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he look at her again. But Orpheus was unable to resist the temptation
and looked back at her before daylight. The moment he looked back,
Eurydice was forever lost in the darkness of the underworld.
According to Blachot, Orpheus made the crucial mistake of desiring
to possess Eurydice in a direct way, whereas he could only posses or
even access her in his songs about her. Reaching to Eurydice beyond
the limits of the song results in her disappearance. Blanchot writes:
“[…]only in the song does Orpheus have power over Eurydice. But in the
song too, Eurydice is already lost, and Orpheus himself is the dispersed
Orpheus; the song immediately makes him ‘infinitely dead’. He loses
Eurydice because he desires her beyond the measured limits of the song,
and he loses himself, but his desire, and Eurydice lost, and Orpheus
dispersed are necessary to the song, just as the ordeal of eternal inertia is
necessary to the work.” [21]
Orpheus looked back because he wanted a pure representation
of Eurydice, a Eurydice existing outside the limits of the song or the
language – the Eurydice who made him write songs. But the desire
itself can never be perfectly represented or expressed. The writer can
never come to such an expression because of the nature of language. The
personal longing is always destroyed by the public nature of language
itself. [22] As Gregory De Vleeschouwer writes in ‘Into the White’: “The
origin of work is the longing to capture the private feeling with a public
representation. That is impossible.” [23] Indeed, from the moment that
a private desire is expressed in language, it can no longer be private
because it involves a multiplicity of possible interpretations. Yet the
writer’s utopia is the transcending of this contradiction: showing the
infinite as infinite and bridging the gap between public and private.
That is why Orpheus looked back.
101
DEMOCRACY, HOPE
AND NIHILISM
Thomas Decreus
21
Blanchot (1982) 173.
22
De Vleeschouwer (forthcoming) 61.
23
De Vleeschouwer (forthcoming) 55-56. Simon Critchley comes to the same conclusion
when he states: “Is there not a performative contradiction at the heart of literature insofar
as its use of language is premised upon the generality of meaning and communication, but
where what is expressed in language is the writer’s solitude?” Cf. Critchley (2004) 37.