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the platinum-selling album, the blockbuster movie.
We want a guarantee of value. Each offers a mitigation
of one’s apparently random choice. At the same
time, however, we know, like a General Election, it is
meaningless. Nothing changes. Such is the totality of
Liberal Democracy.
Worse still, the condition has a retrospective affect.
Nothing escapes its scything action. History is flattened
too, shorn of meaning. Even critiques of the condition
become just an opinion under the smiling curve of the
scythe. Blanchot does not propose an answer. Rather,
he looks at how this condition might have arisen, offering
in the process a startling revision of our understanding
of what literature is. Might the asymmetry of art
and world be what makes it vital and important? In a
short essay from 1953, published in a new translation
by the Oxford Literary Review, Blanchot goes back to
the beginnings of modern thought to investigate this
possibility, specifically to ancient Athens, and Socrates’
preference for speech over writing.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that speech has the
guarantee of the living presence of the speaker. One
can ask questions and receive answers; there is always
the movement of dialogue with those involved always
mindful of truth. In dialogue, progress is possible.
On the other hand, written words can only maintain a
solemn silence: “if you ask them what they mean by
anything,” he says, “they simply return the same an-
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and
swer over and over again.” The philosopher links this
to religious superstition, when Greeks listened to “the
sacred voice” emerging from a stone or the stump of a
tree. Blanchot compares this to the silent confrontation
with written words:
“Like sacred language, what is written comes from
no recognisable source, is without author or origin, and
thereby always refers back to something more original
than itself. Behind the words of the written work,
nobody is present; but language gives voice to this
absence, just as in the oracle, when divinity speaks, the
god himself is never present in his words, and it is the
absence of god which then speaks.” (trans. Leslie Hill)
If, as Blanchot says, the voice of the divine and the
voice of literature are comparable, they are effectively
indistinguishable, thereby doubling the threat to the
human project represented by Socrates. What can be
done if the oracular voice develops an alternative outlet
in literature, luring truth into “the abyss where there
is neither truth nor meaning nor even error”? Blanchot
reminds us what was done: “both Plato and Socrates
are quick to declare writing, like art, a simple pastime
which does not jeopardise seriousness and is reserved
for moments of leisure”. Of course, Socrates went on to
pay with his life for his commitment to the more serious
matter of debate. And while his sacrifice remains
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