ltimate negation -- this requirement we can still

comprehend, despite its going counter to our need f or peace, simplicity, and sleep. Indeed, we

understand it intimately, as the intimacy of the de cision which is ourselves and which gives us

being only when, at our risk and peril, we reject - - with fire and iron and with silent refusal --

being's permanence and protection. Yes, we can unde rstand that the work is thus pure beginning, the first and last moment when being presents itself by way of the jeopardized freedom which

makes us exclude it imperiously, without, however, again including it in the appearance of

beings. But this exigency, which makes the work dec lare being in the unique moment of rupture

-- "those very words: it is," the point which the work brilliantly illuminates even while receiving

its consuming burst of light -- we must also compre hend and feel that this point renders the work

impossible, because it never permits arrival at the work. It is a region anterior to the beginning

where nothing is made of being, and in which nothin g is accomplished. It is the depth of being's

inertia [désoeuvrement].

Thus it seems that the point to which the work lead s us is not only the one where the work is

achieved in the apotheosis of its disappearance -- where it announces the beginning, declaring

being in the freedom that excludes it -- but also t he point to which the work can never lead us,

because this point is always already the one starti ng from which there never is any work.

Perhaps we make things too easy for ourselves when, tracing backwards along the movement of

our active life, content to reverse this movement, we think we grasp thereby the movement of

what we call art. It is the same facile procedure t hat persuades us we find the image by starting

from the object, and that causes us to say, "First we have the object, afterwards comes the

image," as if the image were simply the distancing, the refusal, the transposition of the object.

Similarly we like

-46-

to say that art does not reproduce the things of th e world, does not imitate the "real," and that art

is situated where, having taken leave of the ordina ry world, the artist has bit by bit removed from

it everything useful, imitable, everything pertaini ng to active life. Art seems, from this point of

view, to be the silence of the world, the silence o r the neutralization of what is usual and

immediate in the world, just as the image seems to be the absence of the object.

Described thus, the movement in question permits it self the facilities of common analysis. This

fluency lets us believe that we grasp art, because it furnishes us with a means of representing to

ourselves the starting point of the artistic task. But this representation does not correspond to the

psychology of creation. An artist could never ascen d from the use he makes of an object in the

world to a picture in which this object has become art. It could never suffice for him to bracket

that use, to neutralize the object in order to ente r into the freedom of the picture. On the contrary,

it is because, through a radical reversal, he alrea dy belongs to the work's requirements that,

looking at a certain object, he is by no means cont ent to see it as it might be if it were out of use,

but makes of the object the point through which the work's requirements pass and, consequently,

the moment at which the possible is attenuated, the notions of value and utility effaced, and the

world "dissolves." It is because he already belongs to another time, to time's other, and because

he has abandoned time's labor to expose himself to the trial of the essential solitude where

fascination threatens -- it is because he has appro ached this "point" that, answering to the work's

demands from within this original belonging, he see ms to look at the objects of the ordinary

world in a different way, neutralizing usefulness i n them, rendering them pure, elevating them

through continuous stylization to the simultaneity and symmetry in which they become pictures.

In other words, one never ascends from "the world" to art, even by the movement of refusal and

disqualification which we have described; rather, o ne goes always from art toward what appears

to be the neutralized appearances of the world -- a ppears so, really, only to the domesticated gaze which is generally ours, that gaze of the inadequate spectator riveted to the world of goals and at

most capable of going from the world to the picture .

No one who does not belong to the work as origin, w ho does not belong to that other time where

the work is concerned for its essence, will ever cr eate a work. But whoever does belong to that

other time also belongs to the empty profundity of inertia where nothing is ever made of being.

-47-

To express this in yet another way: when an all-too -familiar expression seems to acknowledge

the poet's power to "give a purer sense to the word s of the tribe," are we to understand that the

poet is the one who, by talent or by creative savoi r faire, is content to change "crude or

immediate" language into essential language, elevat ing the silent nullity of ordinary language to

the accomplished silence of the poem where, through the apotheosis of disappearance, all is

present in the absence of all? By no means. That wo uld be like imagining writing to consist

merely in using ordinary words with more mastery, a richer memory, or an ear more attuned to

their musical resources. Writing never consists in perfecting the language in use, rendering it

purer. Writing begins only when it is the approach to that point where nothing reveals itself,

where, at the heart of dissimulation, speaking is s till but the shadow of speech, a language which

is still only its image, an imaginary language and a language of the imaginary, the one nobody

speaks, the murmur of the incessant and interminabl e which one has to silence if one wants, at

last, to be heard.

When we look at the sculptures of Giacometti, there is a vantage point where they are no longer

subject to the fluctuations of appearance or to the movement of perspective. One sees them

absolutely: no longer reduced, but withdrawn from r eduction, irreducible, and, in space, masters

of space through their power to substitute for spac e the unmalleable, lifeless profundity of the

imaginary. This point, whence we see them irreducib le, puts us at the vanishing point ourselves;

it is the point at which here coincides with nowher e. To write is to find this point. No one writes

who has not enabled language to maintain or provoke contact with this point.

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The Work's Space and Its Demand

III

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The Work and the Errant Word

What can be said about this point?

First, let us try to assemble some of the traits wh ich the approach to literature's space has enabled

us to recognize. Language, at this point, is not a power; it is not the power to tell. It is not at our

disposal; there is in it nothing we can use. It is never the language I speak. I never express myself with it, I never address you, and I never invite your answer. All these features are negative in

form. But this negation only masks the more essenti al fact that in language at this point

everything reverts to affirmation: in this language what denies affirms. For this language speaks

as absence. Wordless, it speaks already; when it ce ases, it persists. It is not silent, because in this

language silence speaks. The defining characteristi c of ordinary language is that listening

comprises part of its very nature. But at this poin t of literature's space, language is not to be

heard. Hence the risk of the poetic function. The p oet is he who hears a language which makes

nothing heard.

It speaks, but without any beginning. It states, bu t does not refer back to something which is to

be stated, something silent, like the meaning behin d an expression, which would guarantee it.

When neutrality speaks, only he who silences it pre pares the conditions for hearing; and yet what

is to be heard is this neutral word, which has alwa ys been said already, cannot stop its saying,

and to which no hearing can be given.

This is an essentially errant word, for it is alway s cast out of itself. It designates the infinitely

distended outside which takes the place of the spok en word's intimacy. It resembles the echo,

when the echo does not simply say out loud what fir st is indistinctly murmured, but merges with

the whispering immensity and is silence become reve rberating

-51-

space, all words' exterior. But here the outside is void, and the echo repeats in advance,

"prophetic in the absence of time."

The Need to Write

The need to write is linked to the approach toward this point at which nothing can be done with

words. Hence the illusion that if one maintained co ntact with this point even as one came back

from it to the world of possibility, "everything" c ould be done, "everything" could be said. This

need must be suppressed and contained. If not, it b ecomes so vast that there is no more room or

space for its realization. One only begins to write when, momentarily, through a ruse, through a

propitious burst of energy, or through life's distr actions, one has succeeded in evading this

impulse which remote control of the work must const antly awaken and subdue, protect and avert,

master and experience in its unmasterable force. Th is operation is so difficult and dangerous that

every writer and every artist is surprised each tim e he achieves it without disaster. And no one

who has looked the risk in the face can doubt that many perished silently. It is not that creative

resources are lacking -- although they are in any e vent insufficient -- but rather that the force of

the writing impulse makes the world disappear. Then time loses its power of decision; nothing

can really begin.

The work is the pure circle where, even as he write s the work, the author dangerously exposes

himself to, but also protects himself against, the pressure which demands that he write. Hence --

in part at least -- the prodigious, the immense joy which, as Goethe says, is that of a deliverance:

a têete-à-tête with the solitary omnipotence of fas cination which one has faced resolutely,

without betraying or fleeing it, but without renoun cing one's own mastery either. This

deliverance, it is true, will have consisted of enc losing oneself outside oneself. It is regularly said of the artist that he finds in his work a convenient way of living while

withdrawing from life's responsibilities. He is sai d to protect himself from the world where

action is difficult by establishing himself in an u nreal world over which he reigns supreme. This

is, in fact, one of the risks of artistic activity: to exile oneself from the difficulties of time and of

active pursuits in time without, however, renouncin g the comfort of the world or the apparent

easiness of pursuits outside of time. The artist of ten seems a weak being who cringes within the

closed sphere of his work where, speaking as master and acting without any obstacles, he can

take revenge for his failures in society.

-52-

Even Stendhal, even Balzac inspire this suspicion; Kafka, Hölderlin certainly do -- and Homer is

blind. But this perspective only expresses one side of the situation. The other side is that the

artist who willingly exposes himself to the risks o f the experience which is his does not feel free

of the world, but, rather, deprived of it; he does not feet that he is master of himself, but rather

that he is absent from himself and exposed to deman ds which, casting him out of life and of

living, open him to that moment at which he cannot do anything and is no longer himself. It is

then that Rimbaud flees into the desert from the re sponsibilities of the poetic decision. He buries

his imagination and his glory. He says "adieu" to " the impossible" in the same way that Leonardo

da Vinci does and almost in the same terms. He does not come back to the world; he takes refuge

in it; and bit by bit his days, devoted henceforth to the aridity of gold, make a shelter for him of

protective forgetfulness. If it is true, as doubtfu l sources have it, that in his last years he would

not stand for any mention of his work or that he re peatedly said of himself, "absurd, ridiculous,

disgusting," the violence of his disavowal, the ref usal to remember himself shows the terror

which he still felt and the force of the upheaval w hich he could not undergo to the limit. He is

reproached with having sold out and deserted, but t he reproach is easy for those who have not

run the risk.

In the work, the artist protects himself not only a gainst the world, but also against the

requirement that draws him out of the world. The work momentarily domesticates th is "outside"

by restoring an intimacy to it. The work silences a nd gives the intimacy of silence to this outside

bereft of intimacy and repose -- this outside, this language of the original experience. But what

the work encloses is also what opens it ceaselessly ; and the work in progress runs one of two

risks: it may either renounce its origin -- exorcis ing it by endowing it with facile prestige -- or the

work may return ever closer to this origin by renou ncing its own realization. Yet a third risk is

that the author may want to maintain contact with t he world, with himself, with the language he

can use to say "I." He wants this, for if he loses himself, the work too is lost. But if, too

cautiously, he remains himself, the work is his work, it expresses him, his gifts, and not the

extreme demand of the work, art as origin.

Every writer, every artist is acquainted with the m oment at which he is cast out and apparently

excluded by the work in progress. The work holds hi m off, the circle in which he no longer has

access to himself has closed, yet he is enclosed th erein because the work, unfinished, will not let

him go. Strength does not fail him; this is not a m oment of

-53- sterility or fatigue, unless, as may well be the case, fatigue itself is simply the form this exclusion

takes. This ordeal is awesome. What the author sees is a cold immobility from which he cannot

turn away, but near which he cannot linger. It is l ike an enclave, a preserve within space, airless

and without light, where a part of himself, and, mo re than that, his truth, his solitary truth,

suffocates in an incomprehensible separation. And h e can only wander astray around this

separation; at the very most he can press himself h ard against the surface beyond which he

distinguishes nothing but an empty torment, unreal and eternal, until the moment when, through

an inexplicable maneuver, through some distraction or through the sheer excessiveness of his

patience, he finds himself suddenly inside the circ le, joins himself there, and reconciles himself

to its secret law.

A work is finished, not when it is completed, but w hen he who labors at it from within can just as

well finish it from without. He is no longer retain ed inside by the work; rather, he is retained

there by a part of himself from which he feels he i s free and from which the work has contributed

to freeing him. This ideal dénouement is, however, never altogether justified. Many a work

moves us because we still see in it the imprint lef t by the author who has departed from it too

hastily, impatient to finish with it, fearful that if he didn't have done with it, he would never be

able to return to the light of day. In these works, which are too great, greater than those who bear

them, the supreme moment -- the nearly central poin t at which we know that if the author

remains there, he will die in the undertaking -- is always perceptible. It is from this mortal point

that we see the great, heroic creators depart -- bu t slowly, almost peacefully -- and come back

with an even step toward the surface which the firm , regular stroke of the radius permits to curve

according to the perfections of the sphere. But how many others are there who can only tear

themselves from the irresistible attraction of the center with an inharmonious violence, leaving

behind them, like scars of badly knit wounds, the t races of their successive flights, their

inconsolable returns, their aberrant comings and go ings? The most sincere openly leave to

abandon what they have themselves abandoned. Others hide the ruins, and this concealment

becomes the only truth of their books.

The central point of the work is the work as origin , the point which cannot be reached, yet the

only one which is worth reaching.

This point is the sovereign requirement. One can ap proach it only by means of the completed

work, but one can complete the work only

-54-

by means of the approach. Those who care only for b rilliant success are nevertheless in search of

this point where nothing can succeed. And whoever w rites caring only for truth has already

entered the magnetic field of this point from which truth is excluded. Certain artists, through no

one knows what good fortune or bad luck, undergo it s pull in an almost pure form: they have

approached this instant by chance, as it were, and wherever they go, whatever they do, it retains

them. It is an imperious and empty demand exerted a ll of the time, drawing them out of time.

They do not desire to write: to them glory is vain, the immortality of works of art does not

impress them, and the obligations of the calling ar e foreign to them. To live in the happy passion

of beings -- that is what they prefer. But their pr eferences are not taken into account, and they are

themselves dismissed, propelled into the essential solitude from which they do not emerge except

by writing a little. Everyone knows the story of the painter whose patron had to imprison him to keep him from

wasting his gifts, and who still managed to escape through a window. But the artist also has a

"patron" within himself, who shuts him in where he cannot remain, and this time there is no

escape. Moreover, this patron does not feed, but st arves, him, presses him into service without

honor, castigates him for no reason, makes of him a feeble and miserable being without any

support except his own incomprehensible torment. An d why? In view of a grandiose work? In

view of a completely insignificant work? He himself has no idea, nor does anyone know.

It is true that many creators appear weaker than ot her men, less capable of living, and

consequently more apt to marvel at life. Perhaps th is is often the case. Still, one would have to

add that their strength lies in their weakness, tha t a new strength is born in them at the very point

where they succumb to the extremity of their weakne ss. And one must say still more: when,

oblivious of their gifts, they set to work, many ar e normal beings, amiable people firmly planted

in life, and it is to the work alone, to the demand which is in the work, that they owe this surplus

of strength which can be measured only by the great est weakness -- this anomaly, the loss of the

world and of themselves. So Goya, so Nerval.

The work requires of the writer that he lose everyt hing he might construe as his own "nature,"

that he lose all character and that, ceasing to be linked to others and to himself by the decision

which makes him an "I," he becomes the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges.

This is a requirement which is no requirement at al l, for it demands

-55-

nothing; it has no content. It does not oblige anyo ne to do anything; it is only the air one has to

breathe, the void on which one has to get a footing , daylight worn thin where the faces one loves

best become invisible. Just as the most courageous men confront risk only through the veil of a

subterfuge, many think that to respond to this call is to answer to the call of truth: they have

something to say, a world within themselves to set free, a mandate to assume, their unjustifiable

life to justify. And it is true that if the artist did not surrender to the original experience which

sets him apart -- which in this separation separate s him from himself -- if he did not abandon

himself to the boundlessness of error and to the sh ifting sands of infinitely repeated beginnings,

the word beginning would be lost. But this justification does not occ ur to the artist; it is not

granted in the experience. It is, on the contrary, ruled out. And the artist can very well know it

"in general," just as he believes in art "in genera l," but his work does not know it, and his search

is ignorant of it. His search is pursued in the anx iety of this ignorance.

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Kafka and the Work's Demand

Someone begins to write, determined by despair. But despair cannot determine anything: "It has

always, and right away, exceeded its purpose" ( Kaf ka, Diaries , 1910). And, likewise, writing

cannot have as its origin anything but "true" despa ir, the kind that leads to nothing, turns us away

from everything, and for a start withdraws the pen from whoever writes. This means that the two

movements -- writing, despair -- have nothing in co mmon except their own indeterminacy. They

have, that is, nothing in common but the sole, inte rrogative mode in which they can be grasped.

No one can say to himself, "I am in despair," but o nly, "You are desperate?" And no one can

affirm, "I am writing," but only "You write? Yes? Y ou are intending to write?" Kafka's case is cloudy and complex. 1 Hölderlin's passion is pure poetic passion; it draws him out

of himself with a demand that bears no other name. Kafka's passion is just as purely literary, but

it is not always only literary. Salvation is an eno rmous preoccupation with him, all the stronger

because it is hopeless, and all the more hopeless b ecause it is totally uncompromising. To be

sure, this preoccupation is expressed with surprisi ng constancy through literature, and for quite a

long time

____________________

1Almost all the texts quoted in the following pages are taken from the complete edition of

Kafka's Diaries. This edition reproduces the thirte en in quarto notebooks where, from 1910 to

1923, Kafka wrote everything that mattered to him: events in his personal life, meditations

upon these events, descriptions of persons and plac es, descriptions of his dreams, narratives

begun, interrupted, and begun again. His is thus no t only a "Journal" as we understand this

genre today, but the very movement of the experienc e of writing, very close to its beginning

and in the essential sense which Kafka was led to g ive this term. It is from this perspective

that his diaries must be read and explored.

Max Brod states that he has made only a few insigni ficant deletions; there is no reason to

doubt this. On the other hand, it is certain that K afka, at many decisive moments, destroyed a

large part of his notes. And after 1923, the Diaries are missing altogether. We do not know

whether the manuscripts destroyed at his request by Dora Dymant included the continuation

of his notebooks; it is very probable they did. It

-57-

it does not differentiate itself from literature. T hen, for some time it continues to be expressed in

literature, but it no longer blends with literature ; it tends rather to use literature. And, since

literature never consents to become a means, and si nce Kafka knows this, conflicts result which

are obscure even for him -- still more so for us -- and an evolution which, difficult to elucidate, is

nevertheless enlightening.

The Young Kafka

Kafka was not always the same. Until 1922, his desi re to write is very great. It gives rise to

works which do not persuade him of his gifts -- wor ks which are less persuasive to him than his

direct awareness of devastatingly abundant, primiti ve forces within him with which he does

practically nothing, for lack of time, but also bec ause he cannot do anything with them, because

he "fears these moments of exaltation as much as he desires them." In many respects, Kafka is at

this point similar to every young man in whom a tas te for writing develops, who recognizes

writing as his vocation, but also recognizes that w riting makes certain demands to which he has

no assurance that he will be equal. The most striki ng sign that Kafka is, to a degree, a young

writer

____________________ must be said, then, that after 1923, Kafka becomes unknown to us, for we do know that those

who were closest to him judged him very differently from the way he pictured himself.

The Diaries (which the travel diaries complete) reveal to us p ractically nothing about his

opinions on the great subjects that may have intere sted him. The Diaries speak to us of Kafka

at that earlier stage when there are no opinions ye t, and when there is scarcely even a Kafka.

Such is its essential value. G. Janouch book, Conversations with Kafka, allows us, on the contrary, to hear Kafka in the relaxation of more ordinary conversations where he speaks of

the world's future, as well as of the Jewish proble m, of Zionism, of religious forms, and

sometimes of his books. Janouch met Kafka in 1920 i n Prague. He noted down the

conversations he reports almost immediately, and Br od has confirmed the authenticity of this

echo. But in order not to misconstrue the import of these words, we should remember that

they were spoken to a very young man, seventeen yea rs old, whose youth, naïveté, and

confident spontaneity touched Kafka, but probably a lso led him to soften his thoughts in order

not to endanger such a youthful soul. Kafka, scrupulous in friendship, often feared troubling

his friends by expressing a truth which was desolat ing only for him. This doesn't mean that he

does not say what he thinks, but that he sometimes says what he does not think profoundly.

[For the passages cited from Kafka Diaries, I have largely depended on the English

translation by Martin Greenberg, The Diaries of Franz Kafka ( New York: Schocken Books,

1949), but frequently I have departed somewhat from his text with an eye to Blanchot's

French rendering of the original -- Trans.]

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like many others is the novel he begins to write in collaboration with Brod. Such a sharing of his

solitude shows that Kafka is still skirting it. He perceives this very rapidly, as this note from the

Diaries indicates:

Max and I must really be different to the very core . Much as I admire his writings when they lie

before me as a whole, resisting my and anyone else' s encroachment, still, every sentence he

writes for Richard and Samuel is bound up with a reluctant concession on my part which I feel

painfully to my very depths. At least today. [ Nove mber 1911]

If, up until 1912 he does not devote himself entire ly to literature, he gives himself this excuse: "I

cannot take the risk as long as I haven't succeeded in completing a more substantial work,

capable of satisfying me fully." The night of Septe mber 22, 1912 brings him this success, this

proof. That night he writes The Verdict at one stretch. It brings him unmistakably near th e point

where it seems that "everything can be expressed, t hat for everything, for the strangest of ideas a

great fire is ready in which they perish and disapp ear." Soon afterwards, he reads this story to his

friends, and the reading confirms his certainty: "I had tears in my eyes. The indubitable character

of the story was confirmed." (This need to read wha t he has just written to friends, often to his

sisters and even to his father, also belongs to the intermediary stage. He will never give it up

altogether. It is not literary vanity -- even thoug h he himself denounces it -- but a need to press

himself physically against his work, to let it bear him up and draw him along, by causing it to

unfold in the vocal space which his great gifts as a reader gave him the power to create.)

Kafka knows from then on that he can write. But thi s knowledge is no knowledge at all, this

capability is not his. With few exceptions, he neve r finds in what he writes the proof that he is

actually writing. His texts are at most preludes, i nvestigative, preliminary attempts. Of The

Metamorphosis he says, "I find it bad; perhaps there is no hope for me whatever," or later: "Great

aversion for The Metamorphosis . Unreadable ending. Almost radically imperfect. It would have

been much better if I had not been disturbed at the time by a business trip" ( January 19, 1914).

The Conflict This last entry alludes to a conflict that Kafka meets head-on and that exhausts him. He has a

profession, a family. He belongs to the

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world and must belong to it. The world provides tim e, but takes it up. Throughout the Diaries --

at least up until 1915 -- there are despairing comm ents, where the thought of suicide recurs,

because he lacks time: time, physical strength, sol itude, silence. No doubt exterior circumstances

are unfavorable: he has to write in the evenings an d at night, his sleep is disturbed, anxiousness

wears him out. But it would be vain to believe that the conflict could have been resolved by

"better organization of [his] affairs." Later, when illness affords him leisure, the conflict persists;

it deepens, changes form. There are no favorable ci rcumstances. Even if one gives "all one's

time" to the work's demands, "all" still is not eno ugh, for it is not a matter of devoting time to the

task, of passing one's time writing, but of passing into another time where there is no longer any

task; it is a matter of approaching that point wher e time is lost, where one enters into the

fascination and the solitude of time's absence. Whe n one has all one's time, one no longer has

time, and "favorable" exterior circumstances have b ecome the -unfavorable -- fact that there are

no longer any circumstances.

Kafka cannot, or will not, consent to write "in lit tle bits" -- in the incompleteness of

discontinuous moments. That is what the night of Se ptember 22 revealed to him. That night,

having written without interruption, he grasped in its plenitude the limitless movement which

enables him to write. "Writing is only possible thu s, with that continuity, with that complete

opening of the body and soul." And later ( December 8, 1914): "Saw again that everything

written in bits, and not at one stretch in the cour se of the greater part or the whole of a night, has

less value, and that I am condemned by my mode of l ife to this lesser value." Here we have a

first explanation for the numerous abandoned narrat ives of which the Diaries, in their current

state, reveal the impressive shreds. Very often "th e story" goes no further than a few lines;

sometimes it rapidly attains coherence and density and yet stops at the end of a page; other times

it continues for several pages, is affirmed, extend ed -- and nonetheless halted. There are many

reasons for this, but the first is that Kafka does not find in the time he has at his disposal the lon g

stretch which would allow the story to develop, as it wants to, in all directions. The story is never

anything but a fragment, then another fragment. "Ho w, from pieces, can I weld a story capable of

springing to life?" And so, never having been maste red, never having created the proper space

where the need to write must at once be suppressed and expressed, the story cuts loose, loses its

way; it returns to the night whence it came, there painfully to retain him who was unable to bring

it forth into the light.

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Kafka would require more time, but he would also ne ed less world. The world is initially his

family, whose constraints he finds hard to put up w ith even though he is never equal to freeing

himself. Subsequently it is his fiancée, his essent ial desire to abide by the law which requires that

a man fulfill his destiny in the world by establish ing a family, having children, belonging to the

community. Here the conflict takes on a new aspect. It contributes to a contradiction which

Kafka's religious situation renders particularly ha rsh. When, on the occasion of his betrothal to F.

B. -- which later was broken, then renewed -- he ti relessly examines, with increasing tension,

"everything for or against my marrying," he always comes up against this requirement: solitude. "My unique aspiration and my sole vocation . . . is literature . . . Everything I have done is a

result only of solitude . . . Married, I will never be alone again. Not that, not that." During his

engagement celebration in Berlin, "I was bound like a criminal. If I'd been tied in a corner with

real chains, policemen before me . . . it would hav e been no worse. And it was my engagement

party, and everyone was doing his best to bring me to life and, not succeeding, to bear with me as

I was." Soon afterwards, the engagement is broken o ff, but the aspiration persists -- the desire for

a "normal" life, to which the torment of having wou nded someone dear lends a heartrending

force. Kafka's story and the story of Kierkegaard's engagement have been compared, by Kafka

himself among others. But the conflict is different . Kierkegaard can renounce Regine; he can

renounce the ethical level. Access to the religious level is not thereby compromised; rather, it is

made possible. But Kafka, if he abandons the earthl y happiness of a normal life, also abandons

the steadiness of a just life. He makes himself an outlaw, deprives himself of the ground and the

foundation he needs in order to be and, in a way, d eprives the law of this ground. His is

Abraham's eternal dilemma. What is demanded of Abra ham is not only that he sacrifice his son,

but God himself. The son is God's future on earth, for it is time which is truly the Promised Land

-- the true, the only dwelling place of the chosen people and of God in his people. Yet Abraham,

by sacrificing his only son, must sacrifice time, a nd time sacrificed will certainly not be given

back in the eternal beyond. The beyond is nothing o ther than the future, the future of God in

time. The beyond is Isaac.

For Kafka the ordeal is all the graver because of e verything that makes it weigh lightly upon him.

(What would the testing of Abraham be if, having no son, he were nevertheless required to

sacrifice this son? He couldn't be taken seriously; he could only be laughed at. That

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laughter is the form of Kafka's pain.) The problem is thus so equivocally elusive that its

indecisiveness overtakes whoever tries to face it. Other writers have known similar conflicts;

Hölderlin struggles against his mother, who wants h im to become a pastor. He cannot attach

himself to any determined task, he cannot attach hi mself to the one he loves, and he loves

precisely the one to which he cannot be attached. H e feels these conflicts in all their force, and

they practically destroy him, but they never put in doubt the absolute demand of poetry apart

from which, at least after 1800, he no longer has a ny existence. For Kafka, everything is more

unclear because he seeks to fuse the work's demand with the demand which could pertain to his

salvation. If writing condemns him to solitude, if it makes of his existence a bachelor's existence

without love and without attachments, and if noneth eless writing appears to him -- at least often

and for a long time -- as the only activity which c ould justify him, this is because solitude

threatens in any event, both within him and outside . For the community is no longer anything but

appearances, and the law which still speaks in it i s not even the law forgotten, but rather the

concealment of its being forgotten. Then writing, i n the heart of the distress and the weakness

from which it is inseparable, again becomes a possi bility of plenitude, a road without any goal at

the end, but capable perhaps of corresponding to th at goal without any road leading to it which is

the one and only goal we must reach. When he is not writing, Kafka is not only alone -- "alone

like Franz Kafka," he will say to G. Janouch -- but a prey to a sterile, cold solitude, a petrifying

cold which he calls torpor and which seems to have been the great threat he feared. Even Brod,

so anxious to represent Kafka as a man without anom alies, acknowledges that he was sometimes

as if not there or dead. Again, this is very simila r to Hölderlin: "I am dumb, I am made of stone." And Kafka: "My incapacity to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to

speak, to take part in the life of others, becomes greater each day; I am turning into stone . . . . If

I don't save myself in some work, I am lost" ( July 28, 1914).

Salvation through Literature

"If I don't save myself in some work . . . ." But w hy should the effort of writing be able to save

him? It seems that Kafka recognized in precisely th is terrible state of self-dissolution, where he is

lost for others and for himself, the center of grav ity of writing's demand. His feeling

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profoundly destroyed is the first intimation of the profundity which replaces destruction with the

possibility of the greatest creation. This is a mar velous reversal, a hope always equal to the

greatest despair. And how understandable it is that he should draw from this experience

confidence he will never willingly question. Thus t he effort of writing, especially in his early

years, becomes something like a means of psychologi cal (not yet of spiritual) salvation: it is an

effort to create something "which might be linked w ord for word with his life, which he draws

into himself so that it might draw him from himself ." He expresses this most naïvely and most

forcefully in these terms: "Today I have a great ye arning to write all my anxiety entirely out of

me, write it into the depths of the paper just as i t comes out of the depths of me, or write it down

in such a way that I could draw what I had written into me completely" ( December 8, 1911).

However somber it may become, this hope will never fail completely; always, at every period,

we find in his Diaries notes of this sort: "The firmness which the most i nsignificant writing

brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful. T he comprehensive view I had of everything

on my walk yesterday!" ( November 27, 1913). At suc h moments writing is not a compelling

call; it is not waiting upon grace, or an obscure p rophetic achievement, but something simpler,

more immediately pressing: the hope of not going un der, or, more precisely, the hope of sinking

faster than himself and thus of catching hold of hi mself at the last minute. This, then, is a duty

more pressing than any other, and it leads him to n ote down on July 31, 1914 these remarkable

words:

I have no time. General mobilization. K. and P. hav e been called up. Now I receive the salary of

solitude. But it is hardly a salary; solitude only brings punishments. It doesn't matter, I am not

much affected by this misery, and more determined t han ever . . . . I will write despite

everything, at any price: it is my fight for surviv al.

A Change in Perspective

And yet it is the shock of the war -- but still mor e the crisis set off by his betrothal, the

movement of writing and his increasingly profound i nvolvement with it, and all the difficulties

he encounters in it -- it is his unhappy situation in general that bit by bit will shed a different light

____________________

2Kafka adds, "This is not an artistic desire."

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on the existence of the writer in him. This change is never explicit; it does not culminate in a

decision; it is only an indistinct perspective. The re are, however, certain indications. In 1914, for

example, he is still striving passionately, despera tely toward the sole end of finding a few free moments for writing -- of obtaining two weeks leave to spend only writing, subordinating

everything to this single, this supreme demand -- w riting. But in 1916, if he again asks for a

leave, it is in order to enlist. "The immediate dut y is unconditional; become a soldier." This

project will have no results, but that is unimporta nt. The wish at its center shows how far Kafka

already is from the "I will write despite everythin g" of July 31, 1914. Later, he will think

seriously of joining the pioneers of Zionism and de parting for Palestine. He says to Janouch: "I

dreamed of leaving for Palestine as a worker or agr icultural laborer . . . . -- You would abandon

everything here? -- Everything, in order to find a life full of meaning in security and beauty." But

since Kafka was already ill, this dream remained a dream, and we will never know whether, like

another Rimbaud, he could have renounced his unique vocation for love of a desert where he

would have found the security of a justified life - - or, indeed, whether he would have found it. Of

all the undertakings to which he applies himself in order to orient his life differently, he himself

will say that they are nothing but broken attempts, so many radii making the center of that

incomplete circle, his life, bristle with dots. In 1922, he counts up all his projects and sees only

failures: the piano, the violin, languages, German studies, antiZionism, Zionism, Hebraic studies,

gardening, wood carving, literature, attempts at ma rriage, living independently, and he adds:

"When I happened to extend the radius a little furt her than usual -- as in the case of my law

studies or my engagement -- it was all even worse j ust to the degree that it represented my effort

to advance further" ( January 13, 1922).

It would be unreasonable to extract from passing no tes the absolute assertions they contain, and

although he himself forgets it here, we cannot forg et that he never stopped writing, that he will

keep writing right up to the end. But still, betwee n the young man who said to the person he

considered his future father-in-law, "I am nothing but literature, and I neither can nor want to be

anything else," and the mature man who, ten years l ater, puts literature on the same level with his

little attempts at gardening, the interior distance is great, even if, seen from the outside, the

writing force remains constant or even appears to u s stronger and more rigorous toward the end,

since to this later period we owe The Castle.

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Where does this difference come from? To say would be to pose as an expert on the inner life of

an infinitely reserved man, opaque even to his frie nds and, moreover, not very accessible to

himself. No one can claim to reduce to a certain nu mber of precise affirmations what for Kafka

himself could not attain the transparency of compre hensible expression. Besides, a shared set of

intentions would be necessary, and this common grou nd is not available. Perhaps we can at least

avoid errors with regard to what shows outwardly if we say that although his confidence in the

powers of art often remains great, his confidence i n his own powers, because it is always more

harshly tested, enlightens him about the test itsel f, about what it demands of him, and enlightens

him especially about what he himself demands of art : no longer that it give reality and coherence

to his person, that it save him, that is, from insa nity, but that it save him from perdition. And

when Kafka senses that, banished from this real wor ld, he is perhaps already a citizen of another

world where he has to struggle not only for himself but for that other world, then writing will

begin to appear to him merely as a means of struggl e -- sometimes disappointing, sometimes

marvelous -- which he can lose without losing every thing.

Let us compare the following two entries. The first is from January 1912: I must be given credit for a very efficient concentration on literary activity. When my organism

realized that writing was the richest direction of my being, everything pointed itself that way,

and all other capacities, those which had as object s the pleasures of sex, drink, food,

philosophical meditation and especially music, were abandoned. I've thinned out in all those

directions. This was necessary, because my strength , even when gathered all together and

devoted to one aim, was so small that it could only half reach the goal of writing . . . . The

compensation for all this is clear. I will now have only to reject work at the office -- my

development being complete and I myself having noth ing more to sacrifice as far as I can see --

to begin my real life . . . . in the course of whic h my face will finally be able to grow old in a

natural way according to the progress of my effort.

Doubtless we should not be deceived by the light to ne of irony, and yet the lightness, the

insouciance are noticeable, and they emphasize by c ontrast the tension of this other entry whose

meaning is apparently the same (it is dated August 6, 1914):

Seen from the point of view of literature, my desti ny is very simple. The sense which leads me to

portray my dreamlike inner life

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has pushed all my other senses into the background, and they have atrophied terribly; they do not

cease to atrophy. Nothing else can ever satisfy me. But now my strength for portraying cannot be

counted on. Perhaps it has disappeared forever; per haps it will come back again someday. The

circumstances of my life are not naturally favorabl e to it. It is thus that I waver, continually fly

toward the top of the mountain where I can scarcely maintain myself for an instant. Others waver

too, but in lower regions, with greater strength. I f they threaten to fall, a relative who walks next

to them for this purpose holds them up. But I waver on the heights; it is, alas, not death, but the

eternal torments of Dying.

Three movements cross here. First, an affirmation: "Nothing else (but literature) can satisfy me."

Then, self-doubt, linked to the inexorably uncertai n essence of his gifts, which "cannot be

counted on." Finally, the feeling that this uncerta inty -- this fact that writing never is a power one

has at one's command -- belongs to what is extreme in the work, to the central, mortal demand,

which "is, alas, not death," which is death but dea th held at a distance, "the eternal torments of

Dying."

It can be said that these three movements, with the ir vicissitudes, constitute the ordeal which

exhausts Kafka's fidelity to "his unique vocation" and which, coinciding with his religious

preoccupations, leads him to read in the work's uni que requirement something other, another

demand which tends to subordinate the first or at l east to transform it. The more Kafka writes,

the less he is sure of writing. Sometimes he tries to reassure himself by thinking that "if one has

once received knowledge of writing, it cannot fail or subside but that also, very rarely, something

suddenly emerges which passes all measure." This is a faint consolation: the more he writes, the

more he nears that extreme point toward which the w ork tends as toward its origin, but which

cannot be looked upon by him who glimpses it except as the empty depths of the indefinite. "I

can no longer continue to write. I am up against th e definitive limit, at which I must perhaps

remain for years before being able to begin again a new story which again will remain

unfinished. This fate pursues me" ( November 30, 19 14). It seems that in 1915-1916 (however vain it may be to try to date a movement which escapes

time), the change in perspective is complete. Kafka renewed relations with his former fiancée.

These relations -- which will culminate in another engagement in 1917 and then immediately

afterward end in the sickness which becomes apparen t at that

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time -- plunge Kafka into torments he cannot overco me. He finds more and more that he cannot

live alone and that he cannot live with others. He is seized and obsessed by the guilt in his

situation; his existence is dominated by what he ca lls the bureaucratic vices -- stinginess,

indecision, a calculating mentality. He has to esca pe bureaucracy whatever the cost, and he can

no longer count on literature for his escape: the s ubstance of literary efforts evaporates because

they partake of imposture and irresponsibility, and because they require solitude but are also

annihilated by solitude. Hence the decision: "Becom e a soldier." At the same time there appear in

the Diaries allusions to the Old Testament, and the cries of a lost man are heard: "Take me in

your arms, I am fallen very low, receive me in the depths; if you refuse now, then later." "Take

me, take me, I am only a snarl of madness and pain. " "Have pity on me, I am a sinner in all the

reaches of my being . . . . Do not reject me among the damned."

Certain of these texts used to be translated into F rench with the word "God" added. It does not

appear. The word "God" hardly ever figures in the Diaries, and never in a significant way. This

does not mean that these invocations, in their unce rtainty, do not have a religious direction;

rather, it means that the force of their uncertaint y must be conserved. Kafka must not be deprived

of the reserve he always showed with regard to what was most important to him. These words of

distress were written in July 1916 and correspond t o a stay in Marienbad with F. B. This visit

was at first not very happy, but in the end it brou ght them together intimately. A year later Kafka

is again betrothed. A month later he coughs blood. In September he leaves Prague, but the

sickness is still mild and does not become threaten ing until 1922 (it seems). In 1917 he writes the

Aphorisms , the only text where spiritual affirmation (in a g eneral form, which does not concern

him in particular), sometimes escapes the test of a negative transcendence.

For the years that follow, almost nothing remains i n the Diaries . In 1918, not a word. There are a

few lines in 1919 when he becomes engaged for six m onths to a young girl about whom we

know practically nothing. In 1920 he meets Milena J asenka, a sensitive, intelligent young Czech

woman, capable of great liberty of mind and passion , to whom for two years he is bound by

violent feeling, full of hope and happiness at the beginning, later doomed to sorrow. The Diaries

become more telling again in 1921 and especially in 1922 when the setbacks of this friendship,

combined with the increasing gravity of his illness , bring him to a point of tension where his

mind seems to vacillate between madness and a

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decisive commitment to salvation. Here we must quot e two long passages. The first is dated

January 28, 1922.

A little groggy, tired from the tobogganing. Weapon s still exist for me, however seldom I may

employ them, and I'm laboring toward them with so m uch difficulty because I do not know the

joy of using them, for as a child I didn't learn. I t is not only "Father's fault" that I didn't learn, but also because I wanted to disturb the "peace," upset the balance, and consequently never had the

right to resurrect on the one hand someone I strove to bury on the other. It is true, I come back to

"the fault," for why did I want to take leave of th e world? Because "he" wouldn't let me live in it,

in his world. Naturally, today I cannot judge clear ly in this matter, for now I am already a citizen

in this other world which compares with the ordinar y world just as the desert compares to

cultivated land (I have been forty years wandering from Canaan), and it is as a foreigner that I

look back. Doubtless, in this other world as well I am only the littlest and most timid (I brought

that with me, it is the paternal inheritance), and if I am capable of living out here, it is only

because of the organization proper to this wilderne ss -- an organization according to which, even

for the least of persons, there are elevations at l ightning speeds, and also, of course, crushing

moments that last thousands of years as if under th e weight of the seas. In spite of everything,

shouldn't I be grateful? Wouldn't I have had to fin d the road leading this far? Might not

"banishment" from one side, joined with rejection f rom this have crushed me at the border? And

is it not thanks to the strength of my father that the expulsion was sufficiently forceful that

nothing could resist it (it, not me)? Indeed, my si tuation is something like the wandering in the

desert in reverse, with continual approaches toward the desert and childish hopes (particularly

concerning women): "Perhaps I shall keep in Canaan after all?" And in the meantime I have been

in the desert for a long time, and these are only v isions born of despair, especially at the

moments when, out here too, I am the most miserable of men and Canaan necessarily offers itself

as the sole Promised Land, for there is no third la nd for men.

The second text is dated the next day:

Attacks on the road, in the evening, in the snow. T here are conflicting thoughts always in my

head, more or less thus: My situation in

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this world would seem to be a dreadful one, alone h ere in Spindiermühle, on a forsaken road,

moreover, where one keeps slipping in the snow in t he dark, a senseless road, moreover, without

any earthly goal (it leads to the bridge? Why there ? In any event I didn't even go that far); I too

am forsaken in this place (I cannot consider the do ctor to be any personal help, I didn't win his

aid by my merits, at bottom the fee is my only rela tionship to him), incapable of striking up a

friendship with anyone, unable to bear having any a cquaintances, full, in fact, of an infinite

astonishment before a cheerful company or before pa rents with their children (at the hotel,

indeed, there is not much gaiety; I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am the cause, in my capacity

as "man with too long a shadow," but as a matter of fact my shadow is too long, and with fresh

astonishment I observe the capacity for resistance, the obstinacy of certain beings who want to

live "in spite of everything" in this shadow, right in it -- but there is much more than this to be

said on the matter); forsaken moreover not only her e but in general, even in Prague, my "home,"

and what is more, forsaken not by people (that woul d not be the worst -- as long as I live I could

chase after them), but rather by myself vis-àvis pe ople, by my strength with regard to them. I am

fond of lovers, but I cannot love, I am too remote, I am excluded. Doubtless, since I am

nonetheless a human being and my roots need nourish ment, I have my proxies "down" (or up)

there too, lamentable and inadequate actors, who ca n satisfy me (it is true, they do not satisfy me

at all, and that is why I am so forsaken) only beca use my main nourishment comes from other

roots in other climes. These roots too are lamentab le, but still, more capable of life. This brings

me to the conflict in my thoughts. If things were o nly as they seem to be on the road in the snow, it would be dreadful. I would be lost, and this is to be understood not as a threat; rather, as

immediate execution. But I live elsewhere; it is on ly that the attraction of the world of men is

immense. In an instant it can make you forget every thing. But great also is the attraction of my

world: those who love me love me because I am "fors aken" -- not, I feel sure, on the principle of

a Weissian vacuum but because they sense that in ha ppy times I enjoy on another plane the

freedom of movement which I lack completely here.

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The Positive Experience

Commentary on these pages seems superfluous. Nevert heless we should notice how, at this date,

deprivation of the world is reversed, becoming a po sitive experience,

3 that of another world

where Kafka is already a citizen, where, granted, h e is only the littlest and most anxious, but

where he also knows staggering heights and enjoys a freedom whose value other men sense,

whose prestige they acknowledge. However, in order not to alter the sense of such images, it is

necessary to read them, not from the common Christi an perspective (according to which there is

this world, then the world beyond, the only one whi ch has value, reality, and majesty), but

always from the "Abraham" perspective. For, as far as Kafka is concerned, to be excluded from

the world means to be excluded from Canaan, to wand er in the desert, and it is this situation

which makes his struggle pathetic, his hope hopeles s. It is as if, cast out of the world, into the

error of infinite migration, he had to struggle cea selessly to make of this outside another world

and of this error the principle, the origin of a ne w freedom. This struggle can have no

ascertainable result. What he has to win is his own loss, the truth of exile and the way back into

the very heart of dispersion. This struggle can be compared to profound Jewish speculations,

when, especially after the Expulsion from Spain, re ligious minds tried to overcome exile by

pushing it to its limit.

4 Kafka clearly associated "all this

____________________

3Certain letters to Milena also allude to the elemen t of the unknown which persists in this

terrible movement (see the studies that appeared in the Nouvelle N. R. F.

: "Kafka et Brod" and

"L'Echec de Milena," October and November, 1954). 4On this subject, we must refer to G. G. Scholem boo k, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism :

The horrors of Exile were mirrored in the Kabbalist ic doctrine of metempsychosis, which

now won immense popularity by stressing the various stages of the soul's exile. The most

fearful fate that could befall any soul -- far more ghastly than the torments of hell -- was to be

"outcast" or "naked," a state precluding either reb irth or even admission to hell. . . . Absolute

homelessness was the sinister symbol of absolute Go dlessness, of utter moral and spiritual

degradation. Union with God or absolute banishment were the two poles between which a

system had to be devised in which the Jews could li ve under the domination of Law, which

seeks to destroy the forces of Exile.

And again this: "There was an ardent desire to brea k down the Exile by enhancing its

torments, by savoring its bitterness to the utmost (even to the night of the Exile of the

Shekhina itself)" [Passages from Major Trends, 3d rev. ed. ( 1941; rpt. New York: Schocken

Books, 1978), p. 250 -- Trans.]. One could well ima gine that the theme of The Metamorphosis

(as well as the obsessive fictions of bestiality) i s reminiscent of, or an

-70- literature" (his own), with "a new Kabbala," "a new secret doctrine" which "could have

developed." "if Zionism hadn't come along in the me antime" ( January 19, 1922). One

understands better why he is at the same time Zioni st and anti-Zionist. Zionism is exile's cure --

the affirmation that an earthly home is possible, t hat the Jewish people has for its dwelling not

only a book, the Bible, but the earth, and belongs no longer to dispersion in time. Kafka wants

this reconciliation profoundly. He wants it even if he is excluded from it, for the greatness of this

rigorous conscience was always to hope for others m ore than for himself and not to measure

mankind's unhappiness by his personal misfortune. " Magnificent, all that, except for me, and

rightly so." He does not belong to this truth, and that is why he has to be anti-Zionist for himself,

on pain of being condemned to immediate execution a nd to the despair of absolute impiety. He

already belongs to the other shore, and his wanderi ng does not consist in nearing Canaan, but in

nearing the desert, the truth of the desert -- in g oing always further in that direction even when,

finding no favor in that other world either, and te mpted again by the joys of the real world

("particularly with regard to women": this is a cle ar allusion to Milena), he tries to persuade

himself that perhaps he still keeps in Canaan. If h e weren't anti-Zionist for himself (that is only

said, of course, figuratively), if there were only this world, then "the situation would be

frightful." Then he would be lost right away. But h e is "elsewhere," and if the force of the human

world's attraction remains great enough to draw him back to the border and keep him there as

though crushed, no less great is the pull of his ow n world, the one where he is free, where he has

the liberty he speaks of with a tremor, a tone of p rophetic authority which contrasts with his

habitual modesty.

There is no doubt that this other world has somethi ng to do with literary activity. The proof is

that Kafka, if he speaks of the "new Kabbala," spea ks of it in connection, precisely, with "all this

literature." But

____________________ allusion to, the tradition of Kabbalistic metempsyc hosis, even if it is not sure that "Samsa"

recalls "Samsara" ( Kafka and Samsa are related nam es, but Kafka rejects this comparison).

Kafka sometimes asserts that he is not yet born: "H esitation before birth: if there is a

transmigration of souls, then I am not yet at the b ottom rung; my life is hesitation before

birth" ( January 24, 1922). Let us recall that in Preparations for a Country Wedding, Raban,

the hero of this early narrative, expresses playful ly the wish to become an insect (Käfer)

which could lie about in bed and esc

ape the disagreeable duties of the community. The " shell"

of solitude seems, thus, to be the image which was to be elaborated in the impressive theme of

The Metamorphosis.

-71-

one also suspects that from here on the demand, the truth of that other world exceeds the work's

demand -- is not in his eyes exhausted by the work and is only imperfectly realized there. When

writing becomes "a form of prayer," it is implied t hat there are probably other forms. And even

if, as a consequence of this world's unhappiness, t here were no other forms, to write is no longer

from this perspective to approach the work, but rat her to wait for that one moment of grace --

Kafka acknowledged that he lay in wait for it -- wh en one would have to write no longer. To

Janouch, who asked him, "Do you mean that poetry te nds toward religion?" he replies, "I will not

say that, but toward prayer, certainly"; and opposi ng literature to poetry, he adds, "Literature

strives to place things in an agreeable light; the poet is constrained to lift them into the realm of the true, the pure, and the constant." This is a significant response, for it corresponds to a note in

the Diaries where Kafka wonders what joy literature can still hold for him: "I can still draw

momentary satisfaction from works like A Country Doctor, provided I can still write such things

(very unlikely). But happiness only if I can raise the world into the pure, the true, and the

immutable" ( September 25, 1917). Here the "idealis t" or "spiritual" demand becomes

categorical. Write, yes, continue to write, but onl y in order to "lift into infinite life what is

perishable and isolated, into the realm of the law what belongs to chance," as he says again to

Janouch. But no sooner is that said than this quest ion arises: Is it possible, then? Is it sure that

writing does not belong to evil? And isn't the cons olation of writing an illusion, a dangerous

illusion, one that must be resisted? "There is unde niably a certain happiness in being able calmly

to write down: suffocation is inconceivably horribl e. Of course it is inconceivable--that is why I

have written nothing down" ( December 20, 1921). An d doesn't the humblest reality of the world

have a solidity lacking in the strongest work?

Writing's lack of independence: it depends on the m aid who tends the fire, on the cat warming

itself by the stove, even on that poor old human be ing warming himself. These are all

autonomous activities, ruled by their own laws; onl y writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a

joke and a despair ( December 6, 1921).

A grimace, the grimace on the face that recoils fro m the light, "a defense of nothingness, a

voucher for nothingness, a whiff of gaiety lent to nothingness" -- such is art.

-72-

And yet, if the confidence of his early years gives place to an attitude of increasingly inflexible

severity, still, even in his most difficult moments , when his very sanity seems threatened, when

he undergoes almost palpable attacks from the unkno wn ("How it spies: for example, on the road

going to the doctor's back there, constantly") -- e ven then he continues to see in his work, not

what threatens him, but what can help him and make salvation accessible to him.

The consolation of writing, remarkable, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps salutary: it is to

leap out of the ranks of murderers; it is an observ ation which is an act (Tat-Beobachtung, the

observation which has become act). There is an obse rvation-act to the extent that a higher sort of

observation is created -- higher, not more acute, a nd the higher it is, the more inaccessible it is to

the rank and file (of murderers), the less it is de pendent, the more it follows the laws proper to its

own movement, the more its road climbs, joyfully, i ncalculably. [ January, 1922]

Here literature is proclaimed as the power which fr ees, the force that allays the oppressions of

the world "where everything feels throttled"; it is the liberating passage from the first to the third

person, from observation of oneself, which was Kafk a's torment, to a higher observation, rising

above mortal reality toward the other world, the wo rld of freedom.

Why Art Is, Is Not, Justified

Why this confidence? One might well wonder. One cou ld answer by reflecting that Kafka

belongs to a tradition where the highest things are expressed in a book which is writing par

excellence,

5 a tradition where the combination, the manipulation of letters has served as the

basis of experiences of ecstasy, and where it is sa id that the world of letters, the letters of the alphabet, is the true world of beatitude. 6 To write is to conjure up spirits, perhaps freeing them

against us, but this danger belongs to the essence of the power that liberates. 7

____________________

5Kafka said to Janouch that "the task of the poet is a prophetic task: the right word is a guide,

the wrong one a seducer; it is not by accident that the Bible is called Scripture."

6Hence Kafka's pitiless condemnation (which applies to himself) of Jewish writers who use

German.

7"Yet what about this fact itself: being a poet? Thi s act of writing is a gift, a silent and

mysterious gift. But its price? In the night the an swer always jumps out at me with

-73-

However, Kafka's was not a "superstitious" mind; th ere was in him a cold lucidity which made

him say to Brod, as they left at the end of some Ha ssidic celebrations, "In fact it was more or less

the same as a tribe of savages: gross superstitions ."

8 We must not, then, limit ourselves to

explanations which, while they may be correct, stil l do not help us understand why Kafka, so

sensitive to the deviation implied in every one of the steps he takes, surrendered with such faith

to that essential error which is writing. Nor would it suffice to recall in this connection that ever

since his adolescence, he had been extraordinarily sensitive to the influence of artists such as

Goethe and Flaubert, whom he was often ready to pla ce above everyone because they placed

their art above everything. Probably Kafka never en tirely separated himself internally from this

conception. But if the passion of art was from the beginning so strong and appeared to him for

such a long time to be salutary, this is because, f rom the start, and by "Father's fault," he found

himself cast out of the world, condemned to a solit ude for which he had literature, not to blame,

but rather to thank -- for brightening this solitud e, making it fertile, opening it onto another

world.

It can be said that his debate with his father push ed the negative aspect of the literary experience

into the background for him. Even when he sees that his work requires his ruin, even when, still

more grave, he sees the opposition between his work and his marriage, he by no means

concludes that there is in this work a fatal power, a voice which decrees "banishment" and

condemns to the desert. He does not come to this co nclusion, because the world has been lost for

him ever since the beginning; real existence has be en withdrawn from him, or it was never

granted him, and when again he speaks of his exile and of the impossibility of escaping it, he will

say, "I have the impression of never

____________________ dazzling clarity: writing is wages received of the diabolical powers one has served. This

surrender to obscure forces, this unleashing of for ces ordinarily held in check, these impure

embraces and everything else that happens in the de pths, does one still know anything about

all this when one writes stories in the full light, in the broad daylight? . . . Does the surface

retain some trace of it? Perhaps there is some othe r way to write? For my part, I know only

this way, in the nights when anguish torments me at the edge of sleep" (cited by Brod).

8But later, Kafka appears to become ever more attent ive toward this form of devotion. Dora

Dymant belonged to a "respected Jewish Hassidic fam ily." And Martin Buber may have

influenced him.

-74- having come here at all, but of having been pushed already as a little child and then chained to

the spot" ( January 24, 1922). Art did not cause hi m this misfortune: art did not even contribute

to it, but on the contrary has shed light upon it - - has been the "consciousness of unhappiness,"

its new dimension.

Art is primarily the consciousness of unhappiness, not its compensation. Kafka's rigor, his

fidelity to the work's demand, his fidelity to the demands of grief, spared him that paradise of

fictions where so many weak artists whom life has d isappointed find satisfaction. Art has for its

object neither reveries nor "constructions." But it does not describe truth either. Truth needs

neither to be known nor to be described -- it canno t even know itself -- just as earthly salvation

asks not to be discussed or represented, but to be achieved. In this sense there is no place for art:

rigorous monism excludes all idols. But, in this sa me sense, if art is not justified in general, it is

at least justified for Kafka alone. For art is link ed, precisely as Kafka is, to what is "outside" the

world, and it expresses the profundity of this outs ide bereft of intimacy and of repose -- this

outside which appears when even with ourselves, eve n with out death, we no longer have

relations of possibility. Art is the consciousness of "this misfortune." It describes the situation of

one who has lost himself, who can no longer say "me ," who in the same movement has lost the

world, the truth of the world, and belongs to exile , to the time of distress when, as Hölderlin says,

the gods are no longer and are not yet. This does n ot mean that art affirms another world, at least

not if it is true that art has its origin, not in a nother world, but in the other of all worlds (it is on

this point, we now see -- but in the notes which re present his religious experience rather than in

his work -- that Kafka takes or is ready to take th e leap which art does not authorize).

Kafka vacillates pathetically. Sometimes he seems t o do everything to create for himself a

dwelling place among men whose "attractiveness is m onstrously strong." He tries to get engaged,

he gardens, he practices manual tasks, he thinks ab out Palestine, he procures lodgings in Prague

in order to win not only solitude but the independe nce of a mature,

____________________

9Kafka does not fail to denounce the temptation -- t he tempting simplicity -- in the excessively

determined distinction between these two worlds: "U sually, the division (of these two worlds)

seems to me too determined, dangerous in its determination, sad and too domineering" (

January 30, 1922).

-75-

vigorous man. On this level, the debate with the fa ther remains essential, and all the new notes of

the Diaries confirm this. They show that Kafka hides nothing f rom himself of what

psychoanalysis could reveal to him. His dependence on his family not only rendered him weak, a

stranger to manly tasks (as he himself affirms), bu t, since this dependence horrifies him, it makes

all forms of dependence just as unbearable to him - - and, to start with, marriage, which reminds

him repulsively of his parents',

10 of the family life from which he would like to free himself but

to which he would also like to commit himself, for that is obedience to the law, that is the truth,

the truth of the father, which attracts him as much as he resists it, so that "really I stand up before

my family, and in its circle I ceaselessly brandish knives to hurt it but at the same time to protect

it." "This on the one hand."

But on the other hand he always sees more, and sick ness naturally helps him see: that he belongs

to the other shore; that, banished, he must not bar gain with this banishment; neither must he, as though crushed against its border, remain passively turned toward a reality from which he feels

excluded and in which he has never even lived since he is not yet born. This new perspective

might be merely that of absolute despair, the nihil istic perspective which is too hastily attributed

to him. There is no denying that distress is his el ement. It is his abode and his "time." But this

distress is never without hope. This hope is often only the torment of distress -- which does not

give hope, but prevents one from getting enough eve n of despair and determines that

"condemned to die, one is also condemned to defend oneself right up to the last" -- and perhaps

at that point assigned to reverse condemnation into deliverance. In this new perspective, the

perspective of distress, it is essential not to tur n toward Canaan. The wanderer has the

____________________

10We must quote at least this passage from a draft of a letter to his fiancée in which he specifies

with the greatest lucidity his relations with his f amily:

But I stem from my parents, I am linked to them jus t as to my sisters by blood. In everyday

life, and because I devote myself to my own goals, I don't feel it, but fundamentally this bond

has more value for me than I know. Sometimes, too, I pursue it with my hatred: the sight of

the conjugal bed, of the rumpled sheets, the night clothes carefull

y spread out, makes me want

to vomit; it pulls all my insides out. It's as if I were not definitively born, as if I were always

coming into the world out of that obscure life in t hat obscure room; it's as if I had always to

search there again for confirmation of myself, and as if I were, at least to a certain extent,

indissolubly linked to these repulsive things. This still impedes my feet which want to run;

my feet are still stuck in the formless original so up. [ October 18, 1916]

-76-

desert for a destination, and it is his approach to the desert which is now the true Promised Land.

"Is it out there you are leading me?" Yes, out ther e. But where is that, out there? It is never in

sight; the desert is even less certain than the wor ld; it is never anything but the approach to the

desert. And in this land of error one is never "her e," but always "far from here." And yet, in this

region where the conditions of a real dwelling lack , where one has to live in an incomprehensible

separation, (an exclusion from which one is, someho w, excluded, just as one is excluded from

oneself) -- in this region which is the region of e rror because in it one does nothing but stray

without end, there subsists a tension: the very pos sibility of erring, of going all the way to the

end of error, of nearing its limit, of transforming wayfaring without any goal into the certitude of

the goal without any way there.

The Move outside Truth: The Landsurveyor

We know that the story of the landsurveyor represen ts the most impressive image of this move.

From the very beginning, this hero of inflexible ob stinacy is described to us as having renounced

his world, his home, the life which includes wife a nd children, forever. Right from the start, then,

he is outside salvation, he belongs to exile, that region where not only is he away from home, but

away from himself. He is in the outside itself -- a realm absolutely bereft of intimacy where

beings seem absent and where everything one thinks one grasps slips away. The tragic difficulty

of the undertaking is that in this world of exclusi on and radical separation, everything is false

and inauthentic as soon as one examines it, everyth ing lacks as soon as one seeks support from it,

but nevertheless the depth of this absence is alway s given anew as an indubitable, absolute

presence. And the world absolute, which means "separated," is in its proper place h ere. For it is as if separation, experienced in all its rigor, could reverse itself and become the absolutely

separated, the absolutely absolute.

This must be put more precisely: Kafka -- that exac ting mind by no means satisfied with the

dilemma of all or nothing which he nevertheless con ceives more intransigently than anyone else

-- hints that in this move outside the true there a re certain rules. They are perhaps contradictory

and indefensible, but still they authorize a sort o f possibility. The first is given in error itself: one

must stray and not be indolent as Joseph K. is in The Trial, imagining as he does that things are

always going to continue and that he is still in th e world when, from the first sentence,

-77-

he is cast out of it. Joseph's fault, similar proba bly to the one with which Kafka reproached

himself at the time he was writing this book, is th at he wants to win his trial in the world itself, to

which he thinks he still belongs, but where his col d, empty heart, his bachelor bureaucrat's

existence, his lack of concern for his family -- al l character traits which Kafka found in himself --

already prevent him from getting a footing. Granted , his indifference yields bit by bit, but that is

a result of the trial, just as the beauty which shi nes in the faces of the accused and makes them

attractive to women is the reflection of their own dissolution, of death advancing in them like a

truer light.

The trial, the banishment, is no doubt a great misf ortune; it is perhaps an incomprehensible

injustice or an inexorable punishment. But it is al so -- to be sure, only to a certain extent (and

this is the hero's excuse, the trap he falls into) -- a given which it does no good to protest by

invoking in hollow speeches some higher justice. On the contrary, one must try to gain from it,

according to the rule which Kafka made his own: "Yo u must limit yourself to what you still

possess." The trial has at least the advantage of m aking known to K. what is really the case. It

dissipates illusion -- the deceptive consolations w hich, because he had a good job and a few

indifferent pleasures, allowed him to believe in hi s existence, in his existence as a man of the

world. But the trial is not, for all that, the trut h. It is, on the contrary, a process of error, like

everything which is linked to the outside, that "ex terior" darkness where one is cast by the force

of banishment. The trial is a process where if one hope remains, it is for him who advances, not

against the current, in futile opposition, but in t he very direction of error.

The Essential Fault

The landsurveyor is almost entirely free of Joseph K.'s faults. He does not seek to return home.

Gone is life in Canaan; effaced is the truth of thi s world; he scarcely even remembers it in brief,

pathetic moments. He is not indolent either, but al ways on the move, never stopping, almost

never getting discouraged, going from failure to fa ilure in a tireless movement which evokes the

cold disquietude of the time which affords no rest. Yes, he goes ahead, with an inflexible

obstinacy, always in the direction of extreme error , disdaining the village which still has some

reality, but wanting the Castle, which perhaps has none, detaching himself from Frieda, who

retains some glints of life, to turn toward Olga, s ister of Amalia, the doubly excluded,

-78-

the rejected -- Amalia who, still worse, in a fearf ul decision, voluntarily chose to be so.

Everything ought to proceed, then, for the best. Bu t nothing of the sort. For the landsurveyor falls incessantly into the fault which Kafka designates as the gravest: impatience. 11 The impatience at

the heart of error is the essential fault, because it misconstrues the very trueness of error which,

like a law, requires that one never believe the goa l is close or that one is coming nearer to it. One

must never have done with the indefinite; one must never grasp -- as if it were the immediate, the

already present -- the profundity of inexhaustible absence.

To be sure, it is inevitable that one should do so, and therein lies the desolating character of such

a quest. Whoever is not impatient is indolent. Whoe ver surrenders to the disquietude of error

loses the indifference that would exhaust time. Sca rcely having arrived, understanding nothing

about this ordeal of exclusion in which he finds hi mself, K. sets out right away to get quickly to

the end. He won't expend any energy on the intermed iaries; in their regard he is indolent. This is

probably to his credit: doubtless it demonstrates t he force of his tense striving towards the

absolute. But his aberration is not any the less gl aring. It consists in taking for the end what is

only an intermediary, a representation befitting hi s "lights."

Surely we are as deceived as the landsurveyor when we think we recognize in the bureaucratic

phantasm the fitting symbol of a superior world. Th is figure merely befits our impatience. It is

the palpable form of the error through which, befor e the impatient gaze, the inexorable force of

the evil infinite is ceaselessly substituted for th e absolute. K. always wants to reach the goal

before having reached it. This demand for a prematu re dénouement is the principle of figuration:

it engenders the image, or, if you will, the idol, and the curse which attaches to it is that which

attaches to idolatry. Man wants unity right away; h e wants it in separation itself. He represents it

to himself, and this representation, the image of unity, immediately reconstitutes the element of

dispersion where he loses himself more and more. Fo r the image as such can never be attained,

and moreover it hides from him the unity of which i t

____________________

11"There are two main human sins from which all the o thers derive: impatience and indolence.

Because of impatience, they were banished from Para dise. Because of indolence, they do not

return. Perhaps there is only one main sin, impatie nce. Because of impatience, they were

driven out, because of impatience, they do not retu rn" (Aphorisms) [English translation from

"Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way," in Wedding Preparations , trans.

Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, Jr. ( London: Seck er & Warburg, 1954) -- Trans.]

-79-

is the image. It separates him from unity by making itself inaccessible and by making unity

inaccessible.

Klamm is by no means invisible. The landsurveyor wa nts to see him, and he sees him. The

Castle, supreme goal, is by no means out of sight. As an image, it is constantly at his disposal.

Naturally when you look at them closely, these figu res are disappointing. The Castle is only a

cluster of village huts; Klamm, a big heavy man sea ted in front of a desk. There is nothing here

that isn't very ordinary and ugly. But this is the landsurveyor's good luck -- the truth, the

deceptive honesty of these images: they are not sed uctive in themselves, they possess nothing to

justify the fascinated interest people take in them . Thus they remind us that they are not the true

goal. In this insignificance, however, the other tr uth lets itself be forgotten. And the other truth is

that these images are, all the same, images of the goal; they partake of its glow, of its ineffable

value, and not to attach oneself to them is already to turn away from the essential. We could summarize this situation as follows: it is impatience which makes the goal inaccessible

by substituting for it the proximity of an intermed iary figure. It is impatience that destroys the

way toward the goal by preventing us from recognizi ng in the intermediary the figure of the

immediate.

We must limit ourselves here to these few indicatio ns. The bureaucratic phantasm, all the

bustling idleness which characterizes it, and those double beings who are its functionaries,

guards, aides, messengers, who always go two by two as if to show clearly that they are only

each other's reflections and the reflection of an i nvisible whole; moreover, that whole chain of

metamorphoses, that methodical enlarging of the dis tance which is never defined as infinite but

necessarily expands indefinitely through the transf ormation of the goal into obstacles, but also of

obstacles into intermediaries leading to the goal - - all this powerful imagery does not represent

the truth of a superior world, or even its transcen dence. It represents, rather, the favorable and

unfavorable nature of figuration -- the bind in whi ch the man of exile is caught, obliged as he is

to make out of error a means of reaching truth and out of what deceives him indefinitely the

ultimate possibility of grasping the infinite.

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The Work's Space

To what extent was Kafka aware of the analogy betwe en this move outside truth and the

movement by which the work tends toward its origin -- toward that center which in the only

place the work can be achieved, in the search for w hich it is realized and which, once reached,

makes the work impossible? To what extent did he co nnect the ordeal of his heroes with the way

in which he himself, through art, was trying to mak e his way toward the work and, through the

work, toward something true? Did he often think of Goethe's words, "It is by postulating the

impossible that the writer procures for himself all of the possible"? This much at least is

strikingly evident: the fault which he punished in K. is also the one with which the artist

reproaches himself. Impatience is this fault. It wa nts to hurry the story toward its dénouement

before the story has developed in all its direction s, exhausted the measure of time which is in it,

lifted the indefinite to a true totality where ever y inauthentic movement, every partially false

image can be transformed into an unshakable certitu de. This is an impossible task, a task which,

if it were accomplished fully, would destroy that v ery truth toward which it tends, just as the

work is wrecked if it touches the point which is it s origin. Many considerations restrain Kafka

from finishing almost any of his "stories" and caus e him, when he has scarcely begun one, to

leave it in search of peace in another. He states t hat he often feels the torment of the artist exiled

from his work at the moment it affirms itself and c loses up. He also says that he sometimes

abandons a story in anguish lest, if he didn't aban don it, he could never come back toward the

world, but it is not certain that this concern was in his case the strongest. That he often abandons

a story because every dénouement bears in itself th e happiness of a definitive truth which he

hasn't the right to accept, to which his existence does not yet correspond -- this reason also

appears to have played a considerable role. But all these hesitations can be summarized as

follows: Kafka, perhaps without knowing it, felt de eply that to write is to surrender to the

incessant; and, out of anxiety -- fear of impatienc e -- and scrupulous attention to the work's

demand, he most often denied himself the leap which alone permits finishing, the insouciant and

happy confidence by which (momentarily) a limit is placed upon the interminable. -81-

What has so inappropriately been called his realism reveals this same instinctive effort to

exorcise the impatience within him. Kafka often sho wed that his genius was a prompt, a ready

one; he was capable of reaching the essential in a few swift strokes. But more and more he

imposed upon himself a minuteness, a slow approach, a detailed precision (even in the

description of his own dreams), without which a man exiled from reality is rapidly condemned to

the errors of confusion and the approximations of t he imaginary. The more one is lost outside, in

the strangeness and insecurity of this loss, the mo re one must appeal to the spirit of rigor,

scruple, exactitude; the more one must concentrate on absence through a multitude of images,

through their determined and modest appearance -- m odest because disengaged from fascination

-- and through their energetically sustained cohere nce. Anyone who belongs to reality can forego

all these details which, as we know, in no way corr espond to the form of a real vision. But he

who belongs to the depths of the limitless and the remote, to the distress of the immeasurable,

yes, that person is condemned to an excess of measu re and to strive for continuity without a

single misstep, without any missing links, without the slightest inconsistency. And condemned is

the right word. For if patience, exactitude, and co ld mastery are qualities indispensable for not

getting lost when nothing subsists that one could h old onto, patience, exactitude, and cold

mastery are also faults which, dividing difficultie s and stretching them out indefinitely, may well

retard the shipwreck, but surely retard deliverance , by ceaselessly transforming the infinite into

the indefinite. In the same way it is measure which , in the work, prevents the limitless from ever

being achieved.

Art and Idolatry

"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven

above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth." Felix Weltsch,

Kafka's friend, who has spoken very pertinently of Kafka's struggle against impatience, thinks

that he took the Biblical commandment to heart. If this is so, then imagine a man upon whom

this essential interdiction weighs, who must, on pa in of death, exile himself from images and

who, suddenly, discovers himself exiled in the imag inary without any dwelling place or

subsistence except images and the space of images. There he is, then, obliged to live off his death

and constrained in his despair, and in order

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to escape despair -- immediate execution -- to make of his condemnation the only road to

salvation. Was Kafka consciously this man? No one c an say. Sometimes one has the feeling that

the more he seeks to remember the essential prohibi tion (for it is in any case forgotten, since the

community in which it was alive is more or less des troyed) -- the more he seeks to remember the

religious sense which lives hidden in this prohibit ion, and seeks this with an ever greater rigor,

emptying himself and the space all around him so th at idols might find no welcome there, the

more he seems prepared, contradictorily, to forget that this interdiction ought also to be applied

to his art. The result is a very unstable equilibri um. This equilibrium, in the illegitimate solitude

which is his, allows him to be faithful to an ever more rigorous spiritual monism while

abandoning himself to a certain artistic idolatry. Then it commits him to purifying this idolatry

by all the rigors of an asceticism which condemns l iterary realities (he leaves his works

unfinished, is unwilling to publish, refuses to bel ieve himself a writer, etc.), and which furthermore -- this is still more grave -- tends to subordinate art to his spiritual condition. Art is

not religion, "it doesn't even lead to religion." B ut in the time of distress which is ours, the time

when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of

this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and

eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which h ides behind this error.

That there is, in Kafka, a tendency at first to let literature's demand relieve religion's and then,

especially toward the end, an inclination to allow his religious experience to take over from his

literary one -- that there is in him a tendency to mix the two in a rather confusing way by passing

from the desert of faith to faith in a world which is no longer the desert but another world, where

liberty will be returned to him -- all this is sugg ested by the notes in the Diaries. "Do I live now

in the other world? Do I dare say it?" ( January 30 , 1922). On one of the pages we have quoted,

Kafka recalls that according to him men have no oth er choice than this one: either to seek the

Promised Land in Canaan or to seek it in the other world, which is the desert, "for," he adds,

"there is no third land for men." Certainly there i s not, but perhaps one should say more. Perhaps

it must be said that the artist -- the man Kafka al so wanted to be, the "poet," concerned for his art

and in search of its origin -- is he for whom there exists not even one world. For there exists for

him only the outside, the glistening flow of the et ernal outside.

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The Work and Death's Space

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Death as Possibility

The Word Experience

The work draws whoever devotes himself to it toward the point where it withstands its

impossibility. The work comes through this test and is, in this respect, experience. But what does

that word mean? In a passage from Malte, Rilke says that "poetry is not sentiment, it is

experience. In order to write a single line, one mu st have seen many cities, men and things."

Rilke does not mean, however, that poetry is the ex pression of a rich personality, capable of

living and of having lived. Memories are necessary, but only that they may be forgotten: in order

that in this forgetfulness -- in the silence of a p rofound metamorphosis -- there might at last be

born a word, the first word of a poem. "Experience" here means contact with being, renewal of

oneself in this contact -- an experiment, but one t hat remains undetermined.

Valéry writes in a letter: "All his life the true p ainter seeks painting: the true poet, Poetry, etc.

For these are not determined activities. In them on e must create the need, the goal, the means, and even the obstacles." Valéry is alluding here to another form of experience. Poetry is not

granted the poet as a truth and a certainty against which he could measure himself. He does not

know whether he is a poet, but neither does he know what poetry is, or even whether it is. It

depends on him, on his search. And this dependence does not make him master of what he seeks;

rather, it makes him uncertain of himself and as if nonexistent. Every work, and each moment of

the work, puts everything into question all over ag ain; and thus he who must live only for the

work has no way to live. Whatever he does, the work withdraws him from what he does and

from what he can do.

Apparently these remarks take into consideration on ly the technical activity in the work. They

imply that art is difficult, that the

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artist, in the practice of his art, lives on uncert ainty. In his almost naïve concern to protect poetr y

from insoluble problems, Valéry tried to present it as an activity all the more demanding in that it

has few secrets and is little able to seclude itsel f in the vagueness of its profundity. Poetry, in hi s

eyes, is a convention which envies mathematics and appears to require nothing but uninterrupted

effort or attention. It seems, then, that art, this strange activity which has to create everything --

need, goal, means -- above all creates for itself w hat hampers it, what renders it not only

supremely difficult, but also useless to all living beings and especially to one living being in

particular, the artist. This activity is not even a game, although it has the innocence and vanity of

games. Yet there comes a moment when it appears as the most necessary of all activities. Poetry

is only an exercise, but this exercise is the mind, the mind's purity, the pure point at which

consciousness -- that empty power to exchange itsel f for everything -- becomes a real power,

enclosing its infinite number of constructs and the whole range of its maneuvers within strict

limits. Art now has a goal, and this goal is the mi nd's mastery. And Valéry considers that his

poems have no interest for him other than that of t eaching him how they were fashioned, how a

work of the mind is produced. Art has a goal; it is this very goal. It is not simply a way of

exercising the mind; it is mind -- which is nothing if it is not a work. And what is the work? The

exceptional moment when possibility becomes power, when the mind -- law or empty form rich

only in undetermined potentiality -- becomes the ce rtainty of a realized form, becomes this body

which is form and this beautiful form which is a lo vely body. The work is mind, and the mind is

the passage, within the work, from the supreme inde terminacy to the determination of that

extreme. This unique passage is real only in the wo rk -- in the work which is never real, never

finished, since it is only the realization of the m ind's infiniteness. The mind, then, sees once

again in the work only an opportunity to recognize and exercise itself ad infinitum. Thus we

return to our point of departure.

This movement, and the terrible constraint, so to s peak, which makes it circular, show that one

can never simply make an allowance for artistic exp erience. Reduced to a purely formal

investigation, it makes form the ambiguous point th rough which everything passes.

1 Everything

becomes enigma, an enigma with which there is no po ssible compromise, for it

____________________

1Valéry's singularity is that he gives to the work t he name "mind," but mind equivocally

conceived by him as form: form which sometimes has the sense of an empty

-88- requires that one do and be nothing which it has not drawn into itself. "All his life the true

painter seeks painting; the true poet, Poetry." " All his life": those are three demanding words.

They do not mean that the painter turns his life in to painting or that he tries to discover painting

in his life. Yet neither do they mean that life rem ains intact when through and through it becomes

the search for an activity which is sure neither of its goals nor of its means but only of this

uncertainty and of the absolute passion which it co mmands.

We have two answers so far. Poetry is experience, l inked to a vital approach, to a movement

which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful co urse of life. In order to write a single line,

one must have exhausted life. And now, the other an swer: to write a single line, one must have

exhausted art, one must have exhausted one's life i n the search for art. These two answers share

the idea that art is experience because it is exper imental: because it is a search -- an investigation

which is not undetermined but is, rather, determine d by its indeterminacy, and involves the

whole of life, even if it seems to know nothing of life.

Yet another answer would be André Gide's: "I wanted to indicate in Tentative amoureuse the

influence of the book upon the writer, during the w riting itself. For, emerging from us, it changes

us, it modifies the course of our life".

2 This answer, however, is more limited. Writing chan ges

us. We do not write according to what we are; we ar e according to what we write. But where

does what is written come from? Still from us? From a possibility in ourselves which is

discovered and affirmed only through literary endea vors? All endeavors transform us; every

action we accomplish acts upon us. Does the act whi ch consists in making a book modify us

more profoundly? And if so, is it really the act it self, the effort, the patience, the attention in this

act which is responsible for the change? Is it not rather a question of a more original demand, a

necessary prior

____________________

2Thirty years later, Gide returns to this point of v iew and refines it: "It seems to me that each

of my books was not so much the product of a new in ner disposition, as, on the

xpower, a capacity of substitution which precedes and makes possible an infinite number of

realizable objects -- while at other times it has t he plastic, concrete reality of a realized form.

In the first instance, it is mind which is the master of forms; in the second, it is body which is

mind's form and power. Poetry, creation, is thus th e ambiguity of one and the other. As mind,

poetry is only pure intellectual exercise and tends to accomplish nothing; it is the empty,

though admirable, movement of the indefinite. But a s already embodied and formed, as the

form and reality of a beautiful body, poetry is as if indifferent to "meaning," to mind. In

language as body, in the physicalness of language, poetry tends only toward the perfection of

a finished thing.

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change which is perhaps achieved through the work, toward which the work leads us but which,

through an essential contradiction, is not just pri or to the work's completion but goes back even

further to the point where nothing can be done at a ll? "I no longer have any personality other

than the one which suits this work." But what suits the work is perhaps that "I" have no

personality. Clemens Brentano, in his novel Godwi, speaks eloquently of "the nullification of

oneself" which is effected in the work. And perhaps it is a question of a still more radical change

which does not consist in a new disposition of the soul and mind, which is not limited to removing me from myself, "nullifying" me, and which is not linked to the particular content of a

given book either, but rather to the fundamental de mand of the work.

To Die Content

Kafka, in a note from his Diaries, makes a remark which bears reflection:

On the way home, I said to Max that on my deathbed, provided the suffering is not too great, I

will be very content. I forgot to add, and later I omitted this on purpose, that the best of what I

have written is based upon this capacity to die con tent. All the good passages, the strongly

convincing ones, are about someone who is dying and who finds it very hard and sees in it an

injustice. This, at least in my opinion, is all ver y moving for the reader. But for me, since I think

I can be content on my deathbed, such descriptions are secretly a game. I even enjoy dying in the

character who is dying. Thus I calculatingly exploi t the reader's attention which I have

concentrated upon death; I keep a much clearer head than he, who will lament, I suppose, on his

deathbed. My lamentation is thus as perfect as poss ible. It does not interrupt itself abruptly the

way real lamentation does, rather it follows its be autiful, pure course.

This is dated December, 1914. One cannot be sure th at it expresses a point of view which Kafka

would still have entertained later. It is, in

____________________

xcontrary, its cause and the first provocation of th at disposition of soul and mind in which I

had to maintain myself in order to bring the book's elaboration to a successful finish. I would

like to express this in a simpler fashion: the book , as soon as it is conceived, disposes of me

entirely; and all within me, including the most pro found in me, orchestrates itself for the

book. I have no personality other than that which s uits this work" ( Journals, July 1922).

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fact, what he keeps quiet about, as if he were awar e of its offensive aspect. But, precisely

because of its irritating insincerity, it is reveal ing. The whole passage might be summarized as

follows: you cannot write unless you remain your ow n master before death; you must have

established with death a relation of sovereign equa ls. If you lose face before death, if death is the

limit of your self-possession, then it slips the wo rds out from under the pen, it cuts in and

interrupts. The writer no longer writes, he cries o ut -- an awkward, confused cry which no one

understands and which touches no one. Kafka feels d eeply here that art is a relation with death.

Why death? Because death is the extreme. He who inc ludes death among all that is in his control

controls himself extremely. He is linked to the who le of his capability; he is power through and

through. Art is mastery of the supreme moment, supr eme mastery.

The sentence, "The best of what I have written is b ased on this capacity to die content," has an

attractive aspect stemming from its simplicity; nev ertheless, it remains difficult to accept. What

is this capacity? What is it that gives Kafka this assurance? Has he already come close enough to

death to know how he will bear himself when he face s it? He seems to suggest that in the "good

passages" of his writings -- where someone is dying , dying an unjust death -- he is himself at

stake. Is it a matter, then, of an approach toward death accomplished under the cover of writing?

The text does not say exactly that. It probably ind icates an intimacy between the unhappy death

which occurs in the work and the writer who enjoys this death. It excludes the cold, distant

relation which allows an objective description. A n arrator, if he knows the art of moving people, can recount in a devastating manner devastating events which are foreign to him. The problem in

that case is one of rhetoric and the right one may or may not have to use it. But the mastery of

which Kafka speaks is different, and the calculatin g tactic which authorizes it is more profound.

Yes, one has to die in the dying character, truth d emands this. But one must be capable of

satisfaction in death, capable of finding in the su preme dissatisfaction supreme satisfaction, and

of maintaining, at the instant of dying, the clears ightedness which comes from such a balance.

Contentment is then very close to Hegelian wisdom, if the latter consists in making satisfaction

and self-consciousness coincide, in finding in extr eme negativity -- in death become possibility,

project, and time -- the measure of the absolutely positive.

Yet here Kafka does not situate himself directly in so ambitious a perspective. Neither, when he

links his capacity to write well with the

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power to die well, does he allude to a conception w hich would concern death in general. Rather,

he alludes to his own experience. For one reason or another he lies down untroubled upon his

death bed, and that is why he can direct upon his h eroes an untroubled gaze and share their death

with clear-sighted intimacy. Which of his writings is he thinking of? Probably In der

Strafkolonie, In the Penal Colony . A few days earlier he had presented to his friend s a reading of

this story, which gave him courage. He then writes The Trial, and several unfinished narratives

which do not concern death directly. We should ment ion The Metamorphosis and The Verdict as

well. To recall these works is to recognize that Ka fka is not thinking of a realistic description of

death scenes. In all these narratives, those who di e do so in a few quick and silent words. This

confirms the idea that not just when they die but a pparently while they are alive Kafka's heroes

carry out their actions in death's space, and that it is to the indefinite time of "dying" that they

belong. They are experiencing, feeling this strange ness out, and Kafka, in them, is also standing

a test. But it seems to him that he won't be able t o bring it to a "happy conclusion," draw from it

a story and a work unless, in a certain way, he is in tune beforehand with the extreme moment of

this trial -- unless he is death's equal.

What disturbs us in his reflection is that it seems to authorize art to cheat. Why describe as unjust

an event that he himself feels capable of welcoming with equanimity? Why does he make death

frightful for us when he is content with it? This g ives the text a cruel shallowness. Perhaps art

demands that one play with death; perhaps it introd uces a game, a bit of play in the situation that

no longer allows for tactics or mastery. But what d oes this play mean? "Art flies around the truth,

with the decided intention not to burn itself." Her e it flies around death. It does not burn itself,

but makes us feel the burn and becomes what burns a nd moves us -- coldly and falsely. This

perspective would suffice to condemn art. But to be fair to Kafka's remark, one must also take it

differently. To die content is not in his eyes an a ttitude that is good in itself, for what it expresses

primarily is discontent with life, exclusion from t he happiness of living -- that happiness which

one must desire and love above everything. "The cap acity to die content" implies that relations

with the normal world are now and henceforth severe d. Kafka is in a sense already dead. This is

given him, as exile was given him; and this gift is linked to that of writing. Naturally, the fact of

being exiled from normal possibilities does not in itself afford mastery over the extreme

possibility. The fact of being deprived of life doe s not

-92- guarantee the happy possession of death; it does not make death acceptable except in a negative

fashion (one is content to finish with the disconte nt of life). Hence the insufficiency and the

superficial character of the remark. But the same y ear precisely, and twice over Kafka writes in

his Diary , "I do not separate myself from men in order to li ve in peace, but in order to be able to

die in peace." This separation, this need for solit ude is imposed upon him by his work. "If I do

not save myself in some work, I am lost. Do I know this distinctly enough? I do not hide from

men because I want to live peacefully, but because I want to perish peacefully." The work in

question is writing. Kafka cuts himself off from th e world in order to write, and he writes in

order to die in peace. Here death, tranquil death, is represented as the wages of art; it is the aim

and the justification of writing. Write to perish p eacefully. Yes, but how to write? What allows

one to write? We know the answer: you cannot write unless you are able to die content. The

contradiction situates us back in the profundity of the experience.

The Circle

Whenever thought is caught in a circle, this is bec ause it has touched upon something original, its

point of departure beyond which it cannot move exce pt to return. Perhaps we would come closer

to that original movement if we modified the focus of Kafka's formulae by removing the words

"peacefully" and "content." The writer, then, is on e who writes in order to be able to die, and he

is one whose power to write comes from an anticipat ed relation with death. The contradiction

subsists, but is seen in a different light. Just as the poet only exists once the poem faces him, only

after the poem, as it were -- although it is necess ary that first there be a poet in order for there to

be a poem -- so one senses that if Kafka goes towar d the power of dying through the work which

he writes, the work itself is by implication an exp erience of death which he apparently has to

have been through already in order to reach the wor k and, through the work, death. But one can

also sense that the movement which, in the work, is the approach to death, death's space and its

use, is not exactly the same movement which would l ead the writer to the possibility of dying.

One can even suppose that the particularly strange relations between artist and work, which

make the work depend on him who is only possible wi thin the work -- one can even suppose that

such an anomaly stems from the experience which ove rpowers the form of time, but stems more

profoundly still from the ambiguity of that experie nce, from its double

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aspect which Kafka expresses with too much simplici ty in the sentences we ascribe to him: Write

to be able to die -- Die to be able to write . These words close us into their circular demand; they

oblige us to start from what we want to find, to se ek nothing but the point of departure, and thus

to make this point something we approach only by qu itting it. But they also authorize this hope:

the hope, where the interminable emerges, of graspi ng the term, of bringing it forth.

Naturally, Kafka's words may seem to express a somb er view peculiar to him. They are in

conflict with generally accepted ideas about art an d the work of art which André Gide, in the

wake of so many others, called upon: "The reasons w hich lead me to write are many, and the

most important are, it seems to me, the most secret . Especially, perhaps, this one: to shelter

something from death" ( Journals, July 27, 1922). To write in order not to die, to entrust oneself

to the survival of the work: this motive is apparen tly what keeps the artist at his task. Genius

confronts death; the work is death rendered vain, o r transfigured, or, in the evasive words of

Proust, made "less bitter," "less inglorious," and "perhaps less probable." Perhaps. We will not rebut these traditional dreams attributed to creators by remarking that they are recent -- that,

belonging to our modern, occidental world, they are connected to the development of humanistic

art, where man seeks to glorify himself in his work s and to act in them, perpetuating himself in

this action. All this is certainly important and me aningful. But art, at this juncture, is no longer

anything but a memorable way of becoming one with h istory. Great historical figures, heroes,

great men of war no less than artists shelter thems elves from death in this way: they enter the

memory of peoples; they are examples, active presen ces. This form of individualism soon ceases

to be satisfying. It soon becomes clear that if wha t is important is primarily the process which is

history -- action in the world, the common striving toward truth -- it is vain to want to remain

oneself above and beyond one's disappearance, vain to desire immutable stability in a work

which would dominate time. This is vain and, moreov er, the opposite of what one wants, which

is not to subsist in the leisurely eternity of idol s, but to change, to disappear in order to cooperat e

in the universal transformation: to act anonymously and not to be a pure, idle name. From this

perspective, creators' dreams of living on through their works appear not only small-minded but

mistaken, and any true action, accomplished anonymo usly in the world and for the sake of the

world's ultimate perfection, seems to affirm a

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triumph over death that is more rigorous, more cert ain. At least such action is free of the

wretched regret that one cannot be oneself for long er.

These dreams, which are so strong and which are lin ked to a transformation of art at a time when

art is not yet present to itself -- at a time when man, who believes he is the master of art, wants to

make himself present, wants to be the one who creat es and by creating escapes destruction even

if only just barely -- these dreams, then, are stri king in this: they show "creators" engaged in a

profound relation with death. And this relation, de spite appearances, is the one Kafka pursued

also. Both he and they want death to be possible: h e in order to grasp it, they in order to hold it at

a distance. The differences are negligible. They ar e set in one perspective, which is the

determination to establish with death a relation of freedom.

Can I Die?

At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer wh o writes in order to be able to die is an affront

to common sense. It would seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any

approach on our part, without our bestirring oursel ves at all; yes, it will come. That is true, but at

the same time it is not true, and indeed quite poss ibly it lacks truth altogether. At least it does not

have the kind of truth which we feel in the world, which is the measure of our action and of our

presence in the world. What makes me disappear from the world cannot find its guarantee there;

and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This explains why no one is linked to

death by real certitude. No one is sure of dying. No one doubts death, but no one can think of

certain death except doubtfully. For to think of de ath is to introduce into thought the supremely

doubtful, the brittleness of the unsure. It is as i f in order to think authentically upon the certaint y

of death, we had to let thought sink into doubt and inauthenticity, or yet again as if when we

strive to think on death, more than our brain -- th e very substance and truth of thought itself --

were bound to crumble. This in itself indicates tha t if men in general do not think about death, if

they avoid confronting it, it is doubtless in order to flee death and hide from it, but that this escape is possible only because death itself is perpetual flight before death, and because it is the

deep of dissimulation. Thus to hide from it is in a certain way to hide in it.

So the ability to die ceases to be a meaningless is sue, and we can understand how a man's goal

might be the search for death's possibility. This s earch, however, only becomes significant when

it is necessary. In

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the great religious systems, death is an important event, but it does not have the paradoxical

character of a brute fact bearing no truth. It is a relation to another world where, precisely, truth

is believed to have its origin. It is the true way, and if it lacks the guarantee of the

comprehensible certitudes which are ours here in th is world, it does have the guarantee of the

incomprehensible but unshakable certitudes of the e ternal. Thus in the great religious systems of

the West, it is not at all difficult to hold that d eath is true. Death always takes place in a world, it

is an event of the greatest world, an event which c an be located and which gives us a location.

Can I die? Have I the power to die? This question h as no force except when all the escape routes

have been rejected. It is when he concentrates excl usively upon himself in the certainty of his

mortal condition that man's concern is to make deat h possible. It does not suffice for him that he

is mortal; he understands that he has to become mor tal, that he must be mortal twice over:

sovereignly, extremely mortal. That is his human vo cation. Death, in the human perspective, is

not a given, it must be achieved. It is a task, one which we take up actively, one which becomes

the source of our activity and mastery. Man dies, t hat is nothing. But man is, starting from his

death. He ties himself tight to his death with a ti e of which he is the judge. He makes his death;

he makes himself mortal and in this way gives himse lf the power of a maker and gives to what

he makes its meaning and its truth. The decision to be without being is possibility itself: the

possibility of death. Three systems of thought -- H egel's, Nietzsche's, Heidegger's -- which

attempt to account for this decision and which ther efore seem, however much they may oppose

each other, to shed the greatest light on the desti ny of modern man, are all attempts at making

death possible.

Kirilov

It would seem that the most immediately pressing co nsequence of such an attitude is to make us

wonder whether, among all the forms of death, there is not one which is more human, more

mortal, and whether voluntary death is not perhaps an exemplary death. To take one's own life: is

this not the shortest road from man to himself, fro m animal to man and, as Kirilov will add, from

man to God? "I recommend my death to you, voluntary death, which comes to me because I

want it to." "To eliminate oneself is the most prai seworthy of acts; it

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practically grants us the right to live." Natural d eath is death "in the most contemptible

conditions, a death which is not free, which does n ot come when it should, a coward's death.

Love of life should make us wish for an altogether different death, a free and conscious death,

one which is no accident and holds no surprises." N ietzsche's words resound like an echo of

liberty. One doesn't kill oneself, but one can. Thi s is a marvelous resource. Without this supply

of oxygen close at hand we would smother, we could no longer live. Having death within reach, docile and reliable, makes life possible, for it is exactly what provides air, space, free and joyful

movement: it is possibility.

Voluntary death appears to pose a moral problem: it accuses and it condemns; it makes a final

judgment. Or else it seems a challenge in defiance of an exterior omnipotence. "I will kill myself

to affirm my insubordination, my new and terrifying liberty." What is new in Kirilov's

undertaking is that he not only considers himself t o be rising up against God by taking his own

life, but expects by so doing to prove the nonexist ence of this God -- to prove it for himself just

as he demonstrates it to others. As long as he has not killed himself, he himself does not know

how this matter stands. Perhaps he is a believer, " having more faith even than a priest," suggests

Dostoyevsky, apparently abandoning him to forlorn w anderings among contradictory feelings.

Yet this remark is not inconsistent. On the contrar y. For it is his preoccupation with God -- the

urgency of his need to become certain about God's n onexistence -- that suggests suicide to

Kirilov. Why suicide? If he dies freely, if he expe riences and proves to himself his liberty in

death and the liberty of his death, he will have at tained the absolute. He will be that absolute. He

will be absolutely man, and there will be no absolu te outside of him. In fact more is involved

here than a proof. In this obscure combat not only Kirilov's knowledge concerning the existence

of God, but that existence itself is at stake. God is gambling his own existence in this freely

chosen death which a resolute man takes upon himsel f. If someone becomes his own master even

in death, master of himself through death, he will be master also of that omnipotence which

makes itself felt by us through death, and he will reduce it to a dead omnipotence. Kirilov's

suicide thus becomes the death of God. Hence his st range conviction that this suicide will

inaugurate a new era, that it will mark the turning point in the history of humanity, and that,

precisely, after him men will no longer need to kil l themselves. His death, by making death

possible, will have liberated life and rendered it wholly human.

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Kirilov's words have an unsteady but attractive rhy thm. He constantly loses his bearings among

clear arguments which he does not pursue to the end because of the intervention, the call of an

obscure argument which he cannot grasp but never ce ases to hear. To all appearances his plan is

that of a calm and collected rationalist. If men do not kill themselves, he thinks, it is because they

are afraid of death; fear of death is the origin of God; if I can die in opposition to this fear, I will

have liberated death from fear and overthrown God. This is a plan which, requiring the serenity

of a man who keeps to reason's undeviating paths, c onflicts with the lamp burning before the

icon, with the religious torment to which Kirilov c onfesses, and above all with the terror that

makes him falter at the end. Yet the starts and sto ps of this disoriented thinking, this madness

which we feel envelops it and even its dizzy fear - - beneath the mask it wears, which is shame at

being afraid -- are solely responsible for the fasc inating interest of Kirilov's undertaking.

Speaking of death, he speaks of God, as if he neede d this supreme name to understand and

evaluate such an event, to confront it in its supre macy. God is, for him, the face of his death. But

is it God that is at issue? Is not the omnipotence in whose shadow Kirilov wanders (sometimes

seized by a happiness which shatters time, sometime s delivered to horror against which he

defends himself with puerile ideologies) -- is not this power fundamentally anonymous? Does it

not make of him a nameless, powerless being, essent ially cowardly and surrendered to

dispersion? This power is death itself, and what is at issue behind Kirilov's undertaking is death's

possibility. Can I kill myself? Have I the power to die? How far can I go freely into death, in full control of my freedom? Even when, with an ideal and heroic resolve, I decide to meet death, isn't

it still death that comes to meet me, and when I th ink I grasp it, does it not grasp me? Does it not

loosen all hold upon me, deliver me to the ungraspa ble? Do I die, humanly, a death which will be

that of a man and which I will imbue with all of hu man intention and freedom? Do I myself die,

or do I not rather die always other from myself, so that I would have to say that properly

speaking I do not die? Can I die? Have I the power to die?

The critical problem that torments Kirilov in the f orm of a God he would like to believe in is the

problem of his suicide's possibility. When someone says to him, "But many people kill

themselves," he does not even understand. As far as he is concerned, no one has yet killed

himself: no one has ever died by his own hand in a real coming to grips, a full and heartfelt

grasping of the situation which would make this act

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an authentic action. Or again, no one has seen in d eath the possibility of taking it himself instead

of receiving it, dying "for the idea" as Kirilov pu ts it, dying that is, in a purely ideal manner.

Certainly, if he succeeds in making death a possibi lity which is his and fully human, he will have

attained absolute freedom. He will have attained it as a man, and he will have given it to men.

Or, in other words, he will have been conscious of disappearing and not consciousness

disappearing; he will have entirely annexed to his consciousness its own disappearance; he will

be, thus, a realized totality, the realization of t he whole, the absolute. Certainly this privilege is

far superior to that of being immortal. Immortality , if it is mine to enjoy by definition, is not

mine. It is rather my limit and my constraint. Thus in this context my whole vocation as a man

consists in making of this immortality which is imp osed upon me something I can gain or lose:

hell or heaven. But immortality in itself, over whi ch I have no power, is nothing to me. On the

other hand, immortality might become one of science 's conquests. Then it would have the value -

- beneficial or not -- of a cure for sickness. It w ould not be altogether without consequences, but

it would have none for Kirilov, who would still ask himself -- and with a passion made greater

by the greater strangeness of the problem: Do I ret ain the power to die? Immortality, guaranteed

by science, would have no weight in his destiny unl ess it signified the impossibility of death. But

then it would be, precisely, the symbolic represent ation of the question he embodies. For a

human race weirdly destined to be immortal, suicide would constitute perhaps the only chance to

remain human, the only way out toward a human futur e.

What might be called Kirilov's task -- death, when death becomes the search for its possibility --

is not exactly the task of voluntary death, the exe rcise of the will in a struggle with death. Is

suicide always the act of a man whose thought is al ready obscured, whose will is sick? Is it

always an involuntary act? That is what is said by certain psychiatrists who, in any event, do not

know it to be the case; some well-meaning theologia ns think so, in order to cover up the scandal,

and Dostoyevsky, who gives his character the appear ance of madness, also draws back from the

abyss that has been opened up before him by Kirilov . But this is not the important problem: does

Kirilov truly die? Does he prove through his death the possibility which he received in advance

from his death, that power of not being which permi tted him to be himself -- to be, that is, though

freely linked to himself, always other than himself -- the power to act, speak, take risks, and be

without being? Can he maintain even in death this s ense of death, sustain even in death this

-99- active and industrious death which is the power to finish, the power that has its source in the

end? Can he act in such a way that death will still be for him the force of the negative, the cutting

edge of decision, the moment of supreme possibility where even his own impossibility will come

to him in the form of a power? Or, on the contrary, is the experience one of radical reversal,

where he dies but cannot die, where death delivers him to the impossibility of dying?

In this search of his, it is not hi