- Да, - но я еще не сыта. Время. Ты никогда не бываешь сыта. Столько уже съела ты на моих глазах, и все такая же сухая и жадная...
Ее звали Стелла. Она напевала изредка, от ее голоса веяло прохладой; вместе, они не могли наговорить..
Но после смерти сестры Рахили, как бы опровергая «коричневую» реальность Германии, реальность войны, арестов, расстрелов, Доносов, на могиле монахини сами собой вырастают розы...
Dmitry Olshansky In Memoriam of Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003)
Dmitry A. Olshansky private psychoanalyst P.O. box 16 St. Petersburg Russia 198261 tel: +8 960 2487075 e-mail: Olshansky@hotmail.com (English) Olchanski@free.fr (Francais) web: http://olshansky.sitecity.ru
Aesthetics of Silence. In Memorian of Maurice Blanchot (1907 – 2003). // Filosofija i drustvo. [Philosophy and Society] (Beograd, Serbia). No. 2 (33), 2007 – p. 263 – 267
(27.09.1907, Quain, Saone-et-Laoire – 20.02.2003, Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, Yvelines).
Beyond biography
We know very few details about life of Maurice Blanchot, and have just several photos that seems to be unusual in media epoch when philosophers present their ideas at the TV, direct the movies and become as popular as cinema-stars. Blanchot has never took part in media-project, academic and social activities and has the sole public speech in support of the students in May 1968. In disguising his personal data – even the fact of his death remains unknown for some weeks – Blanchot aspired to create any pure text, which is beyond his own person and his own image; he looked for pure literature that could not be interpreted as the author’s product only and that could not be reduced to any biographical, psychological or historical context. While Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, Blanchot has realized that death in negation of his own person: he cut off the I [Il guillotine le moi], said Fabrice Pliskin about Blanchot in Nouvel Observateur (27.02.2003). Like other structuralists, Blanchot looks to destroy author-centered writing and looks for decentration of the text and for any other source of writing, beyond the author. The writing, in Blanchot, does not belong to the author’s personality, because the author could not rule it, but he follows any power or other’s desire (in Lacan) or the “jump of inspiration” (in Blanchot). Like his own hero, Orpheus, any author should follow the law of inspiration only, that breaks all rule and conventions of the discourse. In Orpheus’s Gaze he said, “writer is possessed by anything and does not know about it”. Reading, in a same way, could not arise from the imaginary points of view – like ideology (in L. Althusser), narcissism (in J. Lacan), author (in R. Barthes), metanarrations (in J.-F. Lyotard), or the institutional knowledge (in M. Foucault) – but should discover a singularity of each writing-act. Blanchot intended to destroy the hermeneutic that involves the text into the context of author’s life, historical epoch, and social ideology and explain literature on the basis of those external data. In other words, to interpret the text we should follow its own logic and own way of self-interpretation; reader could deal with the words only and could try to discover its singularity rather than trace its historical, social or psychological roots. To return literature to the phenomenology of word – there is nothing beyond the text – was the main aim of Blanchot’s project. Researching Blanchot’s philosophy we can also find that there is almost nothing on author, but the texts.
Aesthetics beyond the values
In the Orpheus’s Gaze Blanchot mentions that artist’s creature should be examined not by the artist himself, but by its own measureless, because creative act is an experience of deepness without measure. Similarly any text has to be examined neither by author’s taste (like in Wilde) nor by reader’s values (like in Barthes), but should be evaluate as a singular literary product without comparison to another texts and with no scale of common values. In Blanchot there are no meta-textual values, but singularity of aesthetics of literary phenomenon of Mallarme, Lautreamont, de Sade, Kafka, Rilke, Hoelderline and others, because each of them creates his own language, own system of values and own aesthetics. In such a way he declined classical opposition between primary and secondary literature, between art and critics: any comment is as original as it deals with language. There is neither primary nor secondary literature, because each text creates its own literary space. Blanchot’s deconstruction of the values is not a continuation of Nietzschean project of revaluation of all the values, but rather avoiding of the common sense in aesthetics as it is. Following Flaubert, Blanchot tries to clean the literature from the any non-textual substructure (ethical, social or pedagogical aims) and return literature to a phenomenology of the word. Blanchot himself focused not on classical literature, but on text as it is: he asked for borders and rules of the genres, form of narration, composition, poetics and style, laws of organization, economy and circulation of the texts. The sense that appears at the border of words (sense of and sense in the language) – was at the focus of Blanchot’s research. Blanchot’s disciple Jacques Derrida expresses that intention in his famous saying from De la grammatologie (1967): “there is nothing out the text”. [Il n’y a pas de hors-texte]. Blanchot turns to analysis of singular text and founded his philosophy as a system of commentaries – in structuralistic manner – with neither comparison, nor generalized conclusions, nor evaluation. Aesthetics, in Blanchot, should refuse the values and turn to singularity of the sense.
Impossible Writing
Jean-Luc Nancy said of Blanchot’s writing that “it opens an opportunity to say more than has been already said, describe impossible and discover a meaning” (In Blanchot’s Company, 1997). Blanchot follows none possible discourse, but pave the new way of writing. Any writing is wider than author and his world and any text says more has been already said and more than it is possible to say. Writing is, like unconscious, beyond the subject, but it possesses the subject and defines himself, therefore it always makes something new, unknown and impossible with us. An art, in Blanchot, is an experience of impossible, which is out of the world and beyond one-self, and therefore any writer always deals with the death that is so impossible as a resurrection. Subject should disappear in the act of writing only to arise in any new place and in a new body; writing is a kind of suicide that removes the subject and at the same time discords an opposition between life and death, proclaiming “an endless death”. Writer looks for the point of his own disappearance, like the hero of Blanchot’s first novel Thomas the Dark [Thomas l'Obscur], who correlates his own being to the letters so much that it splits himself and disperses his own identity. In his working with the text Blanchot’s hero, on the one hand, gradually disappeared in the substance of the language and constitutes a new body, on the other hand. Surely, immortality was the main Blanchot’s interest that constituted his writing as well as a pulsation between death and resurrection. The art is related to loss and is an attempt to symbolize lost object, to include into Fort/Da-structure and to return it into the world as an impossible object, like Eurydice, who could not be revived, but could be returned as a dead into the world of alive: like a ghost, she would remain neither dead not alive. She must remains a specter, which does not exist but, according to Derrida, have some new experience of life. (Spectres de Marx, 1993). Eurydice in Blanchot is also has to remain an impossible woman for Orpheus, like an object a in Lacan, which should be lost to begin a mimetic movement of desire and constitution of the body structure. “Only singing Orpheus could meet Eurydice, but she is already lost in the song”, Eurydice is always has already lost, he is always out of Orpheus’s gaze, always alienated from him; like an object a, she does exist as an impossible object, as a ghost or as block of stone. Or gravestone that witness about the death of the subject. Only as a dead body, which became a clear symbol without flesh, as an impossible body, Eurydice could remain to be an object of art, object of Orpheus’s songs, because “the corpse is the presence of impossible” [L’espace litteraire]. Both death and literature realize the impossible things. Therefore writing is seems like mourning about something unfilled lost, which both splits the subject and supports the writer’s desire. So, lost Eurydice, dispersed by the language Orpheus and the desire to return her are necessary to the art as three basic elements.
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In 1925 Blanchot educated the Department of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, where he met and made friend with Emmanuel Levinas, who introduce fresh Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) to Blanchot and ingratiate him with phenomenological research. In 1930 he received a diploma of Sorbonne for the research on skeptics. At that time he became interested in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and visited the seminars at the St. Anna hospital, where worked young Jacques Lacan. In 1930-th the he worked in ultra-right journals and in 1940-th he turn to literary critics and writes at that time on J. Bataille, A. Camus, M. Duras, S. Mallarme, and J.-P. Sartre. In December 1940, Blanchot met Georges Bataille, who also remains his close friend until his death in 1962. At that time Bataille read him the drafts of his Inner Experience, which suffered an influence of Blanchot’s own first novel Thomas the Dark [Thomas l'Obscur] (published in 2005), which he completed in the same 1940. At that time, Blanchot’s theory and practice was developed together, his critical ideas was growing up on the ground of his own literary exercises. Therefore Blanchot’s critical and philosophical works was not aside abstract conclusions, but the conceptualization of his own writing. His philosophy looks like an art, because he resolved phenomenological questions by the literary means and used philosophy as a literary method. He himself does not recognize the differences between the literature, critics and philosophy and tried to break the barriers between these genres of his writing in freely alloy between narration and philosophical investigation. To research literature, in Blanchot, one should research his own literature, to trace his own way of writing and find his own point of view in language. That is why it is difficult to separate his philosophy and literary legacy, because literary act that entails changes in the author was always in a focus of all his reflections, which expressed in novels, essays and tractates. Blanchot’s second novel Aminadab (1942) give a matter for further critical research, which has been combined in his first collection of articles Miss [Faux Pas], published in 1943. In Blanchot, literature to be the matter of critics, and critics to be a drawing the new literary perspectives: in his second collection he argues the conception of his forthcoming book The Literature and the right to Death, which will be published in 1973. In 1944 he survive first experience of death: he was executed by the Nazis and described that event fifty years later in his last book The Moment of My Death (1994), where he historize his waiting of death that should return. The theme of death that correlates with literature is a usual theme of all his works: Death Sentence (1948), Death as an Opportunity (1955), Waiting. Oblivion (1962) But his literary death comes earlier than bodily: in 1948 he writes his last novel Very Tall [Le Tres-Haut] and retired from literature. He began a lonely life, when even close friends have not seen him for some years, while he stays in correspondence. Was that interrupt is a way to symbolize and play the death as a literary method? Or was that silence rooted in his anxiety of the death and was the way to postpone it, to take possession of the time and delay the end, looking for an eternal conversation, which was the title of his book of 1969? Or was that self-isolation to be a strange narcissist symptom: to show himself to nobody and conserve the immorality of his most valuable object – self-image. To be immortal one should avoid a biography, which always has beginning and the end. In 1962 he has completed his main philosophical work Waiting. Oblivion, where he practices fragmentary writing, which was conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, whom Blanchot met in 1967. That influence is obvious in earlier Derrida, with whom Blanchot stays in contact until the death. In his last years Blanchot continued his research of Kafka (1981), Bataille (in Shameful Society, 1983), Michel Foucault (1986) and Henri Michaux (1999), but none literary texts has been written for these years.
Тем временем:
... Мы имеем в виду забастовку докеров Сантоса – их отказ грузить гитлеровский пароход, на котором бразильское правительство посылает в дар кровавому палачу испанского народа Франко большую партию кофе. Несмотря на неудачный исход забастовки, она является победой рабочего класса Бразилии, сумевшего выразить свои симпатии борющемуся испанскому народу.
Примечателен также выбор автором исходной даты для его повествования. Ноябрь 1937 года был исключительно тяжелым в жизни бразильского народа. Вспомним предшествовавшие ему важнейшие события в истории Бразилии. В 1934 году Коммунистическая партия Бразилии под руководством своего генерального секретаря Луиса Карлоса Престеса организовала массовое антиимпериалистическое движение – Национально освободительный альянс. Наивысшим проявлением этого движения было героическое восстание бразильского народа, вспыхнувшее в ноябре 1935 года в ряде крупных городов. Восстание было подавлено, Престес арестован и приговорен к длительному тюремному заключению. За этим последовал период жесточайших репрессий, и компартия ушла в глубокое подполье. В ноябре 1937 года, в разгар кампании по подготовке президентских выборов, Жетулио Варгас осуществил государственный переворот, разогнав парламент и навязав стране чисто фашистский режим.
1937 год и последующие за ним годы были тревожной эпохой не только для Бразилии, но и для всего мира. Достигла высочайшего подъема героическая борьба испанского народа, сломленная, однако, предательской политикой «невмешательства». Был осуществлен мюнхенский сговор, отдавший во власть Гитлера Чехословакию; фашистская Германия захватила Австрию; Япония без объявления войны напала на Китай и дважды пыталась вторгнуться в пределы Советского Союза; германский фашизм готовился к дальнейшему «штурму на восток». Над всем миром нависли свинцовые тучи войны.
Правдивое отображение событий этой эпохи и тот исторически верный анализ их, который мы находим в романе Амаду, стали возможными для автора только потому, что в своей новой трилогии он безоговорочно вступил на путь социалистического реализма.
Глубоко анализируя события, проникая духовным взором в их сущность, Амаду показывает политическую действительность 1937–1940 годов достоверно и конкретно...
