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central, remains the only medium for the possibility of
a community, even if it is a community of those who
have no community. The growth in sales of intimate
self-portraits and revelatory biographies of public figures,
and the pathological obsession with personalities
and gossip, masquerading as debate, betrays how liberal
democracy functions by removing an effective public
life. As in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Big Brother,
or at least one’s biographer, is always watching. It is
a political environment that has redefined politics into
a means of how best to smooth the way for corporate
oligarchies to manage capital. We need art to raise the
absent voice of a community denied by a misreading
of absence. It requires the reader to trust, despite the
apparent emptiness of art:
“Reading is anguish, and this is because any text,
however important, or amusing, or interesting it maybe
… is empty – at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to
cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not
comprehend.” (trans. Ann Smock)
The artist faces a similar challenge. Blanchot says at
the end of his essay on Beckett:
“Art requires that he who practices it should be immolated
to art, should become other, not another, not
transformed from the human being he was into an artist
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and
with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into
nobody, the empty, animated space where art’s summons
is heard.” (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)
But how is this done? The fragmentary work, perhaps
the apogee of 20th-century Modernist literature
and philosophy, is Blanchot’s approach. Its refusal to
insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well
as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority,
means both reader and writer are constantly moving
toward understanding, toward what is absent, yet
never assuming the nihilism of no truth, no meaning
even as it encroaches on each clearing. Blanchot
calls it, speaking of Kafka but also of himself, “a
combat of passivity – combat that reduces itself to
naught”. Some might see this as needlessly equivocal
or pretentious, preferring, instead, the apparent
clarity of rational progress, even if this, in the end,
leads to the bland relativism of modern culture. Yet in
his essay from 1953 with which we began, Blanchot
says that art’s summons might not have been lost
on Socrates – the great emblematic thinker of positivistic
Western culture. He might also have sensed
the empty, animated space pulling like a black hole
at the Light of Reason. While he accepted the only
guarantee for speech was the living presence of a
human being, he also “went as far as to die in order
to keep his word.” �
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