A Revaluation of the Ethics of Literature in the Light of a
Blanchotian Rethinking of Relationality
Remco Nieberg (10270353)
RMA Philosophy Thesis
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Supervisor: mw. dr. A. (Aukje) van Rooden
15-08-2017
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Introduction
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1
The ethics of literature: the intersubjective understanding
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1.1
Martha Nussbaum and the ethics of perception
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1.2
Richard Rorty and being sensitive to cruelty
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1.3
The underlying intersubjective relationality
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2
Blanchot and the ontological relationality of literature
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2.1
What is literature? – an ontological approach
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2.2
How the murmur takes over: the changing role of the author
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2.3
The neuter speaks or ‘the relation of the third kind’
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3
An ontological ethics of literature
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3.1
Levinas and Blanchot on the il y a
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3.2
A ‘terrible responsibility’: an ethics beyond good and evil
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3.3
Literature’s ethics before ethics
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Conclusion
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With special thanks to my supervisor Aukje
– for the great help and support.
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IntroductionWhy do we read literature? In order to answer this question, we may point to the aesthetic pleasure we expect to get from reading, or we may argue it is just an enjoyable way of relaxation, a delightful pastime. However, throughout the Western intellectual tradition there has been the recurrent idea that literature might have a bearing on ourselves as ethical beings, whether through its aesthetic aspects or not. Indeed, in philosophy the debate about the relation between literature and ethics might be dated back to the times of Plato and Aristotle. In his design for an ideal state Plato famously banned the poets from the city, for their concern with mere imitations instead of truth and goodness would have a corrupting influence on the people’s morality. Contrary, Aristotle stressed the ethically purifying effects tragedy achieves through catharsis. Thus, although both classical thinkers had a different understanding of it, in both cases a relation between literature and ethics was established.
Despite this two-millennia old discussion of the relation between literature and ethics, the last two decades of the twentieth century showed developments in literary criticism and the philosophy of literature that are sometimes referred to as the ‘ethical turn’. Although the appropriateness to call this a ‘turn’ was contested by Michael Eskin (2004, p.558-60), precisely in the light of the long tradition pointed at above, he still admitted that significantly new arguments revolving around these questions were developed. According to Eskin, we could say that what was at stake here was a new aesthetics called ‘ethical criticism’, in which ethics and literature could only be thought of in conjunction, ‘as ethics-and-literature’ (ibid. p.562-3). What this entails is not merely an external relation in which literature might or might not have an influence on morality, but a more intricate relation in which moral theory should be informed by our readings of literature, and the other way around.
Over the last forty years, the field of ethics and literature has grown into a rich and diverse field that, notwithstanding Eskin’s attempt, is hard to map. However, recently Nora Hämäläinen (2016b) proposed a division of the existing field into three different ways in which literature is connected to ethics. The first one is the thin use of literature in moral philosophy: here, literature is used as merely an example to illustrate a moral theory (ibid. p.18). Without expressing any judgement on the advantages and disadvantages of illustrating philosophical theory with literary examples, we may consider the thin use of literature as not very interesting from the perspective of the relations between literature and ethics for it does not imply a claim about any substantial relation between the two.
A considerably more significant view on this relation is to be found in what Hämäläinen calls the thick use of literature. In the thick use, literature is not read as an example of some philosophical argument, but it is read in order for it to contribute to the argument in a more substantial way. In such a reading the specificities of (narrative) literature and literary language are taken up in moral theory, based on the idea that it may express things about moral life in ways that are not possible in the theoretical language of philosophy (ibid. p.20-1). Although she herself does not explicitly link the two, it seems that the thick use of literature corresponds to what Hämäläinen elsewhere calls the theory-oriented position (Hämäläinen 2016a), the more so because in both cases it is Martha Nussbaum who figures as the main proponent. Here, literature is not seen in opposition to, but in conjunction with moral theory. It is because literature expresses things which are not easily captured by theory, that the latter may be enriched by the former; and the other way around, reading literature informed by moral
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theory may help to elucidate the ethical significance of literature. According to this thick use, literature and moral theory need each other ‘in order to put forward a full account of morality’ (ibid. p.188). The third and last way of using literature ‘in’ ethics, is the open-ended use. In such a use literature is not seen as something that can contribute to philosophy, that can enrich philosophy with its specific ways of presenting moral problems. This would still entail a translation from literature to philosophy that is not made in the open-ended use (Hämäläinen 2016b, p.23-4). Again, it might be clarifying to point out the correspondence between this notion of the open-ended use and a similar one used by Hämäläinen in opposition to the theory-oriented position, namely the anti-theorist standpoint. The anti-theorists in the ethics and literature debate – under which heading Hämäläinen not only counts Cora Diamond, who also figures as the example for the open-ended use of literature, but, among others, Richard Rorty too – think of the relationship between literature and moral theory as antagonistic. Literature and moral theory do not need each other as the theory-oriented or thick use of literature claims, but they offer us ‘radically incompatible’ perspectives on morality (Hämäläinen 2016a, p.188). Thus, our reading of literature should not be informed by moral theory, but must remain ‘open-ended’ in order to enable literature to express its own moral values, in its own way.
Although both the thick use and the open-ended use seem to take literature serious and consider it for what it is in itself, instead of reducing it to philosophy – though we may argue that the open-ended use is more successful in this respect than the thick use – we might ask if the ethical value that is ascribed to literature is indeed to be found in every literary work. Are these approaches able to say something about the ethics of literature as such? In order to argue for their claims, scholars often take recourse to examples from particular stories or novels. However, examples might fail to found a claim about literature as such, because in principle it is possible to stand up to every example with a counter-example; often, if not always, it is possible to come up with a different novel, a different story that lacks the ethical values ascribed to literature.
In this thesis, it will be argued that what underlies the abovementioned approaches to the field of ethics and literature, is a particular conception of relationality. In this conception, literature, both writing and reading, is to be considered as a conversation between the reader and the (implied) author, both understood as moral subjects. Thus, this is an intersubjective relation, and the ethical value of literature has to be found in the ‘message’ that is communicated in this conversation. As such, this ethical value can be found in the subject matter or content of the work, which is the what of the message, and in the way in which it deals with this subject matter, the form of the work, which is the how of the message. We will follow Aukje van Rooden (Van Rooden 2015a, p.80) in calling this understanding of the ethical value of literature, with a Heideggerian term, ontical: it is concerned with the qualities and features of literary works, and it discusses their ethical value. However, as will be argued, although this approach may succeed to point out the ethical relevance of particular works of literature, it is not appropriate for a claim about literature as such. If we want to make such a claim, we have to ask about the way in which literature is, how it exists. This is not an ontical, but an ontological question, and as such, it asks for a different approach.
Such an ontological approach to literature is to be found in the works of Maurice Blanchot. Here, the work of literature turns out to be not something in which an (implied) author speaks, but in which a voice is to be heard that belongs to no one, and that says no particular thing. What is more, the literary
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work understood in this way does not lead to an intersubjective relation between the writer and the reader, but to a fundamentally different kind of relation, which Blanchot calls ‘the relation of the third kind’ (Blanchot 1993, p.66-74). Thus, the intersubjective relation that underlies the ontical claims made in the ethics and literature debate does not hold on an ontological level. Therefore, if we want to formulate an ethics of literature which has an ontological foundation and which for that reason is valid for literature as such, we have to do this on the basis of this relation of the third kind.
Such a revaluation of the ethics of literature, on the basis of an ontological rethinking of the kind of relationality that is at play in literature, will indeed be the main issue of this thesis. In order to do this, I will start the first chapter by sketching a broad outline of the ethics and literature debate of the last couple of decades, following Hämäläinen’s account. To do this as completely as possible, I will discuss two philosophers whose ideas are exemplary of the thick or theory-oriented and the open-ended or anti-theoretical uses of literature: respectively Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty. In discussing these views, I will stress the intersubjective form of relationality between reader and (implied) author that is central to them.
In the second chapter, I will give a quite extensive, though general reading of Blanchot’s ontological thinking of literature. After that, while staying on this ontological level, I will turn to how Blanchot conceives of the writer which leads up to the ontological rethinking of relationality. While it will become clear that in this understanding of literature its significance lies for an important part in its relationality, just as was the case with Nussbaum and Rorty, it will at the same time become clear that this ontological conception of relationality differs fundamentally from the intersubjective relationality of the latter two. Although the relation of the third kind leaves the possibility open that on an ontical level the claims made in the ethics and literature debate might be accurate for particular works, it makes these claims on an ontological level untenable. Therefore, in order to be able to discuss the ethics of literature as such, we have to enquire into the ethical significance of the relation of the third kind.
What this ethical significance would be, will be worked out in the third and final chapter by drawing upon Laurens ten Kate’s ideas on Blanchot’s ethics (Ten Kate 1997). Here, this ethics will be characterized as ‘a terrible responsibility’ (Blanchot 1993, p.xii) that exists in going beyond good and evil, where this turns out to be an untenable distinction (Ten Kate 1997, p.124-5). Here, by confronting the ultimate groundlessness of this distinction, every ethics instituted by the moral subject’s judgement about good and evil might be recognized as finite, arbitrary and contingent. Therefore, the ontologically grounded ethics of literature precedes every ethics of good and evil, and as such, we will characterize it as an ethics before ethics.
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1 – The ethics of literature: the intersubjective understandingIn this first chapter, the contemporary debate about the relation between literature and ethics will be discussed. In order to give a complete picture, we will follow the distinction made by Hämäläinen between on the one hand the thick or theory-oriented use of literature for ethics, and on the other hand the open-ended or anti-theorist use. The discussion will focus on two philosophers who are exemplary for the two positions: respectively Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty; the reasons why they can be seen as exemplars will also be paid attention to. As was announced in the introduction, it will be argued that what underlies these views of the relation between literature and ethics, is an approach of literature in which it is placed in an intersubjective relation between writer and reader. The paragraph concluding this chapter will address this underlying particular conception of relationality with a discussion of the role of the implied author in it, as it was pointed out by Hämäläinen.
However, before giving this differentiated perspective on the debate by discussing the theory-oriented and anti-theoretical approaches, it might be helpful to give a broad outline in which the main characteristics common to both positions are addressed. Indeed, according to Hämäläinen, there is great agreement in the debate about the way in which literature has ethical relevance. This relevance is not that it may provide moral philosophy with examples, as the thin use of literature has it, but that it contains moral thought in its own right. Notwithstanding the different conceptions about how to relate literature to moral theory, what is held in common is that the ethical significance of literature is in such a way tied to its form that it cannot be translated into the more argumentative structured theoretical texts which are usual in (academic) philosophy (Hämäläinen 2016a, p.17-9).
Because it is argued that there is a strong connection between the moral thought expressed in literary works, and the form in which it is expressed, we may reasonably ask what kind of moral thought literary works tend to contain due to their form. Do the ties between form and moral content imply certain features that are more commonly found in the moral insights with which literature provides us? Indeed, according to Hämäläinen, following the first agreement discussed above, there is a second type of agreement too, concerning the kinds of moral thought that are to be found in literary works. Although multiple features are dominant in the moral insights ascribed to literature (Hämäläinen herself distinguishes nine of them), and notwithstanding that there are many interconnections between them, that not every thinker in the field shares them, and that there are different stances possible in relation to them (ibid. p.24-5), we might attempt to give a general picture of this kind of moral thought.
The kind of moral thought that is likely to be expressed by literary works is one in which the central capability is called moral perception. ‘Perception’ does not so much indicate that this is an ethics in which the senses are central. Instead, what moral perception indicates is an attentiveness or sensitivity towards the morally relevant particularities of a given situation, and a willingness to respond to these particularities. In narrative literature, this idea of moral perception can be found at the level of the characters in the work, especially in the ways in which they are morally perceptive towards the situations in which they are involved. However, on the level of the writer and the reader too, moral perception is at work: in writing one has to create engaging characters which also involves that one ‘sees’ how to place them in their particular situations and what the morally relevant aspects of these situations are; in reading one is morally perceptive in engaging with the work’s world and the characters involved
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in it (ibid. p.25-8). For that purpose, moral perception involves moral imagination, the empathetic capacity to imagine oneself in the position of someone else (ibid. p.28), and emotional engagement, the insight that both in how we perceive the world and in how we respond to the world, emotions play a constitutive role (ibid. p.34-6). Literature seems to be very suited to express both of these capacities, for not only do the characters display them in some degree (on the basis of which we judge how successful they are in their moral interaction with their world), but in engaging with a work of literature, we – both as writers and as readers – need these capacities in order to engage with the characters in their respective situations. Qualities that are unique for literature – its imaginative, evocative language in which characters and situations are described in a way that expresses their full emotional complexities – incite this engagement from us.
That moral perception has to attend and respond to particular aspects of the situation, is connected with the idea that every (human) situation is unique and has particular features that are of moral significance. Indeed, literature seems to be more fitting to express the particularities of situations than the more general aspects. The latter are more likely to be found in the discursive language of, for example, moral theory, while the rich, evocative language in which literature describes situations, events and characters is more inclined to highlight the particular aspects and features of it (ibid. p.30-1). Therefore, the picture that emerges here of the moral thought to be found in literature is one of moral particularism. Moral particularism is critical of the role of generalizing rules in moral theory, and instead commits to being responsive to the unique features of a particular situation. This means that situations cannot be assessed from the standpoint of a general principle, but have to be approached in a case-by-case manner (ibid. p.76-7). Seen from this perspective, the role of narrative literature is, in Hämäläinen’s words, ‘to put forward the particularity of moral experience and the situation-bound aspects of moral goodness and obligation’ (ibid. p.99).
This is not to say that an ethics based on moral perception might, even when this capacity is perfected, always point us the way towards the right kind of action. Indeed, one of the qualities of literature is that it can confront us with situations in which different moral values and the action they warrant come into conflict with each other, without it being possible to resolve this conflict by some rational procedure or by consulting a higher or highest principle. Instead, the moral values are incommensurable and the demands they impose are irreducible. Thus, what comes to the fore in the moral thought expressed in literature is the incommensurability of good things (ibid. p.36-9). What is more, this kind of moral thought is not only concerned with moral principles and the kind of action they require. Instead, there is a more broad conception of moral philosophy here, in which the main questions are about the good life and how to live. Indeed, these questions are a more appropriate context for moral thought concerned not so much with rules and principles, but with moral capabilities or values such as the above-mentioned moral perception, moral judgement and emotional engagement. In this way, there is more attention for virtue and character, which indeed is often found in literature, for example when it deals with the (moral) development of its characters.
Thus, a general picture of the kind of moral thought to be found in literary works arises here. It is one in which the proper scope for moral thought is extended beyond questions concerning how to act, to questions about moral character and the good life. The central quality or character trait here is that of an imaginative and emotionally engaged moral perception, through which one attends and responds
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to the morally relevant particularities of both situations and persons, based on the view that these particularities give to every situation and person a uniqueness which cannot be adequately done justice to from the perspective of general principles.
The discursive language common to moral theory does not seem to be very fit to express this kind of moral thought, for it is more inclined to stress the general features of situations and the proper action it thus demands from the perspective of general principles. Literature is more likely to be expressive of this kind of moral thought, because its rich and evocative language presents precisely these particularities of its characters and the situations which they are in. In this way, we engage with the characters and we judge or assess whether they are successful or if they fail in responding to these particularities, in other words, whether they are properly morally perceptive. However, moral perception is not only to be found on the level of the characters. Both readers and writers have to engage with a novel, its characters and their situations in a way which requires moral perception; in reading and writing one has to attend to the morally and emotionally relevant particularities of the characters and the situations they are in. Therefore, the reading of literature would be a way to develop this ethical ability, according to the contemporary ethics and literature debate.
Although the general view here is that literature is expressive of an ethics that differs deeply from what is commonly found in moral theory, the relation between them is a question of debate. Indeed, as was discussed in the introduction, the main dividing line inside the ethics and literature debate is, according to Hämäläinen, the one between the thick or theory-oriented use of literature, and the open-ended or anti-theoretical one; between scholars who regard literature as an essential contribution to moral theory, who regard the two in conjunction, as enriching each other, and scholars who see literature as an alternative to moral theory which is more appropriate to express a particular kind of moral thought they agree to. We will now turn to Nussbaum and Rorty as the respective proponents of these two views, in order to come to a better and more complete understanding of this conception of the ethical value of literature. On the basis of this enquiry, we will, in the paragraph concluding this chapter, point out the intersubjective kind of relationality underlying this understanding of the ethical value of literature.
1.1 – Martha Nussbaum and the ethics of perception
According to Martha Nussbaum, the importance of literature lies in its ‘concern with the practical’; it are the ‘ethical and social questions that give literature its high importance in our lives’ (Nussbaum 1990, p.168). These questions are a part of what Nussbaum considers as the search of ethics: ‘the search for a specification of the good life for a human being’ (ibid. p.139). Here, Nussbaum shows that she has indeed the kind of broad conception of ethics that is common in the ethics and literature debate, as Hämäläinen argued. However, the question of the good life is not only addressed by the content of literature, but also in its very form. Indeed, according to Nussbaum, the two are not to be separated: ‘[l]iterary form is not separable from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content – an integral part, then, of the search for and the statement of truth’ (ibid. p.3). There is an organic connection between form and content because, when a text is ‘carefully written and fully imagined’, the thoughts and ideas that are expressed in it lead to the form that is proper to them: they ‘reach toward the expression in writing that has a
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certain shape and form, that uses certain structures, certain terms’ (ibid. p.4). Thus, if literature is indeed concerned with the question of how to live, already in its form it expresses a view of life. Its very style makes a statement, and it is the responsibility of the author to find the style, the form that adequately expresses his/her ideas and views (ibid. p.6-7).
Whenever this first claim about the organic connection between form and content is accepted, it is only a small step towards the second claim central to Nussbaum’s views on the relation between ethics and literature. Resembling the relation between the two agreements described by Hämäläinen, the reason is that when a particular content, that is, some view on life is most adequately expressed in a particular form or style, there might be such views that can only be accurately expressed in the form of literature (ibid. p.5). Indeed, according to Nussbaum, views ‘that emphasize the world’s surprising variety, its complexity and mysteriousness, its flawed and imperfect beauty’ cannot be adequately expressed in the discursive language of conventional moral theory or philosophy, for this is ‘a style that is remarkably flat and lacking in wonder’ and thus contradicts that which it is supposed to express. What is needed instead is a language that is ‘more complex, more allusive, more attentive to particulars’ (ibid. p.3). This is the kind of language that is found in literature. Thus, apparently the moral thought expressed by literature, its view on life, responds to the variety and complexity in the world. What kind of moral thought would this be? And what (formal) qualities of literature are expressive of it?
According to Nussbaum, there are four features to be distinguished which are characteristic of the view of life expressed by literature’s formal qualities. First of all, thanks to its language that is ‘variegated’ and ‘precise’ in its ‘qualitative rightness’, novels show a ‘commitment to qualitative distinctions’ (ibid. p.36). Thus, the richness of literary language makes it represent different things, persons and actions as qualitatively distinct. Different things are not reduced to quantitative differences that can be measured according to a single metric, but are considered according to their own distinctive qualities. This leads up to what Nussbaum calls the noncommensurability of valuable things. As we saw with what Hämäläinen calls the incommensurability of good things, which is basically the same idea, sometimes the choice between different actions or values is irresolvable because their distinctive qualities are not reducible to a common measure. Nussbaum too stresses that the ‘novel as form is deeply involved in the presentation of such conflicts’ (ibid. p.37).
Second, quite similar to what Hämäläinen calls moral perception, Nussbaum claims that a feature of the view of life expressed by literature is the ethical ability of perception. This is ‘the ability to discern, acutely and responsively, the salient features of one’s particular situation’, an idea Nussbaum derives from Aristotle. Following the qualitative commitment of literary language as described above, what is demanded here of ethics is ‘a much finer responsiveness to the concrete’ than what general rules and principles are capable of (ibid.). Indeed, as is also pointed out by Hämäläinen, there is a priority of the particular here. It are the formal aspects of literature that ‘cultivate our ability to see and care for particulars […] as what they themselves are’ (ibid. p.184). Again, it is the imaginative language of literature that represents its characters as individuals and draws our attention to their rich inner lives (Nussbaum 1991, p.889-90, p.892, p.898), and which describes their situation in all its complexity.
However, literature does not merely represent particularities in a distant, disengaged way. Instead, ‘novels both represent and activate the emotions’ (Nussbaum 1990, p.40). Not only are characters represented as emotional beings affected by the particular features of their situation and in
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their relation to other characters, but both readers and writers are also engaged by the literary work in an emotional way. We saw Hämäläinen pointing out that often in the ethics and literature debate emotions are conceived of as constitutive of our relations to the world. For Nussbaum too, emotions have a central role. There is a close connection between emotions, and beliefs about the world and what is of importance in it, thus emotions have a ‘cognitive dimension in their very structure’. Therefore, emotions are indeed important for how we engage with the world, and for that reason they are ‘intelligent parts of our ethical agency’ (ibid. p.41): emotions have to be involved in how we respond to morally relevant particularities, and thus practical wisdom or rationality cannot do without them. This ethical relevance of the emotions is the third feature of the moral thought expressed by literature.
The fourth of these features is what Nussbaum calls the ethical relevance of uncontrolled happenings. Literature is able to make us more sensitive to the contingency of the situations in which we are involved, for it often describes how events just happen to someone without any fault of their own. Although one cannot do anything about such happenings, this does not mean that it would be ethically irrelevant. According to Nussbaum’s broad conception of ethics, in which it is concerned with life itself, every event or situation, whether it is brought about by someone him/herself or it just happens to him/her, is of ethical relevance whenever it has significance for one’s life. Because literary texts have the ‘power to display such uncontrolled events as if they matter to the characters, and to make them matter to the reader’ (ibid. p.43), it can make us more perceptive towards the ethical relevance of such happenings.
Although literature is the most fitting way to express the view of life which is characterized by these four features, while moral theory would already contradict such a view in its discursive style, this is not to say that there is an insuperable rift between literature and moral theory. As we saw, Hämäläinen classifies Nussbaum’s thinking under the heading of the theory-oriented use of literature. Indeed, Nussbaum does not want to ‘substitute the study of novels for the study of the recognized great works of the various philosophical traditions in ethics’ (ibid. p.27). Instead, the study of literary works should be added to the study of more theoretical works. That literature can enrich moral theory in this way is already understandable from the foregoing. It is by ‘confronting it with a distinctive conception or conceptions of various aspects of human ethical life, realized in a form that is the most appropriate one for their expression’ (ibid. p.191), that literature may add views on human life different from what moral theory, due to its discursive language, is capable of expressing.
However, the other way around too, literature must be enriched by moral theory. The reason for this is, according to Nussbaum, that it will ‘clarify to us just what it is that works of literature offer to our sense of life’ (ibid. p.190). Moral theory is animated by ‘a sense of practical importance’ with regard to the question of how to live. It is this sense that often lacks in literary theory, Nussbaum claims. When we let our reading of literature be informed by moral theory, it will become more sensitive to the ways in which literature too is involved in this question (ibid. p.170-1). What is more, when we take moral theory into account in our approach to literature, it will help us ‘sketching out [the literary text’s] relation to other forms of moral writing’ (ibid. p.161); by contrasting the view of life expressed by literature with other conceptions in moral theory, the characteristic features of this view will become more clear.
Now, we might ask what it means to conceive of the work of literature as expressive of the view of life described above. What does it mean to approach literature as something of ethical value? How
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does the reader relate to the work, and how does the author, according to Nussbaum’s conception of the relation between ethics and literature? As we saw above, it is the responsibility of the author to find the right form to express his/her ideas. This form is appropriate when it brings it about that the reader ‘is active in a way suited to the understanding of whatever is there for understanding, with whatever elements of him or herself are suited to the task of understanding’ (ibid. p.6). Thus, it is the author who is responsible for the work’s ethical value. As Nussbaum approvingly claims with regard to Henry James’ view on the subject: ‘[t]he whole moral content of the work expresses the artist’s sense of life; and for the excellence of this the novelist is, in James’s view, rightly held (morally) accountable’ (ibid. p.163). The expression of a view on life, in an appropriate form, is the author’s moral responsibility.
This is not to say that the sense of life expressed by a literary text necessarily belongs to the real-life author. Nussbaum considers works of literature ‘as works whose representational and expressive content issues from human intentions and conceptions’ (ibid. p.8), but these do not have to be ascribed to the flesh-and-blood person whose name is on the cover. Instead, the author who is to be held responsible for the right match between form and content has to be seen as an ‘authorial consciousness’ present in the work itself. This can be, according to Nussbaum, both the narrator in the work itself, or ‘the authorial presence that animates the text taken as a whole’ (an idea that very closely resemblances that of Wayne Booth’s ‘implied author’, that will be discussed in the paragraph closing this chapter). In other words, the morally responsible author is the one whose views are ‘realized’ or ‘embodied’ in the text itself; it is someone to whom we ascribe the thoughts and ideas found in the text itself (ibid. p.9).
This moral thought expressed in the work is what the reader has to respond to. Thus, basically, he/she has to grasp the view of life expressed by the author. However, as we saw Nussbaum claim in the quote above, the reader has to respond ‘with whatever elements of him or herself are suited to the task of understanding’. Just like the view of life expressed by literature cannot be expressed in theoretical, discursive language, the reader cannot in understanding grasp it as a claim made in that kind of language. Thus, here, moral communication ‘is not simply a matter of the uttering and receiving of general propositional judgements’, nor is it ‘any sort of purely intellectual activity’ (ibid. p.153). Instead, the form or style of literature itself demands a kind of reading that is a form of perceiving or attending and responding to the particular. In reading, we attend in such a way to the characters and their situations that this is itself an instance of the kind of ethics that literature is expressive of; this is what Nussbaum calls, again in agreement with Henry James, ‘a complicity between the consciousness of the reader […] and the consciousness, the morality, of perception’ (ibid. p.184). Therefore, ‘the adventure of the reader […] involves valuable aspects of human moral experience that are not tapped by traditional books of moral philosophy’ (ibid. p.143). In reading literature one can ‘understand’ the sense of life expressed in it, not because it is intellectually grasped as a propositional judgement, but because the very act of reading itself is an instances of it; in that sense, it is a kind of ‘experiential learning’ in which perception and responsiveness are not learned as rules and principles are, but in which they are cultivated (ibid. p.44).
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1.2 – Richard Rorty and being sensitive to cruelty
After the discussion of Nussbaum’s theory-oriented approach in the ethics and literature debate, we will now turn to Richard Rorty whose ideas are, as we will see, more exemplary for the anti-theoretical approach. The starting point for his reflections is not, as it is for Nussbaum, a shortcoming in the study of literature (and, parallel to this, a shortcoming in the study of ethics) but his distinction between private and public. According to Rorty, the metaphysical tradition is led by the attempt to fuse the two together in order to formulate how the strive for self-perfection and service to others go together, and even imply each other. Such an attempt is based on the assumption that there exists a common human nature or essence. It is on the basis of this assumption that it is believed ‘that what is most important to each of us is what we have in common with others – that the springs of private fulfilment and of human solidarity are the same’ (Rorty 1989, p.xiii). In other words, when all human beings have an essence in common, the care for this essence would be good for all; private perfection and solidarity with others would come down to the same thing.
However, according to Rorty, there is no such thing as a human nature. That human beings would have an essence in common goes together with the claim that there is a truth out there in the world which has to be found and described (ibid. p.6). Human nature would be such a truth, and it is only when we have discovered this nature and described it in a correct way that we can claim to have found truth. But, according to Rorty, this is a misconception. Truth is a property of sentences: only they can be true or false. Therefore, the world itself cannot be either true or false, but only descriptions of the world can. These descriptions are not to be found out there as the world is; instead, they cannot exist independently of the human mind. They are the product of ‘describing activities of the human mind’, and thus, ‘truth is made rather than found’ (ibid. p.5).
That there is no common human nature to bridge the gap between private perfection and solidarity, does not mean that we have to choose sides. Instead, Rorty’s project is to do justice to both sides, not by bringing them under one single vision, but by acknowledging that their incommensurable demands are both equally valid. This position is that of whom Rorty calls the liberal ironists: liberal in that they think that cruelty is the worst thing that is done to others1, and ironists in that they
acknowledge the contingency of their beliefs and desires. This contingency is the consequence of the insight that truth is made and not found, because this means that beliefs and desires are not grounded on some timeless truth but are instead liable to history and change (ibid. p.xiv-xv).
In accordance with the distinction between private and public, Rorty distinguishes two kinds of books: ‘books which help us become autonomous’ and ‘books which help us become less cruel’ (ibid. p.141). The first kind of books helps us to see the contingencies that make up our sense of self. Who we are and how we think of ourselves does not depend, as might be clear by now, on a hidden human nature or essence. Instead, ‘the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary’ (ibid. p.7). What we are is not only caused by contingent causes rather than an inner essence, but our sense of self, the self-knowledge we have, depends on the vocabulary we use to describe ourselves. Initially we inherit this vocabulary, and thus we accept a
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description of ourselves that is not our own. However, because language has no telos in some essence which it has to describe, and thus lacks a criterion according to Rorty (ibid. p.6), it is itself contingent (ibid. p.16). We might therefore replace this inherited vocabulary by our own, and thus change our self-description and consequentially our sense of self. Here, Rorty agrees with Nietzsche that self-knowledge is self-creation (ibid. p.27).
Now, books may help us in creating ourselves in this way, and thus to become autonomous. Because descriptions of ourselves do not go back to some criterion, the only way to answer questions or doubts we still might have with regard to the self-description we have adopted and the sense of self that results from this, is by a re-description. Books can provide us with other vocabularies, with which we can experientially re-describe ourselves, and compare this re-description with alternatives (ibid. p.80). It is in this way that books might help us to (re-)describe ourselves, and thus to create ourselves in an autonomous way. Notice however, that up till now we have been talking of books rather than of literature. Indeed, ‘books that help us become autonomous’ does not only refer to literary works, but instead can be extended ‘to every book likely to provide candidates for a person’s final vocabulary’ (ibid. p.81). According to Rorty, whether a book might help one to become autonomous ‘has nothing to do with the presence of ‘literary qualities’’ (ibid. p.82). Although the examples of this kind of books Rorty gives cover both works we tend to call theory, like Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s and Derrida’s works, and literary works like that of Proust2, he claims that it is especially (ironist) philosophy and theory that is
of importance for private perfection (ibid. p.94).
However, in the category of books that help us become less cruel, literary qualities are more relevant. It is according to Rorty the ‘thick description of the private and idiosyncratic’ that makes us more sensitive to the pain of others, and which therefore is the proper domain for social hope (ibid. p.94). As was said, Rorty makes a strict distinction between the private and the public. Therefore, the ironist project of self-perfection should not be seen as the aim or foundation of society (ibid. p.44), but should instead be ‘reserved for private life’ (ibid. p.65). What is more, society should not have any (philosophical) foundation at all (ibid. p.52). According to Rorty, the only possible justification of a society would be ‘a matter of historical comparison with other attempts at social organization’ (ibid. p.53); just as selfhood is not founded on an essence, but consists instead in the description and re-description of one’s self, so society is not justified by a foundation, but by the self-re-description that results from an open encounter or discussion, itself subject to a particular historical context and, thus, contingent.
Now, how is human solidarity possible in a society that does not rest on some solid (philosophical) foundation, and has not more than a contingent justification instead? As we already saw, according to Rorty a liberal is someone for whom cruelty is the worst thing possible. Rorty goes on to claim that, for the liberal ironist, ‘recognition of a common susceptibility to humiliation is the only social bond that is needed’ (ibid. p.91). The liberal ironist, as opposed to the metaphysician, does not think of the morally relevant part of a human being as to be found in a common essence, but thinks instead that the only morally relevant aspect of a person, that which makes it a moral subject, is its ability to be humiliated. Therefore, what is needed for solidarity, what is central to morality, is the ‘awareness of
2 Although one could resist making such a distinction with regard to these philosophers whose works arguably
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suffering’ (ibid. p.93). According to Rorty, there are no reasons why we should be aware of this, nor does the liberal ironist long for this reasons; instead, what matters for the liberal ironist, is simply to be able to notice humiliation.
It is here that books may help us to become less cruel. According to Rorty, they may do so in two ways, which leads to another distinction within this category, into ‘books which help us see the effects of social practices and institutions on others’ and books ‘which help us see the effects of our private idiosyncrasies on others’ (ibid. p.141). Under the first kind of books Rorty ranges not only literary novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Les Misérables, but also works like The Condition of the Working
Class in England and journalistic works. Thus, again, this ethical relevance does not seem to be
particular to literature. The second kind of books, however, seems to rely more on literary qualities. Here, books make us aware of the suffering of others through imaginative identification (ibid. p.93). The two authors Rorty discusses as examples, Nabokov and Orwell, do so in a different way: Nabokov makes us aware of how the strive for private perfection may produce cruelty; Orwell takes the point of view of the victims and shows us how they suffer (ibid. p.146). However, in both cases the authors make us sensitive to cruelty; they activate the ‘imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers’ (ibid. p.xvi). As was already said, it is the thick description of particularities which arouses this sensibility; it is the imaginative language which is particular to literature that makes ‘detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation’ possible (ibid. p.192). In this way, literature does not discover solidarity, but it creates it by ‘increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people’ (ibid. p.xvi).
Thus, the ethical value of literature lies not in a moral message or content opposed to its aesthetic form (ibid. p.142). Instead, it is in its formal qualities, which we usually consider as the aesthetic side of literature, that its ethical value is to be found: it are the detailed descriptions of particular characters and their situations, made possible by the imaginative richness of literary language, that help us to become more sensitive to the pain and humiliation of others. Here, we recognize the strong bond between content and form as was described by Nussbaum, and which is an idea common to most of the writers in the ethics and literature debate, according to Hämäläinen. Indeed, just as we discovered there, for Rorty too the moral thought to be found in literature is one of a moral perception that is attentive to the morally relevant particularities in a given situation, in his conception the suffering of others. Rorty also shares with Nussbaum the idea that literature helps us to recognize the ethical relevance of contingency.
However, as we saw, Nussbaum’s use of literature for ethics is theory-oriented, while Rorty is classified by Hämäläinen as an anti-theorist. Indeed, Rorty claims that the recognition of the ethical value of literature is ‘part of a general turn against theory and toward narrative’. Rorty associates theory with ‘the attempt to hold all the sides of our life in a single vision, to describe them with a single vocabulary’ (ibid. p.xvi). Thus, theory is the search for the single vocabulary that gives the right description of all aspects of our lives; in other words, it is the search for truth, the search for the right description of human nature. As we have seen, this project is abandoned by Rorty because there is no such human essence, and thus there is no such final vocabulary. Therefore, Rorty does not strive for a reciprocal enrichment between literature and moral theory or philosophy, but instead claims that ‘the greatest novels offer an alternative to philosophy’ (Rorty 2002, p.353).
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To conclude, we might ask, just as we did with regard to Nussbaum, what it means to conceive of literature as being ethical in the way described above. How do the author and reader relate to the work in order for it to be ethical? Although Rorty does not seem to talk as explicitly about the responsibility of the author as Nussbaum does, a similar idea can be found here. Authors who write the kind of literature described above, ‘are often thought of as people who turned our souls around’, not just accidentally, but because of what ‘they force us to experience’ (ibid. p.352). According to this view, the author writes the work in order to let us experience the suffering of others. In this sense, these books do not only make us more sensitive to cruelty, but they also express that we should do so; they do not only help us to develop our moral capabilities, but they are also expressive of an ethical outlook in which this capability is of importance. Indeed, Rorty explicitly links the ethical value of the works of Nabokov and Orwell to their ethical outlooks and beliefs (Rorty 1989, p.146).
Of course, this ethical value of the work of literature is not grasped by the reader as a theoretical claim or proposition. The ethics of which the work is expressive is not to be found in the form of propositional judgements, but is instead found in what it forces us to experience; indeed, it is ‘the experience of reading the novel that makes one into a rather different person, not the utility of a belief acquired in the process’ (Rorty 2002, p.352). Therefore, reading literature is, as was claimed by Nussbaum too, an instance of experiential learning. According to Rorty, what matters in reading is not the relation to ‘any set of beliefs for which the novel might be cited as justification’, that is, a morality that can be expressed in propositional judgements, but instead the ‘relation to the novelist himself’ (ibid.). When one reads literature which has ethical value, which expresses and develops a sensibility for the suffering of others, we come into an intimate relation to the writer, a ‘suddenly shared sense of the imagination’ (ibid. p.353). The reader does not grasp a moral claim made by the author, but he/she experiences the ethical sense to be found in this product of the author’s imagination.
1.3 – The underlying intersubjective relationality
As has become clear, there is a substantial correspondence between the views of Nussbaum and Rorty with regard to the kind of moral thought or ethical value that can be found in literature: because of its rich, imaginative language, which makes detailed descriptions possible, literature tends to express an ethics of perception which attends and responds to the individual and particular in every human being and in every situation. The views of both Nussbaum and Rorty do indeed share at least some of the features that are, according to Hämäläinen, commonly held in the ethics and literature debate. However, I want to go further in claiming that not only the kind of moral thought that is expressed in literature is held in common, but also a particular approach to literature and what it means to ascribe ethical value to it. What underlies this approach is a particular conception of relationality, in which the literary work has its place in an intersubjective relation between author and reader.
As Hämäläinen rightly notices, it is commonly thought that when assessing the ethical value of a work of literature, one should not put too much weight on the connection between the author and the work. The idea is that interpretation, which tends to cut the work off its author, is at least as important; here, authorial intentions are not decisive. However, Hämäläinen claims, even when one drops the
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notion of authorial intentions, ‘we may still have use for the notion of an agency in the work to whom the perspective can be ascribed’ (Hämäläinen 2016a, p.113-4). Such an agency might be conceptualized as an ‘implied author’, a concept introduced by Wayne Booth in order to argue against the claim of neutrality, found among modern writers like Flaubert and Chekhov. According to Booth, even if an author tries to be neutral towards his/her subject, in writing he/she always has to make choices about what to write and how to write. As such, the literary work is ‘the product of a choosing, evaluating person rather than [..] a self-existing thing’ (Booth 1983, p.74-5). Notwithstanding the author’s effort, he/she does not appear in the work as neutral with regard to all values (ibid. p.71). This evaluating presence in the work is what Booth calls the implied author. However, this is not the same thing as the author who really exists outside of the work (ibid. p.75), nor is it the narrator that is to be found in the work, for this is merely an element created by the implied author that not necessarily coincides with him/her (ibid. p.73). Instead, the implied author is to be inferred from the work itself, and ‘includes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all of the characters’ (ibid.). In short, it is what is expressed by the artistic work as a whole; the implied author is to be held committed to the values that are central to the completed work (ibid. p.73-4).
Nussbaum claims, as we have seen, that we should hold the author responsible for the moral thought that is expressed by a work of literature, that is, what view of life it expresses and if it does so in the appropriate form. However, the author who is to be held responsible should not be seen as the real-life person who wrote it, but as the authorial presence that can be found in the work itself; the responsible author should be based on the work itself, not on some authority outside of the text. This authorial presence corresponds to what was named above the implied author, as Hämäläinen notices (Hämäläinen 2016a, p.117). In Rorty too, the moral thought expressed by the work is to be ascribed to the author. Although Rorty does not elaborate on how we should understand this author, whether it has to be seen as an implied author present in the work itself, or if the work has to be seen as the expression of the authorial intentions of the real-life author3, the concept of the implied author can be used here
too. Even if Rorty sees the work as expressive of the thought of the real-life author, who thus should be held responsible, this would not be a rejection of an implied author: all that it would say is that the implied author corresponds to the real-life author, that the authorial presence in the work is the same as the authority of the writer outside the work.
Now, according to Hämäläinen, in reading literature we are in dialogue with the implied author (ibid. p.115). Whenever we discuss a work of literature from a moral perspective, that is, as moral subjects, it is the implied author with whom we enter into conversation. It is him/her we must hold responsible for the perspective or values expressed by the work. As such, ‘the implied author is in a sense the philosopher of the literary work’ (ibid. p.116). Thus, in discussing the ethical value of a work of literature, the reader, as a moral subject, enters into a dialogue with the implied author, as a moral
subject. Here, underlying the possibility of the ethical assessment of literature, is an intersubjective
relation between the (implied) author-subject and the reader-subject. That their relation is one of conversation, is not to say that the ethical outlook is communicated as a propositional judgement. As we have seen, for both Nussbaum and Rorty, and for the ethics and literature debate in general, a strong
3 As was said above, Rorty seems to suggest the latter in making a connection between the ethical outlooks of
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connection between form and content is of importance. Therefore, the ethical value lies not only in what is represented or expressed by the implied author, but also in how this is done. It is for this reason that this conversation does not succeed, in the case of literary works, when the reader intellectually grasps a meaning or content, but instead when he/she experiences the work’s ethical value. Nevertheless, what underlies this conversation is, still, an intersubjective relation between implied author and reader.
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2 – Blanchot and the ontological relationality of literatureAs we have seen, what is central to the possibility of an ethical assessment of literature as it is practiced in the contemporary ethics and literature debate, is an intersubjective relation between (implied) author and reader in which both are understood to be moral subjects. The writing of the author-subject and the reading of the reader-subject are efforts of each to bring about an ethically relevant dialogue. Here, the ethical value of a work of literature turns out to be found in its subject matter and in the way in which it deals with this, because, as we have said, it is precisely in the what and the how of the representation that the (implied) author expresses the values to which he/she adheres and which are to be grasped by the reader.
However, this implies that claims about the ethical value of literature are bound to particular works – not to literature as such. Indeed, although Nussbaum claims to say something about the very form of literature, in her discussions of novels she focuses on the specificities of the particular work: its storyline, its characters and their development, and the way in which these characters and the situations they are in are presented. According to Nussbaum, it is because of the form of the novel that it is inclined to present the particular as of importance, but still, she has to acknowledge that in fact not all novels do this (Nussbaum 1990, p.45). Instead, we might say that this only goes for a particular kind of novel, especially, though not exclusively, realistic novels like those of Henry James, to name an author of whom Nussbaum seems particularly fond. In contrast, we may think of novels in which the characters and their situations do not seem to demand attention to their particularities; one might think here of Paul Austers
Ghosts, in which the characters are scarcely presented as individuals, as their names already suggest
(namely Blue, White, Black). A similar criticism can be addressed to Rorty: his distinctions between private and public, books that help us become autonomous and books that help us become less cruel, and the distinction within this second category, make clear that for him too, the ethical value of literature lies in the what and how of the message of a particular work and not in what literature (always) is.
As Aukje van Rooden has argued, for both Rorty and Nussbaum, their focus on particular novels instead of on literature as such can be explained from the fact that their approach to literature is ontical, as opposed to an ontological approach. According to this distinction, introduced by Martin Heidegger in
Sein und Zeit (Heidegger 1972 [1927], p.11), on the ontical level questions are asked of beings and their
qualities, properties and features, while on the ontological level questions are asked concerning the basic state of their being or their way of being. Thus, on the ontological level, it is about the being of beings; it is not about some property or feature, but about the way in which it first of all is or exists. According to Van Rooden, an ontical approach to literature is concerned with subject matter, form and reception. What is asked here is what the properties of a work are, and how to interpret it (Van Rooden 2015a, p.80). We might state that the way in which Nussbaum and Rorty are concerned with the ethical value of our interpretation of and attention to particular aspects of the novel, has place on the ontical level. On this level, claims about the ethical value of literature are necessarily limited to particular works and say nothing about literature as such. When we do want to say something about the ethical value of literature as such, we shall have to approach literature on the ontological level, which involves the question: what is literature and how does it exist (ibid. p.81)?
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Such an ontological account of literature is to be found in the works of Maurice Blanchot and it is to him that we now turn. As we will see, his ontological conception of literature unsettles the idea of an intersubjective relation between (implied) author and reader on which the ethical assessment of literature as practiced in the ontical approach is founded. Instead, Blanchot formulates a different kind of relation that is at work in literature, which he calls a relation of the third kind. It is by this ontological reformulation of the relationality of literature that we may get sight of a different kind of ethical value of literature, one that is not placed on the ontical level, but on the ontological. What kind of ethics this would be, will be worked out in the next chapter. First, we will turn to a more general discussion of Blanchot’s ontological conception of literature. After that, we will describe how this ontology of literature implies a role of the author that differs from how it is commonly understood. This will finally lead up to the discussion of the kind of ontological relationality that underlies literature.
2.1 – What is literature? – an ontological approach
When we turn to ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, according to Leslie Hill Blanchot’s ‘most programmatic philosophical account of literature’ (Hill 1997, p.103) with the question ‘what is literature?’ in mind, we are troubled as soon as we come across the remark that this question ‘has received only meaningless answers’ and ‘that something about the very form of such a question takes away all its seriousness’ (Blanchot 1995, p.302). Have we come to the wrong shop, or do we ask the wrong question? For Blanchot, the problem is that such a question turns literature into an object of reflection, as Arthur Cools has argued (Cools 2000, p.43). To resume the Heideggerian vocabulary used above: Blanchot rejects this question as an ontical question that reflects on literature in order to find its answer in the features or properties of literature. However, as an ontological question we might consider it legitimate. This is why Blanchot does not reflect on literature as if on an object, but instead gives a phenomenology of what our experience tells us of the being of literature.
With the question understood in this way, Blanchot’s answer is, at the very least, that ‘[l]iterature is not nothing’ (Blanchot 1995, p.313). That it would be nothing is said by people who create an opposition between action and the passivity of the written word. Does Blanchot, by opposing himself to this view, commit himself to the conception of literature as action, of literature as something that is at work in the world and intervenes here? This was the view of Jean-Paul Sartre, who in his essay What
is Literature? defended the view that prosaic literature, as opposed to poetry, was something that had
to be of use. According to Sartre, words do not only name things, but they disclose them in order to make a change. Here, literature turns out to be an instrument of action, ‘action by disclosure’ (Sartre 2001, p.14). In prosaic literature, ‘[t]o speak is to act’ (ibid. p.13), and words are like ‘loaded pistols’ that have to be aimed by the writer (ibid. p.15). However, Blanchot’s remark about the question ‘what is literature?’ probably was a reference to the title of Sartre’s essay, which he considered thus as one of those ‘meaningless answers’; indeed, as Hill rightly notices, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ may, at least up to a certain height, be considered as a response to Sartre (Hill 1997, p.106). Thus, while Blanchot does not think literature is ‘nothing’ as opposed to action, he neither agrees with Sartre’s conception of literature as action.
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Still, in a specific way literature is at work according to Blanchot, but it is precisely in his conception of the way in which literature ‘works’ that he distances himself from Sartre. Starting from a Hegelian analysis of work, though strongly mediated by Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of it, Blanchot comes to define negation as what is central to work or production. The production of a stove, for example, has to be understood as the negation or destruction of something that was there before, namely stones and cast iron, in order to make something which was not there before: the stove. It is in this way that man realizes his projects, and because this is what both changes the world and changes man, work is ‘the force of history’ (Blanchot 1995, p.313). Thus, it is by negation that man produces, that he/she acts, that he/she propels human history; we might therefore claim that the power to negate is central to the human subject.
Now, according to Blanchot, the writer also works, ‘but to an outstanding degree’ (ibid. p.314). He/she is not, as the producer of the stove is, bound to certain materials such as stones and iron, which determine his/her possibilities. Instead, what he/she is capable of, is ‘[e]verything – first of all, everything’. When he/she writes, he/she is ‘free to create a world’ (ibid. p.315); indeed, there are no limits to what he/she can write. His/her negation is not limited to certain materials or to a particular situation or part of reality, but is global instead. Aukje van Rooden defines this idea of a global negation as ‘a disqualification or bracketing of the established facticity of all elements of reality by turning them into potential material for literary creation’ (Van Rooden 2015b, p.61). In the global negation executed by literature, it is the whole of reality that is negated. At the same time, and for the same reason, all of reality is made available in literature; negating all of reality is making all of reality available in the realm of the imaginary. Thus, the imaginary is neither in the world nor beyond the world, but ‘it is the world, grasped and realized in its entirety by the global negation of all the individual realities contained in it, by their disqualification, their absence, by the realization of that absence itself, which is how literary creation begins […]’ (Blanchot 1995, p.316). While the result of the determined negation of certain materials or a particular situation is a product or an action, the limitlessness of the global negation ruins action, because ‘one cannot act in the infinite, one cannot accomplish anything in the unlimited’ (ibid.). It is for this reason that Blanchot considers the literature of action, defended by Sartre, as ‘deceitful’ (ibid. p.317): it misunderstands the particular form of negation peculiar to literature.
Of course, ‘[l]iterature is bound to language’ (ibid. p.322), thus the global negation in literature has to be accomplished in language. Indeed, negation is central to the working of language. When we speak, for example when I say ‘this woman’, I annihilate the real existing thing, this flesh-and-blood woman, in order to ‘produce’ meaningful words. The woman has to be negated on the level of existence, to regain her in the form of an idea or meaning on what Blanchot calls the level of being (ibid. p.322-5); in language, we lose the real existing woman, but what we get is the woman as idea expressed by a meaningful word. Thus, ‘when I speak, death speaks in me’ (ibid. p.323): my language causes the death of existing things, and this makes it possible to grasp their being or meaning. This death is what in everyday or common language is taken to be the unproblematic working of language, and it is believed that the thing named ‘comes to life again fully and certainly in the form of its idea […] and its meaning’, with ‘all the certainty it had on the level of existence’ (ibid. p.325). Although the existing thing is lost, its meaning is brought into full daylight.
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Literary language, on the contrary, ‘is made of uneasiness’ (ibid.) and is therefore more sensitive to ambiguities in language. Indeed, in literature too, death is at work: literary language grasps the meaning of the thing in its absence. However, at the same time literature wants to grasp the things as they exist before language has caused their death: ‘[t]he language of literature is a search for this moment which precedes literature’ (ibid. p.327). Of course, this is paradoxical, for what chance has literature to attain within its language the existing thing, while that language itself is what annihilates it; how can language grasp existence in itself, when death is the very foundation of language? The hope of literature lies in the awareness that the nonexistence or absence of the thing is made present in the word, which itself is ‘a completely determined and objective reality’ (ibid. p.325). Thus, language does not only bring about the death of the thing, but it transposes ‘the unreality of the thing into the reality of language’ (ibid. p.326). It is the materiality of language, ‘the fact that words are things, too’ (ibid. p.327), which always resists the rendering into pure meaning or being. It is what is physical in language – the ink, the shape, the rhythm, the paper, the book – that ‘acts not as an ideal force but as an obscure power’ (ibid. p.328); it are these aspects of language that escape from the negating power of man that constitutes meaning. Thus, here, language slips out of the hands of man as the master of meaningful language, and ‘insists on playing its own game without man’: ‘[l]iterature now dispenses with the writer’ (ibid.). Because the materiality of words refuses to be negated and taken up in pure meaning, but instead stubbornly resists death and ‘manifests existence without being’, this is what Blanchot calls ‘death as the impossibility of dying’ (ibid.). As we will see, this has important consequences for the role of the author, and as such it is central to the kind of relationality of literature.
If the death of the thing brings its meaning into bright daylight, must the ‘before’ to which the materiality of words bears evidence than not be the night? Is it this night what literature aims at, what it wants to grasp? If so, this night would be central to the ontology of literature. This question is addressed by Blanchot in The Space of Literature where he retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. As is well known, in order to get back his beloved Eurydice, Orpheus descends into the underworld or, as Blanchot expresses it, into the night. What gives him access to the underworld is his art, thus ‘art is the power by which night opens’ (Blanchot 1989, p.171). His art even gives him the opportunity to bring Eurydice from the night of the underworld back in the light of day. However, there is one condition: he is not allowed to look at Eurydice as long as they are in the night. Again, we see negation at work, for in order to let Eurydice be in the daylight, Orpheus has to negate her existence in the night by not looking at her. But, as we know, Orpheus does look back to see Eurydice in the night. But is it her that he sees? No, as soon as he looks back, he loses Eurydice, and this is what he sees: he sees her disappearance. Not the night that by the dialectics of negation could be made productive for the day, not the night that could be negated in order to be made into a work; this night is lost in Orpheus’ gaze, because his look ‘ruins the work’ (ibid. p.172). Instead, what Orpheus gazes at – this moment at which Eurydice slips away from him, this appearance of disappearance – is what Blanchot calls the other night (ibid. p.163).
This other night is thus what cannot be taken up by negation and be rendered into pure meaning; as such, it is indeed what the insurmountable materiality of language testifies of. However, as Frank Vande Veire points out, neither is it a pure night in which everything remains concealed. Rather, in the other night it is this concealment that appears (Vande Veire 1997, p.72), or, as Blanchot puts it, it is the appearance of ‘everything has disappeared’ (Blanchot 1989, p.163). Indeed, although to see Eurydice
