BACHELARD TO BARTHES
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empty neutrality where, as Blanchot writes, being would be perpetu–
ated as nothingness, as the absence of any
determined
being.
One feels that Blanchot is partly responsible for the vogue of
deliberate obscurity among contemporary French writers. There is,
it often seems, something competitively hermetic in their work:
the writing in
Tel Quel
often makes Barthes seem as limpid as
Voltaire, and Lacan has carried the day with a style which is,
hopefully, the
ne plus ultra
of garbled impenetrability. Blanchot,
however, is obscure without being difficult. There is nothing to "un–
derstand" in his work except the conditions in which understanding
is irrelevant. It's nonetheless difficult to talk
about
Blanchot, which
undoubtedly explains why Camus's unsuccessful attempt, in
The
Stranger,
to write a book about which nothing could be said received
much more attention than Blanchot's first book,
Thomas l'obscur,
published a year before Camus's novel. The "neutrality" of Camus's
writing is an illusion;
The Stranger
has a philosophical and social
thesis. Blanchot, on the other hand, is indifferent to negation and
revolt. His work is an attempt to suggest a more "original," nondialec–
tical mode of being. And the obscurity of his writing derives from
this effort to approximate "the pure movement of dying" in litera–
ture and in being, to signify nothing more than the continual disap–
pearing of significance.
Blanchot's enigmatic and poignant sentences seal the doom of
their own meanings. His essays and recits almost
are
an uninterrupted
murmur of an infinite sameness: a single Blanchot sentence contains
the strategy, the model of
his
whole work. That obsessively repeated
model is one of paradox (a silence which speaks, an interiority which
is external), or rather of a juxtaposition of contradictory terms
meant to affirm a reality beyond or before paradoxes and contra–
dictions. The nonparadoxical paradox thus illustrates the extrinsic,
arbitrary relation between language and meaning: language is the
possibility
of meaning, that is, the presence and absence of
all
meaning.
Blanchot's "literary criticism" has, inevitably, tended to tell us
less and less about the writers he chooses to mention; what interests
him in a work is how it refers to what is absent from the work. The
"sympathy" between the writer and the critic is an impersonal anony–
mous identification. Since criticism and literature are occasions which
violate the absence of occasions, ideally both would disappear in their
common source. Thus, in its most extreme, most limited, and yet
