The Writing of the Disaster

*The Writing of the Disaster*, by Blanchot (1980/1986)

## Summary

Amidst the horrors and disasters of modernity, this book attempts to figure out the most serious task of writing--how to write about, how to use words to describe, or explain, or (possibly redeem?), and when is it possible, and when is it not possible.

The book's form itself is pushing coherence, continual observations and notes, fragments and moments, accumulating and accumulating. Pushes against coherent, rational argument. Against the idea of language as pure connection to referent, transparency, Blanchot pushes against this assumption and questions the legitimacy of representation--through the witness, through the historian, through the writer, the philosopher.

Incompleteness of any account, of any understanding.

Continued to challenge the notion that we can fully represent history, or catastrophe, disaster, as comprehensible or complete. Historical testimony is by nature flawed and incomplete. We can not assume to know the disaster completely. Even with a witness, text, photograph, the actual "event" is off-scene and out of our grasp, and obscene.

Writes in fragmentary form, about fragments. Fragments inherently come with gaps, with stops, but it is these gaps and stops which pushes them forward to continue also. *Ie, the archive!*.

Also, fragments are not simply isolated, but because they are juxtaposed they suggestion meaning and connection *at the same time* *as* they push it away and deny meaning. (or create absent meaning)

These fragments are not the same as the "isolated sentence" which is more "aphoristic" than fragmentary.

Aphoristic, isolated sentences, “tend to reverberate like an oracular utterance having the self-sufficiency of a communication to which nothing can be added” (132). Where as the aphoristic sentence “affirms definitively,” and the allusive sentence “makes ambiguity a positive value,”

the *fragmentary* is exposure to **these two kinds to risks**: normativity and that which thinks it escapes the illusion of truth only to “succumb[] to the illusion itself as truth” (133). The fragmentary is related to citation (and incitation).

Re: the word, "disaster." Gets repeated a lot, we ask ourselves what it is. Yes, the Holocaust, references, the immemorial, but it is a disaster that cannot be justified or sublimated. But most importantly it is an experience which is not experienced. It is not an event that arrives and comes. Like death it is imminent, and at the same time already-past (immemorial). It is what we can neither forget nor remember, because in order to forget it we would have to have been able to remember it as something that has actually "happened," or experienced it.

Levinas and Blanchot (along with Derrida) think our relation to the other. More precisely, language is not the “house of being” but something *radically other than being*. Language is not “proper” to human beings. Rather, as Levinas puts it, “*Language is in itself already skepticism*” and as Blanchot continues, “*to write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely*” (110).

One gets the sense that for Blanchot, we cannot take comfort in Being,  in the cosmos (in the fixity of the stars—no, there is dis-aster), or in language, but rather that we “keep watch over absent meaning.”

WD seeks to understand the significance and meaning of the Holocaust independent from the empirical fact of its occurrence. Basically, not that the Holocaust got rid of meaning through the course of the holocaust, but that meaning was absent, in the first place, from the event. The holocaust did not "happen" in the manner of any other event.

Blanchot thinks of the Holocaust as the absolute event of history, an event that is definitely a historical reality but then also a violent rupture in history that challenges, in the first place, its own status as an event. (tension between the philosophical and empirical status of the H). **What this tension and book essentially "gestures toward" is the difficult question of the imperative to remember and ascribe meaning to that which, properly speaking, cannot be known as an experienced presence, an event, and therefore as a memory.**

It is, as Blanchot claims, the question of how memory can safeguard both the empirical and philosophical status of the H when the H is marked by the violent absence of meaning "where all was lost, including guardian thought."

Essentially, "guardian thought" seems to be contingent on memory, yet memory is contingent on having first thought of the H in the present as a presence. Insofar as the H did not "happen" in the present, thought is always a memory; therefore, memory of the H is always a kind of impossibility, hinging on the very "guardian thought" that is absent in the first place.

Question of the I in relation to an experienced present, for what is lost is not only the possibility of memory but also the presence of the I during the event of the H. This rupture between the I and the experience emerges as the inherent failure of the I to tell about an event it cannot tell. (Ie., *SEE UNDER LOVE*???)

## Quotes

"fragments, destined in part to the blank that separates them, find in this gap not what ends them, but what prolongs them" (58). (*the archive?--fragmentation yes is interruption, but the gap is what pushes forward to continue also.*

“the interruption’s somehow having the same meaning as that which does not cease” (21).

[re: citation]: “If quotations, in their fragmenting force, destroy in advance the texts from which they are not only severed but which they exalt till these texts become nothing but severance, then the fragment without a text, or any context, is radically unquotable” (37).

> "The holocaust, the absolute event of history--which is a date in history--that utter-burn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up, where the gift, which knows nothing of forgiveness or of consent, shattered without giving place to anything that can be affirmed, that can be denied ... How can thought be made the keeper of the holocaust where all was lost, including guardian thought?" (WD 47)
>
>

“Naturally [haha], disaster can be understood according to its etymology [. . .] But the etymology of ‘disaster’ does not operate in these fragments as a preferred, or more original insight [. . .] On the contrary, the indeteriminateness of what is written when this word is written, *exceeds etymology and draws it into disaster*” (117).

"When oppression is absolute, there is no more leisure, no more 'free time.' Sleep is supervised. The meaning of work is then the destruction of work in and through work. But what if, as it has happened in certain commandos, labor consists of carrying stones at top speed from one spot and piling them up in another, and then in bringing them back at the run to the starting point...? Then, no act of sabotage can cancel work, for its annulment is work's own very purpose. And yet labor retains a meaning: it tends not only to destroy the worker, but more immediately to occupy, to harness and control him and at the same time perhaps to give him an awareness that to produce and not to produce amount to the same."

"But the danger (here) of words in their theoretical insignificance is perhaps that they claim to evoke the annihilation where all sinks always, without hearing the 'be silent' addressed to those who have known only partially, or from a distance the interruption of history. And yet to watch and to wake, to keep the ceaseless vigil over the immeasurable absence is necessary, for what took up again from this end (Israel, all of us) is marked by this end, from which we cannot come to the end of waking again."

"To write one's autobiography in order either to confess or to engage in self-analysis, or in order to expose oneself, like a work of art, to the gaze of all, is perhaps to seek to survive, but through a perpetual suicide--a death which is total inasmuch as fragmentary." (64) (a fragmentary and total death is a death that can never be experienced in the present; it is rather death which is inherent in the notion of survival.)

"The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; 'I' am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside."

"The disaster is related to forgetfulness--forgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated--the immemorial, perhaps. To remember forgetfully: again, the outside."

"To read, to write, the way one lives under the surveillance of the disaster: exposed to the passivity that is outside passion. The heightening of forgetfulness. / It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence."

"The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience--it is the limit of writing."

"The disaster has already passed beyond danger, even when we are under the threat of -----. The mark of the disaster is that one is never at that mark except when one is under its thread, and, being so, past danger."

"The horror--the honor--of the name, which always threatens to become a title."

"Garrulous prose: a child's mere babble. And yet a man who drools, the idiot, the man of tears who restrains himself no longer, who lets himself go--he too is without words, bereft of power, but still he is closer to speech that flows and flows away than to writing which restrains itself, even if this be restraint beyond mastery. In this sense, there is no silence if not written: broken reserve, a deep cut in the possibility of any cut at all." (*Agamben!!!!!!!!)*

"The fragmentary promises not instability (the opposite of fixity) so much as disarray, confusion.

"Detachment is not sufficient, unless it senses that it is, in advance, a sign of the disaster. The disaster alone holds mastery at a distance. I wish (for example) for a psychoanalyst to whom a sign would come, from the disaster. Power over the imaginary provided that the imaginary be understood as that which evades power. Repetition as un-power."

"There can be this point, at least, to writing: to wear out errors. Speaking propagates, disseminates them by fostering belief in some truth. / To read: not to write; to write what one is forbidden to read. / To write: to refuse to write--to write by way of this refusal. So it is that when he is asked for a few words, this alone suffices for a king of exclusion to be decreed, as though he were being obliged to survive, to lend himself to live in order to continue dying. / To write--for lack of the wherewithal to do so."

"Wittgenstein's 'mysticism,' aside from his faith in unity, must come from his believing that one can *show* when one cannot *speak*. But without language, nothing can be shown. And to be silent is still to speak. Silence is impossible. That is why we desire it. Writing (or Telling, as distinct from anything written or told) precedes every phenomenon, every manifestation or show: all appearing."

FORGETTING, MEMORY, ETC.
*Blanchot: The Writing of the Disaster*

Fragment: closed, sealed-off, isolated, regresses to the condition of the aphorism which, self-contained and self-complacent, lives its life oblivious to other neighboring phrases towards which it refuses to open, with which it refuses to communicate, with which it is not on speaking terms.

“rolled up and closed upon itself”

no self-reliance/perfection, nor integration

Invokes prior unity in etymology (leaning toward past or future)

Blanchot dissociates them from the criterion of totality

prominence to the interval

Interval, fissure, interruption, discontinuity, blank, empty space, “all the more empty as it cannot be confused with pure nothingess…”

it is precisely from nothingness that Blanchot delivers the interval, discovering in this space of discontinuity the source of energy, a motivating force that advances discourse without, however, making its progress direct or easy.

To interrupt discourse would be to divide it, but the intermission thus occasioned ensures a breathing space through which discourse can be given momentum and acquire plurality while new interactions spring up to form a dialogue (which after all is but “a garland of fragments”), an infinite conversation.

“Poetry is memory” (314)

“The singer sings from memory, and grants the power to remember.” The latter grant power to the poet and accounts for and at the same time warrants his prestigious station.

“masters of the memorable” true extent of the poetic dominion

to wield power over memory is to have the power of death, the power to deal the death of oblivion to the already dead, but also the power of life, the power to sing to life those who perished long ago.

Poetic resolutions may therefore seem to be life and death decisions

the essential and most critical moment for the poet/singer/master of the memorable is the moment of recalling. For “Who would be interested in a new and non-transmitted speech?” He recalls the language of the dead as his song becomes audible only in words which have already been heard, for “to hear is always already to have heard.”

Poet’s concern for retelling, telling again each time a first time.”

Tropogical movement of return: it resounds and reverberates with that which has already been said as it has recourse to the principle of repetition, reiteration, recurrence.

the work the singer takes on himself, the ritual he becomes involved in effectuating and solemnising, is one of recollecting, which is a gesture of both remembering and reading. Acts of selecting and collecting.

“waste blanks” and “vacant leaves” to recourse to with references to forgetting use the textual metaphor of Shakespeare’s sonnet 77

However, the moment of forgetfulness that informs the rhythm of recollection is not, according to Blanchot, merely incorporated in the all-inclusive notion of memory. –Orpheus, accidentally forgetting his work which is the only way to do the work(???)

the text that reading, functioning as a fold of recollecting, appropriates for its object is ineluctably one of quotation, since the text of recollection can only be a text of reminiscence, second-hand material, an incongruous vestige of the other.

Quotations inevitably entails the problem of fragmentariness since “quotations, in their fragmentary force, destroy in advance the texts from which they are not only severed but which they exalt till these texts become nothing but severance.”

“nothing but severance” constitutes the text the poem looks back on. It is a text of deletion structured by marks of lacunae, tearing, mutilation, as its existence is preconditioned by the disruptive procedures of quotation.

Since it is the principle of quotation that, according to B, founds the text of memory (what escapes the postulate of citation escapes memory as well as forgetfulness), then the totality of the original text that the poem, in its significant and signifying process of recollection, aspires to return to, is always revoked in advance (despite the fact that quotations seem to function as reminders of the past wholeness, unity, coherence).

The text the poem seems to relapse to and capitalise on and thus re-treat of, can never be retreated to. Its space is not a space of retreat where one is bound to find shelter. Its space should rather be termed as a space of unsheltering.

Unsheltering // opposite of dwelling, spells opening, decentering, wandering, exile, danger. It is a condition marked by indeterminacy and displacement.

The text resists to being treated as a space of return and it even defies being designated as a place, a certain undivided whole.

Thus the text prefiguring the poem appears unsatisfactory, deficient, lacking; there is a void permeating the very origins of the poem, a void that remains untraceable and therefore beyond any negotion procedures.

Untraceability of the void—the reason lies in the fact that the original text is now lost, it is always already lost. It may even not have pre-existed since “man seems to recall what he has never known.”

The void, although remarkable, is not to be marked or remarked: being lost, the text abides in a state of displacement, dispersion and disintegration, inaccessible to the marking/remarking trace of the poet’s pen.

The writing of the original text remains illegible to the gaze of its avid would be reader: when the poet reads the original, his gaze enounters a blank.

His reading of the original is a reading of a loss, of that which, while slipping, disappearing, lapsing into the unapproachable space of absence, calls from this very absence for writing to gather all its resources, to make them disguise the loss, to make them speak on behalf of that loss.

The poet’s text, then, functions as a copious substitute which is bound to be written in default of the original one: a duplicate of the original access to which has been lost, or rather which remains illegible.

the movement is not from the original plenitude to the absence-hollowed copy but a movement from a state of loss to a writing of supplementation. The poet returns to the original to revoke/evoke its text, regardless of the loss which annuls, obliterates, and expropriates any writing that should claim to approach that loss.

the space of forgetfulness which B delineates as “a depth without path and witout return; [which] must escape our mastery, ruin our power to dispose of it.” Thus it is a space which amazes any one approaching it, a space of a maze where movement is bound to be sterile.

Forgetfulness in language—forgetfulness is governed by an essentail tropical principle, the principle of the turn, for he distinguishes in forgetting “what turns away from us” and “the detour that comes from forgetting itself.”

“What turns away from us” must be a missing, unthinkable word, unavailable for recall, that refuses to be turned to account.

loss of remembrance: when we go blank, draw a blank instead of a word. Blank, loss, lack, want, cessation: such is the unmistakably negative idiom of forgetting.

does not arrive

Blanchot, however, gives us to understand that it would be wrong to pass over this absence and make nothing of it. The absence a forgotten word communicates is critical in that it involves a risk to language, a “possibility that all speech could be forgotten,” and thus no word lies outside the pale of forgetting

***THIS POSSIBILITY IS POINTED TOWARD AN  EPISODE FROM 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE IN WHICH FIRST IMAGES AND THEN WORDS BEGIN TO VACATE THE MEMORIES OF THE INHABITANTS OF MACONDO. Determined to avoid the plague, which curiously combined insomnia and forgetfulness (whose first, forgotten, name is lethargy), Jose Arcadio Buendia formulates more and more far-sighted prophylactics against the epidemic only to discover them to be mere “practices of consolation” and that, no matter how ingenious, the “keys to memorizing objects and feelings” are, like everything else, subject to forgetting simply because the possibilities of the loss of memory are infinite, simply because forgetting seems to have the last word.***

the crisis inherent in forgetting suggests moment of hazard/suspense, but also marks a points of transition, prepares the way for a movement within language which a missing word may initiate. It is at the moment of forgetting that the linear progress of language becomes broken, punctuated, interrupted, and that language begins to be at stake.

But it is also then, at the moment of “a difficult interval,” that the detour, an indirect and ciruitous course, originates. Springing from the indefinite space of presence/absence, or rather non-presence/non-absence, a forgotten word, even though silent and inert, prompts language to “rise up in its entirety” by making it “gather around” itself and, by the same token, gather momentum.

Yet a forgotten word, as B observes, does not fade from language without a trace; it lingers on, flashing its absence when becoming known as “something forgotten” and in this devious manner is betrayed by those present words, close at hand, which are ready to embark on a tropical journey.

Forgotten the word is inaccessible, only to open a movement of substitution, a movement essentially metaphorical for in forgetting, language reveals itself as metaphor. Forgetting, being inherent in language, structures language and builds its fabric.

“discontinuity, the arrest of intermittence, does not arrest becoming, on the contrary, it provokes becoming,” –engendering capacity in a moment of abeyance.

Just like the fragment which recognizes in the gap separating it from other fragments not its limit but an extension, the forgotten word acknowledges in the tear it makes from the fabric of language not what spells its end or lethal estrangement from other words, but rather, what activities some latent potential.

The moment of forgetting should not, therefore, be read in terms of a radical disconnection, whereby a word, ostensibly absenting itself from circulation, severs all ties, because as B remarks “there are always some links that have sprung (they are not missing).”

forgetting energizes language, rekindles rather than stifles it, incites it so that words, other words, become born of the obligation which the impossibility of a word brings in its wake. Hence, forgetting is “a meeting point between possibility and impossibility.”

“in forgetting a word, we sense that the capacity to forget is essential to speech”

the relationship in which *essential* has the force of a binding word gives preference to forgetting, and distinguishes it as important, cardinal, vital to the point of being indispensable.

Even if a forgotten word discloses the absence, which it covers up in its present, in the sense of non-forgotten, condition, this absence does not bring language to a standstill: disrupted; and thus challenges, it carries on, and persists against and through the agency of discontinuity, since, as B would have it, “we speak because we have the power to forget.”