Never Wakeful Enough
Dream, literature and subjectivity in the work of Maurice Blanchot
Marieke Hofland 9936793 Master Thesis Philosophy Universiteit van Amsterdam December 2016 Supervisor: Dr. Aukje van Rooden Second reader: Dr. Trijsje Franssen
Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter one: Who dreams of writing?
1.1 From es gibt to il y a 3
1.2 Day-to-day language and the language of literature 4
1.3 Limit-experience: insomnia and dream 6
1.4 ‘An exactness of relation’: dream and literature 8
Chapter two: ‘The experience of non-experience’
2.1 Questions on subjectivity, intentionality and experience 11
2.2 ‘Narrative voice’ and dispersal of self 12
2.3 Loss of self and loss of world 13
2.4 Existential mood 16
Chapter three: The Sleepwalker as child, Posthuman and Orpheus
3.1 Nightmare or tragedy averted? 17
3.2 The child-as-Sleepwalker 19
3.3 Prometheus and the Posthuman 21
3.4 ‘Writing begins with Orpheus’s gaze’ 24
Conclusion 26
Introduction
Modern philosophy begins in disappointment, states Simon Critchley. The “great metaphysical dream of the soul moving frictionless towards knowledge of itself, things-in-themselves and God is just that,” Critchley continues in his book Infinitely Demanding, “a dream. Absolute knowledge or a direct ontology of things as they are is decisively beyond the ken of fallible, finite creatures like us.”1
Critchley observes that “[o]ur culture is endlessly beset with Promethean myths of the overcoming of the human condition […]. We seem to have enormous difficulty in accepting our limitedness, our finiteness, and this failure is a cause of much tragedy.”2 Humans are not the Promethean hero-like
figures who can steal the fire of ultimate truth and knowledge from the gods. Humans are more like the Prometheus who was punished for this, forever trapped in the same cycle, forced to have the same excruciating experience repeat over and over again. Forever the philosopher tries to grasp the totality of things, find solace in static systems of thought. And forever these grand theoretic systems collapse.
What Critchley seem seems to suggest is that when we accept our limitations, we can escape from this Promethean rat-race. Intrigued by this statement, I will develop and where possible answer the following questions: what is the alternative to the Promethean subject? What kind of subject wakes from the ‘great metaphysical dream’ – if it wakes up at all – and in what kind of world does this subject find itself? If ‘absolute knowledge’ is ‘beyond the ken of fallible, finite creatures like us,’ is there anything that we can know of self and things? And, not an unimportant question in our current culture where happiness seems to be both a duty and a right, can ‘tragedy’ be averted when we realise we are limited beings?
Critchley identifies Immanuel Kant’s Copernican turn as the start of this philosophical disappointment.3 Since Kant various philosophical currents have been involved with humankind’s
limited knowledge concerning self and things. Existentialism, which deals with human existence without metaphysical claims, is one of these currents. Phenomenology, which deals with the human experience of self and things without resorting to metaphysics, is another method. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) are notable examples. In these books, Heidegger and Sartre use the phenomenological method to come to their existential philosophy. Both these philosophers find in an essentially meaningless world a self-affirming subject which projects itself in a self-made world of meaning, in theory limited only by contingent external circumstances. The relationship between the subject, object and the outside world is one of personal relations, without resorting to eternal truths. This subject has woken from the metaphysical dream, stands in the daylight and knowingly sees its shadow cast on all the objects around. Ontologically speaking, this subject only sees itself reflected back when addressing the outside.
Although post-metaphysical, Sartre’s and Heidegger’s subject can be seen as an extension of Prometheus. Actively moulding itself and shaping the world around, this subject still believes in a dream, a dream of ontological and intentional freedom of a self-affirming human being. This Promethean subject does not put its trust in eternal metaphysical truths, but in another source of almost unlimited power: the self. Woken up from the metaphysical slumber, a post-Promethean subject can be found in the work of Maurice Blanchot. The subject found in Blanchot’s work serves as an antidote to the Heideggerian and Sartrean subject, and with it the potential arises to step outside the tiresome Promethean rat-race of the self.
The post-Promethean subject found in the work of Blanchot, is however not a creature of the day, but of the night. It no longer dreams of absolute metaphysical knowledge and absolute
1 Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 1 2 Ibid.
affirmation. However, this subject finds itself in another dream. In this dream-like limit-experience – an experience that can be triggered by the language of poetry and literature as well – Blanchot, like Heidegger and Sartre, also finds that the divide between inner and outer, between subject and object, is not clear-cut. But Blanchot wants to take these finding to another level. Where Heidegger and Sartre insist that for a subject to be authentic, it must endow itself with existential projects, Blanchot wants to do fully justice to the unfixed self. Without a fixed self that projects meaning in the world, the potential arises for an experience of existence itself; of seeing more than just the shadow of self and of letting the outside speak for itself. To be fascinated by the outside can result in the subject resting from the endless meaning-making ego. However, just as this experience takes place, the subject is thrown back to his or her reflective consciousness again. The experience of the limitless outside world cannot be maintained by a limited and finite creature.
Blanchot’s subject is not exactly sleeping, but it is not fully awake either. This subject is typified by a restlessness linked to sleep, characterised by insomnia or somnambulism. Even dreaming is part of this restlessness, as the dream interrupts sound, restful sleep. To Blanchot, the dream is “an allusion to a refusal to sleep within sleep – an allusion to the impossibility of sleeping” and thus closely related to insomnia.4 To incorporate in one figure these states on the borderline of
sleep, I will refer to this Blanchotian, post-Promethean, post-metaphysical subject as the Sleepwalker. It is in the liminal stages of sleep that the Sleepwalker finds a world where some sort of an experience of the outside can take place. In these half-asleep half-awake stages, the rational, meaning-making ego or self we encounter the world with during daytime has been replaced by a neutral being. Instead of leading, actively moulding and forcing the ego on the outside, the Sleepwalker is being led by something external to the self, rendered passive and has a chance of encountering things “as they exist.”5
The Sleepwalker’s experience is to Blanchot equivalent to the experience of poetry and writing or reading literature. Blanchot quotes Franz Kafka, who would say to his friend Gustav Janouch, "If it weren't for these terrible nights of insomnia, in general I wouldn't write."6 Elsewhere
he quotes the poet René Char: “Poetry lives on perpetual insomnia.”7 What happens to the self in
the half-asleep half-awake stages is analogous to what happens to the self in literature. The ‘I’ in poetry and writing or reading literature also disintegrates, as in literature the ‘I’ glides into the neutral ‘he’ or ‘it.’8 “Fatigue, insomnia, experience of art” – it is these experiences that “existence
without existents, a pure exteriority of being without appearance, and thus a phenomenology without phenomena,” or simply il y a, ‘there is,’ might be found.9
In the first chapter of this thesis I will unravel the concept of il y a, the things ‘as they exist’ without human intent, and how and to what extent il y a can be experienced. I will clarify why poetry, literature, insomnia and dreaming are found at the heart of this experience. Why is the language of literature crucial? I will explain how poetry, literature, insomnia and dreaming are intertwined. In other words: what is there and how can it be experienced, if it can be experienced at all?
The second chapter deals with the subject that experiences, and what experience might mean in the given context. As mentioned in the introduction, the subjectivity of the Sleepwalker gets undone. What typifies the post-Promethean subject and how can we speak of an experience of ‘my consciousness without me?’10 Can we still identify a self within the Sleepwalker? To elucidate this
4 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 184 5 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 327
6 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 183; Blanchot, Friendship, 147 7 Blanchot, Friendship, 147
8 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 21
9 Bruns, On the Anarchy of Philosophy and Poetry, 179 10 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 328
problem, I will look at several positions current Blanchot scholars have taken up. Findings by William Large, Kris Sealey, Arthur Cools and Gerald L. Bruns will be discussed.
In the third chapter I will look at what Blanchot could mean for us today. Are we freed from the Promethean rat-race when we wake up from the metaphysical dream? What kind of subject is the Sleepwalker? Here I will look at how this subject can be incorporated into our day-to-day life. I will return to Critchley’s words: can tragedy be averted? If so, at what cost?
Besides theoretical works, Blanchot has also written fictional récits, the last one written and published in 1994. In this thesis, I will mainly base my argument on four philosophical works, mostly written in the beginning of his career: The Work of Fire (1949), The Space of Literature (1955), The
Infinite Conversation (1969) and The Writing of the Disaster (1980). These will in part be
supplemented with references to his story ‘The Last Word’ (1948).
Chapter one: Who dreams of writing?
1.1 From es gibt to il y a
Il y a is a term Blanchot had borrowed from his friend and fellow philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.11
Simply translated, il y a means ‘there is’ and the concept refers to existence itself. To Blanchot, il y a is the “anonymous and impersonal flow of being that precedes all being.”12 As il y a is reformulation
of Heidegger’s es gibt, I will briefly turn to Levinas and Heidegger, and roughly sketch the relationship between a few terms Heidegger uses to help explain what Blanchot means.
In Being and Time, Heidegger explains that an essential characteristic of a human being, or
Dasein, is its being-in-the-world. Dasein is always involved with the world, may it be intentionally or
non-intentionally. As a subject, I am not a self-contained ego and always in a web of relations with the objects around me. In effect, Dasein and being-in-the-world cannot be separated. At a most fundamental level, Being-in-the-world entails a ‘mood.’ Normally we are completely immersed in the world, the mood on the background as way of how we are attuned to everything. We feel at home in the world. But anxiety as a mood strips away the familiar relations we have with things. The world emerges as something distinct, something that would go on whether we are around or not. Dasein is still involved in the world, but it no longer experiences the world as inherently meaningful. Anxiety reveals that there would be being regardless of the existence of Dasein. In ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Heidegger writes that “in their very receding, things turn toward us”, disclosing the indifferent existence of the world.13 The world just ‘is there,’ es gibt. Keeping this in mind and turning to
Blanchot’s phrase above, il y a as the “flow of being that precedes all being” would mean ‘there is’ being before the being of things and caught up in the web of Dasein’s being-in-the-world.
The indifference of the es gibt, however, is still something, there is being. Moreover, Heidegger explains in his ‘Letter on “Humanism”,’ that es gibt should be translated as ‘it gives,’ and not as ‘there is’ which is usually the case in English translations.14 The phrasing of ‘it gives’ implies a
generosity, and this marks the divergence between Heidegger and Levinas. Levinas did not intend this generosity in his own reformulation of the il y a, as he would later clarify.15 Es gibt gives itself in
abundance. To Levinas, this notion of generosity obscures the terror one feels coming face to face with the impersonal aspect of existence. In contrast to Heidegger, Levinas, understands ‘there is’ as horrible in its meaninglessness, whereas Heidegger emphasises that es gibt is a potential giver of
11 Id., 332 12 Ibid.
13 Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, 88 14 Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, 254 15 Levinas, ‘Interview with François Poirié’, 45
meaning. Turning back to es gibt, the ‘it’ in ‘it gives’ signifies being, and what it gives, is itself. To Heidegger, however impersonal and indifferent es gibt may be, it does entail a personal aspect. Heidegger writes, “being […] is dependent upon the understanding by being.”16 It means that es gibt
being only as long as there is Dasein and its possibility to comprehend being. Being gives itself only as long as there is Dasein. Heidegger’s es gibt is therefore not concerned with how things are without us, since being only lights up in human context. Anxiety reveals that the world would go on without Dasein, but the fact that there is mood at all entails that Dasein is actually involved. It is exactly this personal aspect in Heidegger which is at stake in Levinas and Blanchot.
As mentioned above, Levinas describes the horror when faced ‘being in genera.’ Levinas links
il y a with the night, where nothing lights up at all. This night is not full of being giving itself, but
rather “full of nothingness of everything […] the impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable ‘consummation’ of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself.”17 Upon questioning,
instead of intelligible being, silence returns, or at best an indistinguishable ‘murmur.’ Things are reduced to a swarming of points, unsituated and unconnected.18 The personal aspect implied in es gibt disappears as the ego has nothing to latch onto. Without any footing, the ego is engulfed by this
‘being in general.’ Seen like this, using powerful descriptive terms like ‘horror’ and ‘menace,’ it is not a surprise that Levinas wants to turn away from il y a.19 Ethics would serve as a way to overcome this
meaninglessness of the il y a, and gives the subject the opportunity to dwell in a more warm and relatively stable intersubjective world – at least temporarily.
Blanchot ascribes to Levinas’s concept of the il y a, in so far that existence itself stands outside human categorisation, is indeterminate and does not generously give itself to be filled in by a creating consciousness. However, rather than to recoil with horror, Blanchot’s subject is drawn to this ‘night’ of existence, which throughout his writings he will call ‘existence without being,’ ‘the outside,’ ‘the neuter,’ ‘the murmur’ and ‘the other night.’ Blanchot wants to do justice to the il y a, horrible as it may be. It is the source of his fascination and he wants to be engulfed by it. Blanchot is attracted to il y a as it is the only existence that is truly authentic. Authentic for Heidegger and Sartre entails existential projects, so that the ego can show its true form through action in the world. As a result, everything the Heideggerian or Sartrean subject encounters, is coloured through the lens of the meaning-making ego. For Blanchot, precisely because the il y a does not answer to human intelligibility and is not formed and shaped by the human ego, can its existence can be considered authentic. What Blanchot wants, in short, is some sort of experience with il y a.
1.2 Day-to-day language and language of literature
A direct experience of il y a is impossible. What makes humans especially unequipped for a direct experience of existence? The answer can be found in language. In normal, day-to-day life we make sense of the world and all the objects therein, by language. There are names for all the objects. We use language to point out and name the things, to make objects workable. The swirl of singular objects is made understandable by assigning generalized words to these objects. Order is created out of the chaos of ‘swarming of points,’ the singular, separate things.20 An intimate connection
between word, concept and object emerges. In language, it is the word that carries the concept, and the concept refers back to the object. Consequentially, language deals with the concepts, not with the objects themselves.
16 Heidegger, Being and Time, 204 17 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 57 18 Id., 59
19 Ibid.
The previous idea concerning language, concepts and objects, can be found in Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the reading of Hegel. Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in the 1930’s were followed by a group of prominent French thinkers. His interpretation of Hegel became influential in the French intellectual milieu. Blanchot formed no exception. Kojève’s influence can be particularly seen in Blanchot’s essay ‘Literature and the Right to Death.’ In this essay Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s notion of negation can be found. Negation is the movement where the word takes the place of the object. In other words, the concept negates the reality of the object.21 It is the negation of all
the particular real objects for the sake of the general idea of the object.22 In this movement the
destructive aspect of language is made into something positive. The word restores to the object “all the certainty it had on the level of existence” and the word has more permanence than the objects as ‘things can change’ and alter.23
Critchley describes the movement as “a form of murder that kills things qua things-in-themselves and translates them back into things-for-consciousness.”24 With language, we have
traded the independence of things for our mastery over them. So in effect, one does not find oneself in a world of objects, but in a world of language. This language that supresses reality always stands in between oneself and the thing. This is a very important notion in the work of Blanchot: human experience of the world is practically always mediated by language. However, there is still something that remains not named, the “pre-conceptual singularity of things the way they were before their deconstruction by words.”25 It is the il y a existence that escapes.
In day-to-day life, the horrible fascination that the il y a holds over us seems far away and an experience thereof almost impossible, but there are certain modes of being where there is a possibility of an experience of the il y a. Some of them are actually quite common. George Bataille’s list of what can bring on an inner-, or interior-experience, include “torment […], tickling, laughter, poetry, erotic transport, varieties of religious ecstasy – and moments of sweet felicity.”26 These are
described by Bataille as certain excessive cognitive and physical modes of being. These modes of being cannot be grasped in language and therefore may allow for some sort of conceptual, non-cognitive experience. Borrowing from Bataille, Blanchot calls such an experience a ‘limit-experience’ and defines it as “the response that man encounters when he has decided to put himself radically in question.”27
As will be explained later, the limit-experience is not always so consciously induced and one would rather describe it as an experience where one has been put radically in question. The limit that is experienced is the limit of the self always trying to make meaning in and of the world, the self always mediated by language, the self that can ordinarily never know anything but language. In the limit-experience this constant chatter is somehow altered and a possibility of a glimpse of the ‘inaccessible, the unknown’ is promised.28 Also, in the limit-experience one stretches the idea of
experience itself as the ‘I’ who experiences is compromised. The question of what happens to the self, and what happens to the concept of experience will be touched upon in the following section, and pursued more thoroughly in the second chapter. For now we will turn to insomnia and dreaming as limit-experiences.
21 Haase and Large, Maurice Blanchot, 30 22 Id., 31
23 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 325
24 Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing, 53 25 Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, 112
26 Bataille, quoted in: Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 137 27 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 203
1.3 Limit-experience: insomnia and dream
Levinas identifies insomnia as a limit-experience that brings one in contact with il y a. In his 1947
From Existence to Existents, Levinas invites his readers to think of an event in which all personal
involvement with the world around us – and consequently all meaning – dissolves.29 He links this
thought-experiment to the seemingly more mundane experience of insomnia. Most people have had the experience of lying in bed, in the dark of the night, utterly and exasperatingly awake, the prospect of restful sleep seemingly far away. Consciousness is exhausted. It can happen that in such an instance perception shifts, and all the things in the room that should be familiar take on an obscure aspect. They are no longer appear your familiar things, where you can do with them whatever you please. Intentionality seems to be inverted and it occurs that the things are looking back at you.
Here Levinas is clearly inspired by Heidegger’s account of anxiety, but as already called attention to above, for the former the limit-experience is something horrific. Rather than the potential for Dasein that arises when faced with the es gibt, in Levinas’s insomnia it seems that ‘you’ along with all things dissolve into an anonymous presence.30 Here we are “no longer related to this
or that thing or to this or that possibility, but to existence itself. It is the disclosure of our existence unencumbered by our attachment of things. In the ‘there is’ we come face to face with our being, which is literally ‘no-thing’ at all.”31
Taken by this thought-experiment, Blanchot reworks Levinas’s account of the limit-experience of insomnia, and the figure of the Sleepwalker emerges. Blanchot positions dreaming next to insomnia. To Blanchot, these states of being are akin in so far that in dreaming someone – or something – wakes up. And this someone – or something – like the insomniac, cannot find rest in sleep. This entity waking up as the body of the dreamer sleeps, is identified as the Sleepwalker, and can be regarded as quite suspicious. Blanchot writes:
“Nocturnal wandering, the tendency to stray when the world is attenuated and grows distant, and even the honest professions which are necessarily practiced at night attract suspicions. To sleep with open eyes is an anomaly symbolically indication something which the general consciousness does not approve of. People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. […] The sleepwalker is suspect, for he is the man who does not find repose in sleep.”32
Good, decent folks do not rummage around at night amongst the deep shadows. In the soothing night of sleep they rest their body and mind. To Blanchot, this kind of sleep belongs to do the day, where body and mind are prepared for the daytime of activities.33 But for the Sleepwalker, the
dreaming that happens at the heart of night, is not a peaceful state. To Blanchot, the “[n]ight, the essence of night, does not let us sleep. In the night no refuge is to be found in sleep.”34 The
dreaming of the Sleepwalker, as is the case with insomnia, is marked by “the impossibility of making sleep a free zone.”35 What takes place in this night of dreams? And why is the Sleepwalker ‘suspect’?
First of all, it is important to note that when Blanchot writes about ‘night,’ he distinguishes between two nights. When we ordinarily speak about night, we usually mean the soothing night of sleep. This is the night that belongs to the day, and is in a sense the opposite of the day. Where everything appears in the day, everything – self, other, the whole difference between self and other
29 Levinas, From Existence to Existents, 57 30 Haase and Large, Maurice Blanchot, 72-73 31 Id., 73
32 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 265 33 Id., 264
34 Id., 266 35 Id., 267
– disappears in the first night. “But,” as Blanchot puts it, “when everything has disappeared in the night, ‘everything has disappeared’ appears.”36 This is the night of dreaming, which Blanchot calls
‘the other night.’37 It is the impossibility of the second night which holds the fascination of Blanchot.
Since the experience of total nothingness is unattainable, as this would be death, it is in the ‘other night’ that dreaming counts as a limit-experience where il y a is approached. It is in the dreaming in the heart of the other night that the Sleepwalker wakes up.
The Sleepwalker is not quite the same as the body who sleeps. This entity is suspect, because “who or what dreams cannot be dragged into the light of day and stopped for identification.”38 The Sleepwalker who wakes up in the dream is not the ‘I’ of the daytime. As
Blanchot formulates it, “[h]e who dreams sleeps, but already he who dreams is he who sleeps no longer.”39 “Of course,” Blanchot reflects elsewhere, “it is not truly another, another person, but what
is it?”40 To Blanchot, the Sleepwalker who wakes up in the dream, is reduced to an indeterminate ‘il,’
a ‘he’ or ‘it.’ The dream-event follows the logic of insomnia. ‘I’ no longer put forth my intentions on the outside, it is rather the outside that seems to gaze back at something which no longer can be identified as ‘me.’ In the dream, there is no self to maintain any personal relations. The daytime ego holds no control over objects in the dream-world. Without any personal relations, boundaries between the self and the outside blur into an experience of the ‘impersonal existence’ of the il y a. In the dream there are no categories of space and time, there is no identity, no difference, no subject, no object. There is neither this, nor that (at the same time, there is not not this and not not that either). It is the realm of what Blanchot calls ‘le neuter,’ the neutral.41 Le neutre is not only the
French grammatical term for the for ‘the neuter,’ but also a contraction of the Latin words ne/uter – neither/nor.
As previously mentioned, in day-to-day life language is used to distinguish between subjects and objects to make sense of the world. The loss of identification and loss of mastery over objects in the dream-state implies that the Sleepwalker’s experience is neither linguistic nor conceptual, in the sense of language ordinarily used as tool to signify external objects. The Sleepwalker, not in possession of an ‘I,’ stripped of instrumental language, projects and intentionality, is on the verge of being reduced to its singular being amid the chaotic swirl of all other singular beings, which Levinas has called the swarming of points, the being in general. Without an ‘I’ who can linguistically differentiate between all these points, the self would get engulfed by the il y a existence. Instead of an ego actively moulding the world around, the Sleepwalker is taken by the images in the dream-world, and made passive. This passivity is another than the dichotomy of passive and active, where passivity can be a conscious choice of the subject. Blanchot means something more radical than a personal stance. “Passivity neither consents nor refuses: neither yes nor no, without preference, it alone suits the limitlessness of the neutral […]. The passive condition is no condition: it is an unconditional which no protection shelters […].”42 With passivity Blanchot indicates a relentless,
unstoppable dispossession of self by a constant flow of images.
Images and words are both ways of making sense of the world. In day-to-day life, images and words function in the same way as the image precedes the object and takes its place. Images in the realm of dream, however, do not refer back to anything we encounter in the daytime, they only resemble themselves.43 The images do not signify. Blanchot writes:
36 Id., 63 37 Id., 163
38 Farbman, The Other Night, 60 39 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 267 40 Blanchot, Friendship, 141
41 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 299 42 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 29 43 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 258
“The dream is that which cannot ‘really’ be. Everything there is similar; each figure is another one, is similar to another and to yet another, and this last to still another. One seeks the original model, wanting to be referred to a point of departure, an initial revelation, but there is none. The dream is the likeness that refers eternally to likeness.”44
This constant flow of images takes over the ego of the Sleepwalker. The ego gets displaced, it is always being moved, ‘interminable,’ and ‘incessant.’ The Sleepwalker has “an intimacy with the outside” – that is, the outside of the meaning-making ego – “which has no location and affords no rest.”45 Desubjectivized, the Sleepwalker is reduced to an impersonal ‘vigilant’ existence, always on
the brink of losing itself. Think about dream-logic: everything can and does morph into another thing, and images constantly blend into each other. The self is not excluded in this constant transforming and the ‘I’ can take on the shape of anything or anyone. To a certain extent, that is, as the body that sleeps remains a reality that cannot be overcome.46
Although made passive, there is no soothing nothingness. In sleep, the dream keeps on interrupting, keeping the Sleepwalker awake, keeping it from total unconsciousness and from fusing with ‘the outside, the night.’47 The Sleepwalker is propelled into the ‘other’ night, the ream of
dream.48 There is no total unconsciousness, there is no escape from self nor from the body, and one
can never fuse with the night. Its and experience Blanchot equates to a never-ending dying, without the final repose of death.
1.4 ‘An exactness of relation’: dream and literature
Blanchot identifies the writer as ‘daytime insomniac.’49 Comparing the realm of dreams and the
space of literature, he even goes as far as saying that “[n]aturally, there is an exactness of relation between the dream state and the written state.”50 To Blanchot, the dream state is important
because it opens up a space where il y a can be approached. Literature holds the same primary status for a possible experience of the outside. How are dreams, sleep, il y a and literature or poetry connected? What is this ‘exactness of relation’? At first glance the answer might be surprising, as the solution can be found in language, earlier identified as the culprit depriving us from a direct experience of things. But Blanchot points not in the direction of the instrumental language day-to-day activities, but to the language of literature or poetry. Blanchot calls the language of literature his ‘only chance’ for some sort of an experience with il y a.51
The first relationship between the dream state and the space of literature can be found when the analogy of night and day is used. As there is day and night, Blanchot sees language working on two slopes.52 The first slope is ordinary language, the language of day-to-day communication and
conversation. It is the realm of ‘pure daylight.’53 As before mentioned, language is used here as a
tool and it gives meaning by negating the reality of the object.54 The second slope is concerned with
the negation itself, with the ‘void’ or ‘gap’ that is left by the object when language is used – the appearance of the disappearance of the object. If the object is everything but the word, then the
44 Id., 268 45 Id., 31
46 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 62 47 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 163 48 Farbman, The Other Night, 53
49 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 121 50 Blanchot, Friendship, 142
51 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 327 52 Id., 332-333
53 Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing, 62 54 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 332
object must reside in the darkness where the searchlight of the word does not reach. The writer-as-Sleepwalker wants to capture “not the man in general, but this man and, in this man, what man rejects in order to speak of him.”55 The Sleepwalker wants not the generalities of instrumental
language, but the singularity of the object. Writing is used to experience the existence of the void left in the wake of the word.56
To obtain this experience, language as tool must be abandoned. The second slope is therefore not concerned with the mundane activity of speech, with signification, but rather with “silence, repose, the cessation of tasks.”57 This way the language of literature approaches il y a
existence. To come back to the day/night analogy, the second slope of literature can be compared to the night of ‘pure sleep.’58 In the night of ‘pure sleep’ the subject would “fuse with the reality and
materiality of things.”59 The writer is fascinated by the ‘reality and materiality of things’ as found in
the night of pure sleep, and wants to bring them back to daylight. Here the writer-as-Sleepwalker faces an impossibility. As seen, a total unconsciousness can never be achieved in sleep. Total unconsciousness would be akin to death. Even as the daytime self is abandoned in sleep, consciousness as the Sleepwalker wakes in the dream. An ultimate experience of existence can never be brought about and can never be written.
With the language of literature or poetry, the writer faces a continuous oscillation. The literary language can never solely work on one slope or the other. As soon as the writer-as-Sleepwalker touches upon the pre-linguistic existence of the thing – the void left in the wake of the word – it is immediately covered, or ‘killed’ again. Literature or poetry is the impossibility of the writer-as-Sleepwalker to find rest in ultimate knowledge. Similarly the dream is the impossibility of the Sleepwalker finding repose in sleep. Literature’s ambiguity, always moving between the two slopes of clarifying signification and the opaque nature of the object, leaves the writer-as-Sleepwalker as restless as the dreaming writer-as-Sleepwalker.
Another component of the ‘exactness of relation’ involves the same sort of ‘grammatical formula’ that exists between dreaming and writing. In both these states, there is a movement from an ‘I’ to a ‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘it.’60 When I sleep, a neutral ‘it.’ the Sleepwalker, awakes. Much in the same
way the poet or the writer of literature “loses the power to say ‘I.’”61 This transformation is most
evident in the case of automatic writing. Putting a pen on paper and write without conscious intent, decisions or thought, “[a]utomatic writing tended to suppress constraints, suspend intermediaries, reject all mediation. It put the hand that writes in contact with something original; it made of this active hand a sovereign passivity […].”62 This movement happens whenever a poem is written or
when a writer enters the literary space. The consciousness of the author-as-Sleepwalker gets by the words. The writer does not command language, it is the words themselves that take over in an intentional reversal. The words ‘gaze back at you.’ “’I’ never speak.”63
To Blanchot, language is an ‘impersonal power.’64 It comes from nowhere in particular and it
belongs to no one.65 One may use the words, but one can never own them. They were there before
the person existed, and will continue to be there after the person has perished, without original
55 Id., 327
56 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 55 57 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 119 58 Id., 264
59 Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing, 62 60 Blanchot, Friendship, 146
61 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 27 62 Id., 179
63 Ibid.
64 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 340 65 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 26
author or origin. To Blanchot, literature is self-generating, it “dispenses with the writer.”66 This is
what Blanchot means by saying that literature is “my consciousness without me.”67 The
writer-as-Sleepwalker is made passive in the same way the writer-as-Sleepwalker is made passive by the images in the realm of dream, as the incessant flow of words displace the subject.
It is becoming clear why the language of literature holds a primary status for a potential experience with the il y a. As is the case with the images in dreams, the self holds no control over literary language. With all personal relations suspended, a neutral relation is established, which in turn lets the neutrality of the il y a come into play. The neutrality of being shines through literary language and dream-images.
Blanchot calls language ‘his only hope’ because to him language possesses a ‘materiality,’ the fact that “words are things too, a kind of nature.”68 Loosened from the grip of a directing self,
literary words and dream-images become ambiguous, and thus neutral. Literary ambiguity or neutrality holds that words cannot be infused with the writer’s intent, as the words are not used as a signifying tool but become things in their own right. In their neutrality literary words emulate the condition of pre-conceptual objects. The meaning of language becomes the being of language in the space of literature. What happens to the thing-like words in literature is the same thing that happens to the images in the dream-space, as in literature words become the image of language.69
In the literary or poetic space, words act like dream-images because only refer to themselves, and do not signify objects but become objects. As any other material object, their existence is opaque. They are irreducible to categories and concepts. “Literature says, ‘I no longer represent, I am; I do not signify, I present.’”70 As presence instead of representation, the images of the dream-state and the
words-as-images of the literary space side with il y a in their singularity.
However, even though literary language in its ambiguity acts like being in general, the simple fact remains that it is still made up of words. Unlike undetermined singular objects, literary ambiguity points towards the possible signifying meaning that still can be extracted. In their neutrality literary words and dream-images join pre-linguistic objects, but their ambiguity prevents them from becoming the exact same status as the objects. Il y a ambiguity means that everything can be anything else, as there is no distinction in being in general. What the writer-as-Sleepwalker is ultimately fascinated by, the night-time ‘silence’ of the words, can never quite be achieved. Even in the most ambiguous poetry, where language takes the writer to realms not cognitively understood, the words still cling to some sort of signification of the daytime reality, they can never be totally silent or neutral. Neither truly awake in the daytime nor totally sleeping in the night-time, but like the insomniac stupefied with the lack of sleep in the daytime and awake in the night, the writer-as-Sleepwalker wakes up in the world of the ‘last word.’ In his 1948 fiction which bears the same name, Blanchot tries to capture the experience of the world of the last word.
“Instead of filling the night with their barking, the dogs silently let me pass, as though they had not seen me. It was only after I had walked some distance they began to howl again: trembling, mulled howls, which at hour of the day resounded like the echo of the words
there is. ‘Those are probably the last words,’ I thought, listening to them. But the words there is were still able to reveal the things that were this remote neighborhood.”71
66 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 328 67 Ibid.
68 Id., 327
69 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 34 70 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 328 71 Blanchot, ‘The Last Word’, 42
The last word might hint to the silence and darkness of the il y a, but “the last word cannot be a word, nor the absence of words, nor anything else but word.”72 The howl of the dogs might not
exactly resemble language, but in the absence of language the promise of thereof is there. With the promise of language the objects are lit up, lifted out of their environment and lose their singularity.
In the rest of Blanchot’s ‘The Last Word,’ we see that this world follows the dream-logic insofar things morph into other things, object constantly appear and disappear as the subject approaches them. Nocturnal silence and daytime noise alternate. ‘The Last Word’ is an example of how Blanchot wants the capture the restless experience of writing, as the movement in the dream-state is the same as the restless movement of writing. The promise of il y a is there, but one can never quite experience it. This is the feeling Blanchot wants to evoke in his literary pieces. Also exemplary is his first récit ‘Thomas the Obscure,’ which reads like a fever dream. “Thomas is not deranged or disordered; he is astonishingly lucid. It is just that he is no longer a logical subject, self-identical, exercising rational control.”73 The dream-logic can further be found in the style of writing
Blanchot uses in his theoretical work, where fragments, paradoxes and récits break apart the conventional way of writing philosophical theory.
Chapter 2: ‘The experience of non-experience’
2.1 Questions on subjectivity, intentionality and experience
What happens to the self, the daytime ego, when it gets displaced by the Sleepwalker? As already mentioned, to Blanchot the ego gets ‘undone’ in in the space of literature and in the dream-state, the power to say ‘I’ is no longer there as it transforms into a ‘neutral existence.’ But even though the ego is undone, there must be someone who – or something that – has an experience. Blanchot uses the term ‘experience’ often and it is a key concept in his work (e.g. ‘limit-experience,’ ‘original experience,’ etc.). What does experience mean? Taken from the ‘Phenomenology’ entry the
Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,
“[t]he central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.”74
As the blinded self as centre is unseated by the dumbfounded Sleepwalker, can we still speak of an experience if there is no intentionality? Can we speak of a consciousness without directedness? How can the impersonal aspect of the Sleepwalker be explained, and how can the Sleepwalker’s experience be understood? For this I will first take a closer look at what Blanchot writes on the neutral, impersonal aspect of self, which he in The Infinite Conversation calls the ‘narrative voice.’ To develop the questions concerning (non-)subjectivity and experience further, I will turn to several contemporary Blanchot scholars, who each have taken former questions in consideration, each with their own understanding. A closer look is taken to articles by William Large (2002), Kris Sealey (2013) and Arthur Cools (2005). These viewpoints will be complemented by observations from Gerald Bruns (1997).
Before the investigation, two extremes can be eliminated – namely, the self as stable centre and the complete disintegration of the self. The subject-as-Prometheus can be placed on one end of the spectrum. Prometheus believes in the autonomous, unitary and individualized ego as director, perfectly well equipped to discover absolute truths. Blanchot shows that words and dream-images
72 Id., 48
73 Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 37
unsettle the self, as the self loses command over them. Calling attention to the neutrality and passivity of the Sleepwalker in the space of literature and in the realm of dream Blanchot has exposed Prometheus truly as myth.
On the other end of the extreme lies the possibility of the total shattering of self. In this case the ego fuses with the environment, so that no discernible separation between the two exists. Although this unity may be craved by the Sleepwalker, and is in fact the source of inspiration for the Sleepwalker-as-writer, it can never be quite achieved. Blanchot does not see this oceanic feeling, the mystical experience where the subject is fully merged with the outside, ever brought to completion in waking life of the Sleepwalker – although, as I will come back to in chapter three, the oceanic feeling is the experience of the infant. But for the Sleepwalker, the ego “never melds with the il y
a.”75 Unity is neither is found within the self, nor between self and outside, as self never fully joins
being in general. In the limit-experience the boundaries between interiority and exteriority are blurred, but not destroyed.
“There cannot be an immediate grasp of the immediate… The immediate excludes everything immediate: this means all direct relation, all mystical fusion, and all sensible contact, just as it excludes itself – renounces its own immediacy – each time it must submit to the mediation of an intermediary in order to offer access.”76
The force of language, despite stretched to the conceptual limit, prohibits this fusion. Total unity would total be total unconsciousness, would be death.
2.2 ‘Narrative voice’ and dispersal of self
In one of his much later works, Blanchot would assert that “[t]he subject does not disappear; rather its excessively determined unity is put in question.”77 No fixed self, no grand unity – what does
happen to the self in the limit-experience of dream and writing? To write, according to Blanchot in
The Space of Literature, “is to pass from the first to the third person, so that what happens to me
happens to no one, is anonymous insofar as it concerns me, repeats itself in an infinite dispersal.”78
Dispersed, dispossessed, displaced, undone, unseated, unsettled – these are all terms Blanchot has used through the years to indicate the ‘narrative voice,’ the neutral, impersonal voice that shows itself the realm of literature – and in the realm dream likewise. After all, in the dream the Sleepwalker recounts the events while the daytime self sleeps. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot explores the notion of dispersal in more depth. Blanchot explains that for impersonal Sleepwalker-as-writer, “the ‘he’ has split in two.”79 The first il refers to the narrator through which the whole of
the story is told, as the movement of the words flow through the Sleepwalker-as-writer, over which it has no mastery. The whole of the story comes ultimately from the outside, the unattached nature of language. This way, the il does not replace the writer as subject as such, but rather becomes a way to indicate language as presence. It is not the writer who speaks, but it is the neutral, the il y a, that murmurs through the words.
In additions, the whole of the story is divided into many subjectivities. “The novelist is one who forgoes saying ‘I’” – by now this is a familiar expression, but in The Infinite Conversation Blanchot continues to explain in more detail that the novelist “delegates his powers to others; the novel is peopled with little ‘egos’ […].”80 These are the characters of the story, each with their own
75 Sealey, ‘The “face” of the il y a’, 438 76 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 38
77 Blanchot, ‘Michel Foucault as I imagine him’, 76 78 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 33
79 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 381 80 Ibid.
particularities. But again, this does entail that the many different subject-positions can be taken up by the writer or the reader. Blanchot points out that all subject-positions are suspended as the characters and their thoughts, feelings and ideas are also governed by the neutral. Their stories are being told in the closed-off world of the book, written down by anonymous language, stripped from the power to recount their own lives.81
So the il of the narrative voice cannot be understood as another subject or subject-position, taken the place “usually occupied by the subject.”82 The third person of the narrative voice is neutral
true to its grammatical form. Personal relations are suspended for the Sleepwalker. It does not mean there is no relation to life whatsoever, but for the Sleepwalker the “relation to life would be a neutral one.”83 Meaning and lack of meaning are neutralized. The il is just in service of the story, of
the words themselves unfolding, and in narrative voice cannot be understood as the conveyer of a personal goal.
Also, the neutral shows that in writing as limit-experience, the unity traditionally associated with the subject is challenged. That does not mean the subject altogether disappears. With the use of ‘dispersal’ and its synonyms, Blanchot indicates that a self must still be there, although it might not be recognized as such as the self we ordinarily identify with on a day-to-day basis. In a reversal, the narrative voice proves the daytime ego the made-up story. Prometheus is not kicked of the throne and destroyed, there never was a fixed Promethean self in the first place. To Blanchot, the Sleepwalker finds itself in a privileged position because it experiences the loss of unity first-hand. The subject as always mediated by words becomes very clear. But at the heart of the matter lies the fact that the ‘I’ is a daytime mirage, a fiction, a myth.
In the movement from the ‘I’ to ‘il,’ the presence of the author becomes the presence of his or her absence. The disappearance of the author itself appears. Blanchot has presented this sort of movement before in The Work of Fire and The Space of Literature. A similar motion can be found when Blanchot describes the relationship between objects and words on the second slope of language. Here the word functions as the “revelation of what revelation destroys.”84 The object as
disappearance, appears. It is also is comparable to what happens in the ‘other night,’ ‘when everything has disappeared in the night, “everything has disappeared” appears.’ The limit-experience indicates that something else exists beyond or beneath the entity that is presented: the word holds the promise that their exists something other than the fixed word; the ‘other night’ too promises there is being in general other than the individual beings perceived; the narrative voice holds the promise that there is more to the stable Promethean ego. The Sleepwalker is found in the dark void left in the wake of the blinded daytime ego. This way, the narrative voice is devoted to the ‘pure passivity of being.’85
2.3 Loss of self and loss of world
To make sense of the feeling of loss of self in the limit-experience, William Large begins his inquiry by asking a relevant question regarding Levinas’s thought experiment. Levinas asked his readers to imagine an event where all beings, things and persons would vanish, where il y a becomes the appearance of this disappearance. Large wonders “[i]f the meaning of the ‘there is’ is taken to be the disappearance of the world and myself, then this disappearance is interpreted categorically as the
actual disappearance of the world and myself, which is quite absurd, since who would be having this
81 Id., 385 82 Ibid.
83 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 379 84 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 328
experience?”86 There must always be someone who experiences something, Large reasons. In his
analysis, the something that the subject experiences is the il y a interpreted as an ‘existential mood.’87 Where in Heidegger fundamental moods like anxiety are personal, Large argues that to
Blanchot a mood must be deeply impersonal.88 It is this mood that completely takes over the self, to
such a degree that a loss of self is experienced. Where anxiety for Heidegger serves as a way to come back to an authentic self, the mood for Blanchot only deepens the feeling of loss.89 The self no
longer experiences relations with other things, as it sees that these relations are projections from the self to begin with. Objects and ego do not disappear, but all meaning vanishes from them. When a personal involvement between me and the outside disappears, and when inside and outside become indistinguishable as such, we can no longer call our existence personal. It just is. In the limit-experience, the subject “hovers on the edge of becoming a senseless thing.”90 Large’s subject does
not actually completely lose itself, as that would be ‘absurd,’ but it experiences feelings of dispersal and disruption.
In Large’s interpretation, the il y a as existential mood takes over the self. The self remains in place, but its peaceful slumber of feeling at home in the world is shook up.91 The loss of
intentionality, and thus loss of meaning is interpreted by the subject as a loss of self, “for there is no object to hold onto that would enable me to distinguish myself from it […].”92 To Large, the il y a is
not exactly the outside, but it is “an existential mood that reveals the totality of being.”93
Kris Sealey hints at an existential mood as well, although she does not use il y a and the mood interchangeably. For her, the experience of il y a existence is an experience of something exterior to self. She too highlights the feeling of loss of directedness, meaning and self. The key to Sealey’s argument can be found in the passivity of the Sleepwalker, as it is taken by anonymous and meaningless word- and dream-images: the ego no longer possess any power that allows it any kind of agency. Rendered passive, there is no-one present to hold on to anything as boundaries between in and out blur. The encounter with the il y a “undermines this very divide between the interiority of the self and exteriority.”94
There is, however, the remainder of the self to be found. To Sealey, “there remains the existent, depersonalized, desubjectivized, and yet very much a unique self, to encounter the il y a. […] [S]omething remains (that is no longer ‘I’) to be privy to my being ‘swept away.’ I am aware of myself as depersonalized and passive under the gaze of the anonymous night.”95 The il y a unsettles
and disrupts the subject, but it ultimately leaves its ‘place’ and ‘self’ intact in order to experience this disruption.96 Moreover, there is no escape from this self. As the ego gets dispossessed by the il y a,
and empties it of intentional content, it “ends not with negation, but with the impossibility of negation.”97 The ambiguity of language prevents the ego from losing complete consciousness.
Where for Large the subject experiences an overwhelming fundamental mood, Sealey’s subject experiences itself as neutral, depersonalized, not making any choices and decisions: ‘my consciousness without me.’ Intentionality, stated in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy as the
86 Large, ‘Impersonal Existence’, 131 87 Id., 137
88 Id., 131
89 Large, ‘Impersonal Existence’, 137 90 Id., 138
91 Ibid. 92 Ibid.
93 Large, ‘Impersonal Existence’, 137 94 Sealey, ‘The “face” of the il y a’, 437 95 Id., 438
96 Ibid. 97 Id., 445
central structure of an experience, is perhaps faulty as the subject experiences a loss of agency, but it is not broken. In Sealey’s interpretation, there is some sort of self-reflexive consciousness in the limit-experience to direct its attention to itself. The self is aware of the powerless self, who is not yet an “established and positioned subject.”98 There is an ebbing away of consciousness, never the total
loss of subjectivity.99 For Sealey the disruptive element of the il y a leads to an experience of a loss of
agency, and thus a feeling of loss of self.
Arthur Cools underscores Large’s notion of somehow linking the il y a with an impersonal existential mood.100 Like Sealey, he also does not equate il y a with mood, but to Cools it seems that
Blanchot “fully agrees with Heidegger with regard to the fundamental function of anxiety,” where
Dasein discovers that its being is rooted in an inherently meaningless world.101 Moreover, the loss of
agency experienced when exposed to the il y a, reveals to the subject its own equally meaningless singular being, the ‘unique self’ as described by Sealey. However, Sealey’s subject is ‘aware of itself as depersonalized.’ To Cools, the limit-experience prohibits such a self-reflectiveness. It “does not effect a return to the self, does not concern his/her self-relatedness. In this regard, Blanchot describes the activity of writing as an experience that goes beyond the author’s subjectivity.”102
For Sealey, the fact that in the limit-experience the outside interrupts the subject, entails that some sort of ethics can be distilled. After all, she reasons, it shows that the other is always “part of the ‘how’ of human identity.”103 To Cools this idea of human identity is quite problematic. Large
already indicated that anxiety for Blanchot does not enable the subject to discover its authentic being as a potential source to act upon. Rather, the mood increases the feeling of loss. Cools sides with Large on this: there is no return to an authentic self, as is proposed by Heidegger. The subject thinking itself authentic and autonomous, able to reaffirm its subjectivity in existential projects, lives in fiction.
The Sleepwalker is as evasive as the il y a itself. As soon as the pre-linguistic self is approached, it is immediately covered or ‘killed’ again by the linguistic ego. The force of the language of literature shows that “one’s understanding of oneself is unbearable and irreducibly connected to something opaque, anonymous and indifferent that singularizes self.”104 The
interruption of the il y a demonstrates not only that the exterior is part of the self, but that the exterior, the ‘impersonal outside,’ actually lies at the heart of subjectivity. And not only is there no return to the self, but with the indifferent and inaccessible language, “the very possibility of a transcendental subjectivity is undermined.”105 At its root, the subject is not subjective. It just is. The
singular self is impossible to describe, and impossible to have it in its singularity take part in an existential project or human ethics. Dragged into the daylight, the opaque, singular self is lost to language.
Cools elucidates the looming impasse. The subject appears be nothing more than “an anxious being attached to language,”106 at its core stripped of intentionality. Again, the question
concerning subjectivity, intentionality and experience must be posed. If the Sleepwalker is stripped of agency, and stripped of both outer and inner directedness, how can we speak of experience if there appears to be nobody who can have an experience of anything?
98 Ibid. 99 Id., 438
100 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 54 101 Id., 58
102 Id., 59
103 Sealey, ‘The “face” of the il y a, 442 104 Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a’, 60 105 Ibid.
2.4 Existential mood
To Gerald Bruns it is also clear that intentionality has no part in the limit-experience, as there is no longer an acting and directing consciousness. “[A]ll subjectivity and objectivity has drained away; only existence remains.”107 Bruns explains that experience does not necessarily need to be
understood in the phenomenological interpretation. Experience does not automatically require intentionality. In the philosophical Romantic tradition, experience has to do with feeling, something that the subject undergoes.108 Taking this in consideration, Large’s interpretation of a mood comes
to mind again. Here the subject experiences a feeling without a particular intentional object. The self is consumed by feeling, to such an extent that self and mood become indistinguishable. However, there are two immediate problems with Large’s claim that the il y a ‘is an existential mood.’
First of all, to Blanchot, the Sleepwalker is rendered passive and neutral. The Sleepwalkers passivity points towards the ‘passivity of being,’ the il y a existence outside the categories of action and repose.109 In the passivity of being all concepts and categories vanish. Feelings have a dialectic:
to feel something, even if that feeling is all-consuming, entails the opposite of that feeling. The il y a neutrality rejects these sort of binaries: it is neither this, nor that. Therefore, the il y a cannot be reduced to a ‘mood’ as such.
To illustrate the second problem, it is worth quoting Blanchot at length. Blanchot writes: “The self has never been the subject of this experience. The ‘I’ will never arrive at it, nor will the individual, this particle of dust that I am, nor even the self of us all that is supposed to represent absolute self-consciousness. Only the ignorance that the I-who-dies would incarnate by acceding to the space where in dying it never dies in the first person as an ‘I’ will reach it. Thus it is necessary to indicate one last time the strangest and most weighty trait of this situation. We speak as though this were an experience, and yet we can never say we have undergone it. An experience that is not lived, even less a state of our self; at most a limit-experience at which, perhaps, the limits fall but that reaches us only at the limit: when the entire future has become present and, through resolution of the decisive Yes, there is affirmed the ascendency over which there is no longer any hold.
The experience of non-experience.
Detour from everything visible and invisible.”110
‘An experience not lived, even less a state of our self,’ ‘the experience of non-experience’: the other problem with Large’s description is the fact that he uses the word ‘existential’ to indicate the Sleepwalker’s experience, which is not apparent in Blanchot’s phrasing. Existentialism deals with how the subject finds itself existing in the world. As Cools has indicated, the Sleepwalker is not only stripped from object-related intentionality, it is also stripped of self-reflectiveness. The subject finding itself in an ‘existential mood’ might be completely the wrong way to describe the Sleepwalker’s experience. There is no personal self to be self-conscious, let alone a subject being aware of finding itself in a certain way. Recalling Sealey’s interpretation, there remains a ‘unique self’ that undergoes the experience of the il y a, but only insofar that all beings are equal in their singularity and thus ‘unique.’ Stripped of instrumental language and singularized, the self would not even be distinguished as such in the il y a.
To Blanchot, the Sleepwalker is "not another, some other person, but the premonition of the other, of that which cannot say ‘I’ any more, which recognizes itself neither in itself nor in others.”111
107 Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 57 108 Id., 137
109 Bruns, The Refusal of Philosophy, 57
