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The experience of these systems of expression,
however, allow a chink in the armour of literature. For
readers, the opposition of cliché and a virgin phrase
is perhaps more troublesome; all phrases become
‘monsters of ambiguity’ when we read. How are we, as
readers, meant to know what an author intended? It is
precisely this ambiguity, the unremitting silence of the
oracle, Blanchot argues, that gives literature the tense
dynamic demanded by the rebels. In effect, literature
is a vampire rising in the dark to suck the blood of
life to continue while the victims are all dependent on
the vampire myth for their living. And the other way
around. Blanchot takes us a long way in this short
essay, yet leaves us more or less stranded as before:
authenticity and originality are present, it seems, only
in the inscrutability of their presence.
If literature relies on comforting demarcations of
genre to proceed, yet demands a naked openness to the
world for the sake of authenticity, then the appearance
of the printed star in Blanchot’s work is perhaps not just
a typographical convenience. It is used again in Blanchot’s
famous late work, The Writing Of The Disaster,
a book made up of fiction and philosophical fragments
designated by the same symbol. An appropriately obsolete
definition of the word disaster is “an unfavourable
aspect of a star”. The star helps us to grasp the possibility
of meaning, which we return to at the end of each
section, while at the same time threatening break down.
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The book is in part about how one deals with disaster,
the trauma of past disasters and the knowledge of the
disaster to come, specifically our own death, where the
very concept of ownership is meaningless. It is also
about the disaster of language itself:
“The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the
very possibility of experience – it is the limit of writing.
This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which
does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing,
is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or
extratextual.” (trans. Ann Smock)
That is, the disaster itself writes. To write is to partake
of the disaster, no matter how much one asserts oneself
through opinion or style. Blanchot’s impersonal voice,
so cold and yet so seductive, abides in the disaster.
To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to
confide in a guest – the other, the reader – entrusting
yourself to him who will henceforth have as an obligation,
and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.
We are absent from one another as the disaster writes
through communication. We are absent even from ourselves
as the I belongs not to itself but the disaster. We
saw this emerge in Beckett’s Trilogy. Yet it is precisely
this absence that Blanchot says can bring us together.
The paradox is essential: language gives voice to this
absence. And art, where the play of the paradox is
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