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 his own decisivene ss that Kirilov is testing, but death as resolution.

He wants to know whether the purity, whether the in tegrity of his act can triumph over the

limitlessness of the indecisive, over the immense i rresolution: over death. He wants to know

whether, by the force of his action, he can render death active and by the affirmation of his

freedom assert himself in death, appropriate it, ma ke it true. In the world he is mortal, but in

death -- in this finish without definition -- does he not risk becoming infinitely mortal? The

question is his task. To answer it is his torment, which drags him toward death, toward the death

he wants to master through the exemplary value of h is own, by making "death understood" its

only content.

Arria

To master death does not simply mean to remain one' s own master in the face of death. That is

the indifferent sovereignty which Stoic serenity ex presses. It is true that when, upon seeing her

husband, Caecina Poetus, hesitate, Arria plunges a dagger into her own breast, draws it back out,

and offers it to him saying, "It is not painful," h er steadiness -- her stiffness -- is impressive.

Restraint is a feature of great and tranquil death scenes which gives pleasure. To die well means

to die with propriety, in conformity with oneself a nd with respect for the living. To die well is to

die in one's own life, turned toward one's life and away from death; and this good death shows

more consideration for the world than regard for th e depth of the abyss. The living appreciate

this reserve, they prefer those who do not abandon themselves. The pleasure we take in a decent

end, our desire to make death humane and proper, to free it from its inhuman quality -- which,

before killing men degrades them through fear and t ransforms them into something repulsively

foreign -- can lead us to praise suicide for doing away with death. This is Nietzsche's position. In

his effort to eliminate the somber importance which Christianity attaches to the last hour, he

regards this final moment as totally insignificant and not even worth a thought: a

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moment which is nothing to us and takes nothing fro m us. "There is nothing more banal than

death." "I am happy to see that men refuse absolute ly to want to think about death!" Kirilov

would also like to say this to us. He himself think s constantly about death, but in order to deliver

us from the thought of it. This is the outermost li mit of the process of humanization; it is

Epicurus's external exhortation: if you are, death is not; if it is, you are not. Stoics want

indifference before death because they want it to b e free of all passion. Thus they attribute

indifference to death; it is an indifferent moment. Ultimately, it is nothing, it is not even the last

moment, which still belongs to life. At this point they have completely vanquished the old enemy

and they can say, "O death, where is thy victory?" They can say this, providing they add, "Where

is thy sting?" For, having freed themselves from de ath, they have in the same stroke deprived

themselves of true life -- the life which "does not shun death or keep clear of destruction, but

endures its death and in death maintains its being. " Hegel called it the life of Mind. It does not suffice, then, to approach the adversary with the strength of a combative mind that

wants to conquer, but from afar and in such a way, apparently, as to prevent death's approach. A

death that is free, useful, and conscious, that is agreeable to the living, in which the dying person

remains true to himself, is a death which has not m et with death. It is a death in which there is

much talk of life, but in it is not heard the unhea rd language from which speech emerges like a

new gift. Those who do not abandon themselves elude thus the absolute abandon. We are spared

the worst, but the essential escapes us.

That is why, with his sense of what is profound and also from the perspective of his theoretical

intentions which were to show that militant atheism was a mad dream, Dostoyevsky did not give

Kirilov an impassive destiny, the cold resolve whic h is the heritage of the ancients. This hero of

certain death is neither indifferent nor master of himself, nor is he certain, and he does not go to

his nullification as toward a pale nothing, purifie d and proportioned to fit him. The fact that his

end is an extraordinary fiasco; that, in killing hi mself, he also kills his companion and double,

with whom he had maintained a sullen silence; that he has for his last interlocutor and finally for

his sole adversary only the most sinister figure, i n whose countenance he can look upon the

failure of his undertaking in all its truth -- thes e circumstances are not simply part of his share of

existence in the world, but emerge from the sordid intimacy of the abyss. We believe, as we die,

that we are engaged in a noble

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combat with God, and finally it is Verkhovensky we meet, a much truer image of that base

power with which one has to compete in bestiality.

We enter thus the greatest contradictions. The deli berateness in suicide, its free and imposing

side, whereby we strive to remain ourselves, serves essentially to protect us from what is at stake

in this event. It would seem that through our effor t to remain ourselves, we elude the essential; it

would seem that we interpose ourselves illegitimate ly between something unbearable and

ourselves, still seeking, in this familiar death th at comes from us, not to meet anyone but

ourselves, our own resolution and our own certitude . Purposeless passion, unreasonable and

vain: this is, on the contrary, what we read upon K leist's face, and it is this which seems to us

imposing -- this passion which seems to reflect the immense passivity of death, which escapes

the logic of decisions, which can perfectly well sp eak but remains secret, mysterious, and

indecipherable because it bears no relation to ligh t. Thus in voluntary death it is still extreme

passivity that we perceive -- the fact that action here is o nly the mask of a fascinated

dispossession. For this point of view, Arria's impa ssivity is no longer the sign of the preservation

of her mastery, but the sign of an absence, of a hi dden disappearance, the shadow of someone

impersonal and neutral. Kirilov's feverishness, his instability, his steps which lead nowhere, do

not signify life's agitation or a still vital force ; they indicate, rather, that he belongs to a space

where no one can rest, and which is in that respect a nocturnal space: no one is welcomed there;

there nothing can abide. Nerval, it is said, wander ed adrift in the streets before hanging himself.

But aimless wandering is already death; it is the m ortal error he must finally interrupt by

immobilizing himself. Hence the hauntingly repetiti ve character of suicidal gestures. He who,

through clumsiness, has missed his own death, is li ke a ghost returning only to continue to fire

upon his own disappearance. He can only kill himsel f over and over. This repetition is as

frivolous as the eternal and as grave as the imagin ary. Thus it is not certain that suicide is an answer to the call of possibility in death. Suicide doubtless

asks life a question -- Is life possible? But it is more essentially a questioning of itself : Is suicide

possible? The psychological contradiction encumberi ng such a project is simply the consequence

of this deeper contradiction. He who kills himself says, "I withdraw from the world, I will act no

longer." And yet this same person wants to make dea th an act; he wants to act supremely and

absolutely. This illogical optimism which shines th rough voluntary death -- this

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confidence that one will always be able to triumph in the end by disposing sovereignly of

nothingness, by being the creator of one's own noth ingness and by remaining able, in the very

midst of the fall, to lift oneself to one's full he ight -- this certitude affirms in the act of suicid e the

very thing suicide claims to deny. That is why he w ho espouses negation cannot allow it to be

incarnated in a final decision which would be exemp t from that negation. The anguish which

opens with such assurance upon nothingness is not e ssential; it has drawn back before the

essential; it does not yet seek anything other than to make of nothingness the road to salvation.

Whoever dwells with negation cannot use it. Whoever belongs to it can no longer, in this

belonging, take leave of himself, for he belongs to the neutrality of absence in which already he

is not himself anymore. This situation is, perhaps, despair -- not what Kierkegaard calls "sickness

unto death," but the sickness in which dying does n ot culminate in death, in which one no longer

keeps up hope for death, in which death is no longe r to come, but is that which comes no longer.

The weakness of suicide lies in the fact that whoev er commits it is still too strong. He is

demonstrating a strength suitable only for a citize n of the world. Whoever kills himself could,

then, go on living: whoever kills himself is linked to hope, the hope of finishing it all, and hope

reveals his desire to begin, to find the beginning again in the end, to inaugurate in that ending a

meaning which, however, he means to challenge by dy ing. Whoever despairs cannot hope to die

either voluntarily or naturally: he has no time, he has no present upon which to brace himself in

order to die. He who kills himself is the great aff irmer of the present. I want to kill myself in an

"absolute" instant, the only one which will not pas s and will not be surpassed. Death, if it arrived

at the time we choose, would be an apotheosis of th e instant ; the instant in it would be that very

flash of brilliance which mystics speak of. And sur ely because of this, suicide retains the power

of an exceptional affirmation. It remains an event which one cannot be content to call voluntary,

an event which one can look neither back upon nor f orward to.

The Strange Project, or Double Death

One cannot "plan" to kill oneself. This apparent pr oject sets out after something never attained,

toward a goal impossible to aim for. I cannot conce ive of the end as an end in itself. But this

implies that death eludes the workday, the time whi ch is nevertheless death made active

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and capable. This is equivalent to thinking that de ath is somehow doubled: there is one death

which circulates in the language of possibility, of liberty, which has for its furthest horizon the

freedom to die and the capacity to take mortal risk s; and there is its double, which is

ungraspable. It is what I cannot grasp, what is not linked to me by any relation of any sort. It is

that which never comes and toward which I do not di rect myself. Thus one begins to understand what is strange and superficial, fascinating and deceptive about

suicide. To kill oneself is to mistake one death fo r the other; it is a sort of bizarre play on words.

I go to meet the death which is in the world, at my disposal, and I think that thereby I can reach

the other death, over which I have no power -- whic h has none over me either, for it has nothing

to do with me, and if I know nothing of it, it know s no more of me; it is the empty intimacy of

this ignorance. That is why suicide remains essenti ally a bet, something hazardous: not because I

leave myself a chance to survive, as sometimes happ ens, but because suicide is a leap. It is the

passage from the certainty of an act that has been planned, consciously decided upon, and

vigorously executed, to something which disorients every project, remains foreign to all

decisions -- the indecisive and uncertain, the crum bling of the inert and the obscurity of the

nontrue. By commiting suicide I want to kill myself at a determined moment. I link death to

now: yes, now, now. But nothing better indicates th e illusion, the madness of this "I want," for

death is never present. There is in suicide a remar kable intention to abolish the future as the

mystery of death: one wants in a sense to kill ones elf so that the future might hold no secrets, but

might become clear and readable, no longer the obsc ure reserve of indecipherable death. Suicide

in this respect does not welcome death; rather, it wishes to eliminate death as future, to relieve

death of that portion of the yetto-come which is, s o to speak, its essence, and to make it

superficial, without substance and without danger. But this tactic is vain. The most minute

precautions, all the most carefully considered and precise arrangements have no power over this

essential indeterminacy -- the fact that death is n ever a relation to a determined moment any

more than it bears any determined relation to mysel f.

One cannot "plan" to kill oneself. One prepares to do so, one acts in view of the ultimate gesture

which still belongs to the normal category of thing s to do, but this gesture does not have death in

view, it does not look at death, it does not keep d eath before it. Hence the attention to minutiae

often symptomatic in those who are about to die -- the

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love for details, the patient, maniacal concern for the most mediocre realities. Other people are

surprised at this, and they say, "When you really w ant to die, you don't think about so many little

things." But the explanation is that you don't want to die, you cannot make of death an object of

the will. You cannot want to die, and the will, arr ested thus at the uncertain threshold of what it

cannot attain, redirects itself, with its calculati ng wisdom, toward everything it still can grasp in

the area around its limit. You think of so many thi ngs because you cannot think of something

else , and this is not for fear of looking into the face of too grave a reality; it is because there is

nothing to see. Whoever wants to die can only want the borders of death, the utilitarian death

which is in the world and which one reaches through the precision of a workman's tools.

Whoever wants to die does not die, he loses the wil l to die. He enters the nocturnal realm of

fascination wherein he dies in a passion bereft of will.

Art, Suicide

What a strange, contradictory undertaking is this e ffort to act where immeasurable passivity

reigns, this striving to maintain the rules, to imp ose measure, and to fix a goal in a movement

that escapes all aims and all resolution. This cont est seems to make death superficial by making

it into an act like any other -- something to do; b ut it also gives the impression of transfiguring

action, as if to reduce death to the level of a pro ject were a unique opportunity to elevate the project toward that which exceeds it. This is madness, but it is madness we could not be spared

without being excluded from the human condition (a humanity that could no longer kill itself

would lose its balance, would cease to be normal). Suicide is an absolute right, the only one

which is not the corollary of a duty, and yet it is a right which no real power reinforces. It would

seem to arch like a delicate and endless bridge whi ch at the decisive moment is cut and becomes

as unreal as a dream, over which nevertheless it is necessary really to pass. Suicide is a right,

then, detached from power and duty, a madness requi red by reasonable integrity and which,

moreover, seems to succeed quite often. It is strik ing that all these traits can be applied equally

well to another experience, one that is apparently less dangerous but perhaps no less mad: the

artist's. Not that the artist makes death his work of art, but it can be said that he is linked to the

work in the same strange way in which the man who t akes death for a goal is linked to death.

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This is evident at first glance. Both the artist an d the suicide plan something that eludes all plans,

and if they do have a path, they have no goal; they do not know what they are doing. Both exert a

resolute will, but both are linked to what they wan t to achieve by a demand that knows nothing

of their will. Both strive toward a point which the y have to approach by means of skill, savoir

faire, effort, the certitudes which the world takes for granted, and yet this point has nothing to do

with such means; it is a stranger to the world, it remains foreign to all achievement and

constantly ruins all deliberate action. How is it p ossible to proceed with a firm step toward that

which will not allow itself to be charted? It seems that both the artist and the suicide succeed in

doing something only by deceiving themselves about what they do. The latter takes one death for

another, the former takes a book for the work. They devote themselves to this misunderstanding

as if blind, but their dim consciousness of it make s of their task a proud bet. For it is as if they

were embarking upon a kind of action which could on ly reach its term at infinity.

This comparison of art to suicide is shocking in a way. But there is nothing surprising about it if,

leaving aside appearances, one understands that eac h of these two movements is testing a

singular form of possibility. Both involve a power that wants to be power even in the region of

the ungraspable, where the domain of goals ends. In both cases an invisible but decisive leap

intervenes: not in the sense that through death we pass into the unknown and that after death we

are delivered to the unfathomable beyond. No, the a ct of dying itself constitutes this leap, the

empty depth of the beyond. It is the fact of dying that includes a radical reversal, through which

the death that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what loosens my hold upon

myself by casting me out of my power to begin and e ven to finish, but also becomes that which

is without any relation to me, without power over m e -- that which is stripped of all possibility --

the unreality of the indefinite. I cannot represent this reversal to myself, I cannot even conceive

of it as definitive. It is not the irreversible ste p beyond which there would be no return, for it is

that which is not accomplished, the interminable an d the incessant.

Suicide is oriented toward this reversal as toward its end. The work seeks this reversal as its

origin. That is a first difference. Suicide, to a c ertain extent, denies the reversal, doesn't take

account of it, and is only "possible" in this refus al. Voluntary death is the refusal to see the other

death, the death one cannot grasp, which one never reaches. It is a kind

-106- of sovereign negligence, an alliance made with visible death in order to exclude the invisible

one, a pact with the good, faithful death which I u se constantly in the world, an effort to expand

its sphere, to make it still viable and true beyond itself, where it is no longer anything but the

other death. The expression "I kill myself" suggest s the doubling which is not taken into account.

For "I" is a self in the plenitude of its action an d resolution, capable of acting sovereignly upon

itself, always strong enough to reach itself with i ts blow. And yet the one who is thus struck is no

longer I, but another, so that when I kill myself, perhaps it is "I" who does the killing, but it is

not done to me. Nor is it my death -- the one I dea lt -- that I have now to die, but rather the death

which I refused, which I neglected, and which is th is very negligence -- perpetual flight and

inertia.

The work wants, so to speak, to install itself, to dwell in this negligence. A call from there

reaches it. That is where, in spite of itself, it i s drawn, by something that puts it absolutely to th e

test. It is attracted by an ordeal in which everyth ing is risked, by an essential risk where being is

at stake, where nothingness slips away, where, that is, the right, the power to die is gambled.

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The Igitur Experience

From this point of view one can sense how it was th at in Mallarmé concern for the work became

confused for a time with the affirmation of suicide . But one also sees how this same concern led

Rilke to seek a relationship with death that would be more "exact" than that of voluntary death.

These two experiences merit reflection.

Mallarmé acknowledged, in a letter to Cazalis ( Nov ember 14, 1896), that Igitur is an

undertaking in which poetry itself is at stake. "It is a tale with which I want to conquer the old

monster Impotence, which is, moreover, its subject, in order to cloister myself in a great labor

already planned and replanned. If it gets finished (the tale), I shall be cured." The great labor was

Hörodiade ,

3 and also poetic work in the largest sense. Igitur is an attempt to make the work

possible by grasping it at the point where what is present is the absence of all power, impotence.

Mallarmé feels deeply here that the state of aridit y which he knows so well is linked to the

work's demand, and is neither simply deprivation of the work nor a psychological state peculiar

to him.

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

make me despair. One is Nothingness . . . . The oth er void which I have found is the one in my

breast." "And now, having reached the horrible visi on of a pure work, I have almost lost my

reason and the meaning of the most familiar words." "Everything which, as a result, my being

has suffered during this long agony is indescribabl e, but fortunately I am perfectly dead. . . .

Which is to convey to you that I am now impersonal, and no longer Stéphane whom you know."

When one recalls these remarks, one cannot doubt th at Igitur was born of the obscure, essentially

hazardous experience into which the

____________________

3Mallarmé may, however, have had another text in min d.

-108- craft of poetry, over the course of years, drew Mallarmé. This risk affects his normal relationship

to the world, his habitual use of language; it dest roys all ideal certainties, deprives the poet of the

physical assurance of living. It exposes him finall y to death -- the death of truth, the death of his

person; it yields him up to the impersonality of de ath.

The Exploration and Purification of Absence

Igitur 's interest does not come directly from the thought which serves as its theme, which is such

that thinking would smother it, and which is simila r in this respect to Hölderlin's. Holderlin's is,

however, richer, more active. He was familiar from youth with Hegel, whereas Mallarmé

received only an impression of Hegelian philosophy. And yet this impression corresponds to the

deep current which drew him, precisely, to the "fri ghtful years." Everything is summed up for

Mallarmé by the relationship among the words thought, absence , language , and death . The

materialist profession of faith ("Yes, I know, we a re but vain forms of matter"), is not Mallarmé's

point of departure. Such a revelation would have ob liged him to reduce thought, God, and all the

other figures of the ideal to nothing. Quite obviou sly it is from this nothing that he starts. He felt

its secret vitality, its force and mystery in his c ontemplation and accomplishment of the poetic

task. His Hegelian vocabulary would merit no attent ion, were it not animated by an authentic

experience, and this experience is that of the powe r of the negative.

One can say that Mallarme saw this nothing in actio n; he experienced the activity of absence. In

absence he grasped a presence, a strength still per sisting, as if in nothingness there were a strange

power of affirmation. All his remarks on language t end to acknowledge the word's ability to

make things absent, to evoke them in this absence, and then to remain faithful to this value of

absence, realizing it completely in a supreme and s ilent disappearance. In fact, the problem for

Mallarmé is not to escape from the real in which he feels trapped, according to a still generally

accepted interpretation of the sonnet on the swan. The true search and the drama take place in the

other sphere, the one in which pure absence affirms itself and where, in so doing, it eludes itself,

causing itself still to be present. It subsists as the dissimulated presence of being, and in this

dissimulation it persists as chance which cannot be abolished. And yet this is where everything is

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stake, for the work is possible only if absence is pure and perfect, only if, in the presence of

Midnight, the dice can be thrown. There alone the w ork's origin speaks; there it begins, it finds

there the force of the beginning.

More precisely: the greatest difficulty does not co me from the pressure of beings, from what we

call their reality, their persistent affirmation, w hose action can never be altogether suspended. It

is in unreality itself that the poet encounters the resistance of a muffled presence. It is unreality

from which he cannot free himself; it is in unreali ty that, disengaged from beings, he meets with

the mystery of "those very words: it is." And this is not because in the unreal something subsists

-- not because the rejection of real things was ins ufficient and the work of negation brought to a

halt too soon -- but because when there is nothing, it is this nothing itself which can no longer be

negated. It affirms, keeps on affirming, and it sta tes nothingness as being, the inertia of being.

This is the situation which would form the subject of Igitur , were it not necessary to add that the

narrative avoids this situation, seeking to surmoun t it by putting a term to it. These are pages in which some readers have thought they recognized the somber hues of despair. But actually they

carry a youthful expression of great hope. For if Igitur were to be right -- if death is true, if it is a

genuine act, not a random occurrence but the suprem e possibility, the extreme moment in which

negation is founded and completed -- then the negat ion that operates in words, and "this drop of

nothingness" which is the presence of consciousness in us, the death from which we derive the

power not to be which is our essence, also partake of truth. They bear witness to something

definitive; they function to "set a limit upon the infinite." And so the work which is linked to the

purity of negation can in its turn arise in the cer tainty of that distant Orient which is its origin.

The Three Movements toward Death.

Igitur is thus not only an exploration but a purification of absence -- it is an attempt to make

absence possible and to glean possibility from it. The whole interest of this narrative lies in the

way three movements are accomplished together. To a certain extent they are distinct from each

other, and yet they are so closely linked that thei r interdependence remains hidden. All three

movements are necessary to reach death; but which c ontrols the others, which is the most

important? The act by which the hero leaves the cha mber, descends the staircase

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drinks the poison, and enters the tomb apparently c onstitutes the initial decision, the "deed"

which alone gives reality to absence and authentica tes nothingness. But in fact this is not the

case. This accomplishment is only an insignificant moment. What is done must first be dreamed,

thought, grasped in advance by the mind, not in a m oment of psychological contemplation, but

through an actual movement -- a lucid effort on the part of the mind to advance outside of itself,

to see itself disappear and to appear to itself in the mirage of this disappearance, to gather itself

all up into this essential death which is the life of the consciousness and, out of all the various

acts of death through which we are, to form the uni que act of the death to come which thought

reaches at the same time that it reaches, and there by liquidates, itself.

Here voluntary death is no longer anything but a dy ing in spirit, which seems to restore to the act

of dying its pure, inward dignity -- but not accord ing to the ideal of Jean-Paul Richter, whose

heroes, "lofty men," die in a pure desire to die, " their eyes gazing steadfastly beyond the clouds"

in response to the call of a dream which disembodie s and dissolves them. The idea of suicide

found in Igitur is more akin to what Novalis means when he makes s uicide "the principle of his

entire philosophy." "The truly philosophical act is suicide; the real beginning of all philosophy

lies in it; all the philosopher's desires tend towa rd it. Only this act fulfills all the conditions and

bears all the marks of a trans-worldly action." Yet these last words indicate a horizon unknown

to Igitur . Novalis, like most of the German Romantics, seeks in death a further region beyond

death, something more than death, a return to the t ransfigured whole -- in that night, for example,

which is not night but the peaceful oneness of day and night. Moreover, in Novalis the

movement toward death is a concentration of the wil l, an affirmation of its magical force, an

energetic expenditure or yet again an unruly affect ion for the remote. But Igitur does not seek to

surpass itself or to discover, through this volunta ry move, a new point of view on the other side

of life. It dies by the spirit -- through the spiri t's very development, through its presence to itsel f,

to its own profound, beating heart, which is precis ely absence, the intimacy of absence, night.

Midnight Night: here is where the true profundity of Igitur is to be felt, and it is here that we can find the

third movement, which, perhaps, commands the two ot hers. If the narrative begins with the

episode called

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"Midnight" -- with the evocation of that pure prese nce where nothing but the subsistence of

nothing subsists -- this is certainly not in order to offer us a choice literary passage, nor is it, as

some have claimed, in order to set the scene for th e action: the empty chamber and its lavish

furnishings enveloped, however, in shadows, the ima ge of which is, in Mallarmé, something like

the original medium of poetry. This "décor" is in r eality the center of the narration whose true

hero is Midnight and whose action is the ebb and fl ow of Midnight.

The story begins with the end, and that is what for ms its troubling truth. With the very first

words, the chamber is empty, as if everything were already accomplished, the poison drunk, the

vial emptied, and the "lamentable personage" laid o ut upon his own ashes. Midnight is here; the

hour when the cast dice have absolved all movement is here; night has been restored to itself,

absence is complete, and silence pure. Thus everyth ing has come to an end. Everything the end

must make manifest, all that Igitur seeks to create by means of his death -- the solitude of

darkness, the deep of disappearance -- is given in advance, and seems the condition for this

death: its anticipated appearance, its eternal imag e. A strange reversal. It is not the youth who, by

disappearing into death, institutes disappearance a nd therein establishes the night. It is the

absolute presence of this disappearance, its dark g listening, which alone permits him to die. It

alone introduces him to his mortal decision and act . It is as though death had first to be

anonymous in order to occur with certainty in someo ne's name, or as if, before being my death, a

personal act in which my person deliberately comes to an end, death had to be the neutrality and

impersonality in which nothing is accomplished, the empty omnipotence which consumes itself

eternally.

We are now a long way away from that voluntary deat h which the final episode let us see.

Drawing back from the precise action which consists in emptying the vial, we have returned to a

thought, the ideal act, already impersonal, where t hinking and dying explored each other in their

reciprocal truth and their hidden identity. But now we find ourselves before the immense

passivity which, in advance, dissolves all action, even the action by which Igitur wants to die, the

momentary master of chance. It seems that three fig ures of death confront each other here in a

motionless simultaneity. All three are necessary fo r death's accomplishment, and the most secret

is apparently the substance of absence, the deep of the void created when one dies, the eternal

outside -- a space formed by my death and yet whose approach is alone what makes me die.

From such a perspective the event could

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never happen (death could never become an event): t hat is what is inscribed in this prerequisite

night. The situation could also be expressed as fol lows: in order for the hero to be able to leave

the chamber and for the final chapter, "Leaving the Chamber," to be written, it is necessary that

the chamber already be empty and that the word to b e written have returned forever into silence.

And this is not a difficulty in logic. This contrad iction expresses everything that makes both

death and the work difficult. One and the other are somehow unapproachable, as Mallarmé said in notes that seem, precisely, to concern Igitur: "The Drama is only insoluble because

unapproachable." And he comments further in the sam e passage: "The Drama is caused by the

Mystery of what follows -- Identity (Idea) Self -- of the Theater and the Hero through the Hymn.

Operation . -- the Hero disengages -- the (maternal) hymn whi ch creates him, and he restores

himself to the Theater which it was -- of the Myste ry where this hymn was hidden." If the

"Theater" here means Midnight's space, a moment whi ch is a place, then theater and hero are

indeed identical, through the hymn which is death b ecome word. How can Igitur "disengage" this

death my making it become song and hymn, and thereb y restore himself to the theater, to the

pure subsistence of Midnight where death was hidden ? That is the "operation." It is an end which

can only be a return to the beginning, as the last words of the narrative say: "Nothingness having

departed, there remains the Castle of purity," that empty chamber in which everything persists.

The "Act of Night"

The way Mallarmé nevertheless tries to approach the drama, in order to find a solution to it, is

very revealing. Among night, the hero's thoughts, a nd his real acts, or, in other words, among

absence, the thought of this absence, and the act b y which it is realized, an exchange is

established, a reciprocity of movements. First we s ee that this Midnight, eternal beginning and

eternal end, is not so immobile as one might think. "Certainly a presence of Midnight subsists."

But this subsisting presence is not a presence. Thi s substantial present is the negation of the

present. It is a vanished present. And Midnight, wh ere first "the absolute present of things" (their

unreal essence) gathered itself together, becomes " the pure dream of a Midnight vanished into

itself": it is no longer a present, but the past, s ymbolized, as is the end of history in Hegel, by a

book lying open upon the table, "page and usual déc or of Night." Night is the book: the silence

and inaction of a

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book when, after everything has been proffered, eve rything returns into the silence that alone

speaks -- that speaks from the depth of the past an d is at the same time the whole future of the

word. For present Midnight, that hour at which the present lacks absolutely, is also the hour in

which the past touches and, without the intervention of any timely act whatever , immediately

attains the future at its most extreme. And such, w e have seen, is the very instant of death, which

is never present, which is the celebration of the a bsolute future, the instant at which one might

say that, in a time without present, what has been will be. This is announced to us in two famous

sentences of Igitur. "I was the hour which is to make me pure"; and, more exac tly, in Midnight's

farewell to night -- a farewell which can never end because it never takes place now, because it is

present only in night's eternal absence: "Adieu, ni ght, that I was, your own tomb, but which,

surviving shade, will change into Eternity."

However, this structure of Night has already given us back a movement: its immobility is

constituted by this call of the past to the future, the muffled scansion by which what has been

affirms its identity with what will be beyond the w recked and sunken present, the abyss of the

present. With this "double beat," the night stirs, it acts, it becomes an act, and this act opens the

gleaming doors of the tomb, creating the solution w hich makes the "exit from the chamber"

possible.

5 Here Mallarmé discovers the motionless sliding whic h causes things to move forward

at the heart of their eternal annulment. There is a n imperceptible exchange among the inner

oscillation of the night, the pulse of the clock, t he back and forth of the doors of the open tomb, the back and forth of consciousness which returns to and goes out from itself, which divides and

escapes from itself, wandering distantly from itsel f with a rustling of nocturnal wings, a phantom

already confused with the ghosts of those who have already died. This "rhythm," in all these

forms, is the movement of a disappearance, the move ment of return to the heart of disappearance

-- a "faltering beat," however, which bit by bit af firms itself, takes on body, and finally becomes

the living heart of Igitur, that heart whose too lu cid certainty then "troubles" him and summons

him to the real act of death. Thus we have come fro m the most interior to the most exterior.

Indefinite absence, immutable and sterile, has impe rceptibly transformed itself. It has taken on

the look

____________________

4In his essay on Mallarmé ( The Interior Distance ), Georges Poulet is right to say that this hour

can "never be expressed by a present, always by a p ast or a future." 5"The hour formulates itself in this echo, at the threshold of the open doors by its act of night."

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and the form of this youth, and having become real in him, it finds in this reality the means of

realizing the decision that annihilates him. Thus n ight, which is Igitur's intimacy, the pulsating

death which is the heart of each of us, must become life itself, the sure heart of life, so that death

may ensue, so that death may for an instant let its elf be grasped, identified--in order that death

might become the death of an identity which has dec ided it and willed it.

The earlier versions of Mallarmé's narrative show t hat in the death and the suicide of Igitur he

initially saw the death and the purification of nig ht. In these pages (in particular in scholium d), it

is no longer either Igitur or his consciousness tha t acts and keeps watch, but night itself, and all

the events are lived by the night. The heart which, in the definitive text, Igitur recognizes as his

own--"I hear the pulsating of my own heart. I do no t like this noise: this perfection of my

certitude troubles me; everything is too clear" -- this heart, then, is, in the earlier versions, the

night's heart: "Everything was perfect; night was p ure Night, and it heard its own heart beat. Still,

this heart troubled it, gave it the disquietude of too much certainty, of a proof too self-confident.

Night wanted in its turn to plunge back into the da rkness of its unique tomb and to abjure the

idea of its form." The night is Igitur, and Igitur is that portion of night which the night must

"reduce to the state of darkness" in order to becom e again the liberty of night.

The Igitur Catastrophe

It is significant that, in the most recent version, Mallarmé modified the whole perspective of the

work by making it Igitur's monologue. Although in t his prolongation of Hamlet's soliloquy there

is no very ringing affirmation of the first person, that wan "I" which from moment to moment

presents itself behind the text and supports its di ction is clearly perceptible. In this way,

everything changes. On account of this voice which speaks, it is no longer night that speaks, but

a voice that is still very personal, no matter how transparent it makes itself; and where we

thought we were in the presence of the secret of Mi dnight, the pure destiny of absence, we now

have only the speaking presence, the rarefied but c ertain evidence of a consciousness which, in

the night which has become its mirror, still contem plates only itself. That is remarkable. It is as

though Mallarmé had drawn back before what he will call, in Un Coup de dés , "the identical

neutrality of the abyss." He seemed to do justice t o the night, but it is to consciousness

-115- that he delegates all rights. Yes it is as though he had feared to see everything dissipate, "waver,

subside, madness," if he did not introduce, surrept itiously, a living mind which, from behind,

could still sustain the absolute nullity that he cl aimed to evoke. Whoever wishes to speak of a

"catastrophe" in Igitur might well find it here. Igitur does not leave the chamber: the empty

chamber is simply he -- he who merely goes on speak ing of the empty chamber and who, to

make it absent, has only his word, founded by no mo re original absence. And if, in order to

accede sovereignly to death, it is truly necessary that he expose himself to the presence of

sovereign death -- that pure medium of a Midnight w hich "crosses him out" and obliterates him -

- this confrontation, this decisive test is missed, for it takes place under the protection of

consciousness, with its guarantee, and without cons ciousness's running any risk.

Finally there remains only the act in the obscurity of its resolve: the vial that is emptied, the drop

of nothingness that is drunk. Granted, this act is imbued with consciousness, but its having been

decided upon does not suffice to make it decisive; it bears in itself the cloudiness of the decision.

Igitur ends his monologue rather feebly with these words, "The hour has struck for me to depart,"

in which we see that everything remains to be done. He has not taken so much as one step toward

the "therefore" which his name represents -- that c onclusion of himself which he wants to draw

from himself, believing that solely by virtue of un derstanding it, knowing it in its quality as

chance, he can rise to the level of necessity and a nnul his end as chance by adjusting himself

precisely to that nullity. But how could Igitur kno w chance? Chance is the night he has avoided,

in which he has contemplated only proof of himself and his constant certitude. Chance is death,

and the dice according to which one dies are cast b y chance; they signify only the utterly

hazardous movement which reintroduces us within cha nce. Is it at Midnight that "the dice must

be cast"? But Midnight is precisely the hour that d oes not strike until after the dice are thrown,

the hour which has never yet come, which never come s, the pure, ungraspable future, the hour

eternally past. Nietzsche had already come up again st the same contradiction when he said, "Die

at the right time." That right moment which alone w ill balance our life by placing opposite it on

the scales a sovereignly balanced death can be gras ped only as the unknowable secret: only as

that which could never be elucidated unless, alread y dead, we could look at ourselves from a

point from which it would be granted us to embrace as a whole both our life and our death -- the

point which is perhaps the truth of the night from which Igitur would like, precisely, to take his

leave, in order to render his

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leave-taking possible and correct, but which he red uces to the poverty of a reflection. "Die at the

right time." But death's rightful quality is improp riety, inaccuracy -- the fact that it comes either

too soon or too late, prematurely and as if after t he fact, never coming until after its arrival. It is

the abyss of present time, the reign of a time with out a present, without that exactly positioned

point which is the unstable balance of the instant whereby everything finds its level upon a single

plane.

Un Coup de dés

Is Un Coup de dés the recognition of such a failure? Is it the renun ciation of the wish -- to master

the measurelessness of chance through a sovereignly measured death? Perhaps. But this cannot

be said with certainty. Rather, it is Igitur, a work not simply unfinished but left dangling, t hat

announces this failure -- announces it by being thu s forsaken. And thereby it recovers its meaning. It escapes the naïveté of a successful undertaking to become the force and the

obsession of the interminable. For thirty years Igitur accompanied Mallarmé, just as all his life

the hope of the "great Work" kept its vigil by his side. He evoked this Work mysteriously before

his friends, and he eventually made its realization credible even in his own eyes and even, for a

time, in the eyes of the man who had the least conf idence in the impossible, Valéry -- Valéry

who, startled by his own credence, never recovered from this hurt, so to speak, but hid it beneath

the demands of a contrary commitment.

Un Coup de dés is not Igitur, although it resurrects almost all of Igitur's elements. It is not Igitur

reversed, the challenge abandoned, the dream defeat ed, hope changed to resignation. Such

comparisons would be worthless. Un Coup de dés does not answer Igitur as one sentence

answers another, as a solution answers a problem. T hat reverberating proclamation itself -- A

THROW OF THE DICE NEVER WILL ABOLISH CHANCE -- the force of its affirmation, the

peremptory brilliance of its certitude, which makes it an authoritative presence holding the whole

work together physically -- this lightning which se ems to fall upon the mad faith of Igitur in

order to destroy and consume it, does not contradic t Igitur , but on the contrary gives it its last

chance, which is not to annul chance, even by an ac t of mortal negation, but to abandon itself

entirely to chance, to consecrate chance by enterin g without reserve into its intimacy, with the

abandon of impotence, " without the ship that is vain no matter where ." In an artist so fascinated

by the desire for mastery, nothing is more impressi ve than that final phase in

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which the work shines suddenly above him, no longer necessary but as a "perhaps" of pure

chance, in the uncertainty of "the exception," not necessary but the absolutely unnecessary, a

constellation of doubt which only shines in the for gotten sky of perdition. The night of Igitur has

become the sea, " the gaping deep," "the identical neutrality of the abyss ," "a whirlpool of hilarity

and horror ." But Igitur was still searching only for himself in the night, and he wanted to die in

the heart of his thought. To make impotence a power -- these were the stakes; this has been

conveyed to us. In Un Coup de dés, the youth, who has matured, however, who is now " the

Master," the man of sovereign mastery, does perhaps hold the successful throw of the dice in his

hand, " the unique Number which does not want to be another "; but he does not take his unique

chance to master chance any more than a man who alw ays holds in his hand the supreme power,

the power to die, can exercise that power. He dies outside this power, "cadaver pulled away by

the arm from the secret he holds ." This massive image rejects the challenge of volu ntary death,

where the hand holds the secret by which we are cas t out of the secret. And this chance which is

not taken, which remains idle, is not even a sign o f wisdom, the fruit of a carefully considered

and resolute abstention. It is itself something ran dom, linked to the happenstance of old age and

its incapacities, as if impotence had to appear to us in its most devastated form, where it is

nothing but misery and abandon, the ludicrous futur e of an extremely old man whose death is

only useless inertia. " A shipwreck that." But what happens in this shipwreck? Can the supr eme

conjunction, the game which in the fact of dying is played not against or with chance, but in its

intimacy, in that region where nothing can be grasp ed -- can this relation to impossibility still

prolong itself? Can it give rise to an " as if" with which the dizziness of the work would be

suggested -- a delirium contained by " a small rigorous reason," a sort of "worried" "laughter ,"

" mute " and " expiatory "? To this no answer is offered, no other certainty than the concentration of chance, its stellar glorification, its elevation to the point where its rupture "rains down absence,"

" some last point which sanctifies it ."

"If it gets finished (the tale), I shall be cured." This hope is touching in its simplicity. But the t ale

was not finished. Impotence -- that abandon in whic h the work holds us and where it requires

that we descend in the concern for its approach -- knows no cure. That death is incurable. The

absence that Mallarmé hoped to render pure is not p ure. The night

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is not perfect, it does not welcome, it does not op en. It is not the opposite of day -- silence,

repose, the cessation of tasks. In the night, silen ce is speech, and there is no repose, for there is

no position. There the incessant and the uninterrup ted reign -- not the certainty of death

achieved, but "the eternal torments of Dying."

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Rilke and Death's Demand

When Rilke, in order to live up to his poet's desti ny, does his best to accommodate that greater

dimension of himself which must not exclude what he becomes by dying, he cannot be said to

recoil from the difficult sides of the experience. He faces what he calls the horror. It is most

terrible. It is too great a force for us: it is our own force which outdoes us [nous dépasse] and

which we do not recognize. But, for that reason, we must draw it toward us, bring it close, and in

it bring ourselves close to what is close to it.

Sometimes he speaks of overcoming death. The word overcome is one of the words poetry

needs. To overcome means to outdo [ dépasser], but to outdo what outdoes us by undergoing it,

without turning away from it or aiming at anything beyond. Perhaps it is in this sense that

Nietzsche intends Zarathustra's formula: "Man is so mething that must be overcome." It is not

that man must attain something beyond man; he has n othing to attain, and if he is what exceeds

him, this excess is not anything he can possess, or be. To overcome , then, is also very different

from to master . One of the errors of voluntary death lies in the desire to be master of one's end

and to impose one's form and limit even upon this l ast movement. Such is the challenge of Igitur:

to assign a limit to chance, to die centered within oneself in the transparency of an event which

one has made equal to oneself, which one has annihi lated and by which, thus, one can be

annihilated without violence. Suicide remains linke d to this wish to die by doing without death

[ en se passant de la mort ].

When Rilke contemplates the suicide of the young Co unt Wolf Kalckreuth -- and his

contemplation takes the form of a poem -- what he c annot accept is the impatience and the

inattention which this form of death shows. Inatten tion is an offense against a certain profound

maturity which

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is the opposite of the modern world's brutal agitat ion -- that officiousness which hurries to action

and bustles about in the empty urgency of things to do. Impatience is also an offense against

suffering: by refusing to suffer the frightful, by eluding the unbearable, one eludes the moment when everything reverses and the greatest danger becomes the essential security. The impatience

in voluntary death is this refusal to wait to reach the pure center where we would find our

bearings again in that which exceeds us.

Why did you not wait until the burden became unbear able: then it reverses itself and is only so

heavy because it is so pure.

Thus we see that too prompt a death is like a child 's caprice, a failure in attentiveness, a gesture

of inattention which leaves us strangers to our end -- leaves us to die, despite the resolute

character of the event, in a state of distraction a nd impropriety. He who too willingly dies -- that

too passionately mortal being, man, who with all hi s might wants to cease living -- is as if

whisked from death by the violence of the élan that tears him from life. One must not desire to

die too much; one must not obfuscate death by casti ng the shadow of an excessive desire upon it.

Perhaps there are two distracted deaths: the one in which we have not matured, which does not

belong to us, and the one which has not matured in us and which we have acquired by violence.

In both cases -- on the one hand because death is n ot our own, and on the other because it is more

our desire than our death -- we might well fear per ishing for lack of death by succumbing in the

ultimate state of inattention.

1. The Search for a Proper Death

It seems, then, that outside all religious or moral systems, one is led to wonder whether there are

not a good and a bad death: a possibility of dying authentically, on good terms with death, and

also a danger of dying badly, as if inadvertently, an inessential and false death -- a danger so

great that all of life could depend upon this legit imate relation to death, this clear-sighted gaze

directed toward the profundity of an exact

____________________

6[In translating Blanchot's quotations from Rilke's poems, I have consulted J. B. Leishman's

English verse translations of the original texts, Selected Works ( New York: New Directions,

1967), vol. 1; but my English seeks to be as close as possible to Blanchot's French version of

Rilke -- Trans.]

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death. When one reflects upon this concern that dea th be valid, and this need to link the word

death with the word authenticity--a need which Rilke lived intensely in several for ms--one sees

that for him it had a double origin.

A. To Die Faithful to Onself

O Lord, grant to each his own death, the dying whic h truly evolves from this life in which he

found love, meaning and distress.

This wish is rooted in a form of individualism whic h belongs to the end of the nineteenth century

and which was endowed with its noble pride by a nar rowly interpreted Nietzsche. Nietzsche too

wishes to die his own death. Hence the excellence w hich sees in voluntary death. "He dies his

death, victorious, who accomplishes it himself." "B ut detestable . . . is your grimacing death,

which advances in its belly like a thief." "If not, your death will suit you ill." To die an individua l

death, still oneself at the very last, to be an ind ividual right up to the end, unique and undivided:

this is the hard, central kernel which does not wan t to let itself be broken. One wants to die, but in one's own time and one's own way. One doesn't want to die just anybody's undistinguished

death. Contempt for anonymous death, for the "They die," is the disguised anguish to which the

anonymous character of death gives rise. Or again, one is glad to die: it is noble to die, but not to

decease.

The Anguish of Anonymous Death

Contempt plays no part in Rilke's discreet and sile nt intimacy. But the anguish of anonymous

death confirmed him in the concern which the views of Simmel, Jacobsen, and Kierkegaard had

first awakened in him. Malte gave this anguish a form which we would not able t o separate from

that book if our era not, at closer range, contempl ated impersonal death and the particular look it

gives men. In fact, Malte's anguish has more than a little to do with the anonymous existence of

big cities--to that distress which makes vagrants o f some, men fallen out of themselves and out

of the world, already dead of an unwitting death ne ver to be achieved. Such is the true

perspective of this book: the apprenticeship of exi le, proximity to error which takes the concrete

form of the vagabond existence into which the young

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foreigner slips, banished from his station in life, cast into the insecurity of a space where he

cannot live or die "himself."

This fear which arises in Malte, which leads him to discover "the existence of the terrible" in

every particle of air -- this anguish born of oppre ssive strangeness, when all protective security is

gone and suddenly the idea of a human nature, of a human world in which we could take shelter

collapses: Rilke confronted it lucidly and endured it bravely. He stayed in Paris, in that town too

big and "full to the brim with sadness," stayed the re "precisely because it is difficult." He saw

there the decisive test, the one which transforms a nd teaches to see, a starting point for "a

beginner learning the conditions of his own life." "If one manages to work here, one advances far

in profundity." Nevertheless, when he tries to give form to this test in the third part of the Book

of Hours , why does he seem to turn away from death as he sa w it, the frightful approach of an

empty mask, and replace it with the hope for anothe r death, which would be neither foreign nor

heavy? Doesn't this faith which he expresses -- thi s thought that one can die greeted by a death of

one's own, familiar and amicable -- mark the point at which he eluded the experience by

enveloping himself in a hope meant to console his h eart? One can't fail to recognize this backing

off. But there is something else as well. Malte doe s not encounter anguish only in its pure form

of the terrible; he also discovers the terrible in the form of the absence of anguish, daily

insignificance. Nietzsche had seen this too, but he accepted it as a challenge: "There is nothing

more banal than death." Death as banality, death de grading itself and becoming a vulgar nullity:

that is what made Rilke back away. He shrank from t he moment when death reveals itself as it

also is, when dying and killing have no more import ance than "taking a drink of water of cutting

the head of a cabbage." Mass-produced death, ready- made in bulk for all and in which each

disappears hastily; death as an anonymous product, an object without value, like the things of the

modern world which Rilke always rejected: if only f rom these comparisons one sees how he

slips from death's essential neutrality to the idea that this neutrality is but an historical and

temporary form of death, the sterile death of big c ities.

7 Sometimes, when fear seizes him, he

cannot avoid hearing the anonymous hum of "dying" w hich is by no means the fault of the times

or ____________________ 7"It is evident that with accelerated production, each individual death is not so well executed,

but that doesn't matter much anyway. It's the quant ity that counts. Who still attaches any

importance to a well-wrought death? No one. Even ri ch people, who can pay for luxury, have

ceased to care about it; the desire to have one's o wn death

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people's negligence. In all times we all die like t he flies that autumn forces indoors, into rooms

where they circle blindly in an immobile dizziness, suddenly dotting the walls with their

mindless death. But, the fear past, Rilke reassures himself by evoking the happier world of

another time, and that nil death which made him shu dder seems to him to reveal only the

indigence of an era devoted to haste and idle amuse ment.

When I think back to my home (where there is nobody left now), it always seems to me that

formerly it must have been otherwise. Formerly one knew -- or maybe one guessed -- that one

had one's death within one, as the fruit its core. Children had a little one, adults a big one.

Women carried it in their womb, men in their breast . They truly had their death, and that

awareness gave dignity, a quiet pride.

And so the image of a loftier death arises in Rilke , that of the Chamberlain, where death's

sovereignty, at the same time that it exceeds our h abitual human perspectives with its

monumental omnipotence, retains at least the featur es of an aristocratic superiority, which one

fears, but which one can admire.

The Task of Dying and the Artistic Task

In this terror before mass-produced death there is the sadness of the artist who honors well-

wrought things, who wants to make a work and make o f death his work. Death is thus from the

start linked to the movement, so difficult to bring to light, of the artistic experience. This does

not mean that, like the much-admired personalities of the Renaissance, we are to be artists of

ourselves, to make of our life and of our death an art, and of art a sumptuous affirmation of our

person. Rilke enjoys neither the tranquil innocence of this pride nor its naïveté. He is sure neither

of himself nor of the work, since he lives in a cri tical period which obliges art to feel unjustified.

Art is perhaps a road toward ourselves -- Rilke is the first to think so -- and perhaps also toward a

death which would be ours. But where is art? The ro ad that leads to it is

____________________ is becoming more and more rare. Shortly it will be as rare as a life of one's own" ( The

Notebooks of M.-L. Brigge ). [In translating Blanchot's quotations from this book, I have been

guided by Herter Norton M. D. English translation o f the original, The Notebooks of Malte

Laurids Brigge ( New York: Norton Press, 1949) -- Trans.]

-124-

unknown. Granted, the work demands effort, applicat ion, knowledge; but all these forms of

aptitude are plunged in an immense ignorance. The w ork always means: not knowing that art

exists already, not knowing that there is already a world.

The search for a death that would be mine sheds lig ht, thanks to the obscurity of its paths, upon

precisely what is difficult in artistic "realizatio n." When one considers the images that serve to sustain Rilke's thought (death "ripens" in our very heart; it is the "fruit," the sweet, obscure fruit,

or else a fruit still "green," without sweetness, w hich we, "leaves and bark," must bear and

nourish),

8 one sees clearly that he seeks to make of our end s omething other than an accident

which would arrive from outside to terminate us has tily. Death must exist for me not only at the

very last moment, but as soon as I begin to live an d in life's intimacy and profundity. Death

would thus be part of existence, it would draw life from mine, deep within. It would be made of

me and, perhaps, for me, as a child is the child of its mother. These are images which Rilke also

uses frequently: we engender our death, or else we bring our death into the world dead, a

stillborn child. And he prays:

And grant us now (after all women's pains) the seri ous motherhood of men.

These are grave and troubling figures which, howeve r, keep their secret. Rilke appeals to the

image of vegetable or organic maturation only in or der to turn us toward what we prefer to stay

clear of -- in order to show us that death has a ki nd of existence, and to train our attention upon

this existence, awaken our concern. Death exists, b ut what form of existence does it have? What

relation does this image establish between him who lives and the fact of dying? One might

believe in a natural link; one might think, for exa mple, that I produce my death as the body

produces cancer. But that is not the case: despite the biological reality of the event, one must

always reflect, beyond the organic phenomenon, upon death's being. One never dies simply of an

____________________

In there is Death. Not the one whose voice

Wonderfully greeted them in their childhood,

but the little death as it is understood in there,

while their own end hangs in them like a

sour, green fruit, which doesn't ripen . . . .

For we are only the leaf and the bark.

The great death which each bears in himself

is the fruit around which all revolves.

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illness, but of one's death, and that is why Rilke shied so stubbornly from learning of what he

was dying: he did not want to put between himself a nd his end the mediation of any general

knowledge.

My intimacy with my death seems, then, unapproachab le. It is not within me like the vigilance of

the species or like a vital necessity which over an d above my person would affirm the larger

view of nature. All such naturalistic conceptions a re foreign to Rilke. I remain responsible for

this intimacy which I cannot approach. I can, accor ding to an obscure choice incumbent upon

me, die of the great death which I bear within me, but also of that little death, sour and green,

which I have been unable to make into a lovely frui t, or yet again of a borrowed, random death:

. . . it's not our death, but one that takes us in the end only because we have not ripened our own.

This foreign death makes us die in the distress of estrangement. My death must become always more inward. It must be like my invisible form, my gesture, the

silence of my most hidden secret. There is somethin g I must do to accomplish it; indeed,

everything remains for me to do: it must be my work . But this work is beyond me, it is that part

of me upon which I shed no light, which I do not at tain and of which I am not master. Sometimes

Rilke, in his respect for thoughtful effort and tas ks carefully done, says of such a death:

. . . it was a death which good work

had profoundly formed, this proper death

which has so great a need of us because we live it,

and to which we are never nearer than here.

Death would seem, then, to be the dearth which we m ust generously fill, essential poverty which

resembles that of God, "the absolute want that want s our aid," and which is terrifying only

because of the distress that separates it from us. To sustain, to fashion our nothingness -- such is

the task. We must be the figurers and the poets of our death.

Patience

Such is the task: it invites us once more to associ ate poetic labors and the effort we must put into

dying, but it clarifies neither one nor the other. The impression of a singular activity, scarcely

graspable, essentially different from what is ordin arily called acting and doing, alone persists.

The image of the fruit's slow maturation, the invis ible

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growth of that other fruit, the child, suggest the idea of unhurried efforts, where relations with

time are profoundly changed, as are relations with our will which projects and produces.

Although the perspective is different, we find agai n here the same condemnation of impatience

which we have recognized in Kafka: the feeling that the shortest road is an offense against the

indefinite if it leads us toward what we want to re ach without making us reach what exceeds all

will.

9 Time as it is expressed in our habitual activities is time that decides, that negates; it is the

hasty movement between points that must not retain it. Patience tells another time, another sort

of task whose end one doesn't see, which assigns us no goal we can steadfastly pursue. Here

patience is essential because impatience is inevita ble in this space (the space of death's approach

and of the work's), where there are neither milesto nes nor forms, where one has to suffer the

unruly call of the remote. Impatience is inevitable and necessary. Were we not impatient, we

would have no right to patience; we would not know that great appeasement which in the

greatest tension no longer tends toward anything. P atience is the endurance of impatience, its

acceptance and welcome, the accord which wants stil l to persist in the most extreme confusion.

This patience, though it separates us from all form s of daily activity, is not inactive. But its

procedure is mysterious. The task of forming our de ath leaves us to guess: it seems that we are to

do something which, however, we cannot do, which do es not depend upon us, but we upon it,

upon which we do not even depend, for it escapes us and we escape it. To say that Rilke affirms

the immanence of death in life is no doubt to speak correctly, but it is also to construe only one

side of his

____________________

10If one compared this patience to the dangerous mobi lity of Romantic thought, patience would appear as its intimacy, but also as the inner pause, the expiation at the very heart of the fault

(although in Rilke, patience often signifies a humb ler attitude, a return to the silent tranquility

of things as opposed to the feverishness of tasks, or yet again, as obedience to the fall which,

drawing a thing toward the center of gravity of pur e forces, makes it come to rest and rest

itself in its immobile plenitude).

9Van Gogh constantly appeals to patience: "What is it to draw? How does one com e to do it? It

is the action of making one's way through an invisible iron wall which seems to be between

what one feels and what one is capable of. How is one to get through this wall, for it is no use

beating on it, one must undermine it and file one's way through slowly and patiently in my

judgment."

"I am not an artist -- how imprecise -- even to thi nk this of oneself -- how could one not have

patience, not learn from nature to have patience, h ave patience by seeing the wheat silently

rise, things grow -- how could one judge oneself to be a thing so absolutely dead as to think

that one can no longer even grow. . . . I say this to show how stupid I find it to speak of artists'

being gifted or not."

-127-

thought. This immanence is not given; it is to be a chieved. It is our task, and such a task consists

not only in humanizing or in mastering the foreignn ess of our death by a patient act, but in

respecting its "transcendence." We must understand in it the absolutely foreign, obey what

exceeds us, and be faithful to what excludes us. Wh at must one do to die without betraying this

high power, death? There is, then, a double task: I must die a death which does not betray me,

and I myself must die without betraying the truth a nd the essence of death.

B. To Die Faithful to Death

It is at this juncture that we come back to the oth er requirement at the origin of Rilke's image of

personal death. The anguish of anonymous death, the anguish of the "They die" and the hope for

an "I die" in which individualism retrenches, tempt s him at first to want to give his name and his

countenance to the instant of dying: he does not wa nt to die like a fly in the hum of mindlessness

and nullity; he wants to possess his death and be n amed, be hailed by this unique death. From

this perspective he suffers the obsession of the "I " that wants to die without ceasing to be "I" -- a

remainder of the need for immortality. This "I" wan ts to die concentrated in the very fact of

dying, so that my death might be the moment of my g reatest authenticity, the moment toward

which "I" propel myself as if toward the possibilit y which is absolutely proper to me, which is

proper only to me and which secures me in the stead fast solitude of this pure "I."

However, Rilke does not think only of the anguish o f ceasing to be himself. He also thinks of

death, of the supreme experience it represents, an experience which, because it is supreme, is

terrifying, whose terror keeps us at a distance and which is impoverished by this distance. Men

have recoiled from the obscure part of themselves, they have rejected and excluded it, and thus it

has become foreign to them. It is an enemy to them, an evil power which they evade through

constant distractions or which they denature by the dread which separates them from it. This is a

great sorrow. It makes our life a desert of dread, doubly impoverished: impoverished by the

poverty of this dread which is a bad dread, impover ished because deprived of the death which

this poor dread thrusts obstinately outside us. And so, to make death my death is no longer at this

point to remain myself even in death; it is to -128-

stretch this self as far even as death, to expose m yself to death, no longer excluding but including

it -- to regard it as mine, to read it as my secret truth, the terribleness in which I recognize what I

am when I am greater than myself, absolutely myself or the absolutely great.

And so the concern that will bit by bit displace th e center of Rilke's thoughts is affirmed: will we

continue to regard death as the foreign and incompr ehensible, or will we learn to draw it into life,

to make of it the other name, the other side of lif e? This concern becomes more pressing and

more painful with the war. The horror of war sheds its somber light upon all that is inhuman for

man in this abyss: yes, death is the adversary, the invisible opponent that wounds the best in us

and by which all our joys perish. This view weighs heavily with Rilke, whom the ordeal of 1914

ravages in every way. Hence the energy he clearly d evotes to keeping his gaze level before the

ghastly sight of all the graves. In the Bardo Thödol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the deceased,

during a period of indecision when he continues to die, sees himself confronted with the clear

primordial light, then with the peaceful deities, t hen with the terrifying figures of the angry

deities. If he lacks the strength to recognize hims elf in these images, if he does not see in them

the projection of his own horrified soul, avid and violent -- if he seeks to flee them -- he will give

them reality and density and thus fall back into th e errors of existence. It is to a similar

purification during life itself that Rilke calls us , with the difference that death is not the

denunciation of the illusory appearances in which w e live, but forms a whole with life, forms the

generous space of the two domains' unity. Confidenc e in life and, for life's sake, in death: if we

refuse death it is as if we refused the somber and difficult sides of life. It is as if we sought to

welcome in life only its minimal parts. So, then, w ould our pleasures be minimal. "Whoever does

not consent to the frightful in life and does not g reet it with cries of joy never enters into

possession of the inexpressible powers of our life. He remains marginal. When the time for

judgment comes, he will have been neither alive nor dead."

____________________

11In this effort to "strengthen a familiar trust in d eath by basing it upon the profoundest joys and

splendors of life," Rilke seeks, above all, to mast er our fear. What we dread as an enigma is

only unknown because of the error, our fear, which prevents it from making itself known. Our

horror creates the horrible. It is the force with w hich we exclude death that confr

onts us, when

death arrives, with the horror of being excluded fr om our own milieu. Rilke does not put

death on a pinnacle; he seeks first and foremost a reconciliation: he wants us to trust in this

obscurity that it might clarify itself. But, as

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The Malte Experience

The Malte experience was decisive for Rilke. This book is my sterious because it turns around a

hidden center which the author was unable to approa ch. This center is the death of Malte, or the

instant of his collapse. The whole first part of th e book announces it: all Malte's experiences tend

to undermine life with the proof of its impossibili ty; a bottomless space opens where he slips,

falls -- but this fall is hidden from us. Moreover, as it is written, the book seems to develop only

in order to forget this truth, and ramifies into di versions where the unexpressed signals to us

from further and further away. In his letters Rilke always spoke of the young Malte as a being

struggling in an ordeal which he was bound to lose. Has this test not surpassed his strength, has he not failed to withstand it even though he was

convinced in his mind of its necessity, so convince d that he pursued it with such instinctive

perseverence that in the end it attached itself to him never again to leave him? This book of

Malte Laurids Brigge , if ever it is written, will be nothing but the bo ok of this discovery,

presented in someone for whom it was too strong. Pe rhaps, after all, he did stand the test

victoriously, for he wrote the death of the Chamber lain. But, like Raskolnikov, exhausted by his

action, he remained on the road, incapable of conti nuing to act at the moment the action was to

____________________ happens in all mediations, what was the reality and the force that surpass us runs the risk, by

modifying itself according to our measure, of losin g the significance of its immoderation.

Strangeness surmounted dissolves into a pallid inti macy which only teaches us our own

knowledge. Rilke said of death: "Be satisfied to be lieve that it is a friend, your profoundest

friend, perhaps the only friend never to be alienat ed by our actions and waverings, never."

Perhaps the experience ceases, thus, utterly to der ail us, but thus it leaves us on the old track

of our habitual reality. In order to be "the awaken er," it must be "the stranger." One cannot at

once draw death close and hope that it will teach u s the truth of the remote. Rilke also says,

"Death is not beyond our strength; it is the measur ing mark at the top of the vase; we are full

each time we want to reach it, and for us to be fil led means to be heavy: that is all. "Here,

death is the sign of a full existence: the fear of dying would be fear of that weight by which

we are plenitude and authenticity; it would be tepi d preference for insufficiency. The desire to

die would express, on the contrary then, a certain need for plenitude; it would be the aspiring

movement toward the brim, the impulse of liquid tha t wants to fill the vase. But is reaching

the brim enough? "To overflow"; that is the secret liquid passion, the one that knows no

measure. And overflowing does not signify plenitude , but emptiness, the excess by

comparison to which fullness is still lacking.

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begin, so that his liberty, conquered anew, turned against him and destroyed him without

resistance.

Malte's is the discovery of that force too great fo r us, impersonal death, which is the excess of

our strength, that which exceeds it, that which wou ld make our strength prodigious if we

succeeded in making it ours anew. He could not mast er this discovery, he could not make it the

basis of his art. What happens, then?

For some time yet I will still be able to write all this and bear witness to it. But the day will come

when my hand will be far from me, and when I order it to write, it will trace words to which I

will not have consented. The time of that other int erpretation will come, when the words will

come apart, when all meaning will dissolve like clo uds and fall down like rain. Despite my fear, I

am like someone on the brink of great things, and I remember that I used to feel such glimmers

within myself when I was going to write. But this t ime I will be written. I am the impression that

will be transformed. Just a little more and I could , ah! understand all this, acquiesce in

everything. Only one step, and my profound misery w ould be happiness. But I cannot take this

step; I have fallen and cannot get up because I am broken.

One might well say that the narrative ends here; th is is its extreme dénouement, beyond which

everything must fall silent, and yet, strangely, th ese pages are on the contrary only the beginning of the book, which not only continues, but bit by bit and in the entire second part moves steadily

further from the immediate personal ordeal, no long er makes any allusion to it except with a

prudent reserve, if we assume that Malte, when he s peaks of the somber death of Charles the

Fearless or of the King's madness, does so in order not to speak of his own death or of his

madness. Everything conspires to suggest that Rilke hid the end of the book at the beginning, in

order to demonstrate to himself that after this end something remains possible, that it is not the

frightful final line after which there is nothing m ore to say. And we know that, nevertheless, the

completion of Malte marked for its author the beginning of a crisis th at lasted ten years. No

doubt the crisis had

____________________

12[Quotations from Rilke's correspondence are transla ted with an eye to Jane Bannard Green

and M.D. Herter Norton translation from the German, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke ( New

York: Norton Press, 1945-48 -- Trans.]

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other deep levels, but Rilke himself always connect ed it with this book where he felt he had said

everything and yet had hidden the essential, so tha t his hero, his double, still hovered about him,

like an ill-buried dead man who kept wanting to fin d a dwelling in his gaze. "I am still

convalescing from that book" ( 1912). "Can you unde rstand that after that book I have been left

behind just like a survivor, at a loss in the deepe st region of myself, unoccupied, unoccupiable?"

( 1911). "In consistent despair, Malte has come up behind everything, to a certain extent behind

death, so that nothing is possible for me any more, not even dying" ( 1910). We must retain this

expression, which is rare in Rilke's experience and which shows the experience opened onto that

nocturnal region where death no longer appears as p ossibility proper, but as the empty depths of

the impossible, a region from which he most often t urns aside, in which he will nonetheless

wander ten years, called into it by the work and th e work's demand.

He endures this ordeal with patience, a painful con sternation, and the disquietude of a wanderer

who has no relationships even to himself. It has be en observed that in four and a half years he

lives in fifty or so different locations. In 1919 h e writes again to a friend, "My inner self has

closed up steadily as if to protect itself; it has become inaccessible to me, and now I do not know

whether in my heart there is still the strength to enter into world relationships and to realize

them, or whether only the tomb of my former spirit has quietly remained there." Why these

difficulties? They arise because the whole problem for him is to begin from the point at which

the "vanished one" was destroyed. How can a beginni ng be made from the impossible? "For five

years, ever since Malte was finished, I have been living like a rank begin ner and in truth like

someone who does not begin." Later, when his patien ce and his consent have extricated him

from this "lost and desolate region" by permitting him to encounter his true poet's language, that

of the Elegies , he will say concisely that in this new work, star ting from the same givens which

had made Malte's existence impossible, life becomes possible again, and he will say moreover

that he has not found the way out by backing up, bu t on the contrary, by pushing further on upon

the hard road.

2. Death's Space

In the Elegies, the affirmation of life and that of death are revealed as one. To admit of one

without the other -- we celebrate this -132-

discovery here -- a limitation which in the end exc ludes all that is infinite. Death is the side of

life which is not turned toward us, nor do we shed any light upon it. We must try to become as

fully conscious as possible of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms and is

nourished forever by both. . . . The true form of l ife extends through both spheres, the blood of

the mightiest circulation flows through both: there is neither a here nor a beyond but the great

unity.

The fame which has greeted this letter to Hulewicz and made the thoughts by which Rilke tried

to comment upon his poems better known than the poe ms shows how much we like to substitute

interesting ideas for the pure poetic movement. And it is striking that the poet too is constantly

tempted to unburden himself of the dark language, n ot by expressing it, but by understanding it --

as if, in the anguish of words which he is called u pon only to write and never to read, he wanted

to persuade himself that in spite of everything he understands himself; he has the right to read

and comprehend.

The Other Side

Rilke's reading has "raised" a part of his work to the level of ideas. It has translated his

experience. Rilke rejects the Christian solution, t his is well known. It is here below, "in a purely

earthly consciousness, profoundly, blessedly terres trial," that death is a beyond to be learned by

us, recognized and welcomed -- perhaps furthered. D eath exists not only, then, at the moment of

death; at all times we are its contemporaries. Why, therefore, can we not accede immediately to

that other side, which is life itself but related o therwise, become other, the other relation? One

might be content to recognize the definition of thi s region in its inaccessibility: it is "the side

which is not turned toward us, nor do we shed light upon it." Thus it would be what essentially

escapes, a kind of transcendence, but of which we c annot say that it has value and reality, about

which we know only this: that we are turned away fr om it.

But why "turned away"? What makes us necessarily un able in our own fashion to turn back? Our

limits, apparently: we are limited beings. When we look in front of us, we do not see what is

behind. When we are here, it is on the condition th at we renounce elsewhere. The limit retains

us, contains us, thrusts us back toward what we are , turns us

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back toward ourselves, away from the other, makes o f us averted beings. To accede to the other

side would be thus to enter into the liberty of tha t which is free of limits. But are we not, in a

way, beings freed from the here and now? I see, per haps, only what is in front of me, but I can

represent to myself what is behind. Thanks to consc iousness, am I not at all times elsewhere

from where I am, always master of the other and cap able of something else? Yes, it is true, but

this is also our sorrow. Through consciousness we e scape what is present, but we are delivered to

representation. Through representation we reintrodu ce into our intimacy with ourselves the

constraints of the face-to-face encounter; we confr ont ourselves, even when we look despairingly

outside of ourselves.

This is called destiny: being face to face

and nothing else, and always opposite. Such is the human condition: to be able to relate only to things which turn us away from other

things and, graver still, to be present to ourselve s in everything and in this presence not to meet

anything except head-on, separate from it by this v is-à-vis and separated from ourselves by this

interposition of ourselves.

At this juncture one can say that what excludes us from the limitless is what makes us beings

deprived of limits. We believe ourselves to be turn ed away by each finite thing from the

infinitude of all things. But we are no less turned away from each thing by the way in which we

grasp it, representing it to make it ours -- to mak e of it an object, an objective reality, to establish

it in our utilitarian world by withdrawing it from the purity of space. "The other side" is where

we would cease to be turned away from a single thin g by our way of looking at it, averted from it

by our gaze.

With all its eyes the creature sees

the Open. Our eyes only are

as if reversed.

To accede to the other side would thus be to transf orm our way of having access. Rilke is very

tempted to see consciousness, as his era conceived of it, as the principal difficulty. In a letter of

February 25, 1926 he specifies

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that it is the low "degree of consciousness" which puts the animal at an advantage by permitting

it to enter into reality without having to be the c enter of it. "By Open we do not mean the sky, the

air, space -- which for the observer are still obje cts, and thus opaque. The animal, the flower is

all that without realizing it, and has thus before itself, beyond itself, that indescribably open

freedom which, for us, has its extremely short-live d equivalents perhaps only in the first instants

of love -- when one being sees in the other, in the beloved, his own extension -- or again in the

outpouring to God."

It is clear that Rilke confronts here the idea of c onsciousness closed upon itself, inhabited by

images. The animal is where it looks, and its look does not reflect it, nor does it reflect the thing,

but opens the animal onto the thing. The other side , then, which Rilke also calls "the pure

relation," is the purity of the relation: the fact of being, in this relation, outside oneself, in the

thing itself, and not in a representation of the th ing. Death in this sense would be the equivalent

of what has been called intentionality. Because of death "we look out with a great animal gaze."

Through death the eyes turn back, and this return i s the other side, and the other side is the fact of

living no longer turned away, but turned back, intr oduced into the intimacy of conversion, not

deprived of consciousness but established by consci ousness outside it, cast into the ecstasy of

this movement.

Let us reflect upon the two obstacles. The first st ems from the locality of beings, their temporal

or spatial limit -- from, that is, what could be ca lled a "bad extension," where one thing

necessarily supplants another, can't be seen except hiding the other, etc. The second difficulty

comes from a bad interiority , that of consciousness, where we are no doubt free from the limits

of the here and now, where in the matrix of our int imacy everything is at our disposal, but where

we are also excluded by this closed intimacy from t rue access to everything -- excluded, moreover, from things by the imperious, the violent way we master them, by the purposeful

activity that makes us possessors, producers, conce rned with results and avid for objects.

On the one hand, then, a bad space, on the other a bad "interior." On the one hand, nevertheless,

reality and the force of the exterior; on the other , the profundity of intimacy, the freedom and

silence of the

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invisible. Mightn't there be a point where space is at once intimacy and exteriority, a space

which, outside, would in itself be spiritual intima cy? An intimacy which, in us, would be the

reality of the outdoors, such that there we would b e within ourselves outside in the intimacy and

in the intimate vastness of that outside? This is w hat Rilke's experience -- which had at first a

"mystical" form (the one he encounters at Capri and at Duino),

13 then the form of the poetic

experience -- leads him to recognize, or at least t o glimpse and sense, and perhaps to call forth by

expressing it. He names it Weltinnenraum, the world's inner space, which is no less things'

intimacy than ours, and the free communication from one to the other, the strong, unrestrained

freedom where the pure force of the undetermined is affirmed.

Through all beings spreads the one space:

the world's inner space. Silently fly the birds

all through us. O I who want to grow,

I look outside, and it is in me that the tree grows !

The World's Inner Space

What can be said of it? What exactly is this interi ority of the exterior, this extension within us

where "the infinite," as Rilke says at the time of the Capri experience, "penetrates so intimately

that it is as though the shining stars rested light ly in his breast"? Can we truly accede to this

space? And how can we? For consciousness is our des tiny; we cannot leave it; and in it we are

never in space but in the vis-à-vis of representati on where we are always busy, moreover -- busy

acting, doing and possessing. Rilke never departs f rom the decided affirmation of the Open, but

his estimate of our power to approach it varies gre atly. Sometimes it seems that man is always

excluded from it. At other times Rilke allows a hop e for the "great movements of love," when

you go beyond the beloved, when you are true to the audacity of this movement which knows

neither stop nor limit, neither wants nor is able t o rest in the person sought, but destroys this

person or surpasses him in order that he not be the screen that would hide the outside. These are

such grave conditions that they make us prefer fail ure. To love is always to love someone, to

have someone before you, to look only at him and no t beyond him -- if not inadvertently, in the

leap of passion that knows nothing of ends. And so love finally turns us away, rather than turning

____________________

13We find the narrative of this experience under the title Adventure I , Adventure II in Prose

Fragments .

14Poem dated August 1914.

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us back. Even the child, who is nearer the pure dan ger of immediate life, . . . the young child, already

we turn him around and force him to look backwards

at the world of forms and not into the Open, which

in the animal's face is so profound.

And even the animal, "whose Being is infinite for it, inconceivable, unreflective," even the

animal which, "where we see the future, sees everyt hing, and sees itself in everything and safe

forever" -- sometimes the animal too bears "the wei ght and the care of a great sadness," the

uneasiness that comes of being separated from origi nal bliss and as if removed from the intimacy

of its own breath.

Thus one could say that the Open is absolutely unce rtain and that never, upon any face or in any

gaze, have we perceived its reflection, for all mir roring is already that of a figurative reality.

" Always it is the world and never a Nowhere without no." This uncertainty is essential: to

approach the Open as something sure would surely be to miss it. What is striking, and

characteristic of Rilke, is how much nevertheless h e remains certain of the uncertain, how he

tries to set aside its doubtfulness, to affirm it i n hope rather than in anguish, with a confidence

not unaware that the task is difficult but which co nstantly renews the glad forecast. It is as if he

were sure that there is in us, on account of the ve ry fact that we are "turned away," the possibility

of turning back, the promise of an essential reconv ersion.

In fact, if we come back to the two obstacles which in life keep us turned toward a limited life, it

seems that the principal obstacle -- since we see a nimals, who are free of it, accede to what is

closed for us -- is the bad interiority which is ou r own. And it seems that this bad consciousness

can, from the imprisoning or banishing power which it was, become the power of welcome and

adherence: no longer that which separates us from r eal things, but that which restores them to us

at the point where they escape divisible space and enter the essential extension. Our bad

consciousness is bad, not because it is interior an d because it is freedom outside objective limits,

but because it is not interior enough and because i t is by no means free. For in it, as in the bad

outside, objects reign, along with the concern for results, the desire to have, the greed that links

us to possession, the need for security and stabili ty, the tendency to know in order to be sure, the

tendency to "take account" which necessarily become s an inclination to count and to reduce

everything to accounts -- the very destiny of the m odern world.

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If there is hope, then, for our turning back, it li es in our turning away always more, through a

conversion of the consciousness. Instead of leading consciousness back toward that which we

call the real but which is only the objective reali ty where we dwell in the security of stable forms

and separate existences -- instead, also, of mainta ining consciousness at its own surface, in the

world of representations which is only the double o f objects -- such a conversion would turn it

away toward a profounder intimacy, toward the most interior and the most invisible, where we

are no longer anxious to do and act, but free of ou rselves and of real things and of phantoms of

things, "abandoned, exposed upon the mountains of t he heart," as close as possible to the point

where "the interior and the exterior gather themsel ves together into a single continuous space."

Novalis had certainly expressed a similar aspiratio n when he said: "We dream of voyaging

across the universe. Isn't the universe, then, in u s? We do not know the depths of our mind. Toward the interior goes the mysterious road. Eternity with its worlds, past and future, is in us."

Nor is there any doubt that Kierkegaard says someth ing that Rilke understood when he awakens

the deep reaches of subjectivity and wants to free it from general categories and possibilities so

as to grasp it afresh in its singularity. However, Rilke's experience has its own particular

features: it is foreign to the imperious and magic violence by which, in Novalis, the interior

affirms and gives rise to the exterior. And it is n o less foreign to all surpassing of the earthly: if

the poet goes further and further inward, it is not in order to emerge in God, but in order to

emerge outside and to be faithful to the earth, to the plenitude and the superabundance of earthly

existence when it springs forth outside all limits, in its excessive force that surpasses all

calculation. Moreover, Rilke's experience has its o wn tasks. They are essentially those of the

poetic word. And it is in this that his thought ris es to a greater height. Here the theistic

temptations which encumber his ideas on death fade, as do his hypotheses on consciousness and

even the idea of the Open, which sometimes tends to become an existing region and not

existence itself in its demandingness, or the exces sive, limitless intimacy of this demand.

Conversion: Transmutation into Invisibility

And yet what happens when, turning always further a way from the exterior, we descend toward

that imaginary space, the heart's intimacy?

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One might suppose that consciousness is seeking unc onsciousness as its solution; that it dreams

of dissolving in an instinctive blindness where it would regain the great unknowing purity of the

animal. This is not the case. Instead (except in th e Third Elegy where the elemental speaks),

Rilke experiences this interiorization as a transmu tation of significations themselves. It is a

matter -- he says so in his letter to Hulewicz -- o f "becoming as fully conscious as possible of our

existence." And he says in the same letter: "All th e configurations of the here and now are to be

used not in a time-bound way, but, as far as we are able, to be placed in those superior

significances in which we have a share." The words "superior significances" indicate that this

interiorization which reverses the consciousness's destiny by purifying it of everything it

represents and produces, of everything that makes i t a substitute for the objective real which we

call the world (a conversion which cannot be compar ed to phenomenological reduction, but

which nonetheless evokes it), does not go toward th e void of unknowing, but toward higher or

more demanding meanings -- closer too, perhaps, to their source. Thus this more inner

consciousness is also more conscious, which for Ril ke means that "in it we are introduced into

the givens of earthly existence independent of time and space" (it is only a matter, then, of a

broader, more distended consciousness). But more co nscious also means: more pure, closer to

the demand that founds the consciousness and that m akes it not the bad intimacy which closes us

in, but the force of the surpassing where intimacy is the bursting and springing of the outside.

But how is this conversion possible? How is it acco mplished? And what gives it authority and

reality, if it is not to be reduced to the uncertai nty of "extremely momentary" and perhaps always

unreal states?

Through conversion everything is turned inward. Thi s means that we turn ourselves, but that we

also turn everything, all the things we have to do with. That is the essential point. Man is linked

to things, he is in the midst of them, and if he re nounces his realizing and representing activity, if

he apparently withdraws into himself, it is not in order to dismiss everything which isn't he, the humble and outworn realities, but rather to take these with him, to make them participate in this

interiorization where they lose their use value, th eir falsified nature, and lose also their narrow

boundaries in order to penetrate into their true pr ofundity. Thus does this conversion appear as an

immense task of transmutation, in which things, all things, are transformed and interiorized by

becoming interior in us and by becoming interior to themselves. This transformation of the

visible into the invisible and of the invisible int o the always more invisible takes place where the

fact of being unrevealed does not

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express a simple privation, but access to the other side "which is not turned toward us nor do we

shed light upon it." Rilke has repeated this in man y ways, and these formulae are among the best

known to the French reader: "We are the bees of the Invisible. We ardently suck the honey of the

visible in order to accumulate it in the great gold en hive of the Invisible." "Our task is to

impregnate the provisional and perishable earth so profoundly in our mind, with so much

patience and passion, that its essence can be rebor n in us invisible."

Every man is called upon to take up again the missi on of Noah. He must become the intimate

and pure ark of all things, the refuge in which the y take shelter, where they are not content to be

kept as they are, as they imagine themselves to be -- narrow, outworn, so many traps for life --

but are transformed, lose their form, lose themselv es to enter into the intimacy of their reserve,

where they are as if preserved from themselves, unt ouched, intact, in the pure point of the

undetermined. Yes, every man is Noah, but on closer inspection, he is Noah in a strange way,

and his mission consists less in saving everything from the flood than, on the contrary, in

plunging all things into a deeper flood where they disappear prematurely and radically. That, in

fact, is what the human vocation amounts to. If it is necessary that everything visible become

invisible, if this metamorphosis is the goal, our i ntervention is apparently quite superficial: the

metamorphosis is accomplished perfectly of itself, for everything is perishable, for, says Rilke in

the same letter, "the perishable is everywhere engu lfed in a deep being." What have we then to

do, we who are the least durable, the most prompt t o disappear? What have we to offer in this

task of salvation? Precisely that: our promptness a t disappearing, our aptitude for perishing, our

fragility, our exhaustion, our gift for death.

Death's Space and the Word's

Here again, then, is the truth of our condition and the weight of our problem. Rilke, at the end of

the Elegies, uses this expression: "the infinitely dead." An ambiguous formula. But one can say

of men that they are infinitely mortal, a little mo re than mortal. Everything is perishable, but we

are the most perishable; all things pass, and are t ransformed, but we want transformation, we

want to pass, and our will is this passing on, furt her. Hence the call: "Want change" ("Wolle die

Wandlung"). We must not rest, but pass on. "Nowhere is there

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staying" ("Bleiben ist nirgends"). "Whatever closes itself into staying the same is already

petrified." To live is always already to take leave , to be dismissed and to dismiss what is. But we

can get ahead of this separation and, looking at it as though it were behind us, make of it the

moment when, even now, we touch the abyss and acced e to the deep of being. Thus we see that conversion -- the movement toward the most interior, a work in which we

transform ourselves as we transform everything -- h as something to do with our end, and that this

transformation, this fruition of the visible in the invisible for which we are responsible, is the

very task of dying, which has until now been so dif ficult for us to recognize. It takes effort, yet

effort evidently quite different from that which we put into making objects and projecting results.

We even see now that it is the opposite of purposef ul work, although similar in one point. For in

both cases it is certainly a matter of "transformat ion." In the world things are transformed into

objects in order to be grasped, utilized, made more certain in the distinct rigor of their limits and

the affirmation of a homogeneous and divisible spac e. But in imaginary space things are

transformed into that which cannot be grasped. Out of use, bey ond wear, they are not in our

possession but are the movement of dispossession wh ich releases us both from them and from

ourselves. They are not certain but are joined to t he intimacy of the risk where neither they nor

we are sheltered any more, but where we are, rather , introduced, utterly without reserve, into a

place where nothing retains us at all.

In a poem, one of his last, Rilke says that interio r space "translates things." It makes them pass

from one language to another, from the foreign, ext erior language into a language which is

altogether interior and which is even the interior of language, where language names in silence

and by silence, and makes of the name a silent real ity. "Space (which) exceeds us and translates

things" is thus the transfigurer, the translator pa r excellence. But this statement suggests more: is

there not another translator, another space where t hings cease to be visible in order to dwell in

their invisible intimacy? Certainly, and we can bol dly give it its name. This essential translator is

the poet, and this space is the poem's space, where no longer is anything present, where in the

midst of absence everything speaks, everything retu rns into the spiritual accord which is open

and not immobile but the center of the eternal move ment.

____________________

15To praise the poetry of Jacobsen, Rilke says, "One does not know where the verbal weave

finishes or where the space begins."

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If the metamorphosis of the visible into the invisi ble is our task, if it is the truth of conversion,

then there is a point at which we see it through wi thout losing it in the evanescence of "extremely

momentary" states: this point is the word. To speak is essentially to transform the visible into the

invisible; it is to enter a space which is not divi sible, an intimacy which, however, exists outside

oneself. To speak is to take one's position at the point where the word needs space to reverberate

and be heard, and where space, becoming the word's very movement, becomes hearing's

profundity, its vibration. "How," says Rilke, in a text written in French, "how could one sustain,

how could one save the visible, if not by creating the language of absence, of the invisible?"

The Open ir the poem. The space where everything returns to deep being, w here there is

infinite passage between the two domains, where eve rything dies but where death is the learned

companion of life, where horror is ravishing joy, w here celebration laments and lamentation

praises -- the very space toward which "all worlds hasten as toward their nearest and truest

reality," the space of the mightiest circulation an d of ceaseless metamorphosis -- this is the

poem's space. This is the Orphic space to which the poet doubtless has no access, where he can

penetrate only to disappear, which he attains only when he is united with the intimacy of the breach that makes him a mouth unheard, just as it makes him who hears into the weight of

silence. The Open is the work, but the work as orig in.

Song as Origin: Orpheus

When Rilke exalts Orpheus, when he exalts the song which is being, he is not speaking of the

ultimate perfection of a song which begins by being sung, or even of the fullness of song, but of

song as origin and the origin of song. There is, it is true, an essential ambiguity in the figure of

Orpheus. This ambiguity belongs to the myth which p reserves the figure and is its reserve, but

the ambiguity also stems from the uncertainty in Ri lke's thoughts, from the way in which, little

by little in the course of the experience, he disso lved the substance and reality of death. Orpheus

is not like the Angel in whom the transformation is achieved, who is unaware of its risks but also

of its protection and significance. Orpheus is the act of metamorphosis: not the Orpheus who has

conquered death, but he who always dies, who is the demand that we disappear and who

disappears in the anguish of this disappearance, an anguish which becomes song, a word which

is the pure

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movement of dying. Orpheus dies a little more than we do, he is we ourselves bearing the

anticipated knowledge of out death, knowledge which is dispersion's intimacy. If the poem could

become a poet, Orpheus would be the poem: he is the ideal and the emblem of poetic plenitude.

Yet he is at the same time not the completed poem, but something more mysterious and more

demanding: the origin of the poem, the sacrificial point which is no longer the reconciliation of

the two domains, but the abyss of the lost god, the infinite trace of absence, a moment to which

Rilke comes closest perhaps in these three lines:

O you, lost god! You, infinite trace!

By dismembering you the hostile forces had to dispe rse you

To make of us now hearers and a mouth of Nature.

This ambiguity manifests itself in many ways. Somet imes it seems that, for Rilke, what makes

the human word heavy, foreign to the purity of beco ming, is also what makes it more expressive,

more capable of its proper mission -- the metamorph osis of the visible into invisibility where the

Open is at hand. The world's inner space requires t he restraint of human language in order truly

to be affirmed. It is only pure and only true withi n the strict limitations of this word.

The one space through which birds plunge is not

the intimate space which sets off your face

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Space exceeds us and translates things:

That the tree's being may succeed for you,

cast around it the inner space, that space

which announces itself in you. Surround it with res traint.

It knows not how to limit itself. Only in taking fo rm

from your renunciation does it truly become a tree.

Here the task of the poet is that of a mediation wh ich Hölderlin was first to express and

celebrate.

17 The poet's destiny is to expose himself to the forc e of the undetermined and to the pure violence of being from which nothing can be made, to endure this force courageously, but

also to contain it by imposing upon it restraint an d the perfection of a form. This is a requirement

full of risk:

____________________

16Poem dated June 1924. 17At least in the hymn, So, on a festival day . . .

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Why must someone stand here like a shepherd,

Exposed thus to such excess of influence?

Yet it is a task which consists, not in surrenderin g to being's unresolvable ambiguity, but in

giving it decisiveness, exactitude, and form, or, a s he says, in "making things from anguish": in

lifting the uncertainty of anguish to the resolutio n of an exact formulation. We know how much

the concern to give expression to things, and to ex press them with the finite words that suit them,

counted for Rilke. In this respect, the inexpressib le seems beside the point to him. To speak is

our task, to tell finite things in an accomplished fashion that excludes the infinite is our power,

because we are ourselves finite beings, anxious to come to a finish and able, in the realm of the

finite, to grasp completion. Here the Open closes u nder the constraint of a language so

determined that, far from being the pure milieu whe re conversion to the interior and

transmutation into invisibility are achieved, it tr ansforms itself into a graspable thing, becomes

the discourse of the world, a language where things are not transformed but immobilized, fixed

in their visible aspect, as it sometimes happens in the Expressionist part of Rilke's work, the

Neue Gedichte , a work of the eye and not of the heart, Hetzwerk.

Or, on the contrary, the poet turns toward the most inward as toward the source whose pure,

silent surging must be preserved. Then the true poe m is no longer the word that captures, the

closed space of the telling word, but the breathing intimacy whereby the poet consumes himself

in order to augment space and dissipates himself rh ythmically: a pure inner burning around

nothing.

Breathing, O invisible poem!

World's space which purely and always

exchanges itself for very being. Counterweight,

in which rhythmically I am achieved.

. . . . . . . . . . .

A gain in space.

And in another sonnet:

To sing in truth is a different breath

A breath around nothing. A stirring in God. The win d.

____________________

18So he says to himself, after finishing the Neue Gedichte:

The work of vision is done

Now do the work of the heart. -144-

" A breath around nothing ." That is something like the truth of the poem whe n it is no longer

anything but a silent intimacy, a pure expenditure in which our life is sacrificed -- and not in

view of any result, in order to conquer or acquire, but for nothing, in the pure relation to which

the symbolic name of God is given here. " To sing is a different breath": it is no longer the

language which is graspable and grasping affirmatio n, covetousness and conquest, the breathing

that is aspiration as much as respiration, which is always in quest of something, which is durable

and wants duration. In the song, to speak is to pas s on, to consent to the passage which is pure

decline, and language is no longer anything but "th at profound innocence of the human heart

through which it is able to describe, in its irresi stible fall all the way to its ruin, a pure line."

Metamorphosis, then, appears as the happy consumpti on of being when, without reserve, it

enters into the movement where nothing is preserved , which does not realize, accomplish, or

save anything, which is the pure felicity of descen ding, the joy of the fall, the jubilant word

which one unique time gives voice to disappearance, before disappearing into it:

Here, among those who pass, in the Kingdom of decli ne, Be the glass that rings and, in the

brilliant resonance, is already broken.

But, one has immediately to add, Rilke also, and mu ch more gladly, conceives of metamorphosis

as an entrance into the eternal, and of imaginary s pace as liberation from time the destroyer. "It

would seem to me almost wrong still to call time wh at was rather a state of liberty, in a very

perceptible way a space, the environment of the Ope n, and not the act of passing."

19 Sometimes,

in his last works, he seems to allude to a complete d time which would hold still in a pure circle

of time closed upon itself. But whether space is th is time risen above the passing moment, or the

space which "drinks absent presence" and changes du ration into timelessness, it appears as the

center where what is no longer still subsists. And our vocation, to establish things and ourselves

in this space, is, not to disappear, but to perpetu ate: to save things, yes, to make them invisible,

but in order that they be reborn in their invisibil ity. And so death, that readier death which is our

destiny, again becomes the promise of survival, and already the moment is at hand

____________________

19Kein Vergehn : Rilke opposes "space" here, and "the Open," to co nsumption by time, the fall

toward the end.

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when dying for Rilke will be to escape death -- a s trange volatization of his experience. What

does it mean and how is it accomplished?

3. Death's Transmutation

It is in the Ninth Elegy that Rilke indicates the p ower which belongs to us -- to us the most

perishable of all beings -- to save what will last longer than we.

And these things whose life is decline understand t hat you praise them; fleeting, they lend us, us

the most fleeting, the power to save. They want us to change them in the bottom of our invisible

heart into -- O infinite -- into ourselves! whatsoe ver we may be in the end. Such, then, is our privilege. Granted, it is linked to our gift for disappearing, but only because in

this disappearance the power to conserve is also ma nifest, and because in this readier death

resurrection is expressed, the joy of a transfigure d life.

We are imperceptibly approaching the instant in Ril ke's experience when dying will not be to

die, but to transform the fact of death, and when t he effort to teach us not to deny the extreme but

to expose ourselves to the overpowering intimacy of our end will culiminate in the peaceful

affirmation that there is no death, that "close to death, one no longer sees death." The animal who

lives in the Open is "free of death." But we, to th e extent that ours is necessarily the perspective

of a life which is limited and maintained between l imits, "we see only death."

Death, we see only death; the free animal always ha s its decline behind it, and before it God, and

when it moves, it moves in Eternity, as springs flo w.

Death, "to see only death," is thus the error of a limited life and of a poorly converted

consciousness. Death is that very concern to delimi t which we introduce into being; it is the

result and perhaps the means of the bad transmutati on by which we make of all thing objects --

tightly closed, well-finished realities imbued with our preoccupation with the finish. Freedom

must be liberation from death, the approach toward the point where death becomes transparent.

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For close to death one no longer sees death, and on e stares outward, perhaps with a great animal

gaze.

Thus we should say no longer now that death is the side of life from which we are turned away.

It is only the error in this turning: aversion. Whe rever we turn away, there is death, and what we

call the moment of dying is only the crook of the t urn, the extreme of its curvature, the end point

beyond which everything reverses itself, everything turns back. This is so true that in the ordeal

of conversion -- that return inward by which we go into ourselves outside of ourselves -- if we

are somehow stolen from death it is because without even perceiving it we pass the instant of

dying, having gone too far, inattentive and as if d istracted, neglecting what we would have to

have done to die (be afraid, hold onto the world, w ant to do something). And in this negligence

death has become forgetfulness; we have forgotten t o die. After the account of his two mystical

experiences, Capri and Duino, where for the first t ime he seems to have felt what after 1914 he

will call the world's inner space, Rilke, speaking of himself in the third person, adds:

In fact he had been free for a long time, and if so mething prevented his dying, perhaps it was

only this: that he had overlooked it once, somewher e, and that he didn't have, like others, to go

on ahead in order to reach it, but on the contrary, to go back the other way. His action was

already outside, in the confident things that child ren play with, and was perishing in them.

The Intimacy of Invisible Death

It might seem surprising that he should be so littl e disturbed by this volatization of the

experience to which he devotes himself. The explana tion is that this very evanescence expresses

the movement toward which he tends profoundly. Just as each thing must become invisible,

likewise what makes death a thing, the brute fact o f death, must become invisible. Death enters

into its own invisibility, passes from its opacity to its transparency, from its terrifying reality to

its ravishing unreality. It is in this passage its own conversion; through this conversion it is the ungraspable, the invisible -- the source, however, of all invisibility. And suddenly we understand

why Rilke always kept silent,

____________________

20[Here I have compared Blanchot's French with G. Cra ig Houston's English translation of the

German, Selected Works , ( New York: New Directions, 1967), vol. 2 -- Tran s.]

-147-

even to himself, about the death of Malte. Not to p erceive this death was to give it its one chance

to be authentic. Ignorance made it not the fatal er ror of the terrible limit against which we are

broken, but the bloom of the glad moment when, by i nteriorizing itself, it loses itself in its own

intimacy. And likewise, in his last illness, he wan ted not to know of what he was dying or that he

was going to die: "Rilke's conversations with his d octor invariably reflect his desire that his pain

be no one's. . . . Strange conversations," recounts Dr. Haemmerli. "They always went right up to

the point where the sick man would have had to pron ounce the word death, but at which all at

once he stopped prudently." This prudence is diffic ult to interpret. One doesn't know whether the

desire "not to see death" expresses fear of seeing it, elusiveness and flight before the

inconceivable, or, on the contrary, the profound in timacy which creates silence, imposes silence,

and turns into ignorance in order not to stay withi n the boundaries of limited knowledge.

Thus we see more clearly how Rilke's thoughts have shifted since the days when he wished for a

personal death. As before -- although he no longer expresses the distinction in such a decisive

fashion -- he remains willing to speak of two death s, to see in one sheer death, death's pure

transparency, but in the other the opaque and impur e. And as before -- more precisely than

before -- he sees between these two deaths the diff erence made by an expenditure of effort, by a

transmutation: either because bad death, the one th at has the brutality of an event and of a

random occurrence, remains an untransmuted death, a death not reintroduced into its essential

secret, or because it becomes in true death the int imacy of transmutation.

Another aspect of his thought which gains precision is that this task of transmutation, which

infinitely exceeds us and cannot result from our wo rdly aptitude for acting and doing, is only

accomplished in us by death itself -- as if, in us alone, death could purify, could interiorize itself

and apply to its own reality that power of metamorp hosis, that force of invisibility whose original

profundity it is. And why is it in us, in humans, o f all beings the most fragile, that death finds this

perfection? It is because not only do we number amo ng those who pass away, but in this

kingdom of decline we are also those who consent to pass, who say yes to disappearance and in

whom disappearance becomes speech, becomes word and song. Thus death is in us the purity of

dying because it can reach the point where it sings , because it finds in us "that . . identity of

absence and presence" which is manifest in the song , the extreme tip of fragility which at the

moment of breaking

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resonates, whose vibration is the pure resonance of the very break. Rilke affirms that death is

"der eigentliche Ja-sager," the authentic yea-sayer , it says only yes. But this only happens in the

being that has the power to speak, just as speaking is not truly speech and essential word except

in this absolute yes where the word gives voice to death's intimacy. Thus there is a secret identity

between singing and dying, between death -- the tra nsmutation of the invisible by the invisible -- and the song within which this transmutation is accomplished. We come back here to what

Kafka, at least in the sentences we ascribed to him , seemed to seek to express: I write to die, to

give death its essential possibility, through which it is essentially death, source of invisibility; but

at the same time, I cannot write unless death write s in me, makes of me the void where the

impersonal is affirmed.

No One's Death

The word impersonal which we introduce here indicates the difference b etween the outlooks of

the early and the late Rilke. If death is the heart of the transparency where it infinitely transforms

itself, there can no longer be any question of a pe rsonal death, where I would die in the

affirmation of my own reality and my unique existen ce, a death such that I would be supremely

invisible in it and it visible in me (with that mon umental character which death has in Brigge the

Chamberlain during his lifetime). And my prayer can no longer be:

Oh Lord, grant to each his own death, the dying whi ch truly evolves from this life where he

found love, meaning and distress

but rather: Grant me the death which is not mine, t he death of no one, the dying which truly

evolves from death, where I am not called upon to d ie, which is not an event -- an event that

would be proper to me, which would happen to me alo ne -- but the unreality and the absence

where nothing happens, where neither love not meani ng nor distress accompanies me, but the

pure abandon of all that.

Rilke is doubtless unwilling to restore to death th e lowly impersonality which would make of it

something less than personal, something always impr oper. The impersonality toward which

death tends in Rilke is ideal. It is above the pers on: not the brutality of a fact or the randomness

of chance, but the volatization of the very fact of death, its transfiguration at its own center.

Moreover, the ambiguity of

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the word eigen (der eigene Tod , "death proper"), which means "own," proper to me as well as

authentic, is significant here. ( Heidegger seems t o dwell on this ambiguity when he speaks of

death as the absolutely proper possibility, by whic h he means that death is the uttermost

possibility, the most extreme thing that happens to the self, but also the "ownmost," the most

personal event to befall the "I," the event where " I" affirm myself the most and the most

authentically.) This ambiguity allows Rilke never t o cease recognizing himself in his early

prayer: Grant to each his own, his proper death, th e death which is properly death, the essential

death and the death which is essentially death; gra nt to me this essence which is also mine, since

it is in me that it has been purified -- that it ha s become, through inward conversion, through the

consent and the intimacy of my song, pure death, th e purification of death by death and thus my

work, the work of art which is the passage of thing s into the heart of death's purity.

One must not forget, in fact, that this effort to r aise death to itself, to make the point where it

loses itself within itself coincide with the point at which I lose myself outside of myself, is not a

simple internal affair, but implies an immense resp onsibility toward things and is possible only

through their mediation through the movement which is entrusted to me and which must raise

things themselves to a point of greater reality and truth. This is essential in Rilke. It is through this double requirement that he preserves in poetic existence the tension without which it would

perhaps fade into a rather pale ideality. One of th e two domains must never be sacrificed to the

other: the visible is necessary to the invisible; i t is saved in the invisible, but it is also what saves

the invisible. This "holy law of contrast" reestabl ishes between the two poles an equality of

value:

Being here below and being beyond, may both claim y ou Strangely, without distinction.

The Ecstatic Experience of Art

The hidden certitude that "beyond" is only another mode of being "here below" when I am no

longer simply in myself but outside, close to the s incerity of things: this is what draws me

constantly back toward their "sight," and turns me toward them so that the turning back may be

accomplished in me. In a way, I save myself no less by seeing things

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than I save them by giving them access to the invis ible. Everything hinges on the movement of

seeing, when in it my gaze, ceasing to direct itsel f forward with the pull of time that attracts it to

goals, turns back to look "as if over the shoulder, behind, toward things," in order to reach "their

closed existence," which I see then as perfected, n ot crumbling or being altered by the wear of

active life, but as it is in the innocence of being . I see things then with the disinterested and

somewhat distant look of someone who has just left them.

This disinterested gaze, which has no future and se ems to come from the heart of death, this look

to which "all things give themselves at once more d istantly and somehow more truly," is the gaze

of the mystical Duino experience, but it is also th e gaze of "art." And it is correct to say that the

artist's experience is an ecstatic experience and t hat it is, like the Duino experience, an

experience of death. To see properly is essentially to die. It is to introduce into sight the turning

back again which is ecstasy and which is death. Thi s does not mean that everything sinks into the

void.

21 On the contrary, things then offer themselves in th e inexhaustible fecundity of their

meaning which our vision ordinarily misses -- our v ision which is only capable of one point of

view. "A finch that was near him and whose blue gaz e he had already met on other occasions,

touched him now across a more spiritual distance, b ut with such an inexhaustible significance

that it seemed nothing was hidden anymore."

Hence the unfailing fondness for things, the faithf ul abiding with them which Rilke advised at all

periods of his life as that which can best bring us toward a form of authenticity. It might well be

said that often when he thinks of the word absence, he thinks of what the presence of things is

for him: he thinks of that being-a-thing, humble, s ilent, grave obedience to the pure gravity of

forces which is repose in the web of influences and the balance of movements. Again, toward the

end of his life he said: "My world begins next to t hings.""I have . . . the particular happiness of

living by means of things."

There is not one thing in which I do not find mysel f; It is not my voice alone that sings:

everything resonates.

He considered with regret painting's tendency to de part from "the object." He sees there a

reflection of war and a mutilation. Thus, speaking of Klee, he says: ____________________ 21Although à propos of the Capri "experience," Rilke acknowledges the void: "extension"

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During the war years I often thought I felt exactly this disappearance of "the object" (for the

extent to which we accept one -- and in addition as pire to express ourselves through it -- is a

matter of faith: broken beings are best expressed, then, by fragments and debris . . .). But now,

reading this book by Hausenstein, so full of intell igence, I have been able to discover in myself

an immense calm, and to understand, in spite of eve rything, how safe all things are for me. It

takes the obstinacy of a city dweller (and Hausenst ein is one), to dare claim that nothing exists

any more. For myself, I can start afresh from your little cowslips. Really, nothing prevents me

from finding all things inexhaustible and intact: w here would art find its point of departure if not

in this joy and this tension of an infinite beginni ng?

This text not only reveals Rilke's preferences in a n interesting way, but brings us back to the

profound ambiguity of his experience. He says it hi mself: art takes its point of departure in

things, but what things? Intact things -- unverbraucht -- when they are not being used and used

up by their use in the world. Art must not, then, s tart from the hierarchically "ordered" things

which our "ordinary" life proposes to us. In the wo rld's order things have being according to their

value; they have worth, and some are worth more tha n others. Art knows nothing of this order. It

takes an interest in realities according to an abso lute disinterestedness, that infinite distance

which is death. If it starts then, from things, it starts from all things without distinction. It does

not choose, it takes its point of departure in the very refusal to choose. If the artist prefers to look

among things for "beautiful" ones, he betrays being , he betrays art. Rilke, on the contrary,

refuses to "choose between the beautiful and the un beautiful. Each is only a space, a possibility,

and it is up to me to fill each perfectly or imperf ectly." Not to choose, not to refuse anything

access to vision and, in vision, to transmutation - - to start from things, but from all things: this is

a rule which always tormented him and which he lear ned perhaps from Hofmannsthal. The latter,

in a 1907 essay, The Poet and These Times , said of the poet, "It is as if his eyes had no li ds." He

must not leave anything out of himself, he must not withold himself from any being, from any

phantasm

____________________ is arranged in a way so little "human" that men "co uld only name it: emptiness."

22[The English translation from the German which I co mpared to Blanchot's French is by Violet

M. Macdonald ( London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1951) -- Trans.]

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born of a human mind; he can reject no thought. Lik ewise in 1907 Rilke says with the same force

in a letter to Clara Rilke: "No more than one choic e is permitted. He who creates cannot turn

away from any existence; a single failing anywhere at all snatches him from the state of grace,

makes him faulty through and through." The poet, le st he betray himself by betraying being,

must never "turn away." By this aversion he would s urrender to bad death, the one that limits and

delimits. He must in no way defend himself; he is e ssentially a man without defenses:

A being with no shell, open to pain, Tormented by l ight, shaken by every sound. Rilke often used the image of the little anemone he saw one day in Rome. "It had opened so wide

during the day that it could not close up again at night." Thus, in an Orpheus sonnet, he exalts

this gift for welcoming infinitely as a symbol of p oetic openness: "You, acceptance and force of

so many worlds ," he says, in a line where the word Entschluss, (" resolution"), echoing the word

erschliessen ("to open"), reveals one of the source s of Heidegger's Entschlossenheit ("resolute

acceptance"). So the artist must be, and so his lif e. But where is this life to be found?

But when, in which of all the lives Are we at last beings who open and welcome?

If the poet is truly linked to this acceptance whic h doesn't choose and which seeks its starting

point not in any particular thing but in all things and, more profoundly, in a region anterior to

things, in the indeterminacy of being -- if the poe t must live at the intersection of infinite

relations, in the place opened and as if void where foreign destinies cross -- then he can well say

joyfully that he takes his point of departure in th ings: what he calls "things" is no longer anything

but the depth of the immediate and undetermined, an d what he calls point of departure is the

approach toward the point where nothing begins. It is "the tension of an infinite beginning," art

itself as origin or again the experience of the Ope n, the search for a true dying.

The Secret of double Death

So we have returned, now, to the center from which all the ambiguity of the movement radiates.

To start off from things, yes, that is necessary. I t is they that must be saved; it is in them, by

turning authentically toward them, that we learn to turn toward the invisible, to feel

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the movement of transmutation and, in this movement , to transmute transmutation itself, to the

point where it becomes the purity of death purified of dying, in the unique song where death says

yes and which, in the fullness of this yes is song' s very fullness and its perfection. This

movement is certainly difficult, a long and patient experience. But at least it shows us clearly

where we must begin. Are not things given us? "For my part, I can start afresh from your little

cowslips; truly nothing prevents me from finding al l things inexhaustible and intact." Yes,

"nothing prevents me" -- provided, however, that I be freed from every obstacle, from all limits.

And this liberation will be illusory if, from the f irst step, it is not that radical turning back which

alone makes me "him who is ready for everything, wh o excludes nothing," "a being with no

shell." It is necessary, then, no longer to start f rom things in order to make possible the approach

toward true death, but to start from the deep of de ath in order to turn toward the intimacy of

things -- to "see" them truly, with the disinterest ed gaze of him who does not cleave to himself,

who cannot say "I," who is no one: impersonal death .

To start from death? But where, now, is death? One may judge that Rilke does much to

"idealize" the ordeal of dying. He seeks to make it invisible to us, he wants to purify it of its

brutality; he sees in it a promise of unity, the ho pe of a larger understanding. If death is the

extreme, then it must be said that this is a very a ccommodating extreme, which takes such care

not to threaten our faith in the oneness of being, our sense of the whole and even our fear of

death, for this death disappears, discreetly, into itself. But this disappearance precisely, which

has its reassuring side, also has a fearful one, wh ich is like another form of its excessiveness, the

image of what makes it an impure transcendence, tha t which we never meet, which we cannot

grasp: the ungraspable; absolute indeterminacy. If death's true reality is not simply what from the outside we call quitting life -- if death is something other than its worldly reality, and if it eludes

us, turning always away -- then this movement makes us sense not only its discretion and its

essential intimacy but also its profound unreality: death as abyss, not that which founds but the

absence and the loss of all foundation.

This is an impressive result of Rilke's experience, for it enlightens us in spite of him, as if

through the mediation of his reassuring intentions it continued to speak to us in the harsh original

language. When the force upon which he makes everyt hing depend is detached from the moment

when it has the reality of the last instant, it esc apes him and escapes us constantly. It is inevitabl e

but inaccessible death; it is the

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abyss of the present, time without a present, with which I have no relationships; it is that toward

which I cannot go forth, for in it I do not die, I have fallen from the power to die. I n it they die;

they do not cease, and they do not finish dying.

There is much to suggest that the movement by which he purifies death, by taking away its

random character, forced Rilke to incorporate this randomness in its essence, to close it upon its

absolute indeterminacy, so that instead of being on ly an improper and untimely event, death

becomes, at the heart of its invisibility, that whi ch is not even an event, that which is not

accomplished, yet which is there, the part of this event which its accomplishment cannot realize.

Rilke's assertion, which has had repercussions in p hilosophy, that there is something like a

double death, two relations with death, one which w e like to call authentic and the other

inauthentic, only expresses the doubleness within which such an event withdraws as if to

preserve the void of its secret. Inevitable, but in accessible; certain, but ungraspable. That which

produces meaning (nothingness as the power to negat e, the force of the negative, the end starting

from which man is the decision to be without being) is the risk that rejects being -- is history,

truth. It is death as the extreme of power, as my m ost proper possibility, but also the death which

never comes to me, to which I can never say yes, wi th which there is no authentic relation

possible. Indeed, I elude it when I think I master it through a resolute acceptance, for then I turn

away from what makes it the essentially inauthentic and the essentially inessential. From this

point of view, death admits of no "being for death"; it does not have the solidity which would

sustain such a relation. It is that which happens t o no one, the uncertainty and the indecision of

what never happens. I cannot think about it serious ly, for it is not serious. It is its own imposter;

it is disintegration, vacant debilitation -- not th e term, but the interminable, not proper but

featureless death, and not true death but, as Kafka says, "the sneer of its capital error."

Orphic Space

What is, moreover, very striking in Rilke's itinera ry is the way the force of the poetic experience

led him, and almost without his knowing it, from th e search for a personal death -- clearly it is

with this kind of death that he feels most kinship -- to an altogether different obligation. After

having, at first, made art "the road toward myself, " he feels increasingly

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that this road must lead to the point where, within myself, I belong to the outside. It leads me

where I am no longer myself, where if I speak it is not I who speak, where I cannot speak. To encounter Orpheus is to encounter this voice which is not mine, this death which becomes song,

but which is not my death, even though I must disap pear in it more profoundly.

Once and for all,

It is Orpheus when there is song. He comes and he g oes.

These words seem merely to echo the ancient idea ac cording to which there is only one poet, a

single superior power to speak which "now and again throughout time makes itself known in the

souls that submit to it." This is what Plato called enthusiasm. Closer to Rilke, Novalis had

affirmed it in his turn, in a way which the Orpheus verses seem to recall: "Klingsohr, eternal

poet, does not die, remains in the world." But Orph eus, precisely, does die, and he does not

remain: he comes and he goes. Orpheus does not symb olize the lofty transcendence of which the

poet would be the vehicle and which would lead him to say: it is not I who speak but the god

who speaks in me. Orpheus does not signify the eter nity and the immutability of the poetic

sphere, but, on the contrary, links the "poetic" to an immeasurable demand that we disappear. He

is a call to die more profoundly, to turn toward a more extreme dying:

O seek to understand that he must disappear!

Even if the anguish of it dismay him.

While his word extends this world,

Already he is beyond where you may not accompany hi m.

. . . . . . . . . .

And he obeys by going beyond.

Through Orpheus we are reminded that speaking poeti cally and disappearing belong to the

profundity of a single movement, that he who sings must jeopardize himself entirely and, in the

end, perish, for he speaks only when the anticipate d approach toward death, the premature

separation, the adieu given in advance obliterate i n him the false certitude of being, dissipate

protective safeguards, deliver him to a limitless i nsecurity. Orpheus conveys all this, but he is

also a more mysterious sign. He leads and attracts us toward the point where he himself, the

eternal poem, enters into his own disappearance, wh ere he identifies himself with the force that

dismembers him and becomes "pure contradiction," th e "lost god," the god's absence, the original

void of which the first elegy speaks in connection with the myth of

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Linos, and from which "the uninterrupted tidings fo rmed of silence" propagate themselves

through terrified space -- the murmur of the interm inable. Orpheus is the mysterious sign pointed

toward the origin, where not only secure existence and the hope of truth and the gods are lacking,

but also the poem; where the power to speak and the power to hear, undergoing their own lack,

endure their impossibility.

This movement is "pure contradiction." It is linked to the infinitude of the transformation which

leads us not only to death, but infinitely transmut es death itself, which makes of death the infinite

movement of dying and of him who dies him who is in finitely dead, as if in death's intimacy it

were for him a matter of dying always more, immeasu rably -- of continuing inside death to make

possible the movement of transformation which must not cease, night of measureless excess,

Nacht aus Übermass , where one has in nonbeing eternally to return to being. Thus the rose becomes for Rilke the symbol both of poetic action and of death, when death is no

one's sleep. The rose is like the perceptible prese nce of Orphic space, the space which is nothing

but outerness and which is nothing but intimacy, su perabundance where things do not limit or

infringe upon each other, but in their common unfur ling make room instead of taking it up, and

constantly "transform the outside world . . . into a handful of Within."

Almost a being without boundaries and as if spared

and more purely inner and very strangely tender

and illuminating itself right up to the edge,

is such a thing known to us?

The poem -- and in it the poet -- is this intimacy opened to the world, unreservedly exposed to

being. It is the world, things and being ceaselessl y transformed into innerness. It is the intimacy

of this transformation, an apparently tranquil and gentle movement, but which is the greatest

danger, for then the word touches the deepest intim acy, demands not only the abandonment of all

exterior assurance but risks its very self and intr oduces us into that point where nothing can be

said of being, nothing made, where endlessly everyt hing starts over and where dying itself is a

task without end.

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust

Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel

Lidern .

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Rose, O pure contradiction, delight

Of being no one's sleep under so many

lids.

Rilke and Mallarmé

If we wanted to isolate the characteristic feature of Rilke's experience, the one which his poetry

conserves above and beyond the images and forms, we would have to look for it in a particular

relation to the negative: in the tension which is a consent, the patience which obeys but which

nevertheless goes beyond ("He obeys by going beyond "), in the slow and practically invisible

action without efficacy but not without authority, which he opposes to the active force of the

world and which, in song, is secret attentiveness t o death.

Rilke, like Mallarmé, makes poetry a relation to ab sence. How different, however, are the

experiences of these two poets, apparently so close ; how different the demands that occupied

them within the same experience. While for Mallarmé absence remains the force of the negative

-- that which removes "the reality of things" and d elivers us from their weight -- for Rilke

absence is also the presence of things, the intimac y of the being-a-thing where the desire to fall

toward the center in a silent, immobile, endless fa ll is gathered. Mallarmé's poetry pronounces

being with the brilliance of that which has the pow er to annihilate, to suspend beings and

suspend itself by withdrawing into the dazzling viv acity of an instant. This poetry retains the

decisiveness that makes of absence something active , of death an act and of voluntary death --

where nothingness is entirely within our mastery -- the poetic event par excellence, brought to

light by the Igitur experiment. But Rilke, who also turns toward death as toward the origin of poetic possibility, seeks a deeper relation with death. He sees in voluntary death still only the

symbol of a violent power and a spirit of strength upon which poetic truth cannot be founded. He

sees there an offense against death itself, a faili ng with respect to its discreet essence and to the

patience of its invisible force.

Absence is linked, in Mallarmé, to the suddenness o f the instant . For an instant, at the moment

when everything falls back into nothingness, the pu rity of being gleams. For an instant, universal

absence becomes pure presence; and when everything disappears, disappearance appears. This is

pure clarity apparent, the unique point

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where light is darkness shining, and it is day by n ight. Absence in Rilke is linked to the space

which is itself perhaps freed from time, but which nonetheless, through the slow transmutation

that consecrates it, is also like another time, a w ay of approaching a time which would be the

very time of dying or the essence of death, a time very different from the impatient and violent

agitation which is ours, as different as poetry's i neffectual action is from effective action.

In these times, when in the restlessness of the int erminable and the stagnation of endless error we

have to dwell outside of ourselves, outside of the world, and, it would seem, even die outside of

death, Rilke wants to acknowledge a supreme possibi lity, one more movement, the approach to

grace, to the poetic opening: a relation with the O pen that is happy at last, the liberation of the

Orphic word in which space is affirmed, space which is a "Nowhere without no." Then to speak

is a glorious transparency. To speak is no longer t o tell or to name. To speak is to celebrate, and

to celebrate is to praise, to make of the word a pu re radiant consumption which still speaks when

there is no more to say, does not name what is name less but welcomes it, invokes and glorifies it.

This is the only language where night and silence a re manifest without being interrupted or

revealed:

O tell me, poet, what you do. -- I praise.

But the mortal and monstrous,

how do you endure it, welcome it? -- I praise.

But the nameless, the anonymous,

how, poet, do you invoke it? -- I praise.

Where do you derive the right to be true

in all disguises, beneath every mask? -- I praise.

And how does silence know you, and furor,

as well as the star and the tempest? -- Because I p raise.

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Inspiration

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The Outside, the Night

Whoever devotes himself to the work is drawn by it toward the point where it undergoes

impossibility. This experience is purely nocturnal, it is the very experience of night.

In the night, everything has disappeared. This is t he first night. Here absence approaches --

silence, repose, night. Here death blots out Alexan der's picture; here the sleeper does not know

he sleeps, and he who dies goes to meet real dying. Here language completes and fulfills itself in

the silent profundity which vouches for it as its m eaning.

But when everything has disappeared in the night, " everything has disappeared" appears. This is </