The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Agamben, and the Writers of the No 9781472544018

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In memory of Grandma Valora

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Introduction: Writing of the No

It would have been even better if I had put into action the “novel that went out into the street” that I had proposed to a few artist friends. We would have really increased impossibilities in the city. The Public would have seen our “scraps of art,” novelistic scenes unfolding by themselves in the streets, catching glimpses of one another among the “scraps of the living,” in old sidewalks, doorways, domiciles, bars, and the public would dream it saw “life”; it would dream the novel but in reverse: in this case, the novel’s consciousness is its fantasy; its dream the external execution of its themes. —Macedonio Fernández There is also, then, the riches of thought, there is the indigence that makes us feel that thinking is always learning to think less than we think, to think about the lack that thought also is—and, speaking, how to preserve this lack by bringing it to speech . . . —Maurice Blanchot My eyes are tired. For over half a century they have gazed into nullity where they have found a lovely nothing. —James Joyce In his novel Bartleby and Co. Enrique Vila-Matas describes how Maurice Blanchot was tired of always hearing journalists ask writers the same two questions: One was: “What are the tendencies in today’s literature?” The other: “Where is literature heading?” He later answered them anyway: “Literature is heading toward itself, toward its essence, which is its disappearance.”1 Bartleby and Co. is a sustained attempt to flesh out the meaning of this enigmatic claim. Among those Vila-Matas invokes in his quest is Giorgio Agamben, whose essay “Bartleby, or On Contingency” places him with Blanchot in the novel’s constellation of “writers of the No,” authors who, having lost all hope of an expressible, totality of words that signify wholly, eternally, and unequivocally, and of an accessible tradition, decide instead to build their work from a standpoint of extreme negativity, while still chancing that the literary word’s potential is not yet consumed. Scholars are, of course, still asking the questions that tire Blanchot. Like VilaMatas, those concerned with formulating them with regard to an immanent ontology have often turned to Blanchot and Agamben to navigate this increasingly

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funambulate terrain, that of the modern literary concept. Recent works of criticism like William Watkin’s The Literary Agamben and Mark Hewson’s Blanchot and Literary Criticism show not only that literature holds a privileged place in their theoretical writings, but also that these writings themselves often exhibit a tendency they are attracted to, which is to overcome the divide between theory and literature by rendering it inoperative. This approach was clearly articulated by Alexander Garcia Düttman in his introduction to Agamben’s early book Idea of Prose, in which Agamben neutralizes the opposition between “a prose whose implicit philosophical determination regulates the effects of its signifying function and a poetry whose purely sonorous and rhythmic dimension seems to resist any translation.”2 In this zone of indistinction, Agamben and Blanchot glimpse a space of communication that they posit as “literary,” as well as “ethical” and “political.” Although each of the above-mentioned titles effectively approaches this place in a nuanced way by focusing on works by one of these two authors, what is still missing is an investigation of the relationship between them. My aim is to initiate this effort, to ask the tired question—where is literature heading?—in a new way, by initially staging a confrontation between the two poststructural theorists that have most fully engaged it. The urgency of this investigation is underlined by the fact that the significance of a dispute between Blanchot and Agamben has gone mostly unnoticed. Thomas Carl Wall’s book Radical Passivity is to my knowledge the most sustained consideration of the relationship between the work of Blanchot and Agamben, though it is not directly concerned with the literary question. Wall’s philosophical analysis shows how these two are aligned with Emmanuel Levinas in a common conception of “radical passivity.” He develops this insight by isolating this passivity in respect of what he deems to be the central concern of each writer: for Blanchot, it is passivity in regard to the image, for Levinas in regard to the Other, and for Agamben in regard to being-in-language. While this approach carries a certain reductive tendency, because Blanchot and Agamben at least have connected each of these concerns throughout their writings in prominent ways, it allows us to draw out the common ontological basis from which the three writers stage their interventions. One of the theses advanced by Wall is that Agamben’s work is an extension of the trajectories that Blanchot initiates in The Unavowable Community: Through Blanchot, we come to Agamben’s notion of a community-to-come that is already “in” language and that is no longer graspable as sacrificed, recognized, and identified. Central to Agamben’s recent work is the notion of complete being-in-language without any residue. We believe therefore that his work unfolds from Blanchot’s la communaute inavouable, though Agamben seems to want to deny this.3

Wall makes no further mention of this dispute with Agamben, not even to describe its basis, and proceeds to conflate Agamben’s work with Blanchot’s throughout the rest of the book. Such an unequivocal dismissal of Agamben’s objection to this conflation seems curious, especially given that one of Wall’s central claims is that Agamben is

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in some way an exemplary reader of Blanchot, so much so that his own work is an “unfolding” of potentials harbored by The Unavowable Community. The first question I will take up in this book is the one that Wall does not pursue: why does Agamben “seem to want to deny” that his work on ontology and language congruently unfolds from Blanchot’s book? At the onset, it seemed that answering this question might, at the very least, illuminate the dispute between Blanchot and Agamben. Because Wall claims that the dispute arises in some way from an encounter with The Unavowable Community, a book inextricably bound up in the literary question, it also seemed possible that it could come to bear on my primary concern, which, like Vila-Matas’s, is to ask about the future of an immanent literature by studying those most engaged with its unfolding. Contra Vila-Matas’s fragmentary novelistic approach, which tallies the “writers of the No” with speed and brevity, the demands of this inquiry required us to abide in more sustained, though still fragmentary, encounters, as well as to register a group of new authors in this trajectory—Vila-Matas himself, Anne Carson, and César Aira, among others—and also draw out a potent concept of “study” that allows them to effectively articulate the theme of disappearance at issue for Blanchot. Before we can approach these elements, however, it is necessary to begin to unpack the dispute that renders them intelligible in the way I propose. *** Despite positing a similar ontology and engaging a wide range of the same set of writers as Blanchot (from Kafka and Melville, to Musil, Mallarmé, and Walser), Agamben rarely refers to his work directly. However, in a book, Remnants of Auschwitz (published the same year as Wall’s Radical Passivity), Agamben devotes an entire page to distinguishing his reading of Robert Antelme’s book The Human Race from Blanchot’s by focusing on how the latter fails to see the implications of his own definition of the human as “the indestructible that can be infinitely destroyed.”4 “Blanchot misunderstands his own words,” Agamben writes, “when he sees infinite destruction as the place of ‘the human relation in its primacy,’ as the relation to the Other.”5 For Agamben, here Blanchot unwittingly inscribes the elements of an ontology of metaphysical presence into his otherwise immanentist project because the human—”the indestructible”—”does not exist, either as essence or as relation.”6 Agamben proposes a reading of Blanchot’s definition that he claims is both more complicated and simpler than the latter’s reading of his own words, one that sees it not as “a definition which, like all good logical definitions, identifies a human essence in attributing a specific difference to it,” but rather as an articulation of the paraontology of disappearance that both writers are often so committed to, their “radical passivity”: The human being can survive the human being, the human being is what remains after the destruction of the human being, not because somewhere there is a human essence to be destroyed or saved, but because the place of the human is divided,

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The Disappearance of Literature because the human being exists in the fracture between the living being and the speaking being, the inhuman and the human. That is: the human being exists in the human being’s non-place, in the missing articulation between the living being and logos. The human being is the being that is lacking to itself and that consists solely in this lack and in the errancy it opens.7

Now we are possibly getting closer to unraveling the dispute between Blanchot and Agamben that Wall quickly mentions and dismisses. Agamben briefly revisits this point of contention in The Time That Remains, where he claims that the formulation of the human as the “indestructible that can be infinitely destroyed” implies a problematic universalizing concept, one “above cuts and divisions,” with “the individual as the ultimate limit of each division.”8 Difference, in other words, is set aside in order to “pinpoint a sameness or a universal lurking beyond.”9 Agamben distinguishes this tendency, which he also attributes to Alain Badiou, from his own messianic universalism, which does not invoke “a transcendent principle through which differences may be perceived,” but, rather, “involves an operation that divides the divisions of the law themselves and renders them inoperative, without ever reaching any final ground.”10 The messianic hos me (as not) formula introduces a subjective tension or oscillation that disrupts every vocation or legalistic identity, every bios or sameness, without replacing it with another identity: “Jew as non-Jew, Greek as non-Greek.”11 The hos me produces Agamben’s version of the universal, the “remnant” or “coming community” of potential beings, humanity beyond the law: “If man is that which may be infinitely destroyed, this also means that something other than this destruction, and within this destruction, remains, and that man is this remnant.”12 Without the oscillating potentiality implied by the remnant, this infinite destruction isolates the subject in one pole of this oscillation: the impersonal, which manifests itself as an absolute passivity that is existentially separate from action, and not an indistinguishable part of it as in Agamben’s work and elsewhere in Blanchot. This passivity or infinite destruction also correlates to zöe, the bare life of the living being that comes to light every time the so-called “human rights” are revoked, when humans are pushed beyond the limit that Grete Salus wrote about, in a passage that Agamben invokes to distance himself from Blanchot: “man should never have to see how this suffering to the most extreme power no longer has anything human about it.”13 Agamben extends Salus’s claim to develop the critique of Blanchot, his brief complicity with a biopolitical trajectory: “she also meant this much: there is no human essence; the human being is a potential being and, in the moment in which human beings think they have grasped the essence of the human in its infinite destructibility, what then appears is something that ‘no longer has anything human about it.’”14 *** A possible model of this approach to Blanchot can be found in Agamben’s loving criticism of novelist and poet Elsa Morante, with whom he shared a deep friendship as well as an abiding suspicion of the typical uses of language. “When I told her,” he says,

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for instance, “that I was writing a book called Language and Death, she commented: “Language and death? Language is death!”15 In the seventh chapter of The End of the Poem, titled “The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure,” Agamben seeks to decipher why Morante places Spinoza at the top of the genealogical tree in her “Canzone of the Happy Few and the Unhappy Many,” alongside Simone Weil, Giordano Bruno, Gramsci, Rimbaud, Mozart, Joan of Arc, Giovanni Bellini, Plato, and Rembrandt. In the Canzone, Morante marks Spinoza’s place with the title “the celebration of the hidden treasure,” a formula that, as Agamben notes, is an allusion to her late text on Beato Angelico. This text, he claims, holds the key to understanding her affinity to Spinoza. “Colors,” she writes, “are a gift of light, which makes use of bodies . . . to transform its invisible celebration into an epiphany . . . It is well known that to the eyes of idiots (poor and rich alike) the hierarchy of splendors culminates in the sign of gold. For those who do not know the true, inner alchemy of light, earthly mines are the place of a hidden treasure.”16 The “celebration of the hidden treasure” is in this way an articulation of the becoming visible, in bodies, of the alchemy of light. Spinoza develops this idea under the term “comprehension,” which according to Morante carries the meaning of alchemy, an alchemy of immanence that Agamben describes, following Kafka, as “both a spiritualization of matter and a materialization of light.”17 As Agamben further notes, it is this “comprehension” or “celebration” that knowledge of the third kind revealed to Spinoza sub quadam aeternitatis specie. Agamben describes this “Spinozist” moment in Morante’s work via the encounter with Beato Angelico as the moment of her “supreme vision,” where she “sets aside her tragic ‘prejudices’ and Edenic mythology” in an idea, “which—like comprehension in Spinoza—is far more despairing than every tragedy and far more festive than every comedy.”18 And then we find a passage that proves helpful for unpacking the dispute between Blanchot and Agamben: Here the reconciliation with Spinoza is important, for it acts as a counterbalance to a temptation in Elsa that was certainly strong. All greatness contains an inner threat with which it is in constant combat and to which it at times succumbs. And every comprehension of a work that does not keep in mind this part of the shadow (which is absolutely not of the psychological order) risks falling into hagiography. For Elsa, this shadowy part coincides with the tragico-sacrificial mythology that identifies the creature’s bare life as the most absolute innocence and as the most extreme guilt, as sanctity and as malediction, and as darkness and as light. This mythology takes these two aspects to be indistinguishable, according to the ambiguous meaning (which is wrongly thought to be original) of the adjective sacer. It is a conception of this kind that leads Simone Weil, in her Cahiers, to evoke the figure of the scapegoat, in whom sacrificial innocence and guilt, sanctity and abjection, victim and executioner are founded for the sake of catharsis. It is necessary to recognize this temptation in both Morante and Weil for what it is, and to search in their own work for the antidotes contained there when they refuse the temptation of the spirit of the desert.19

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The Disappearance of Literature

The claim I cautiously advance in Chapter 1 is that Agamben extends his critique/ affirmation of Morante and Weil to Blanchot as well, by configuring his work The Open as an implicit reading of The Unavowable Community. Agamben’s critique focuses on a particular passage in this book by Blanchot that can be read as a moment in which Blanchot seemingly gives in to “the temptation of the spirit of the desert,” the consignment of some aspect of being, however fleeting, to the realm of the metaphysical sacred. Speaking of a woman who appears in Marguerite Duras’ récit “The Malady of Death,” whose sexual encounter with a man there tints the concept of the unavowable community developed in that work, Blanchot writes: “But without there being any trace of profanation, there remains her separate existence retaining something of the sacred, particularly when at the end she offers her body, just as the eucharistic body was offered in an absolute, immemorial gift.”20 Agamben, a prophet of the profane, is wary of passages like this in Blanchot’s work, as his critique in Remnants of Auschwitz already shows. In Chapter 1, I further unravel this dispute by tracing Agamben’s “literary” response to Blanchot in The Open. I conclude this initial staging by emphasizing the affirmative element that emerges from it, which allows us to glimpse a figure or image, or, perhaps, what is beyond figures and images, the modality of the student, the potential being, or “pataphysician” that, we will see, carries the emblem of the literature of the future, which is heading toward its essence, its disappearance. In this way, I argue, Agamben urges a reading of Blanchot more in line with the latter’s commitment to “potential being,” to radical passivity or inoperativity. *** This approach is evident in the opening sections of Homo Sacer I, where Agamben briefly cites Blanchot’s writings on the exception and inoperativity to situate his project.21 It also reappears near the end of the essay, “What Is an Apparatus?” in a discussion of the modern discourse on technology. Agamben defines an apparatus as “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of living beings.”22 This includes, he says, apparatuses whose connection with power is evident, such as prisons, schools, the panopticon, confession, factories, and also those in which the connection is more oblique, a group that includes cigarettes, navigation, computers, the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, and language itself. Subjectivity, in this scheme, is what results from the relation and “hand-to-hand combat” between living beings and apparatuses. When the apparatus takes the upper hand, though, it does not so much initiate a process of subjectification as it does one of desubjectification. The current phase of capitalism imposes an exponentially proliferating range of technological identities on consumers. These identities or forms of subjectification take shape as though on a constantly rotating stage, and so they are always also accompanied by a process of desubjectification. This reciprocal indifference of subjectification and desubjectification produces a spectral subject,

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one unique to the society of the spectacle. Agamben uses two familiar apparatuses to illustrate this point: He who lets himself be captured by the “cellular telephone” apparatus—whatever the intensity of the desire that has driven him—cannot acquire a new subjectivity, but only a number through which he can, eventually, be controlled. The spectator who spends his evenings in front of the television set only gets, in exchange for his desubjectification, the frustrated mask of the couch potato, or his inclusion in the calculation of viewership ratings.23

For Agamben, the discourse on technological apparatuses is “well-meaning” but imbued with vanity because it “asserts that the problem with apparatuses can be reduced to the question of their correct use.”24 He continues, with a characteristically confrontational tone: “those who make such claims seem to ignore a simple fact: If a certain process of subjectification (or, in this case, desubjectification) corresponds to every apparatus, then it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it ‘in the right way.’ Those who continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media apparatus in which they are captured.”25 This passage speaks about ontological, political, literary, and philosophical themes that we will take up in the course of this study. In fact, the “disappearance of literature” cannot be understood apart from the implications of the sort of empty subjectivity or nonsubjectivity that Agamben broaches in this text. However, I invoke it here primarily to register its resonance with a passage found in Blanchot’s book Friendship, at the end of the chapter titled “Man at Point Zero.” Indeed, the reflection on technology we just cited seems to be a fairly precise paraphrase of these sentences from Blanchot: Certainly the declamations against technical advances are always suspect, but no less suspect is the kind of appeasement we are ready to find when we affirm that technical developments will suffice to put the solution of all the difficulties they create into our hands. There is no chance of this, of course, and one might even add: fortunately. For if societies born of technology have an advantage over other societies, it is to be found not in the bountiful material resources with which they endow us, but in the state of crisis to which they clearly bring us, thus baring us before the leap of the future.26

The connection between these two passages appears to have gone unnoticed so far, and it provides a textual basis for the sort of claim that Wall advances on purely conceptual grounds, that Agamben’s work unfolds from Blanchot’s.27 If we further examine how these passages on the technology discourse proceed in the texts from which we isolate them here, we arrive at another point of textual resonance, one that succinctly draws out the basis of my second guiding question, which Wall addresses in a largely convincing philosophical discussion, but that I ask in regard to the literary idea: how does Agamben’s work unfold from, or align

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with, Blanchot’s? As the title of Blanchot’s chapter, “Man at Point Zero,” indicates, this textual node is a sort of fundamental estimation of the import these two writers attach to their own work, and to the work of literature itself, condensing their stakes and aims into simple statements of purpose. A few pages beyond the previous passage, in the chapter titled “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing,” Blanchot articulates this basic theme in terms of the “philosophical” element that persists in everything the individual could possibly encounter, the ways that things, people, and texts harbor potentials that can only be actualized via a radical subjective shift or erasure. In this passage we see how what Blanchot calls “literature” begins to coincide with what he calls “philosophy,” in a common operation performed on language, which rises from a “desire for communication without reticence.” We will return to the precise nature of this communication, which also emerges from Georges Bataille’s ecstatic response to his own chance existence, his “inner experience,” a notion that Blanchot explicitly draws on in The Unavowable Community and that is in the background of much of Agamben’s writing as well. For now, though, we can turn to the passages at issue to begin to indicate a powerful resonance between Blanchot and Agamben, the sense of community that emerges from their writings, one not subject to the work of sublation and formation, but instead to the risky game of disappearance and resistance, loss and transgression that a certain unavowable social bond carries in its incessanct movement toward what is other, toward an upheaval that implies an entirely different way of being: This transformation will not only be of an institutional or social order; rather, what is required in the change is the totality of existence. A profound conversion, in its depth, and such that philosophy alone—and not religion with its dogmas and its churches, nor the State with its plans and categories—can shed light on it and prepare it. An entirely individual conversion. The existence that must be reached by the upheaval can only be my existence. I must change my life. Without this transformation, I will not become a man able to respond to the radical possibility that I bear. I must become the person on whom one can rely, tied to the future by a loyalty without reserve, just as I am tied to men by a desire for communication without reticence. With this change, with the seriousness with which I will engage myself, in it alone and absolutely, I will also awaken others to the same exigency, because “if the transformation is not carried out by innumerable individuals, it will not be possible to save humanity.”28

Compare this with the closing passage of Agamben’s essay on the apparatus: [I]nstead of redeeming our world, this [governmental] machine (true to the original eschatological vocation of Providence) is leading us to catastrophe. The problem of the profanation of apparatuses—that is to say, the restitution to common use of what has been captured and separated in them—is, for this reason, all the more urgent. But this problem cannot be properly raised as long as those who are concerned with it are unable to intervene in their own processes of

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subjectification, any more than in their own apparatuses, in order to then bring to light the Ungovernable, which is the beginning and, at the same time, the vanishing point of every politics.29

In the second chapter, I develop the idea of “the disappearance of literature” as the way of identifying this vanishing point in Blanchot and Agamben, of bringing to light the Ungovernable subjectivity that emerges/departs from their works. As Blanchot writes, “Literature is perhaps essentially a power of contestation: contestation of the established power, contestation of what is (and of the fact of being), contestation of language and of the forms of literary language, finally contestation of itself as power . . . it is the unlimited itself . . .”30 Here we can begin to see how the disappearance of literature harbors a triple-pronged negativity, directed against language, literature, and subjectivity. *** What is the full sense of this triple meaning? Why, for instance, did Robert Walser dismiss his friend Seelig’s suggestion that the novelist’s work would last as long as Gottfried Keller’s with the sober reminder that “he, Robert Walser, was a walking nobody and he wished to be forgotten”?31 And why does Blanchot prod his fellow writers, in a question that will serve as the epigraph for Vila-Matas’s other novel about the future of literature, Montano’s Malady: “what will we do to disappear?”32 The disappearance at issue here is not a permanent vanishing where artistic language is forever nullified. Rather, what Blanchot and Agamben reject most generally is a particular understanding of literature, its claim to verisimilitude, and therefore also a particular understanding of language, its signifying function, and then a certain subjectivity as well, or rather subjectivity itself, its persistence in the ego and the individual, in any identity. This means that literature will have to pass through what Vila-Matas describes as a “terrible zone, a zone of shadows which is also where the most radical of denials has its home and where the blast of coldness, in short, is a blast of destruction.”33 This is the zone of literary inactivity, deactivation, or decreation, in which the communicative and informative functions of language are deactivated in order to open it up to a new potential use. “Whoever affirms literature in this zone affirms nothing,” says Vila-Matas. “Whoever looks for it is only looking for what escapes, whoever finds it only finds what is here or, possibly, what is beyond literature. That is why, in the end, every book pursues non-literature as the essence of what it wants and passionately desires to discover.”34 Literature does not claim an essence “because the essence of any text consists precisely in evading any essential classification, any assertion that establishes or claims it.”35 As Blanchot writes, the essence of literature is never here anymore, it is always to be found or invented anew.36 When the effects of literature intensify to a certain point, these writers tell us, the subject, the reader, or writer, crosses a threshold whereby the particular unfolding announced by literature’s disappearance, its essence, can assume the form of a life. This is the gambit of Macedonio Fernández, Borges’s forgotten mentor, who dreamed of

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the “novel that went out into the streets,” where a different use of language in everyday life installs its own “pure” space of radical autonomy alongside ordinary language, in an extreme refusal of engagement with it, just as what Blanchot calls the “pure novel” leaves everything behind in order to search for its own reality and its own laws, which are not those of the familiar world that surrounds us.37 In his essay “The Pure Novel,” Blanchot beautifully expresses the intimate relationship between two possible experiences of purity or absolute refusal: one can be found in the novel, and the other in the use of the literary word, the asignifying word or the questioning word, in the realm of everyday life. The first, he says, carries over into the second or, rather, is harmonized with it: Since the rule of verisimilitude has no value, the novel is free to transform reality; not just color it differently but change its structure, overturn its laws and extinguish the light of understanding. It secretes its own world. It is master of its own appearances. It arranges its figures and incidents into a new ensemble, around a unity of its own choosing and with no need to justify its frame of reference. This freedom can seem absolute, but it is none the less bound by a fundamental necessity to harmonize, without trompe-l’oeil effects, the inside and the outside of the novel’s creation.38

To harmonize the novel’s inside with its outside is to turn it into a procedure, an experience one undergoes in order to bring about a transformation. It is to extend the “literariness” of the novel, the way its language manifests the unfolding of a new space, into the efforts of everyday resistance and creation, so that the novel’s subversive element does not remain hermetically sealed within its pages but seeps into struggles by forming zones of interference and refusal. As translator Jeff Fort claims in his excellent introduction to Aminadab, Blanchot’s early novel, “the task of literature is to maintain this passionate movement toward an intimate strangeness opened by language at the heart of the ordinary and familiar and to speak the language that would keep it open.”39 Agamben articulates this opening in explicitly political terms, or rather in terms of the becoming-indistinct of politics, philosophy, and art: Art is not an aesthetic human activity that can also, in certain circumstances, acquire a political significance. Art is inherently political because it is an activity that renders inactive and contemplates the senses and habitual gestures of human beings and opens them up to a new potential use. This is why art resembles politics and philosophy almost to the point of becoming one with them. What poetry does for the power to speak and art does for the senses, politics and philosophy must do for the biological, economic, and social activities—they show what the human body can do and open it up to a new potential use.40

In Agamben’s work, the sense of negativity harbored by Blanchot’s formulation of literature’s disappearance extends its scope, as the rejection of representational language and literary realism is linked to a new mobilization of speech and sense

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toward the deactivation of activities in every sphere of human affairs. Innovative action, in general, in other words, draws upon the same essential resource as literature. In this way, Agamben’s philological rigor, his ability to use a diffuse and proliferating range of objects, can be read as a sustained commitment to pursue the revolutionary “philosophy” glimpsed in Blanchot’s project, the element within all things that refers them to a new hermeneutic sphere, toward innovation. In the second chapter, I elaborate this idea by showing that Blanchot and Agamben develop the ontological notion of disappearance along the triple axis of language, literature, and subjectivity. *** The third chapter, however, will show that reading Blanchot and Agamben together allows us to approach a neglected aspect of their works that is paradigmatic of literature’s disappearance: the idea of study. The first articulation of this concept can be found in a footnote to The Unavowable Community. This note refers to a section near the end of Blanchot’s text where, in a gesture of radical effacement, he replaces the dominant, reactionary sense of law as the ossification of being in the status quo with a new law that, rather than guaranteeing the continual fall of the potentiality of obedient citizens into a predictable actuality (the bios of zöe in the biopolitical language popularized by Agamben), instead supports the subject’s freedom, its ability to maintain its potentiality to do or not do anything, its pure labor-power. In this passage, Blanchot goes so far as to equate the name of this new law with his notion of the unavowable community itself, the “community of those who have no community,” which he sometimes refers to as “the alliance.” Here, in the final sustained thought that appears in the text, we can glimpse the signature of Blanchot’s writing, which consists in linking this new law to the mode of being of the scholar, of study: the Law (the alliance) given to mankind to free it from idolatry risks falling into the hands of an idolatrous cult if it is addored in and for itself, without submitting itself to the unending study, to the masterful teaching its practice demands. A teaching which in turn does not dispense—no matter how indispensable it is—with renouncing its primacy when the urgency of bringing help to someone upsets all study and imposes itself as application of the Law which always precedes the Law.41

Here Blanchot articulates study as a rhythm that oscillates between being astonished or absorbed in the work, event, or object (the Law of “inner experience”), on one pole, and a drive to follow the direction of the work toward the new hermeneutic spheres and political exigencies it opens up, on the other: loss and discovery, bewilderment and lucidity, patient and agent, disappearance and appearance, theory and “help.” The help is carried out by the being in the climax of individuation, having nearly exhausted the unindividuated substratum from which it emerged. Because the oscillating subjectivity that we will explore is always a hybrid tension of the polar opposition, this process of individuation is never completely concluded in a fully realized singularity. Just as the

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being can never fully assume the preindividual aspect without it becoming menacing and overwhelming, so can it never become absolutely singular without risking isolation from the very collective sources—perception, language, and productive forces—that help it most refine its singularity. The student is the one who knows how to navigate this sea of potential in the space between the singular and the general, she is the one who knows the score of intensities required to replenish this or that faculty, to enlist it in help.42 Blanchot’s “unending study” that can nonetheless transform itself in order to make itself uniquely available for struggle or help resonates with at least three other formulations of study’s communal efficacy. The first is Walter Benjamin’s articulation of an “educative violence” that he likens to a “divine” violence capable of fomenting revolution.43 The concept of study is essential to the political and literary categories that pervade Benjamin’s thought. For instance, the writing on the flâneur is deeply rooted in a concept of study—“The flâneur, as is well known, makes ‘studies’ “—potent enough to reemerge in the dérive of the situationists.44 The second reference is Hannah Arendt’s cryptic claim near the end of her book On Violence that “the really new and potential revolutionary class in society will consist of intellectuals.”45 For Arendt, the “potential power” harbored by this class, “as yet unrealized, is very great, perhaps too great for the good of mankind.”46 The third passage that comes to mind here is from Agamben’s fragment “Idea of Study,” in his book Idea of Prose. Here Agamben argues that the special resistance of study does not merely consist in negativity, in fending off the imposition of certain actualities. It also harbors a unique sustenance: “At this point,” Agamben says, after it comes to terms with a possibly interminable solitude “study shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns to its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the soul.”47 These formulations carry the sense of study that emerges from our analysis, and we will return to them in the third chapter, where we will also examine Agamben’s essay on K., Kafka’s land surveyor, a strange figure of the student. This chapter marks a shift from theoretical analysis to literary encounters because it closes with a reading of César Aira’s short novel How I Became a Nun. This is the first of four readings of literature—two novels from Aira, one by Vila-Matas, and an unclassifiable hybrid work by Anne Carson—in the second half of the book. These readings bear the final overarching question of this study, which emerges from the encounters between Blanchot and Agamben in the first three chapters. Wall focuses on one philosophical tendency of The Unavowable Community when conflating it with Agamben’s work, but this book’s abiding legacy is, increasingly, a literary one, especially if we consider the ways that contemporary writers respond to the challenge that Blanchot issues in its final paragraph. “With what kinds of words?” he asks of the writers of the future, the ones, at least, he wants to read, who know that literature is heading toward its essence, its disappearance.48 This is the same question that guides the second half of this book. Their response, I show, constitutes a new literary trajectory: the writing of the No. The parameters of this form are registered in the final chapters by way of three inflections of the concept of study: autodidacticism, mysticism, and irony, via Aira’s How I Became a Nun, Anne Carson’s Decreation, and Vila-Matas’s

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Never Any End to Paris. This trajectory is marked by a move to extend the sense of potentiality carried by Blanchot’s formulation of literature’s disappearance through a figure that we have begun to see is dear to both Blanchot and Agamben, that of the student. The narrators of Bartleby and Co. and Never Any End to Paris tell their study by means of a series of fragmentary essays, while the child-narrator of How I Became a Nun adopts autodidacticism as a method of deactivating and overcoming the limits of institutionalized learning. We find a concise scholarly essay on three female mystics at the center of Carson’s book, which is imbued with forms and themes of study as well as a unique, poetic formulation of the ontology of disappearance. Agamben’s critique of Blanchot that I examine in the first chapter is also best understood in relation to the concept of study. In the footnote at issue, Blanchot offers study as an antidote to the exact temptation—subjective ossification in the impersonal or the sacred—that, Agamben indicates, he actually succumbs to in rare moments. The “warning” that Agamben extends to readers of Blanchot is repeated in various ways by Aira, Carson, and VilaMatas. Carson, for example, says this about Simone Weil, one of the writers Agamben explicitly mentions in the passage we examined earlier: “it is hard to commend moral extremism of the kind that took [her] to death at the age of thirty-four.”49 Carson’s reading in some ways affirms precisely this “moral extremism” or “saintliness,” while moving beyond it in other ways, a tension that illuminates the importance of this book’s initial pairing of Blanchot and Agamben as a hermeneutic tool. The ongoing scholarly attempt to understand the literary concept in their works should at least register this pairing, as should any writing that aims to approach the paths still open to literature, which, I argue, proceed in one particular direction—the writing of the No—as though marked by the similarity and difference between Blanchot and Agamben. To read this marking or signature, however, it is important to remember that behind Blanchot and Agamben, usually in the background of their texts, perhaps because of the unavowable nature of the “community of lovers” as well as of psychoanalytic jouissance, lurk the figures of Bataille and Lacan. While a full consideration of these relationships is beyond the scope of this book, it is important to acknowledge at the onset, that, like the works of Blanchot and Agamben, or those of anyone who would take seriously the challenge posed by literature after World War II and what Agamben calls the “unending death of the camps,” this book is devoted to the unsayable “inner experience” that Bataille nonetheless tries to make available to his readers, to the sort of mysticism that is not an escape from history and politics, but rather an experience that shatters these categories, that enables beings to perceive the absolute contingency of every single lifeform, opening them to to the ecstatic anguish that carries the sense of communication and community that pervades Bataille’s texts. As Amy Hollywood shows in her excellent book Sensible Ecstasy, “Bataille’s work raises the question of how mysticism can be the site of both the desire to be everything, to escape the particularity, limitations, and constraints of the body, and of the recognition that one is not everything, of embodied subjectivity in all of its pleasurable and painful affects.”50 For Bataille, the most intense subjective oscillations between these two profound truths give way to modalities beyond both poles, forms of mysticism that he, like Lacan, associates with women such as Angela

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of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila. The emphasis on corporeality and the emotions found in these mystics can be understood, Hollywood argues, in terms of modern scholarly distinctions between affective or erotic forms of mysticism, usually associated with women, and more speculative or intellectual forms of mysticism associated with men. Unlike most secular scholarship, however, which until recently has marginalized affective and bodily forms of mysticism in favor of the speculative, Hollywood follows a countertradition in French poststructuralism that views mysticism as an affective encounter that helps to sustain loss and support immanent experience by cleaving the space of an intense communication or communion, a form of community that bridges the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, body and soul. Lacan articulates these themes in a singular passage from a 1972 seminar: Me, I don’t use the word mystic as Peguy used it. Mysticism is not all [pas tout] that which is not politics. It is something serious, about which certain people teach us, and most often women, or gifted people like Saint John of the Cross—because one is not forced when one is male, to place oneself on the side of the [phallic function]. One can also place oneself on the side of the not all [pas tout]. There are men who are as good as women. It happens. And who at the same time feel good about it. Despite, I don’t say their phallus, despite that which encumbers them under that title, they catch a glimpse, they sense the idea that there must be a jouissance that goes beyond. That’s who one calls “mystics.”51

Bataille, Lacan’s friend, also understands this interplay between loss and desire and the ritualistic practices that can shatter the limits that normally obscure or suppress our experience of both. Just as he dramatizes a theory of practice that, if carried out, might elicit inner experience, and just as Lacan argues that psychoanalysis, as he understands it, is a method of engendering mystical jouissance, so do Blanchot and Agamben outline a habit of study that potentially gives rise to a form of ecstasy, a sort of nourishing “scholarly mysticism.”52 The call for community that results from these vicissitudes of experience, from abject meditation and psychoanalytic mysticism, as well as from a surrender of oneself to an interminable study, is, Andrew Mitchell and Jason Winfree claim, “not a struggle against this or that oppressive social system, then, but paradoxically, a call for the destruction of community in any recognizable sense. Community is as much—indeed, more—a heterological operation as it is an end or a goal. It is anarchic rather than utopian.”53 This book, then, aims to extend this sense of community in its own way by linking Blanchot and Agamben to a group of contemporary writers, perhaps those whom Agamben refers to in a 1998 interview on the subject of Blanchot and literature. Taking up a common criticism of Blanchot (that is also often directed toward Agamben himself) that his valorization of the concept and terminology of “death” in his reflections on both literature and politics is in poor taste, if not obscene, after Auschwitz (“from the space of undending death Blanchot found the space of

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literature”), Agamben defers the question to those in future generations who will be drawn to the question “how is literature possible?”54 Similarly, in an essay on Bataille and Blanchot, “The Confronted Community,” written to introduce the second edition of his important book The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy clearly articulates the purpose of his own writing as it pertains to the “unavowable” secret of inner experience: “I am writing not in order to resolve anything, but to draw the attention of future readers.”55 Perhaps most exemplary are Jacques Derrida’s comments, delivered with a knowing grin at the end in a documentary on Blanchot: The work of Blanchot—everybody knows it, his friends, his admirers, but also his opponents of all kinds—is one of the great works, one of the great events of this century, and beyond this century, and which walks along more or less subterraneously, in any case discreetly, gaining in intensity of presence, and the degree to which this intensity or density imposes itself, gives rise to a kind of apprehension, of fright also, of ressentiment. And therefore I think it’s time that this is suspended . . . or ceases. For that, I think it’s time that the almost clandestine character of Blanchot’s work and of his ‘initiates’ changes. In any case, in this hope I take the risk of failure of which I have spoken.56

I, too, hope to take the risk inherent in telling the ecstatic aspect of the work of Blanchot, Agamben, and the writers of the No. There are three connected sets of “critical levels” that I wish this book to pass through in my attempt to render the disappearance or mysticism at issue. Of these levels, which form the core of Agamben’s own methodological principle, the first two sets belong together, and the third reformulates the first two in explicit terms of a theory of signification. The first set consists of the three levels of criticism that Agamben describes as three concentric spheres in his essay “Kommerell, or On Gesture”: philologicohermenuetic, physiognomic, and gestic. The first sphere interprets the work, while the second situates it, Agamben says, in both historical and natural orders, and the third “resolves the work’s intention into a gesture (or into a constellation of gestures).”57 For Agamben, every “authentic” critic “moves through all three fields, pausing in each of them according to his own temperament.”58 Given the dearth of criticism from the perspective of the third level in any academic discipline, and my own temperament (if we are to trust Agamben’s theory), this work is largely inscribed in the gestic field, the “unnamable science” of Aby Warburg, an approach that tends to the aspect of language that is “not exhausted in communication and that captures language, so to speak, in its solitary moments.”59 Gesture is that which expresses the mystery of being-in-language itself, of always being at a loss in language, the aspect of language that is cut from the branches of discourse and removed from the being that speaks or writes it, to the extent that he or she must improvise to make up for the impossibility of speaking accurately, still resting, as it were, in the place of this language, its takingplace, which dissolves the gesturing subject, the writer, and leaves words that may do the same eventually for an unsuspecting reader.

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The second set of levels implicated in this book, then, pertains to gestures themselves, and can be found in Kommerell’s essay on Kleist, which Agamben mentions in his own essay. For Agamben, this state of speechlessness in language appears on three levels: the enigma (Rätsel), in which the more the speaker tries to express himself in words, the more he makes himself incomprehensible (as happens to the characters of Kleist’s drama); the secret (Geheimnis), which remains unsaid in the enigma and is nothing other than the Being of human beings insofar as they live in the truth of language; and the mystery (Mysterium), which is the mimed performance of the secret.60

For Kommerell, these layers of gestural expression point beyond the romantic gesture exemplified by Goethe’s work, which, as Agamben notes, shelters or restrains the enigma of his characters in a symbol. They ultimately indicate a sphere of “pure gesture” in Kommerell’s book on Jean Paul, in which he offers this definition: “Beyond the gestures of the soul and the gestures of nature there is a third sphere, which one may call pure gestures. Its temporality is the eternity of Jean Paul’s dreams. These dreams, dreamt in a superhuman sleep of the brightest wakefulness, are fragments of an other world in the soul of Jean Paul.”61 In terms of criticism, to be aware of such “fragments of an other world” is to sense the most unresolved elements in texts, not in order to then clarify the unresolved element, but to extend it as a beacon of pure transmissibility, to repeat it with a difference for a time that will see it as its own and, activated in such a way, find a path to its own disappearance, its own “citability.” I propose, then, to outline a specific gestural literary tendency currently unfolding in the works of the writers of the No, the group of writers—novelists, poets, philosophers, critics—that respond to Blanchot’s intuition regarding the figure of literature heading toward its disappearance, often in terms of study. The third set of levels that inform this text offers the best way into the themes of study, mysticism, and language at issue for these writers. Agamben identifies this final set in a mystical reading of Plato’s largely unwritten doctrine of “the thing itself.” While this excurses on the thing itself establishes the ecstatic core of Platonic mysticism, it also obstinately insists on how this mysticism is, “like all authentic mysticism, profoundly implicated in the logoi,” not in a so-called supernatural experience.62 In his Seventh Letter, Plato offers a theory of signification that contains five elements: name, defining discourse, image (the sensible object), the knowledge derived through the first four, and the fifth, the thing itself, which cannot be said or known as such. Philological labor leads Agamben to further define the fifth element in Plato’s original as “that by which each being is knowable and truly is.”63 This theory, then, guards against representation or presupposition; it is “concerned with the risk that knowability itself—the Idea—would be, in turn, presupposed and substantialized as another thing, as a duplicate of the thing before or beyond the thing.”64 The thing itself, then, is what is not supposed by the name and the word. Instead, it can only be apprehended and rendered “in the very medium of its knowability, in the pure light of its self-manifestation and announcement to consciousness.”65 The problem at issue here is “necessarily the problem of every

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human discourse that wants to make a subject out of what is not a subject: how is it possible to speak without sup-posing, without hypo-thesizing and subjectifying that about which one speaks?”66 In other words, Agamben’s analysis leads us to understand that, as the White Knight claims in Lewis Carrol’s novel: “The name of the name is not the name.” What searches beyond the name, when this “what” is spoken or written of, cannot take the shape of another name. It occupies a level of signification beyond the order of known names: the realm of the thing itself. Thus, the name of the name is the ecstatic experience of the being that thinks itself beyond all boundaries and disappears, leaving strange words that came to light in the same moment, “knowing representations,” a language that “says presuppositions as presuppositions and, in this way, reaches the unpresupposable and unpresupposed principle that, as such, constitutes authentic human community and communication.”67 For Agamben, we can, in other words, think of such a nonlinguistic thing as the thing itself only in language, through a language without relation to things: “It is a chimera in the Spinozian sense of the term, that is, a purely verbal being.”68 It is hard to understand what such a being could do, one that constantly risks such an absolute exposure to the vicissitudes of communication, that becomes a new sort of walking, talking mystic. This book aims to inscribe this question as a path to be followed in the literary milieu of our times. The first chapter will show how it emerges from a dispute as well as a certain solidarity between Blanchot and Agamben, while the second chapter will be a detailed examination of its ontological underpinnings. The third chapter will relate this ontology to an idea of study, and the fourth will relate it to literature. Chapters five through seven are explicit attempts to crystallize or reduce the literary tendency at issue, “the disappearance of literature” to the sphere of pure gesture, beyond psychology, interpretation, literary history, or a theory of genres, in order to think the “thing” of literature’s disappearance, to let it show itself beyond its “formal garment and conceptual meaning,” in the light of its pure transmissibility or, more precisely, to show how it opens onto the experience of transmissibility itself: an image to be altered, a word to be effaced.69 The divisions of this book, its fragmented structure, are presented in this way precisely in order to experiment with a certain fragmentary, “paradigmatic” methodology utilized by each of the writers I engage. This approach gains me the chance to develop a prose criticism that “moves alongside” the works I engage, in the sense of para- that Agamben evokes whenever he discusses methodology. For him, as for me in this book, the method of the paradigm “implies the total abandonment of the particular-general couple as the model of logical inference.”70 The rule that I establish when I begin to articulate the concept of ‘the disappearance of literature’ and then proceed to show how the concept continues to emerge from the details of several specific works of literature is not a generality preexisting the unique examples and applicable to them. It also does not emerge from a comprehensive tally of all individual cases that could fall under this category. Instead, it is only the showing of the exemplary constellation that constitutes a rule, “which as such cannot be applied or stated.”71 More than this, however, the fragmentary form of the book is rooted in a deeper philological method that stands beneath the articulation of paradigms, which

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Agamben, among others, borrows from the art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg often repeated “the dear God dwells in the details” in order to emphasize the need for attentiveness to even the most minute details of a work, an idea, or an expression in the search for the most fundamental truths. This dictum is evident in the work of Walter Benjamin, one of Warburg’s admirers who wrote that to approach the “truthcontent” of a work required “the most precise immersion into the individual details of a given subject.” Benjamin followed a logic of citation that dreamed of a work that would be merely a collection of such efficacious, and sometimes obscure, details culled from the texts of an interminable study. My aim, too, is for the ideas and expressions found in the citations that I gather in this book to stand absolutely alone and resonate in the immediate constellation of their co-appearance. However, insofar as I fall short of my aim, I must offer explanations and “de-fragment” the original, raw collection of passages. I think this is the productive failure of any scholarship that moves toward Benjamin’s dream. Perhaps this book is, in the end, best read as a certain sort of studymanual. Several important sections, including the entire first chapter, were discussed in a nascent form in classes I taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and revised substantially based on ideas from students in these classes who embarked on their own readings of The Open.

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Blanchot and Agamben on Désoeuvrement

At the onset of The Open, Agamben partially revises an earlier criticism of Bataille to show how his Acephale community glimpsed a privileged mode of being in its flirtations with death on the outskirts of Paris, while war was in full swing throughout Europe. However, for Agamben, this group, as shown in its plan to subject one of its members to death, was ultimately only able to bring to light the problematic nature of sovereignty, the ways it consigns its subjects to the possibilities of death or any conceivable treatment. To go beyond the politics of sovereignty, and more fully develop the implications of the modality perhaps only briefly registered by Bataille’s group of friends, Agamben latches onto an element of Heidegger’s ontology that can also easily be traced in the ontology Blanchot deploys in The Unavowable Community. This element is the mode of existence that gives rise to the collective movement of thought in the forward dawning or unfolding of the world. In Agamben’s engagement with Heidegger’s conception of “the open,” we can see a variation of Blanchot’s notion of anguished, mystical collectivity that he develops in the name of “the unavowable community.” But, just as Agamben’s use of Heidegger’s concept is accompanied by a critique of the aspect of the German philosopher’s thought that is still complicit with metaphysics and sovereignty, he also seeks to distance himself from the same part of Blanchot’s thought. The structure of this book mimics the structure and narrative progression of The Unavowable Community. Both works take up Bataille at the onset, which leads the authors through a pursuit of similar ontological themes and the same type of confrontation with the law, which both seek to overcome via a concept of désoeuvrement. This term has proved to be difficult for translators but could very roughly be rendered as “unworking” or, possibly, in the term that Anne Carson deploys to refer to Simone Weil’s use of a similar concept, “decreation.” Agamben, for his part, leaves the term in its original French. His use of it allows him to posit a mode of being “outside of being,” just as it allows Blanchot to claim that the “community of those who have no community” leads one outside of ontology. *** Both writers ultimately inflect the concept of désoeuvrement toward a consideration of the political, ontological, and literary implications of sexual fulfillment. This is where a key difference emerges that gives rise to Agamben’s critique of Blanchot, muted and delicate though it is, to the extent that Blanchot is never explicitly mentioned. This difference lies in a disagreement over the barrier that separates the sacred from the

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profane. Certain mystical tendencies in Blanchot’s work (not all), as well as the possible influence of Bataille, lead him to conserve an idea of the sacred, which must surely seem in bad taste to Agamben, for whom no concept is more dear than that of ‘profanation,’ of returning all the objects, texts, gestures, etc., that have become part of the capitalist spectacle back to the sphere of common use, as well as eliminating all the ways in which human bodies are consecrated at the altar of sovereignty so that human life may be separated from animal life in every citizen-subject, the better to violently seize the latter in case it cannot be assimilated into the juridical–political order. To maintain the realm of the sacred in any form is, for Agamben, to be unwittingly aligned with the politics of totalitarianism and death camps. While Blanchot otherwise directs a prolific amount of writing toward breaking down the barriers that separate the high from the low, the sacred from the profane—which may be why Agamben’s critique remains muted—the sacred nonetheless seeps through in The Unavowable Community, where it is transcribed onto the female body via his notion of the “absolutely feminine.” Valorizing the relationship between two lovers found in Duras’ The Malady of Death, Blanchot writes: “It is a surprising relationship which revokes everything one may have said about it, and which shows the indefinable power of the feminine over what wants to, or believes it can, stay foreign to it.”1 The woman, in this relational scheme, assumes the place Blanchot normally assigns to the image. Her beckoning is what provokes the encounter that jars the man loose from his subjective moorings in an ecstatic experience and opens the space of his empty subjectivity for the collective, the unavowable community.2 However, the final stamp of the encounter written by Duras is, in Blanchot’s reading, tinged with the appearance of the sacred at the peak of sexual experience. Through his possibly covert reading of The Unavowable Community, Agamben distances himself from this aspect of Blanchot’s text. He does so by relating Benjamin’s discussion of sexual fulfillment to Titian’s depiction of the postcoital scene in Nymph and Shepherd (1513–14). The image of love and sexuality found there rejects the traditional notions of the couple and of legalism in these spheres, notions that Blanchot, however, cannot escape when, following Duras, he inscribes a “contractual agreement (marriage, money)” into this relationship that beckons the unavowable community.3 *** As in Bataille’s Acephale group, community in the passage at issue from Blanchot here is founded on sacrifice, on a woman’s availability for any treatment, even death: “You know you can dispose of her in whatever way you wish, even the most dangerous.”4 While “sacrifice” is one of many terms that takes on multiple strategic meanings in Bataille’s texts, here, in Blanchot’s iteration, it harbors something of what would later appear under the term “naked life” in Agamben’s work, in the sense that it alludes to a momentary excess of lack (a “halo” for Agamben) that escapes any predication and does not desire an end to its insufficiency, its lack, its constant disappearance. Rather, the being that recognizes its own insufficiency, its “common” existence or withdrawal into the preindividual dimension of itself, strives to deepen this condition by seeking its own contention via exposure to some other that “puts it into play,” in the words of

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Blanchot and Agamben on Désoeuvrement

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Blanchot, that calls it into question insofar as it is a substantial, egoistic, individual. In The Unavowable Community, we therefore find this admonition against self-criticism, in order to remember the communal impulse: If human existence is an existence that puts itself radically and constantly into question, it cannot of itself alone have that possibility which always goes beyond it, for then the question would always be lacking a question (self-criticism being clearly only the refusal of criticism by the other, a way to be self-sufficient while reserving for oneself the right to insufficiency, a self-abasement that is a self-heightening).5

Blanchot continues his reading of Bataille in the first half of this book by articulating sacrifice in terms of this movement of contestation in language, bound up with the other, in which the subject is somewhat violently removed from itself. He cites Bataille’s words in Theorie de la Religion: “to sacrifice is not to kill, but to abandon and to give.”6 For Blanchot, this sacrifice, gift, or abandonment is framed in terms of a disappearance that does not block community but becomes its condition; the way community can avoid stasis in its continual contestation and rebirth, its “absolute” movement of unfolding and becoming new, which is also its movement of destruction and negation: ultimately, there is nothing to give or to give up and that time itself is only one of the ways in which this nothing to give offers and withdraws itself like the whim of the absolute which goes out of itself by giving rise to something other than itself, in the shape of an absence. An absence which, in a limited way, applies to the community whose only clearly ungraspable secret it would be. The absence of community is not the failure of community: absence belongs to community as its extreme moment or as the ordeal that exposes it to its necessary disappearance.7

The moment of ecstasy sought by Blanchot and Bataille, the “ordeal” that induces disappearance, is an abject immersion in the impersonal. However, under the regime of legal sovereignty, in the death camps as in the everyday life of the citizen in the state of exception, naked life (or “sacrificed life” in Bataille’s fraught terminology) subsists in too close a proximity to actual death. We can be killed if our naked manifestation triggers the whim of sovereignty or its pervasive extension in the sovereign police force. Thus, any articulation of naked life that emphasizes its phase of absolute abjection without attending to how it can break loose from it risks complicity with the sacrifice of such life at the altar of the state, rather than nourishing the ecstatic sacrifice of the self that could be the catalyst of an oscillation that founds community and ethics. However aligned these writers may explicitly be on the importance of this oscillation, elements of Bataille’s wartime writings and Blanchot’s inscription of them in The Unavowable Community, in Agamben’s view, threaten oscillation in its nascent moments by founding it on what can easily be menacing and overwhelming: the death of someone else. Aiming to base the form of contested community on what calls us into question most radically, Blanchot and Bataille both posit another’s death as this source— not my own consciousness of anticipating death, but my actual being-with another as

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she dies. As Blanchot writes, “To remain present in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself another’s death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community.”8 This a paraphrase of Bataille’s words, from Le Pas Au-dela: “A man alive, who sees a fellow-man die, can survive only beside himself.”9 Most writing that that takes Bataille’s Inner Experience as its point of departure, including Bataille’s own later texts themselves, seems to want to replace this central role assigned to one’s witnessing another’s death with another experience: namely that of reading, writing, and speaking. The structure of language itself mimics the ontological structure of witnessing another’s death; it bears the same type of juissance that carries the subject and the community beyond themselves. Thus, the underlying strategy of Agamben’s work on community, as well as that of much of what we find in Blanchot and Bataille, consists in transferring the abject anguish and strange ecstasy involved in witnessing another’s death onto the literary concept or the work of literature itself, in intensifying the process of disappearance already at work in a certain strain of writing. To keep the idea of community necessarily tied to the experience of one’s death, or at least to one’s contractual openness to it, is to risk isolating the subject in this impersonal realm of displacement wrought by another’s death, the experience of which harbors the capacity to paralyze and incapacitate the individual as much as to inspire community. Thus, Blanchot’s image of the prone woman subject to death, as though part of a certain “eucharistic sacrifice,” may still resemble too closely the experience of actual death posited by Bataille at the heart of community. Because of this, it has the capacity to halt the oscillation needed for the mode of community sought by these writers. For Agamben, an important category of naked life that pushes our understanding of the term further than the absolute abjection we sometimes find in Blanchot’s Unavowable Community and Bataille’s wartime writings can be found in the legal terminology of homo sacer. Though many of Agamben’s critics, including Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri, see this figure as too invested in a notion of death and abjection to be substantially different from that found in the Acephale experiment, another reading is possible. Homo sacer, this being that can be killed but not technically sacrificed or murdered by the state, because it stands outside the predication of the bios of the law, does begin to harbor something of a political and ethical subjectivity precisely because of this. However, Agamben’s development of this term in his voluminous Homo Sacer series often includes a reminder of what may be sometimes missing in Bataille and Blanchot: that it can in no way maximize this type of freedom by always remaining absolutely passive, always keeping its zöe in abeyance, which Blanchot indicates is a trait of the “absolutely feminine.” For Agamben, recognizing the ways that human life is split between zöe and bios is beneficial not just as a mapping operation, but also because it functions as a paradigm for the two poles of subjectivity, genius and ego, the impersonal and the individual. However, for Agamben, the subjective relationship between the two poles is one of absolutely incessant oscillation: “Man is thus a single being with two phases; he is a being that results from the complex dialectic between a part that has yet to be individuated and lived and another part that is marked by

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Blanchot and Agamben on Désoeuvrement

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fate and individual experience.”10 In the next chapter we will examine a warning that Agamben extends to those who would dwell too long in the impersonal element, thus halting the oscillation that characterizes immanent experience in this scheme, those who would let themselves be shaken and traversed by Genius to the point of falling apart. And yet the image we see accentuated at the end of Blanchot’s book, of the sacred body of the woman, is an eternally fixed image of the vulnerability of zöe, without the infusion of an oscillation that could move it toward politics and ethics.11 For Agamben, this is the danger of the sacred: its isolation in the population of the nation, in individual beings that are wholly consigned to it by the law, beyond the law, enables the situation whereby these same beings are subject to any possible treatment. Thus, an ontological schema that posits a belonging to the sacred merely highlights the problem of sovereignty, without moving beyond it. Agamben bluntly directs this critique toward Bataille in Notes on Politics: “To have mistaken such a naked life separate from its form, in its abjection, for a superior principle—sovereignty or the sacred—is the limit of Bataille’s thought, which makes it useless to us.”12 *** With this critique in mind, we can turn to the final sections of The Open, where we find an image in the place in the text, the discussion of sexual fulfillment, which corresponds to the spot in Blanchot’s book where he renders the image of abject, naked life in absolute sexual vulnerability. If we continue to consider the possible textual parallels between The Open and The Unavowable Community, then this is where Agamben comments on the sacred “absolute femininity” that marks a division between him and Blanchot, by juxtaposing it with Titian’s painting, in which he finds an image of sexual fulfillment that has been emptied of every sacred element. In the nineteenth chapter of The Open, Agamben tries to unravel the enigma of the two figures depicted in Titian’s painting, which he describes in this way: The two figures are represented in the foreground, immersed in a dark country landscape; the shepherd, seated facing us, holds a flute in his hands as if he had just taken it from his lips. The nymph, nude and represented from the back, lies stretched next to him on a leopard’s skin, a traditional symbol for wantonness and libido, showing her full and luminous hips. With a studied gesture, she turns her pensive face toward the viewers, and with her left hand lightly touches her other arm in a sort of caress. A little further in the distance, there is a tree that has been struck by lightning, half dry and half green, like the tree in the allegory of Lot, against which an animal—a “bold goat” according to some, but perhaps a fawn— dramatically rears up, as if to nibble at its leaves. Still higher, as is often the case in the late, impressionist Titian, one’s gaze becomes lost in a vivid mass of painting.13

The chapter that contains this description is titled “Désoeuvrement,” and in Agamben’s analysis of the painting he develops the French term, Blanchot’s signature concept that he invokes as the final word of The Unavowable Community, in a way slightly different

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from what we find in Blanchot’s book. Blanchot articulates the concept there as one pole of a subjective oscillation. “Unknown spaces of freedom” are found, he writes, “between what we call work, oeuvre, and what we call unworking, désoeuvrement.”14 Agamben, on the contrary, renders the term as the name of the between-space of oscillation itself. In what follows in this section we can reflect on this difference and how it relates to Agamben’s possible critique of Blanchot’s inscription of the sacred in The Unavowable Community. Only apparently obscure, this distinction is an important matter of emphasis. It allows us to stave off a hagiographic reading of Blanchot by marking a place in the latter’s texts where the impersonal pole of subjective polarity is isolated at the cost of obscuring an incessant oscillation, one that opens onto the jouissance at play in the disappearance of literature. To start it may be helpful to fully examine how Agamben defines the term in question. He begins by interpreting Nymph and Shepherd as Titian’s recantation of his earlier painting The Three Ages of Man, in which sensual pleasure and love are depicted with overtones of death and sin, via the close proximity between two lovers depicted there and a shattered and dry tree—symbol of knowledge and sin—on which an Eros is leaning. As Agamben notes, when taking up the motif of the tree again in the later painting, “Titian has it blooming on one side, thus bringing together in a single trunk the two Edenic trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”15 The depiction of the fawn rising up from the Tree of Life in Nymph and Shepherd is also a revision from the earlier painting, where it is tranquilly stretched on the grass. In these ways, he argues, “the enigma of the sexual relationship between the man and the woman, which was already at the center of the first painting, thus receives a new and more mature formulation.”16 Agamben then articulates this formulation with reference to one of Benjamin’s densest aphorisms, found in the text that concludes Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street) in the Arcades Project and bears the heading “Doctor’s Night-Bell”: Sexual fulfillment delivers the man from his mystery, which does not consist in sexuality but which in its fulfillment, and perhaps in it alone, is severed—not solved. It is comparable to the fetters that bind him to life. The woman cuts them, and the man is free to die because his life has lost its mystery. Thereby he is reborn, and as his beloved frees him from the mother’s spell, the woman literally detaches him from Mother Earth—a midwife who cuts that umbilical cord which the mystery of nature has woven.17

Titian’s painting is an image of this life that has lost its mystery. “To be sure,” Agamben writes, “in their fulfillment the lovers learn something of each other that they should not have known—they have lost their mystery—and yet have not become any less impenetrable. But in this mutual disenchantment from their secret, they enter, just as in Benjamin’s aphorism, a new and more blessed life, one that is neither animal nor human.”18 Agamben sees this image of life that has been separated from both nature and humanity as a “hieroglyph of a new in-humanity,” a paradigm for the coming people who exist in the interval or play between nature and humanity, zöe and bios, genius

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Blanchot and Agamben on Désoeuvrement

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and ego, in constant oscillation.19 This oscillating subject defies the mechanism of the law, the “anthropological machine” that divides the human from the animal in order to produce the human via an isolation and suspension of the animal. This oscillation is, paradoxically, what Benjamin calls “dialectics at a standstill,” where the two terms are never surpassed in a third term that would be their dialectical synthesis; rather, they are allowed to rest in the constellation of their noncoincidence. In Titian’s painting, the animal that rears up the Tree of Life and of Knowledge symbolizes this “new and blessed life,” the mutual disenchantment from their secret, the complete rendering of their being to the outside. In Agamben’s reading of Benjamin and interpretation of Titian, the passage to a “higher stage beyond both nature and knowledge, beyond concealment and disconcealment” is an “initiation” where both lovers open each other to their own lack of mystery as their most intimate secret.20 He turns to the painting one final time, in order to name the subjectivity at stake here with the term so important to Blanchot, désoeuvrement: As is clear from both the posture of the two lovers and the flute taken from their lips, their condition is otium, it is workless. If it is true, as Dundas writes, that in these paintings Titian has created “a realm in which to reflect on the relationship between body and spirit,” in the Vienna painting this relationship is, so to speak, neutralized. In their fulfillment, the lovers who have lost their mystery contemplate a human nature rendered perfectly inoperative—the inactivity and désoeuvrement of the human and of the animal as the supreme and unsavable figure of life.21

Here désoeuvrement is the name of the “between” being, whose consciousness is not defined by knowledge and mastery, by consciousness of something, but rather by consciousness in something. This diffuse, kaleidoscopic, and wandering modality overcomes the opposition between being and beings, just as it overcomes that between knowledge/nonknowledge, consciousness/unconsciousness, human/animal. *** Agamben identifies the “pataphysicist” Alfred Jarry as a genealogical node for this conception of désoeuvrement, and he invokes René Massat’s formulation of “one of the alchemical keys” of Jarry’s work in the final chapter of The Open, where he offers his fullest definition of désoeuvrement. For Massat, the “alchemical key” at issue for Jarry appears to be “the belief, inherited from medieval science, that the man who managed to separate the different natures tightly bound together during his existence would succeed in freeing within himself the profound sense of life.”22 The alchemical transformation that constitutes the modality of désoeuvrement, then, consists in separating the two poles of subjectivity, not in order to isolate one at the expense of the other, in the metaphysical sense of overcoming the animal in order to arrive at the human, but to let them be outside of being, outside the mechanisms of predication and law that would turn them into fuel for the state’s anthropological machine. In this way, the gesture of Jarry’s pataphysics coincides with that of Agamben’s désoeuvrement.

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In Jarry’s nomenclature “Pataphysics” (pataphysique) is a punning term that nonetheless still also carries the sense of its literal meaning as “‘that which is above metaphysics” or “that which is above that which is after physics.” It is the linguistic register of pataphysics that bestows its most useful political meaning, as Pablo Lopez has demonstrated in his book, Pataphors, where he coins the term “pataphor” to further extend the unworking, refusal, and creation at issue in Jarry’s work into the operations of language. As Jarry claimed that pataphysics existed “as far from metaphysics as metaphysics extends from regular reality,” a pataphor is a figure of speech located as far from metaphor as metaphor is from nonfigurative language.23 While metaphysics and metaphors attain one degree of separation from reality, pataphors and pataphysics move beyond by two degrees. This allows an idea to assume its own life, a sort of plasticity freed from the harness of rigid representation. Metaphors, in other words, operate on the level of the same; they juxtapose apparently unrelated material in order to draw out subtle identities. Pataphors unsettle this mechanism; they use the facade of metaphorical similarity as a basis for establishing an entirely new range of references and outlandish articulations: a new world in the midst of the old, the novel taking to the streets. Just as Kafka sought to forge a new form of life on the basis of absolute separation from historical progress, on cultural “intransmissibility,” and just as Blanchot pursued the “pure novel” that exists in a relationship of absolute refusal of the established world, so the pataphysician seeks to initiate a new world on the grounds of a tenuous unreality. The work of Jean Baudrillard also reaches a higher degree of intelligibility in this context, as his definition of the simulacrum as a copy for which there is no original coincides precisely with the definition of pataphysics. The copy becomes truth in its own right, an example of what Baudrillard calls the “hyperreal.” While Plato saw two levels of reproduction—faithful representation and willfully distorted depiction (simulacrum)—Baudrillard posits four: (1) basic representation of reality, (2) distortion of reality, (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model), and (4) simulacrum, which bears no relation to any established reality at all.24 *** Baudrillard uses the concept of God as an example of a simulacrum. In his work, simulacra are conceived negatively, but Gilles Deleuze makes a different claim in his book Difference and Repetition, where simulacra is developed as the avenue by which accepted ideals or “privileged positions” could be “challenged and overturned.”25 (69). Deleuze defines simulacra as “those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance.”26 Though Baudrillard describes himself as a pataphysicist, it is Deleuze’s conception that most closely aligns with Jarry’s work. The pantheistic tendencies in Deleuze allow one to begin to glimpse an idea of God that is not delivered up to the sacred, as it is in rare moments in Blanchot’s work, or to the negative (which amounts to the same thing), as it is in Baudrillard. Jarry offers an exemplary formulation of this immanent notion of God in his book Gestures

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Blanchot and Agamben on Désoeuvrement

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and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll. Here he explains the principles and purposes of pataphysics and ends the book with an estimate of the surface of God, noting that it is often represented by a triangle. Doctor Faustroll’s calculations led him to explain that “God is the shortest path from zero to infinity in both directions” but because God has no extension and is not a line, his conclusion is more precisely articulated in the formula “God is the tangential point of zero and infinity.”27 If zero and infinity can be read as the poles of absolute openness and absolute closedness, then God is what does not coincide with either one but goes beyond both in a tangent or departure, a gesture that Agamben says takes it outside of being, “outside in an exteriority more external than any open, and inside in an intimacy more internal than any closedness.”28 This tangential movement of departure assigned the name of God is an important sense of the disappearance of literature that this study aims to trace. We will return to it at various points by examining how the writers we are concerned with “tell God,” in the words of Anne Carson, whose own work is a sustained inquiry into this type of (a) theology (or, rather, what is beyond both theology and atheology).29 This is the place where the disappearance of literature manifests the collective, the community of those who welcome a certain sort of death, one induced by texts, images, and memories. Pataphysics is a paradigm for this disappearance or death. As Luis Casado writes, this community has its own celebrations. He mentions once seeing a pataphysical calendar that highlighted “Vacuaciones,” days when there is nothing to celebrate, not in the sense that on these days no celebration occurs, but that nothing is precisely what is celebrated.30 This is the same celebration that Elsa Morante refers to in her cryptic notion, “The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure,” the Spinozist moment in her thought, where the philosopher’s conception of the univocity of god and world manifests in a burst, a celebration that must remain hidden in some way because it is still accessed via the form of language; only its shattering capacity remains. The works we examine throughout this study are best read as such celebrations. They are infused with Mallarmé’s principle of the linguistic absolute, which Vila-Matas invokes in an image of the writer in Never Any End to Paris: “Mallarmé not moving from his home in Paris his whole life, never once leaving his desk, conceiving of language as a creative and transformative force born to craft enigmas rather than explain them.”31 *** Equipped with the pataphysical paradigm that Agamben evokes at the end of The Open, we can now better understand how this text constitutes a reading of The Unavowable Community. This aspect of The Open allows us to use it as the first example of the literature that we will trace in the final four chapters, because it articulates an array of concerns or trajectories that are also taken up or extended by Vila-Matas, Carson, and Aira in their attempts to “tell God,” to write the inexpressible moment of disappearance that manifests the collective forward dawning of thought. In the last chapter, Agamben pursues his reading of Blanchot’s book via a reading of Bataille that is both different from Blanchot’s and from his own prior reading of Bataille, which had found his work to be “useless to us.”32 Agamben had already started

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the book by noting that Bataille was so struck by the Gnostic effigies of animal-headed archons that he saw in the Cabinet des Medailles of the Bibliotheque Nationale that in 1930 he dedicated an article to them in his journal Documents. The images that Bataille reproduced included, according to his captions, “ three archons with duck heads,” a “panmorphous Iao,” one “god with the legs of a man, the body of a serpent, and the head of a cock,” and an “acephelous god topped with two animal heads.”33 The last image, in particular, can be read as a portend for future developments of Bataille’s project, as 6 years later the cover of the first issue of the journal Acephale, drawn by André Masson, showed a naked, headless human figure as the insignia of the “sacred conspiracy” that Bataille plotted with a small group of friends. This plot, giving way to eroticism, laughter, and joy in the face of death, in woods on the outskirts of Paris, in full European crisis, included an agreement (never carried out) to sacrifice one member by beheading: “Man has escaped from his head, as the condemned man from prison,” reads the programmatic text in the journal.34 Here, man’s head stands for his humanity, the rational “humanistic” projects to master his animality, and the acephalous being is a possible figure man would assume in the posthistorical, “chiefless,” world when the dialectical process of Hegelian negation, by means of which the animals of the species homo sapiens had become human, reached completion.35 In this case, the lack of a head is a way of responding to the question of what becomes of the human in posthistory by refusing to concede that the being at this final stage reverts back to a serene animality, as Bataille’s teacher Alexandre Kojève maintained. Agamben finds another image in a later issue of Acephale that hints at a different relationship between animal and human life at the end of history by depicting a creature that, we will see, adopts the likeness of both human and animal only in order to set them aside. For Agamben, “the illustrations of issue 3–4 of the journal, in which the same naked figure from the first issue now bears a majestic bull’s head, attest to an aporia which accompanies Bataille’s entire project.”36 This aporia becomes clear here as that of determining the posthistorical alternative to a regained animality, which cannot however be human either, because the human is the result of the negation of the animal. For the small group of 40-year-old initiates that Bataille drew together to play at being “sorcerer’s apprentices,” the headless being joyfully disregarding a coming death was perhaps not the only way to conceive of what remains after the dialectics of history have stopped churning. After all, allegedly on the verge of permanently consigning one of the group to the realm of the sacred, of sacrifice, they abandoned their death pact. Unfortunately, any other possibilities were forestalled by the onset of war in Europe in 1939. In The Open, though, Agamben tries to develop the implications of the image that Bataille perhaps only glimpsed briefly, that of the majestic bull’s head on the naked human body. This quest takes him to the ancient texts of the Gnostic Basilides, from whose circle in Egypt, around the middle of the second century A.D., come the animalheaded effigies reproduced by Bataille in Documents. Basilides designs a soteriological drama, which begins with a nonexistent god issuing into the cosmos a “triple seed or filial line,” the last of which is still entangled “like a miscarriage” in the “great heap” of corporeal matter and must, in the end, make its way back to the divine nonexistence from which it came.37 While these aspects do not distinguish Basilides from the general

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trajectory initiated by the “great Gnostic drama of cosmic mixture and separation,” what Agamben calls his “incomparable originality” is that “he is the first to pose the problem of the state of matter and natural life once all divine or spiritual elements have abandoned it to return to their original place.”38 He does this in an exegesis of the messianic formulation found in the passage in the Letter to the Romans in which Paul depicts a natural world that groans and suffers birth pangs while waiting for redemption. Basilides writes, When the whole filial line thus arrives above and is beyond the boundary of the spirit, then the whole creation will receive compassion. For up to the present it groans and is tormented and waits for the revelation of the sons of God, so that all the men of the filial line may go up from here. When that has happened, God will bring on the whole world the great ignorance [megale agnoia], so that every creature may remain in its natural condition [kata physin] and none desire anything contrary to its nature. Thus, all the souls who find themselves in this expanse, whose nature it is to remain immortal in this place alone, will stay here below, knowing nothing other than or better than this expanse; in the regions below there will be no news and no knowledge of the realities above, so that the souls below may not be tormented by desiring impossible things, like fish striving to graze on the hills with the sheep—for such a desire would be their destruction.39

For Agamben, this idea of natural life that is unsavable and that has been completely abandoned by every spiritual element—and yet, because of the “great ignorance,” is nonetheless perfectly blessed—can be read as a “sort of grand counterimage of man’s regained animality at the end of history, which so bothered Bataille.”40 Here, Agamben writes, “darkness and light, matter and spirit, animal life and logos . . . are separated forever.”41 This separation, however, does not allow both poles to close themselves in a more impenetrable, ineffable, or sacred mystery; rather, it liberates their own truer nature by letting them both be set aside or be rendered inactive in the great ignorance. At this point, Agamben inscribes the alchemical principle of Jarry’s pataphysics in the image of the bull-headed human that originated with Basilides and struck Bataille. He unravels the definition of the Latin verb ignoscere, which Basilides uses to describe the blessed form of ignorance that descends on the beings left after humanity has definitively bid farewell to the logos and to its own history: Etymologists have always been left perplexed when faced with the Latin verb ignoscere, which seems explicable as in-gnosco, yet which does not mean “not to know” {ignorare}, but rather “to forgive.” To articulate a zone of nonknowledge— or better, of a-knowledge {ignoscenza}—means in this sense not simply to let something be, but to leave something outside of being, to render it unsavable.42

Here, Agamben affirms the quest Bataille articulates in a note to Inner Experience: “Can one not free from its religious antecedents the possibility for mystical experience . . . to the point of linking it to the nudity of ignorance.”43 To let the being be outside of being,

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to render it unsavable because there is no substantial or present subject left to save, only one that disappears, is to separate the two aspects of its subjectivity enough to oscillate between them, in the formation of the new pataphysical subject that Jarry claimed could “free within himself the profound sense of life,” a sense that could never be carried by knowledge or explanations. The human body with the majestic bull’s head is a figure of the being that consists in this separation, or, rather, as a smudge between it. As Agamben writes, And if one day, according to a now-classic image, the “face in the sand” that the sciences of man have formed on the shore of our history should finally be erased, what will appear in its place will not be a new mandylion or “Veronica” of a regained humanity or animality. The righteous with animal heads in the miniature in the Ambrosian do not represent a new declension of the man-animal relation so much as a figure of the “great ignorance” which lets both of them be outside of being, saved precisely in their being unsavable. Perhaps there is still a way in which living beings can sit at the messianic banquet of the righteous without taking on a historical task and without setting the anthropological machine into action.44

Here Agamben completes his reading of Bataille by showing how the image he glimpsed opens onto pure immanence, outside of being. This contrasts with Blanchot’s encounter with Bataille in The Unavowable Community, which leads him to the image of the sacred female body, consigned to death much in the same way as were the small group of initiates that briefly glimpsed the acephalic being on the outskirts of Paris. This is the first point of Agamben’s encounter with Blanchot, its element of critique or negativity. The second point has to do with an aspect of The Open that we have not mentioned yet, the affirmative part of this encounter. It consists in the mode of telling that Agamben adopts in his text, which is that of a student completing the work initiated by the teacher. This mode can be read as an extension of the concept of study that Blanchot defines in the footnote to The Unavowable Community that we examined in the introduction. *** Agamben details the intellectual and personal relationship between Bataille and Kojève in the second and third chapters of The Open. Its dynamics were fraught with disputes, particularly in the terrain of the interpretation of Hegel, where, Agamben says, the authority of Kojève, Bataille’s teacher and mentor despite being 5 years younger, must have been threatening. The traces of these disputes can be found in footnotes and letters by both, and they culminate in the disagreement over the status of the beings left in posthistory. While Kojève insists on a return to animality that does away with the negativity that fueled the dialectical machine, Bataille instead claims that negativity itself would carry over into posthistory, and that, furthermore, the mode of posthistorical being would consist solely in this negativity that is no longer directed toward eradicating or mastering animality, a “negativity with no

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use” for which Bataille offers the evidence of his own life, or, rather, its “continual aborting,” “the open wound that is my life.”45 This negativity that is not aimed at anything other than the forms of representation and identity (any “salvific narrative” in Bataille’s terminology) that would direct it toward predictable and legalistic modes of subjectivization is, in other words, the same negativity harnessed by the writers of the No, the “blast of destruction” that they direct against signifying language. Bataille’s attempts to convince his teacher were futile, and the idealism Kojève inherits from Hegel leads him to privilege the same naked, animal life that Blanchot inscribes in the realm of the sacred in The Unavowable Community. At the end of chapter three Agamben summarizes the critique of Kojève that emerges from a consideration of the dispute between Bataille and his teacher: Kojève, however, privileges the aspect of negation and death in the relation between man and the anthropophorous animal, and he seems not to see the process by which, on the contrary, man (or the State for him) in modernity begins to care for his own animal life, and by which natural life becomes the stakes in what Foucault called biopower. Perhaps the body of the anthropophorous animal (the body of the slave) is the unresolved remnant that idealism leaves as an inheritance to thought, and the aporias of the philosophy of our time coincide with the aporias of this body that is irreducibly drawn and divided between animality and humanity.46

This is the principal thesis of Agamben’s book, and it is no coincidence that it emerges in his narrative from the peculiar student/teacher relationship of Bataille and Kojève. In fact, themes and images of education pervade The Open, and the bulk of Agamben’s own foray into the problem of the human/animal split in this text consists of his attempt to complete the work of his own teacher, Martin Heidegger. The Open is a continuation of concerns Agamben initiated in his early book Language and Death, where he assesses the philosophies of Hegel and Heidegger via the category of negativity. In that text, though, the engagement with Heidegger’s work is not a sustained one: “Our investigation is not directly an investigation of Heidegger’s thought. Rather, it turns around Heidegger, interrogating this essential relation [between language and death] as it surfaces at certain decisive moments in Western philosophy, particularly in Hegel.”47 A more direct encounter would have to wait until The Open, which also picks up its consideration of Bataille and Kojève from observations originating 20 years earlier in Language and Death. While a sustained reading of Language and Death is beyond the scope of our study, we can briefly turn to its opening page in order to better situate the engagement with Heidegger found in The Open for our purposes of tracing how this work constitutes a literary “celebration of the hidden treasure” as well as how it unfolds from The Unavowable Community. It does this via a reconsideration of the aspect of Bataille’s work that attracted Blanchot, which we have already examined, as well as through a concept of study that carries on that found in Blanchot’s footnote, which we encountered in the introduction. The outlines of this concept are found in the opening passage of Language and Death, where Agamben relates a remark made by Heidegger in a seminar that Agamben himself attended. Describing the impetus for investigating the

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relationship between language and death, which Heidegger claims “flashes up before us, but remains still unthought” in a reflection on the distinction between animality and humanity in the third conference on the Nature of Language,48 Agamben says that such a reflection could take his readers to “a crucial outer limit in Heidegger’s thought— perhaps the very limit about which he told his students, in a seminar conducted in Le Thor during the summer of 1968: ‘You can see it, I cannot’. ”49 In this way, Agamben inscribes the mode of the student into the trajectory of these two works. The more direct engagement with Heidegger that we find in The Open is best read as Agamben’s attempt, as a student, to pursue a blind-spot of his teacher’s work. This is one explicit narrative trajectory of the entire project that encompasses Language and Death and The Open. As we have seen, the latter work itself opens with a consideration of how Bataille attempts to correct the work of his teacher Kojève, and this development of an image that Bataille could see but Kojève could not is another narrative strategy that Agamben weaves through this book. These two trajectories blend in the final chapter, “Outside of Being,” where Jarry is also invoked in the presentation of the title concept. Here, letting the animal and the human be outside of being is identified as the “supreme category” of Heidegger’s ontology, which Agamben locates in his conception of “profound boredom,” a modality that corresponds to radical passivity, deactivation, absolute potentiality, oscillation, decreation, désoeuvrement, or whatever else it might be called in the works of the writers we are concerned with. The power of the student is the unique capacity to give rise to this modality, and, just as Blanchot enlists a concept of study in his articulation of the unavowable community, so Agamben inscribes the perspective of the student throughout The Open, which, together with Language and Death, forms the bookends of a long study. The torrent of concepts that crowd and charge the earlier work (God is “hurled into the abyss”) gives way to a more serene and stylized presentation in the later one. The themes of study and education culminate in a brief reflection near the end of The Open, when Agamben cites Walter Benjamin’s theory of education, whereby technology and education are aligned in the common task of ordering or understanding the relationship with nature and with different generations. As Benjamin writes, this function differs substantially from the commonly held notion that technology is the mastery of nature just as education is fallaciously (though widely) understood as the mastery of children: The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the sense of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the sense of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery not of nature but mastery of the relation between nature and humanity. It is true that men as a species completed their evolution thousands of years ago; but humanity as a species is just beginning its.50

What does it mean to conceive of education as the mastery of the relationship between generations and not as the mastery of the younger generation itself? Following

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Agamben’s reading of Benjamin, we could say it means neither must the older generation master the younger generation nor the younger the older, nor must both generations be surpassed in a third configuration that would represent their dialectical synthesis. Rather, Agamben writes, “according to the Benjaminian model of a ‘dialectic at a standstill’, what is decisive here is only the ‘between’, the interval or, we might say, the play between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a non-coincidence.”51 When the oedipal tension between the generations is deactivated, then both can see the other as a harbor of potentials or images that, when encountered in the space between, can propel the lives of each to a new, more intelligible mode of existence, the collective forward dawning of thought wrought by the disappearance of the subject. *** A final letter from Kojève to Bataille, which Agamben examines, betrays the literary stakes of their dispute over the ontology of posthistory and points us toward the final aspect of Agamben’s reading of Blanchot that we have found in The Open. Like the final passage of The Unavowable Community, this letter also opens onto an important inflection of Blanchot’s formulation of literature’s disappearance, its future, that of a mystical literature that is wrested from the sacred, of writing that somehow inscribes what disappears from being in an asignifying language, the speaking of what must always remain silent, the pataphorical register of language. In the letter to Bataille dated 28 July 1942, Kojève develops a series of considerations surrounding the problem of mysticism and silence in Bataille’s work: To manage to express silence (verbally) is to speak without saying anything. There are an infinite number of ways to do it. But the result is always the same (if one is successful): nothingness. That is why all authentic mystics have value: inasmuch as they are authentically mystical, they speak of nothingness adequately, that is, they do not say anything . . . The mystics also write—just like you do. Why? I think that as mystics they have no reason to do it. But I believe that the mystic who writes . . . is not simply a mystic. He is also an “ordinary man” with the whole dialectic of the Anerkennen. That is why he writes. And that is why we find in the mystical book (in the margin of silence verbalized by discourse that is stripped of meaning) a comprehensible content: in particular, a philosophical content. And so it is with you.52

It is Kojève’s notion of a mystic that has no need to write that bothers Bataille, who views writing as the best way to extend the possibility of this strange interplay of presence and absence that characterizes the form of mystical experience at stake for Bataille. Before we can turn to the relationship between mysticism and writing, however, we must first clarify the ontological structure of the former. Bataille describes his different notion of mysticism as “the contrary of action” and the “deferral of existence until later,” formulations that Kojève objects to on the grounds that, by positing a

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potentiality in and of itself they defer the synthetic actuality sought by the Hegelian dialectic. Kojève writes, What follows is still comprehensible and makes sense. But it is false. That is simply to say “pagan,” “greek”: ontology of being (interminable . . .). For you say: “deferral of existence until later.” But what if (as the Christian philosophers say) this existence does not exist “later”? Or what if (as is true, and as Hegel says) existence is nothing other than this “deferral until later”? Existence—according to Aristotle (who understood incorrectly)—is the passage from potentiality to actuality. When actuality is whole, it has exhausted its potential. It is without potential, impotent, nonexistent: it is no more. Human existence is this deferral until later. And this “later” itself is death, it is nothing.53

Here the human is shown to be a negative version of the “placeholder of nothingness” that we will evoke in a positive sense in the next chapter, where Kafka posits this nothingness as the very ground on which we live and set forth our projects, the place that nourishes a negation and destruction inseparable from a potency that is always ready to be employed in struggles, the same potency that Spinoza describes as a resting or finding peace within oneself, which he further defines as “a joy born of the fact that man considers himself and his power of acting.”54 Kojève posits an actuality without any potentiality, a subjectivity without oscillation, and in this way is open to the same critique Agamben directs toward Blanchot, a vulnerability to stasis in the impersonal pole of the subjective split. In this context, the closing of Kojève’s letter, in which he invites Bataille to reenter the realm of Hegelian wisdom, takes on the light of a sinister contrast: “I wish you to pass from potentiality to actuality, from philosophy to wisdom. But for that, reduce to nothingness that which is only nothingness, that is, reduce to silence the angelic part of your book.” Here the radical effacement of potentiality that constitutes this sort of Hegelianism can be seen through Kojève’s attempt to coax his student Bataille to adopt the disengaged negativity of traditional mysticism. In a section on Heidegger near the middle of The Open, Agamben explains how mysticism is often complicit with metaphysics, precisely because of the negativity that Kojève valorizes. Heidegger articulates the animal’s relation to its environment, to what captivates it and disinhibits it, in terms that resonate with the paradoxes of mystical knowledge—or nonknowledge, because the mystic is held in absolute sway by something that is still entirely closed off from it, even in the most intense moment of being shaken or possessed. As Agamben writes, animal captivation and the openness of the world seem related to one another as are negative and positive theology, and their relationship is as ambiguous as the one which simultaneously opposes and binds in a secret complicity the dark night of the mystic and the clarity of rational knowledge. And it is perhaps to make a tacit, ironic allusion to this relationship that Heidegger feels the need at a certain point

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to illustrate animal captivation with one of the oldest symbols of the unio mystica, the moth that is burned by the flame which attracts it and yet obstinately remains unknown to the end.55

By positing the pole of nonknowledge as the final resting place of mystical experience, the passage from Kojève on mystical writing is clearly distinguished from the final passage of The Unavowable Community, in which Blanchot affirms Bataille (while orienting his mystical practice more “lovingly”) and attests to a different way of writing the inexpressible, a different mysticism, one that does not rest in death and negation, but instead finds an experience of language that no longer presupposes any negative foundation. In that moment Blanchot moves beyond the sacred toward an immanent form of life and writing. *** Agamben’s affirmation of such a different mysticism can perhaps be glimpsed in the esoteric references that pervade The Open, but its clearest formulation is found elsewhere, in the essay “Magic and Happiness,” in the Profanations collection published 3 years after The Open. Here, he focuses on the contingent process or procedure of ecstatic or mystical experience by linking it to the techniques of magic, which he articulates as the collision of names, ideas, and perceptions in the crucible of curiosity that suddenly and unpredictably gives way to what is beyond the name, what is not presupposed by language; in other words, to disappearance, ecstasy, mysticism, the self-unfolding of the world that nourishes the being who cooperates with it. Agamben begins the essay by invoking an insight made by Benjamin during one of his mescaline experiments, which can be found in the book Benjamin On Hashish.56 Agamben writes: Walter Benjamin once said that a child’s first experience of the world is not his realization that “adults are stronger but rather that he cannot make magic.” The statement was made under the influence of a twenty-milligram dose of mescaline, but that does not make it any less salient. It is, in fact, quite likely that the invincible sadness that sometimes overwhelms children is born precisely from their awareness that they are incapable of magic. Whatever we can achieve through merit and effort, cannot make us truly happy. Only magic can do that.57

Agamben then notes how this secret solidarity between magic and happiness was registered by the childlike genius of Mozart, who indicates this awareness in a letter to Joseph Bullinger: “To live respectably and to live happily are two very different things, and the latter will not be possible for me without some kind of magic; for this, something truly supernatural would have to happen.”58 What type of magic and what “supernatural” event is at issue here? The attempt to answer this question takes Agamben to the realm of the fairy tale. The idea of happiness that he glimpses there

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escapes the moral register of getting what one deserves, because of the outstanding individual one has managed to be. On the contrary, this alternative happiness is laced with contingency and surprise. To risk it is to abandon all moral and legalistic subjective modalities, in favor of an openness for the to-come (l’avenir), the magic that children hope for. Agamben writes: Like creatures in fables, children know that in order to be happy it is necessary to keep the genie in the bottle at one’s side, and have the donkey that craps gold coins or the hen that lays golden eggs in one’s house. And no matter what the situation, it is much more important to know the exact place and the right words to say than to take the trouble to reach a goal by honest means. Magic means precisely that no one can be worthy of happiness and that, as the ancients knew, any happiness commensurate with man is always hubris; it is always the result of arrogance and excess. But if someone succeeds in influencing fortune through trickery, if happiness depends not on what one is but on a magic walnut or an “Open sesame!”—then and only then can one consider oneself to be truly and blessedly happy.59

Kafka also cleverly attested to happiness as something that cannot be deserved in a conversation with Gustav Janouch, when he allegedly affirms that “there is plenty of hope—but not for us.”60 As Agamben claims, this saying is an ironic variation of the precept that there is only one way to achieve happiness on this earth: to believe in the divine and not to aspire to reach it. This formulation of the “not for us” does not mean that happiness is saved only for others. Rather, it finds us only when it was not meant for us. This is to say, Agamben writes, that “happiness can be ours only through magic. At that point, when we have wrenched it away from fate, happiness coincides entirely with our knowing ourselves to be capable of magic, with the gesture we use to banish that childhood sadness once and for all.”61 For Agamben, the notion that there is no greater happiness than feeling capable of magic is most intelligible within certain esoteric linguistic and literary trajectories. Kafka’s enigmatic definition of magic is a paradigm for these trajectories. He writes that if we call life by its right name, it comes forth, because “that is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.”62 As Agamben notes, this definition coincides with the ancient tradition of kabbalists and necromancers that posits magic as a science of secret names. This means that each thing, each being, has two names: its manifest name and another, secret name to which it must respond. In these traditions, to be a magus means to know and evoke these “archi-names” that seal his power of life and death over the creature that bears it. However, then, at the end of the essay, Agamben identifies another “more luminous tradition” that more accurately carries the meaning of Kafka’s definition of magic. This tradition, which remains nameless in this essay, is, we learn in the later essay “Theory of Signatures,” (in the collection The Signature of All Things) that of the magus Paracelsus.63 In the concluding passage to “Magic and Happiness,” Agamben offers his most beautiful (re)formulation of the question Blanchot left to those who would find the disappearance of literature extended in their own words, which stand beside the unfolding of the world that

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remains unexpressed, gestured to, within them. “With what words?,” Blanchot asks of these writers, and Agamben responds with the entire text of The Open, but most succinctly with this passage: But according to another, more luminous tradition, the secret name is not so much the cipher of the thing’s subservience to the magus’s speech as, rather, the monogram that sanctions its liberation from language. The secret name was the name by which the creature was called in Eden. When it is pronounced, every manifest name—the entire Babel of names—is shattered. That is why, according to this doctrine, magic is a call to happiness. The secret name is the gesture that restores the creature to the unexpressed. In the final instance, magic is not a knowledge of names but a gesture, a breaking free from the name. That is why a child is never more content than when he invents a secret language. His sadness comes less from ignorance of magic names than from his own inability to free himself from the name that has been imposed on him. No sooner does he succeed, no sooner does he invent a new name, than he holds in his hands the laissez-passer that grants him happiness. To have a name is to be guilty. And justice, like magic, is nameless. Happy, and without a name, the creature knocks at the gates of the land of the magi, who speak in gestures alone.64

The writers we will look at next are beginning to populate the “land of the magi.” We can turn to them to see how they return the creature, and the language that marks it, to the unexpressed. What emerges is the chance occurrence that gives rise to happiness, the realization of the power of the secret name: not, however, the one imposed on us, but the one we invent for ourselves, the language that is only for us, as César Aira’s youthful narrator exemplifies in how she bestows a secret, dyslexic language to each of her imaginary students, in his book How I Became a Nun. The next step in the approach to this secret language is to clarify its ontological structure as much as possible. In the next chapter, I will begin to do this by showing how the most intense formulations of this schema coalesce around a particular understanding of the image, and its implications for language, literature, and study.

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The (Para)Ontology of Disappearance

Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a productive starting point for an encounter with the ontology implicated in the writing of the No, as the extensive poststructural discourse on Bartleby has become a node for analyzing the relationship between philosophy and literature. For Agamben, who, like Vila-Matas and Blanchot, consistently interrogates the literary question in terms of ontology, Bartleby’s renunciation of copying is a reference to a messianic disruption of the Law, a liberation from the “oldness of the letter.”1 Bartleby is a “new Messiah who comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not.”2 This essay, in other words, exhibits the core of Agamben’s commitment to revive the ontological status of potentiality as well as to develop a poetic prose that would correspond to his theory of gestural language. In an early fragment from Idea of Prose the figure of Bartleby serves to orient these philosophical and formal trajectories under the auspices of study. Following brief references to how the notion of study plays out in the lives of Plato and Thomas Aquinas, Agamben turns to the figure of Bartleby for his most pressing reflections on the concept: But the latest, most exemplary embodiment of study in our culture is not the great philosopher nor the sainted doctor. It is rather the student, such as he appears in certain novels of Kafka or Walser. His prototype occurs in Melville’s student who sits in a low-ceilinged room “in all things like a tomb,” his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. And his most extreme exemplar is Bartleby, the scrivener who has ceased to write. Here the messianic tension is reversed or, rather, has gone beyond itself. His gesture is that of a potential that does not precede but follow its act, has left it behind forever; of a Talmud that has not only renounced the rebuilding of the temple but has even forgotten it. At this point, study shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns to its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the soul.3

This passage allows us to raise questions that may guide an ontological foray in terms of the writing of the No, in terms of literature, study, disappearance, and community. What is the relationship between messianic categories of time and the figure of the student if the latter brings the polar “messianic tension” between stoppage and repetition to its bursting point, forcing it to go beyond its limits? What is the nature of the special inspiration or “self-nourishment” that emanates from the long dwelling

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in potential that stamps the existence of the student? And what possibilities are open to a use of words that aims to respond to these questions? The aim of the ontological mapping carried out in this second chapter is to cover the ground needed to raise these questions with any sort of pertinence or urgency. Having already covered this ground himself, Bartleby is an excellent guide. But how could such a dour personality as his be said to inspire? And how could “I would prefer not to” be a formula capable of disrupting homogeneous order? *** As Agamben’s essay details, the schema of potentiality at issue in Bartleby’s formulaic “I would prefer not to” is a “decreation” in which “the actual world is led back to its right not to be, and, therefore, all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence.”4 This decreation, radical negativity, or “radical passivity,” as Thomas Wall terms the concept in his work on Blanchot, Agamben, and Emmanuel Levinas, consists, on the level of subjectivity, in the refusal of every identity, activity, or actuality, in an inactivity that allows anyone to contemplate their own power, of that which they are and are not capable of doing. This refusal neutralizes conceptions of the ego-based or selfconstituting individual, because the depths of psychology are precisely what block an external form of subjectivity, an openness to contingency. The sense of this form, found under the category of ‘immanence’ in the Spinoza–Nietzsche–Deleuze lineage of thought, is conveyed by Vila-Matas near the end of Montano’s Malady: “if we look carefully at today’s world, which is undergoing such transformation, we’ll see that what’s needed is not to remain in ‘the lazy eternity of idols’ (as Blanchot wrote), but to change, to disappear in order to cooperate in the transformation of the world: to act namelessly and not be just an idle name.”5 Or, in the words of Simone Weil, “we participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.”6 This inactivity, then, is not simply inaction, idleness, or paralysis. Rather, Agamben says, “it is something like an inactivity internal to the activity itself, which consists in rendering inactive every particular power to act and to do. Life that contemplates its own power renders itself inactive in all its activities.”7 Agamben sees the decisive figure of this inactivity in Spinoza, who uses it to define the highest freedom to which human beings are capable of aspiring when he describes a resting or finding peace within oneself that he defines as “a joy born of the fact that man considers himself and his power of acting.”8 This peace, or sweetness, is the ontological ground zero for Weil, Blanchot, Vila-Matas, and Agamben alike. It is a level of immanence, one that suggests a new and heightened relationship with the void, the self-unfolding or self-exposure of the world. *** This passivity becomes a source of extreme imaginary power for these writers because, they will say, a purely passive potentiality is nothing other than a unique thought of contingency, of a momentarily transfixing array that includes novel combinations of the real past, the imagined or potential past, the real present, and the potential one, all

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aligned in a flash of insight that provokes learning and newness: the forward dawning of thought wrapped in the kernel of an image. But what, precisely, is the function of this image? How does it come? And how could a crystallized image, apparently so foreign to the “flux” of being, be located on a plane of immanence? Each writer takes up these questions in his own way, to start, by understanding an image as the flash of an awakening, an “incandescent moment of certainty” that momentarily freezes the screen of thought, as it is constantly divided between past and present, into a standstill that arrests time and, in doing so, forms spaces of a new literature and politics.9 Benjamin, one starting point for this conception of the image, describes the categories that give rise to its space as oriented toward the political and theological spheres of messianic time, spheres which, as we will see, are so intimately related to the sphere of literature as to often overlap with it. “Now,” Benjamin writes, “as these formations dissolve, within the enlightened consciousness, political-theological categories arise to take their place. And it is only within the purview of these categories, which bring the flow of events to a standstill, that history forms, at the interior of this flow, as crystalline constellation.”10 The image that is found within this flow is an index or a signature that removes the subject held in its fascination from the linear “storm of progress” Benjamin glimpsed before a Paul Klee painting, in order to refer it to a different time, a time of rupture and discontinuity, where the past is installed in the present as a constellation, an awaking that flashes in an instant and spurs the forward dawning of thought. This imaginative perspective crystallizes a present that sees the past coming at it from the future. Our unfinished past, the toys we stored in the attic as much as the embarrassments we concealed or the chances we didn’t take, rises up again, not to shed light on the present or to have the present shed light on it, but to leave its own context in the moment of citability in order to enter the present and transform it into an image. *** This conception of the image is the source of an important divergence between Benjamin and a Marxist approach that emphasizes the function of commodification without glimpsing what eludes this process of appropriation. This difference illuminates the mode of being implied by Blanchot’s terminology of disappearance. Benjamin displays a penetrating awareness of what resists abstraction and commodification, the fully material and sensuous aspect of things that elicits an intense fascination. How, he asks, does our relationship to these types of things transform our understanding of the past? In Benjamin’s historical image, the encounter with objects reaches its apex in a zone of indistinction between subjective displacement and objective revelation, a “contact zone” where forces of history and imagination converge. These encounters propel the forward dawning of thought through an ever more diffuse array of positions in the ways they open passages between the experience of individual consciousness and the broader currents and flows of history. This displacement is not a fusion, but an asymmetrical abandonment of the subject to the world that is unfolding, a leave-taking that constantly moves thought forward, free as it is to absorb the constellation of images that it has become, and therefore

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loosed as it is to pursue language as an illusory or imaginary space superimposed onto the extant world. *** As Tom Jacobs explains in an excellent essay, one such moment occurs in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man.11 In Chapter Thirteen, the unnamed protagonist, who has recently moved to Harlem from the rural South, unwittingly enters the scene of an eviction in progress and is confronted with a vast assemblage of objects strewn about on the sidewalk in front of him. These objects, he soon understands, are all the possessions the evicted elderly couple had gathered over the course of their lives. Their souvenirs, knick-knacks, and furnishings have been turned into a public exhibition, including: an old daguerreotype portrait of the couple in their youth, a pair of “knocking bones” (percussion instruments used in minstrel shows), a straightening comb, nuggets of High John the Conqueror (a good luck charm), a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham Lincoln, a bent Masonic emblem, an old breast pump, a postcard depicting a man in blackface, the image of a celebrity torn from a magazine, a collector’s plate from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, a dime pierced with a nail so as to be worn on a string for good luck, three expired insurance policies, an old newspaper article with the caption, “Marcus Garvey Deported”, and the Free Papers of “Primus Provo,” freed in 1859. Initially content simply to stare at the couple’s private belongings, the protagonist notices an illegible cultural history enveloped within them that draws him into its web of implication. As he begins to discern the sensuous details of the objects before him, the abstract and general terms that at first rendered the collection an assemblage of junk assume a more complex form that transforms it into objects of value that have been salvaged from the “refuse of history.” As Jacobs notes, the shock of recognizing a secret history within this “ad hoc configuration of objects stuns him momentarily, and incites him to reconsider his own relation to the past.”12 In this way, the Invisible Man’s historical consciousness is activated by objects that introduce a new space accompanying and interfering with the familiar one, a space of awakening in which historical intelligibility bursts forth and collective memories are fulfilled. Captivated by the faded daguerreotype portrait of the couple, he notices “strange memories awakening that began an echoing in my head like that of a hysterical voice stuttering in a dark street”; the frozen gaze of the couple transmits a “grim, unillusioned pride that suddenly seemed to me both a reproach and a warning.”13 Here history suddenly erupts, and the meaning of the past is transformed by its unexpected relation to the present. This allows the Invisible Man to view the evicted couple’s collection “in light of his estrangement from his own ethnic heritage and in terms of the social injustice that frames its present context.”14 Ellison writes: I turned and stared again at the jumble, no longer looking at what was before my eyes, but inwardly-outwardly, around a corner into the dark, far-away-and-long-ago, not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes,

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images, heard even when not listening at home. And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would rather suffer indefinitely than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal. And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition: this junk, these shabby chairs, these heavy, old-fashioned pressing irons, zinc wash tubs with dented bottoms – all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been: And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my mother hanging wash on a cold windy day, so cold that the warm clothes froze even before the vapor thinned and hung stiff on the line, and her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind and her gray head bare to the darkened sky—why were they causing me discomfort far beyond their intrinsic meaning as objects? And why did I see them now, as behind a veil that threatened to lift, stirred by the cold wind in the narrow street?15 (italics in original)

Throughout Ellison’s novel, he uses italics to indicate the sudden intrusion of a thought, image, or memory into the narrator’s consciousness, which is always unexpected, and always heightens the intelligibility of the moment of the present in which it arises, such as in this passage, where the cold wind in the narrow street stirs an image of his mother, who faces a similar wind, her plight now inextricably linked to the fate of the elderly couple whose emblems of southern folk culture agitate his own memory and trigger the forward dawning of a new thought and a new mode of being for him, as the encounter with evicted couple’s objects inspires an impromptu speech that stirs a gathering crowd and draws the attention of the police. Although the objects register as icons of social injustice and racism, he is more deeply affected by the profound sense that they offer him an immediate relation to the past, one that prompts action in the present. They function as a cipher of an obscure history suddenly come violently to life, of the words that were “heard even while not listening,” now made audible once again in their moment of intelligibility. The confusion Ellison’s protagonist expresses here is consonant with the power of the historical image, which highlights the historical forces that converge at the moment of the critical encounter with a visual, verbal, or tactile text: It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine— that is, not archaic—images. The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.16

Moments when the past jolts us, when it erupts unexpectedly into the present with the force of a rupture, “suddenly emergent,” initiate the challenge of the historical image,

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that of losing and then finding oneself again amidst the “storm blowing from paradise,” which continues to leave piling rubble in its wake. *** What is the relationship between the historical image and the artistic image, which seems to be a type of historical image insofar as it also carries an index or signature that refers it to a particular hermeneutic sphere and to a particular time? And what does the human’s historical status as a being that can arrest time while undergoing images have to do with the disappearance of the subject and the disappearance of literature? In his book The Man Without Content Agamben considers precisely these questions. The starting point for his reflections is that aesthetics as the science of the work of art, because of the distance it maintains between the work and the viewer, decisively destroyed the transmissibility of the past, or of any content whatsoever, in the realm of art. Beginning with Kant’s definition of the beautiful as that which gives us pleasure without interest, Agamben traces the development of a culture of aesthetics, a museum culture driven by the critic, whose exercise of aesthetic judgment initiates a split into the work of art. This split is decisive because the opposition it sets up is between art and nonart. The work of art, in the theater of aesthetic judgment, is negated through the work of interpretation, which coldly re-creates the object of interpretation with a greater claim to truth than it previously had: “Wherever the critic encounters art, he brings it back to non-art; wherever he exercises his reflection, he brings with him nonbeing and shadow, as though he had no other means to worship art than the celebration of a kind of black mass in honor of the deus inversus, the inverted god, of non-art.”17 In this scheme of aesthetics, the critic’s exclusive claim to the content of art limits the artist’s role to the expression of a pure artistic principle without content, to that of a vessel that gives form to the outpouring of Genius, the content of which will be truly decided elsewhere, in journals, newspapers, and monographs. The artist is “the man without content, who has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of the nothingness of expression and no other ground than this incomprehensible station on this side of himself.”18 In the age of aesthetics, art engenders alienation and disinterest in the museums and salons of high taste. The spectator is held captive by the artistic object, the meaning of which is empty, in force without signifying, until it is elucidated by the critic. The artist, then, is a sort of placeholder of nothingness, whose existence serves only to guarantee the event of pure artistic expression itself, before it is subject to the decisive whims of critical judgment. In this way, Agamben claims, aesthetics conclusively annihilates the transmissibility of art and of culture and history as myth and story within it. *** This permanent severing of tradition has been lamented as the irreparable loss of any criteria that could settle the conflict between past and future, a conflict that now places humanity in the position of the angel in the Klee painting, “Angelus Novus,” from which

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Benjamin drew for his celebrated image of the Angel of History in the fifth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In this painting, the angel is blown facing backward by the “storm of progress,” the linear march of history, the debris of which accumulates in an ever-growing mound that piles in the angel’s wake. Its anxious gaze is fixed upon the rubble, blinding it to the catastrophic destiny it hurtles toward. If humans cannot in any way experience the transmission of culture, then they are left like the angel, to helplessly watch the past accumulate while the continuum of linear time, the storm of progress, prevents them from finding the space of the present that would allow them to appropriate their own historicity, to deactivate the continual and automatic falling of their own potentiality into a small range of actualities that are delineated by the legal categories of will and necessity. The questions “what will I do?” and “what must I do?” stifle the question of potentiality, “what can I do?,” and a contingent conception of history remains impossible as long as cultural intransmissibility continues to permanently immobilize the human subject in the split between old and new. When living beings are unable to relate to the past in any way other than the aesthetic mode of alienation, in which the accumulated culture is, however, at least assured a “phantasmagoric” survival in the work of art due to its preservation, isolation, and death in the museum or gallery, a new question regarding the task of art begins to emerge. While a mythical–traditional system sustains the continuity between old and new by ensuring that “every object transmits at every moment, without residue, the system of beliefs and notions that has found expression in it,” culture in the age of aesthetics is crystallized or fixed in the flash of an artistic image that is alienated from its historical context and no longer able to play its role as the immediate conductor of traditional knowledge.19 The question that suddenly becomes clear here, that of whether humanity is able to transform cultural intransmissibility and the resulting accumulation of phantasmagoric images into a new basis for taking measure of the present, finding solid ground in time, and therefore halting the storm of linear history, remains open to this very day. *** In his essay “The Two Versions of the Imaginary” Blanchot meditates on this question by describing how the new function of the image leads away from the traps that fuel the ego as a transcendent, individualized interiority. Blanchot’s theorization of how the phantasmagoric images of literature work in the space of pure passivity aligns closely with Agamben’s Benjaminian conception of the historical image; for each, the negation that transformed the thing into an image strangely allows the thing to return with a power it never had. This is because in the image the object, the thing, the experience, the artwork, can no longer be encountered from a vantage point that assumes an ontological split between the subject and the object, the transcendent and the material. As Blanchot writes, the literary image, or any image that comes in the space of pure potentiality, cannot be used in the moment of its arising; it can only be contemplated. This inoperativity of the image, and of the object that has transformed into image, vertiginously reverses the sway humans hold over their world as they are constantly

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directed from one object to another. The individual that confidently manipulates his or her surroundings to secure his or her desired future is only operating as such in programmed relation to the identities or egoisms that fester in the transcendent space opened up by individuality in the first place. In this mode of subjectivity, the object is neutralized in favor of a representation, just as what has happened to language in the society of the spectacle, where the complete subsumption of all linguistic relations into a sedate representation is accomplished not for the sake of replacing these with their knowability (as Agamben reminds us, “the image is not the thing, but the thing’s knowability [its nudity].”) but in order to destroy lived experience and initiate a process of desubjectivization and resubjectivization that produces the “docile bodies” of modern biopolitics.20 The image, conversely, neutralizes the object as well, not to turn it into a representation, however, but to remove the veil of unintelligibility that obscures its citability, its signature. As Blanchot writes, in a passage that figures prominently in Thomas Carl Wall’s important analysis of this schema: To experience an event as an image is not to free oneself of that event, but neither is it to engage oneself with it through a free dimension: it is to let oneself be taken by it, to go from the region of the real, where we hold ourselves at a distance from things the better to use them, to that other region where distance holds us, this distance, which is now unloving, unavailable depth, an inappreciable remoteness become in some sense the sovereign and last power of things. This movement implies infinite degrees. Thus psychoanalysis says that the image, far from leading us outside of things and making us live in the mode of gratuitous fantasy, seems to surrender us profoundly to ourselves. The image is intimate because it makes our intimacy an exterior power that we passively submit to: outside of us, in the backward motion of the world that the image provokes, the depth of our passion trails along, astray and brilliant.21

The space of the image leads the subject to its point of departure, its disappearance. It does this through a process that begins by negating the object, because the image is not the thing, but the thing’s knowability, an intelligibility that arises once the thing has been replaced by its image. Because of this the image “neither expresses nor signifies the thing.”22 Nevertheless, “inasmuch as it is nothing other than the giving of the thing over to knowledge, nothing other than the stripping off of the clothes that cover it, nudity is not separate from the thing: it is the thing itself.”23 When the old representational schema of the object disappears, the object returns in its knowability to destroy the subject, to immobilize it, and force it outside itself, because the interiority that always stamped the object and made it “mine” is turned inside out and referred to a different time and a different space, outside the psyche and into the world. This movement, that of typology and messianic redemption, turns each object, each event, each text, into, in the words of Benjamin, a “small gate through which the messiah may enter.” The moment of redemption is the moment of disappearance, in which the most intimate aspects of the subject’s interiority move outside this interiority, and thus the content of the subject is placed outside the subject, or beside the subject. “Para-subjectivity,” then,

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could be a term for this process of disappearance. Like the artist in the age of aesthetics, the subject who submits to the image is the “man without content” a development that we may bravely recognize, as Kafka urges in his story “The Great Wall of China,” as the “very ground on which we live.”24 On this new ground, the impersonality of objective truth and the subjectivity of the person dissolve into the single plane of the image. In a brief essay that strikes Blanchot, Robert Musil gives exemplary expression to the imaginary, potential nature of the world and person that appears on this univocal plane of immanence, the experience of which is sought in a new intermediary language between subject and object: “If the coherence of ideas between them is not sufficiently firm, and if one scorns the coherence that could give them the person of the author, a progression will remain that, without being subjective or objective, will be able to be both at once: a possible image of the world, a possible person, that is what I seek.”25 *** What are the consequences of this radical erasure of the subject in relation to the image for the new mode of telling that we are tracing under the auspices of literature’s disappearance? An answer to this question is developed by an author who is certainly also a “writer of the No”: César Aira. In fact, no less an astute reader than Roberto Bolaño has written that the only living writer with whom Aira may be compared is Vila-Matas.26 Aira’s short novels often develop the implications of a Benjaminian conception of history for the making of art and literature, implications that point toward the end of what he calls “storytelling,” a term he associates with the representational regime of art and literature that is disappearing in favor of uncertain new mechanisms and procedures. The specific argument I am thinking of is found in Aira’s jarring fictionalized account of German landscape painter Johan Moritz Rugendas, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, in a discussion the artist has with his companion Krause regarding the relationship between art and history. The starting premise for the two is an agreement about the usefulness of history for understanding how things came into being. They then oppose history to nature and culture, insofar as the latter are depicted in painting, by saying that a scene of these latter types gave no indication of how it had been made, “of the order in which its components had appeared or the causal chains that had led to that particular configuration.”27 Rugendas further elaborates his conception of history by aligning it with storytelling, because stories have always satisfied the same need as history, the desire to know how things had been created. Then, in a radical valorization of a new art over history and storytelling, Rugendas arrives at a “rather paradoxical conclusion” that approaches the heart of Blanchot’s claim that, in order to fulfill its ontological destiny, literature will have to disappear. “He suggested, hypothetically, that, were all the storytellers to fall silent, nothing would be lost, since the present generation, or those of the future, could experience the events of the past without needing to be told about them, simply by recombining or yielding to the available facts.”28 This new way of relating to the past in the absence of stories about it would restore an ontological fullness to the past, because any past event itself was contingent; it could have been otherwise. To experience the past without being

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told about it is to cancel the fixed actuality of the past in favor of its potentiality; it is to momentarily disrupt linear time altogether and end the time of the type of story that insists on establishing causal relationships. In the words of Benjamin, to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”29 To view the past as something that collides with the present in a crystallized flash of insight, in an image, is to experience the past without the intentionality of a story that establishes a causal relationship between the past and the present. In this way, the creative flash of the historical image, which combines moments, objects, and insights in a novel constellation, escapes the determinism of a historical storytelling that assumes history’s primary task is to articulate the way in which every existing thing or situation was made. This disruption of causal chains that stretch back to the ancient foundation of Western culture is another indication that the historical image is located immediately on a plane of immanence, because, as Agamben writes, “all causal interpretations are in fact consistent with Western metaphysics, and presuppose the sundering of reality into two different ontological levels.”30 Literature that corresponds to the ontological challenge posed by the historical image, then, cannot tell a story in the traditional sense. It can merely deactivate the tendencies that cause our experience of the world to be as abstract as the everyday language we use to engage and tell about it. By aligning history with literature, Aira offers us an important insight into how the problem of literature’s disappearance may arise, because the disruption of history, the end of history, would correspond, then, to the disruption of literature, the end of literature, insofar as both subsist in the causal explanations of storytelling. However, rather than proclaiming a posthistorical state, Aira, as well as Agamben and Benjamin, develops a concept of a charged messianic time, which exists alongside the “progressive” time of history, in a relationship of interference with it. In the words of Césare Casarino, the revolutionary space and the nonrevolutionary space are “paradoxically coterminous and coextensive, synchronous and nonsynchronous”; they are both here right now.31 The shards of messianic, profane time now exist as flickering beacons, as what Eugenio De Signoribus calls “a defenseless, unredeemed light” that searches “gropingly for its brothers in an inhospitable world.”32 The political task now, in this scheme, is to guide this weak light not only toward its other “brothers and sisters” but also to shine it directly into the cluttered, remote darkness of a history and a culture that piles up in front of us because we cannot put it to rest or even access it in any other way. *** In this way, an opening can begin to penetrate even the most tragic expressions of linguistic being, such as the one made by Ingeborg Bachmann when she wrote, “Language is punishment. All things must enter into language and remain there according to the degree of their guilt.”33 Following the seriousness that characterizes this statement, Agamben points to a critical use of language, the use of a “serious

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word, one that never forgets that language is a punishment and that we are all, in speaking or writing, suffering a punishment,”34 a punishment that is “perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses—one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.”35 Now irrevocably defined by belonging to a medium, the human is left to face up to this medium and the knowledge of good and evil it has always been purported to deliver. When, however, this knowledge turns out to be nothing more than that of happiness and sadness, then language, rather than being constantly deployed in conflicts of moral judgment, can be set free to the far more felicitous task of its own unfolding and that of the world alongside it. *** The question at the heart of this next task, the intelligibility of which rises here in the immanent experience of history and the space of an empty (or oscillating) subjectivity, can be formulated in this way: what conception of language corresponds to an experience of the historical image and to the subject that is outside itself in Being? The conversation between Rugendas and Krause in Aira’s novel offers a way into this question. The purpose of storytelling, Rugendas concludes, could be better fulfilled by a new art, which functions by handing down, instead of a story, a set of “tools.” “And the tools would be stylistic,” says Rugendas. “According to this theory, then, art was more useful than discourse.”36 Perhaps this is why Aira himself has said in many interviews that he thinks of himself not so much as an author of novels, but as an artist who happens to write books. And, for him, as for Rugendas, making art is above all a question of procedure. The artist’s primary vocation, he says, is to create procedures or experiments by which art can be made. Whether the procedure is executed successfully or not is secondary. Procedure becomes so important to Aira because of the ethical stance it founds, which is one of collective availability and creative repetition. In other words, as Marcelo Ballvé says, procedure is relevant beyond the individual creator because anyone can use it.37 And, decisively for Aira, it is procedure that transforms art from the transmission of a content into the transmission of transmissibility itself, independent of any content. A conception of literature as procedure is also ultimately what attracts Blanchot to a new art of the written word, an apocalyptic art that points rather than communicates, that continually refers the subject beyond itself to a new terrain in which what speaks through language is not an author or a subject, but an impersonal murmur of questioning that arises from an experience of the world. How can the world speak in language? How can language become a tool that constantly enforces the disappearance of the subject on a plane of immanence? What specific use of language, what style, could catalyze this transformation, could turn words away from signifying functions in order to communicate communicability itself, openness to the world itself? What language could be a procedure that suspends its communicative and informative aspects in order to open onto a new potential use? ***

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Having begun to note the ontology of disappearance Blanchot invokes in order to understand where literature is headed, we can now extend this concept of being or nonbeing more fully into the sphere of books, in order to investigate the disappearance of signifying language in the work of those writers for whom Blanchot’s claim would seem a provocation and an opening, a rebirth. This shift is announced by Vila-Matas when the narrator of Bartleby and Co. notes the disappearance of representational realism as a viable method for those pursuing the possibilities of writing opened up by our times of crisis. Literature has now entered a mode of self-annulment, indicates the novel’s hunchback narrator as he cites Portuguese writer Antonio Guerreiro in a fragment on Agamben, and “the only path still open to genuine literary creation is to be tracked down in suspicion, in denial, the writer’s bad conscience, forged in the works of authors of the constellation Bartleby– Hofmannsthel, Walser, Kafka, Musil, Beckett, Celan . . ..”38 This self-annulment is a burst of destruction that literature aims at the legacy of metaphysics (signifying language) that persists within it. In this sense, according to Vila-Matas, it aligns itself with claims such as the one made by Wittgenstein when he said that, “should someone ever write the ethical truths in a book, stating in clear and verifiable terms what good and evil are in an absolute sense, this book would cause all the other books to explode, blowing them to smithereens.”39 Books would be irrelevant, then, if one actually accomplished its metaphysical destiny of signifying absolute truth, and to reduce the writing of books to this task in the first place is, the writers of the No indicate, to imbue literature with a different type of negativity, a representational negativity that takes aim at the words or texts suspended in potential by every act of publishing. The humility of the writer of the No is to realize that, contrary to those millions who have tried to write the book that explodes all others, knowing of the Truth beyond all truth, expressing the encounter with the aspect of being that is not individuated, the experience of Genius and not Ego, “requires powers that we do not have, requires a force of expression that would far surpass any earthly expression, a language that ought to be beyond the undergrowth of voices and all earthly tongues, a language that would be more than music, a language that would allow the eye to receive the cognitive whole.”40 The task of thinking through the limits of language as they are inflected in an ontology of potentiality, then, opens one possible approach to literary production, that of denial and negativity, of insisting that the impossibility of the “eye receiving the cognitive whole” in language be announced finally in literature so language and literature can be set free for tasks other than revealing truth in a moral register. The outline of a literature of potentiality is further elucidated by Agamben, VilaMatas, and Blanchot when they speak of how the special disappearance of literature entails a new beginning for it as much as the end of its old representational schema; one literary tendency disappears while another is born. Agamben uses the example of the poem to clarify how this is the case. “What is a poem” he says, “if not a linguistic activity that consists in rendering language inactive, in deactivating its communicative and informative functions in order to open it up to a new potential use?”41 Just as politics and philosophy are charged with deactivating biological, economic, and social

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activities in order to make them available for a new use, so, we have read, literature is asked to assume this task for our languages, senses, and habitual gestures. In this way, the zone of decreation also becomes a zone of creation, because what is at stake is an activity that takes place in language and acts upon the power to speak. To paraphrase Agamben, the poetic subject is not the individual who wrote this or that work, but the subject that comes into being at the point in which language has been rendered inactive and has become, within and for that subject, “purely speakable.”42 What is the source of this linguistic purity? Language here has been stripped of the vulgarly ineffable or the unsayable. To think through the limits of language in directions other than toward the transcendent is to deactivate the element within writing that presupposes that richer copies of the text exist in the form of speech and mental phenomena, which in turn point toward an even more originary existence in an immaterial realm that grounds physical existence and gives it its true hidden meaning. Speech and thought, in this perspective, form the hidden meanings of written language, which is removed from these supposedly more authentic levels of the Voice, of “pure” consciousness and beyond. These last levels of signification, which could also be discussed in terms of the transcendental signifiers of theology or Platonism, could be likened to a Matrushka doll that never ceases to open onto another doll, the features of which become constantly more difficult to discern, or to the infinite doors of the law in Kafka’s fable, which are guarded by increasingly terrible and mysterious doorkeepers at each level. However, when determinate linguistic meaning is constantly deferred to a more pure level than the last, the regression becomes infinite or ineffable and meaning must ultimately ground itself in a zone of pure transcendent nothingness. In opposition to this transcendent nothingness, Blanchot and Agamben instead offer a material nothingness, where the subject disappears into language so completely as to leave no residue whatsoever. No typical relational structure of language is possible here, such as that which in metaphysics points to a richer source of meaning that cannot be conveyed in the word on the page or the voice in the air. Rather, if there is any relation at all conveyed in language, it is relation to an empty space, a dead author, a vanished subject; it is a nonrelation. To put it in the words of Foucault, which Agamben cites at the end of his essay “Theory of Signatures,” the new use of language opened up here is “to show that to speak is to do something—something other than to express what one thinks.”43 *** In the new approaches to writing developed by the writers of the No, the ultimate mystery of life is not figured in literature as it is in the logic of the dominant thoughtsystems of our time: as a transcendent truth that can, nonetheless, somehow be truthfully represented in language. As Agamben rightly points out in Language and Death, the dominant thought schemas are still rooted in something like the ineffable interpretation of the Eleusinian Mysteries that, according to a common reading, founded the dialectic in Hegel’s early thought. The ineffable, undecidable, transcendental signifier of metaphysics gained new life as the source of the Hegelian

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dialectic, which, grounding subjectivity in the split of being into the transcendent and the material, constructed the framework of modern identity formation, the banner of which could still be emblazoned with Hegel’s description of the human as the negative being who “is that which he is not and not that which he is.” The transcendent level of the spirit is replaced now with the transcendent level of the self of psychology, of the individual of capitalist democracy, and of all the countless mutations these can undergo at the behest of identity formation. These ontological structures of transcendence correspond to a literature of power, to a national literature or philosophy, to representational realism. The negative being they nurture is not the one that seeks out the self-unfolding of the world by negating everything that conceals it, but, on the contrary, that which seeks to negate this forward dawning, not in order to lead other possible worlds back to their right to be, but to replace all possible worlds with a representation, a spectacle. Thus, while Agamben’s own definition of the proper place of the human, which for him consists in errancy and lack, in the lack of the self, in its disappearance, comes very close to the Hegelian conception, the difference between the two corresponds to the difference between the “spectral” subject of this phase of capitalism and the Ungovernable subjectivity that emerges in conflict with the forces of constant subjectivization and desubjectivization that enforce this frustrated, inert mode of existence. This incompatibility with metaphysical transcendence of all sorts does not mean that immanence is opposed to mystery. Rather, the sort of mystery that can be evoked through an a-representational use of language is a purely materialist one, the sense of which is captured by Fernando Pessoa’s claim, which Vila-Matas cites at the close of his fragment on Agamben, that the only mystery is that there’s someone thinking about the mystery, or by René Char’s words, which Blanchot invokes at the close of his book about the end of literature, The Book To Come: “In the explosion of the universe that we are experiencing, a miracle! The pieces that are coming down are alive.”44; or, most succinctly, by Kafka near the end of his life: “Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let go of the earth.”45 A “miraculous” literature, then, consists in the humility of a word that remains weak to the mental phenomena it would vainly try to express, and that transforms this weakness into a source of extreme freedom, foremost from any “Law of the letter” that produces crystallized linguistic meaning and subjective identity, and from an undecidability that roots language in the ineffable. *** To find this asignifying speech, literature, or language, Blanchot says in a short essay “Death of the Last Writer,” we may have to travel into ourselves and beyond, beyond even the realms of interior monologue into “the deepest part of man,” which is “not silent but most often mute, reduced to a few scattered signs.”46 When compared to this experience of a radical passivity or negation that resists the capture of language at all costs, “interior monologue is a coarse imitation, and one that imitates only the apparent traits of the uninterrupted and unceasing flow of unspeaking speech.”47 This “unceasing flow” is heard only as an “echo, in advance, of what has not been said and what will never

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be said.”48 While “interior monologue has a center, the ‘I’ that brings everything back to itself, that other speech has no center; it is essentially wandering and always outside.”49 This strange other speech bursts from a world that unfolds unpredictably in the space of the image. The indistinction between subject and object that characterizes the paraontology of disappearance is thus also found in the relationship between the speaker and her language. For both Agamben and Vila-Matas, true literary language announces its own taking place as words without an author, weak and without authority, or, more precisely, as words that now are the author, who has now lost all consistency other than that of the rhythm of the work, which oscillates between the appearance of language and the artistic study of that language that incorporates it into the trajectory of the work. In his attempt to pinpoint the relationship that establishes a certain poem as a work by Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Agamben clarifies this ontological structure of the disappearance of the author in the appearance of artistic language. “Does it mean,” he writes, “that on a certain day this particular sentiment, this incomparable thought passed for a brief moment through the mind and soul of the individual named César Vallejo?”50 Rejecting this notion of a written word that passes through or points back to a “purer” thought, Agamben instead posits a writer, César Vallejo, who is enthralled by a linguistic image that only appears while or after he dips his pen to shape the poetic words that will always harbor the image. “Indeed,” he writes, “it is rather likely that this thought and this sentiment became real for him, and their details and nuances became inextricably his own, only after—or while—writing the poem (just as they become so for us only in the moment when we read the poem).”51 The narrator of Never Any End to Paris (a version of Vila-Matas himself) affirms Agamben’s claim for the unexpected arrival of literary language: When people ask me if I have my texts organized in my head before I write them or if they develop as they go surprising even me, I always reply that infinite surprises occur in the writing. And that it’s lucky it’s like that, because surprise, the sudden change of direction, the phrase that appears at a precise moment without one knowing where it comes from, are the unexpected dividends, the fantastic little push that keeps the writer on his toes.52

*** To remain faithful to the challenge Blanchot extended to himself and others, that of “harmonizing” the inside and the outside of the novel, it will be necessary to extend the notion of surprise in literary language—the unfolding of the world via the asignifying word—into the realm of community. Blanchot provides a way into this sort of consideration via his discussion of the language of totalitarianism. The dictator’s words are met with the challenge of a community of students, of artists, or lovers, together or apart, who find a different use of language, a new ecstatic mode of being. To the “boundless murmuring” that momentarily arrests the artistic writer, Blanchot opposes the word of the law, of the dictator, the sovereign who, as Agamben demonstrates in Homo Sacer, can declare the state of exception, the one who can oppose the restless words of potentiality that threaten

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the primary legal categories of will and necessity with a decisive judgment that is always a being-in-force without content. In the state of exception the sovereign’s very command, his every whim, is immediately law, and so there is not, in this perspective, any way to discern law from life, a paradox of the state of exception that, Agamben says, lies in the fact that in this situation “it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from execution of the law, such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any remainder (a person who goes for a walk during curfew is not transgressing the law any more than the soldier who kills him is executing it).”53 It is here, in the space of an empty law, that the sovereign dictator recognizes his true rival for the claim to the source of words and of their meaning: the world that itself is speaking through language, in an unknown language from the future. As Blanchot writes, The dictator . . . is the man of dictare, of imperious repetition, the one who, each time the danger of an unknown language appears, tries to struggle against it by the rigor of a commandment without rejoinder and without content . . . To mere boundless murmuring, he opposes the cleanness of the word of command; to the insinuation of the unheard, the shouted order; for the wandering cry of the ghost in Hamlet, who under the earth, old mole, wanders here and there without power and without destiny, he substitutes the fixed language of regal reason, which commands and never doubts.54

The speech of the dictator, then, is that of representational, signifying language. It reduces the immanent experience of Being, the elusive emptiness in which experience or Being itself is what speaks through the mind, to a rigid certainty; it coerces the subject by negating its potential to-do or not-to-do in order to establish the actuality dictated by law, the true function of any signifying word. In terms of the Greek division of the concept of life into two categories, the word of the law, or any signifying word, initiates a falling of pure zöe into one bios, of bare life into a particular way of life. But, as Blanchot notes, the dictator can only arise at the behest of those who fear the silence of the murmur, of unspeaking speech, of the self-unveiling of the world that comes in the moment of pure potentiality, of those who wish to negate it to replace it with what they want it to say, with a representation consisting of morality or law, rather than seeking a new form of expression that would correspond with the surprise that epitomizes being at this level of immanence: But this perfect adversary, the providential man, called into being to obliterate the fog of the ambiguity of phantom language with his commands and his iron decisions—isn’t he, in reality, called into being by that ambiguity? Isn’t he its parody, its mask even emptier than it, isn’t he its lying reply, when, with the prayer of weary, unhappy men, in order to flee the terrible rumor of absence (terrible but deceptive) we turn toward the presence of the categorical idol who requires only our docility and promises the great repose of inner deafness?55

***

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To this inner deafness that silences the unspeaking speech of l’avenir, the self-unveiling of the world, the future to-come that is not programmed or predictable, Blanchot opposes a different type of silence, the withdrawal into pure potentiality or absolute tranquility or contemplation, the momentary detachment from the flow of Being that allows one to recognize this flow for what it is, to be contemporary with it in order to let it speak for what it can be: newness, departure, the void, the roll of the dice. In this space of detachment and passivity, when every potential to do or not to do is withdrawn, an image appears that cannot be used, only contemplated. This image is the language of silence, the strange indistinction of optic and linguistic categories that would allow the “eye to receive the cognitive whole.” In this way, the dictator is at once the rival of artists as well as the world that speaks through them: Thus dictators come to naturally take the place of writers, artists, and men of thought. But whereas the empty language of command is the frightened, mendacious prolongation of what we would prefer to hear shouted in public squares, rather than having to welcome it and appease it in ourselves through a great personal effort of attention, the writer’s task is an entirely different one, and also an entirely different responsibility: that of entering, more than anyone else, into a relationship of intimacy with the initial rumor. It is at that price alone that he can silence it, and hear it in this silence, then express it, after having transformed it.56

The language that results from this transformation is weak and impotent compared with the experience of its origin. This is, however, a condition that bestows upon this new language its incomparable ethos and simplicity, a transformation that turns speech into song, into the discourse of the living being that escapes the Law and language of bios in order to enter the “saved night” of zöe, of the simple fact of being alive with no imposed direction. As Agamben writes, “It is perhaps time to call into question the prestige that language has enjoyed and continues to enjoy in our culture, as a tool of incomparable potency, efficacy, and beauty. And yet, considered in itself, it is no more beautiful than birdsong, no more efficacious than the signals insects exchange, no more powerful than the roar with which the lion asserts his dominion.”57 The use of language, in other words, is a way to enrich corporeality; it is a gestural form: to speak is to manage the body. For Agamben, “the decisive element that confers on human language its peculiar virtue is not in the tool itself but in the place it leaves to the speaker, in the fact that it prepares within itself a hollowed-out form that the speaker must always assume in order to speak—that is to say, in the ethical relation that is established between the speaker and his language.”58 This hollowed out form corresponds to the para-subjectivity of Blanchot’s inoperative image and Benjamin’s messianic conception of the historical image. It refers the subject outside itself, rendering it empty in order to enter the world and behold its myriad constellations. In this emptiness, the subject, the everyday artist “without content,” every person that speaks, begins to invent a language, to make it her or his own: “The human being is that living being that, in order to speak, must say ‘I,’ must ‘take the word,’ assume it and

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make it his own.”59 As Blanchot decisively concludes while describing the function of the unspeaking speech of the void, There is no writer without such an approach, and who does not firmly experience its ordeal. This unspeaking speech very much resembles inspiration, but it is not confused with it; it leads only to that place unique to each person, the hell into which Orpheus descends, place of dispersion and conflict, where he must all of a sudden face up to things and find, in himself, in it and in the experience of all art, what transforms powerlessness into power, turns error into a path and unspeaking speech into a silence from which it can truly speak and allow the origin to speak in it, without destroying humanity.60

This is, for Agamben as for Blanchot, the communal stake of the battleground of language, which pits the dictator against the artist. The contention over the impersonal void, the self-exposure of the world insofar as it manifests or doesn’t manifest in language, is the originary conflict between intelligibility and representation, singularity and identity, redemption and history. *** This conflict has cast a large shadow over the writers of the No. For instance, consider the work of Kafka, who incessantly interrogates the language of the law at its limit, where it is about to break apart. Indeed, this limit finds its most articulated figure in literature in Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony.” This story, written during a short break from work on The Trial, tells of an officer who explains the function of a unique torture apparatus designed to extract confessions from the accused by inscribing the truth of his sentence on the flesh of his back, via a harrow of needles. Here, curiously, as Agamben notes in his essay K., “the discovery of the truth of the accusation is entrusted not to the judge but to the accused, who does so by deciphering the writing that the harrow inscribes onto his flesh”61: Enlightenment comes to even the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription, he purses his mouth as if he were listening. You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one’s eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds. To be sure, that is a hard task; he needs 6 hours to accomplish it. By that time the Harrow has pierced him quite through and casts him into the pit, where he pitches down upon the blood and water and the cotton wool.62

The specific nature of the accusation, or at least the category we are meant to read it in, is revealed at the end of the story when the officer, who has no crime to confess, turns his apparatus on himself and voluntarily assumes the bloody inscription of a sentence on himself, before being flayed to death by the machine’s continued onslaught.

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According to Agamben, the officer’s actions are an example of a false self-accusation, or self-slander, the originary category of the Law that instantiates the Law itself as a deception, as the result of a self-imposed false guilt, of an “original sin, the ancient fault committed by man,” according to Kafka, which “consists in the accusation that he makes and from which he does not desist: that a wrong has been done to him, that an original sin has been committed against him.”63 The officer’s voluntary assumption of a sentence that has no decipherable content, and so could never elicit a confession, is, in fact, what is accomplished by every self-slanderer. Here, guilt is not identified as the cause of the accusation at stake; rather, it is equated with it. For Kafka, the guilt of the law, humanity’s original sin, is the implication of Being itself in the sphere of accusation, and the largely unquestioned acquiescence of every citizen to this implication. As Agamben writes, “the accusation is perhaps the juridical ‘category’ par excellence . . . without which the whole edifice of the law would fall apart: the indictment of Being within the sphere of law. Law, then, is essentially an accusation or a ‘category.’ When Being is indicted, or ‘accused,’ within the sphere of law, it loses its innocence; it becomes a cosa (a case): an object of litigation.”64 Self-slander, then, emerges in this perspective as a strange and insufficient form of resistance to the law as well as the most extreme form of humanity’s implication within law. Its subversive element consists in its function as a “strategy that seeks to deactivate and render inoperative the accusation, the indictment that the law addresses toward Being.”65 By founding itself as false accusation and by breaking down the opposition between accused and accuser by ensuring that both coincide in the same body, self-slander reveals the oscillation or indistinction of the law’s two foundational categories, creating a legal fiction, as it were, at the heart of the law, a being in a state of quantum indeterminacy, both doing and not doing something at the same time. Self-slander, in other words, categorizes the same subject as both innocent and guilty: “whoever accuses himself—insofar as he has been accused—must face precisely for this reason the impossibility of confessing, and the court can condemn him as the accuser only it if recognizes his innocence as the accused.”66 Agamben reads the example of self-slander as a paradigm for the law in general, which operates, as we have seen, via this and another mechanism that could be called a sort of fiction (a brand of realism), that of the sovereign’s reduction of the immanent experience of Being into the words of command in the state of exception, the fundamental error whereby measure is placed on the immeasurable. Just as the law is not founded on justice, but rather on the whim of the sovereign, so is it also not founded on guilt, but rather accusation. Justice and guilt, widely assumed to be the basis of the law and its trials, give way at the foundation of the law to simple decisions, those of the sovereign leader and his subjects. Of these, the subjective acquiescence to the category of the law is more originary, as the dominion of the state depends on it, as the base “material” of the state that can be wielded this way and that for whatever purposes best serve governmental institutions in the state of exception. The self-slanderer is the one who assumes the strange guilt of an innocent who is called to stand before the law, who assumes innocence itself as what must be indicted and punished because it has fallen under the grasp of the law. Thus, normal guilt, which is the foundation of both punishment and accusation, is nullified, or at least

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challenged, by an innocence that is draped in the cloth of guilt, as it were, without identifying with it. However, as Kafka’s Joseph K. attests to in The Trial, the challenge posed by the self-slanderer is easily met by the law, and “Kafka is indeed completely aware of the insufficiency of this strategy, since the response of the law is to transform the indictment itself into a crime, and to turn self-slander into its foundation.”67 Just as Joseph K. cannot confess his crime of self-slander and so is murdered when all other strategies to elicit such a confession fail, so the officer in the penal colony cannot obtain a legible confession from the harrow, which carves him up after this failure. The deaths of the officer and of Joseph K. signal the descent of those who administer the law into the realm of the criminal themselves. As Agamben writes, “When the torture machine is no longer able to force the condemned to decipher the truth on his own flesh, torture gives way to simple homicide.”68 This breakdown of law coincides with the dissolution of the language that girds it, language that was supposed to have been deciphered in the bloody carvings of the needles on the officer’s back. A law that produces nonsense or nothingness at its center, a failed or impossible confession, as a result of enforcing self-slander, coincides with a word that has nothing to fall back on other than a representation of a mental experience that eludes the grasp of language, which points all the way back to a transcendent nothingness. Here, pure potentiality, the innocence of bare life, is directed to the particular actuality of the language of the law. This fall of zöe into bios is, for Kafka as for Agamben, the “original sin” of humanity, which is first accomplished by language. This perspective allows us to make sense of Ingeborg Bachmann’s claim regarding this linguistic guilt, which is decisive for an understanding of the “blast of destruction” that Vila-Matas claims must be directed toward signifying language: “Language is punishment. All things must enter into language and remain there according to the degree of their guilt.” For Agamben, this is the “secret of the penal colony,” the realization that the “machine of torture invented by the previous commandant of the colony is in fact language.”69 This means that, for humans, language is primarily an instrument of justice and punishment, of the law. *** Could there be a use of words that remains outside this stricture, one that resists and even threatens to shatter the infernal machine of language? An attempt to imagine this language beyond what we have already traced is found in Agamben’s earlier analysis of Kafka’s story in Idea of Prose, where he directs his attention to the slip of paper the officer inserts into the machine before his demise, in order to consider the possibility that the officer’s aim the whole time is to destroy the machine once and for all. Indeed, the officer seems prepared for a final confrontation with the machine. Kafka writes: “‘Then the time has come,’ he said at last, and suddenly looked at the explorer with bright eyes that held some challenge, some appeal for cooperation.”70 The key element of the officer’s plan is the inscription that must be cut into his flesh. It does not have, as for the condemned man, the form of a precise commandment (“Honor thy superiors”), but consists in the pure and simple injunction: “Be just.”71 But, Agamben notes, it is

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exactly when the apparatus tries to write this that it breaks apart and fails to perform its task of torturously inscribing a judgment on the flesh of the condemned: The ultimate meaning of language—the tale now seems to say—is the injunction “Be just”; and yet it is precisely the meaning of this injunction that the machine of language is absolutely incapable of getting us to understand. Or, rather, it can do it only by ceasing to perform its penal function, only by shattering into pieces and turning from punisher to murderer. In this way justice triumphs over justice, language over language. That the officer does not find in the machine what others had found is now perfectly understandable: at this point there is nothing left for him to understand. This is why his expression is the same as in life: his look calm and convinced, through his forehead the point of the great iron spike.72

The officer, once perhaps a faithful agent of the law, now carries out an “inside job” in order to destroy its instrument of judgment, the tool of language. Language cannot be just, or real justice can never be captured in language, but the explosion of language wrought by the officer is not a mere demolition, where words are expiated forever and the just is permanently abandoned. Rather, a new language and a new justice seem to appear here, too late for the officer who, however, tries to ensure the efficacy of his deed by seeking the witness of the journalist who narrates the story. In fact, it seems that the officer gives up his life in order to transmit the blueprint for shattering the law. By forcing it to signify justice, the officer calls the bluff of the law, provoking it to enter a sphere where it can only break down under the scrutiny of those who refuse to be misled by its facade of power and glory, those dispersed students of a new unavowable community, joined in the shared vicissitudes of extra-legal being. This scrutiny, nurtured by the officer who plays teacher to the journalist, is the special scrutiny of the student. Indeed, the journalist seems to be a curious, eager, and shocked learner, and, as Kafka’s text indicates, if anything subversive happens here it happens not just through the officer’s act but via the journalist’s cooperation as well, his survival beyond the traumatic event to tell the story. What remains to be seen in our endeavor to trace the trajectory of literature’s disappearance is still the precise nature of this type of cooperation, this type of study, this sort of telling.

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3

The Potential of Study

Jacques Derrida ends his final interview by invoking a concept of survival, a gesture that undoubtedly underlines its importance to his entire philosophical project. If we are survivors, according to Derrida, it is because our experiences are of the edge, that is, living at the very limits of life, at the extreme, at the borderline of possibilities, where subjective disappearance or death is constantly wrought by others, by texts and objects as well as by language and Being itself: “I maintained that survival is an originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existence, Dasein, if you will. We are structurally survivors, marked by this structure of the trace and of the testament.”1 Writing is the trace of this peculiar survival, because it testifies to an experience of selflessness or decreation, a special abject mysticism, the “inner experience” of Bataille, a writer very important to Derrida because of his singular testimony of a movement toward nonknowledge, toward a “Presence in no way distinct from Absence,” where “the mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.”2 The subjective dissolution that characterizes these vicissitudes can be memorialized through a cunning use of words, though the writer who emerges, who survives the experience, is completely reborn. Thus, as Derrida notes elsewhere, in Blanchot’s testimony of his own near-death experience, Blanchot is distinguished from “Blanchot,” the former only the trace of the latter, who now moves reborn into a new life, a “life without life,” a life that proceeds from death, while Blanchot carries on only in the text, forever expropriated or dead. As Derrida says earlier in the final interview, “at the moment I leave ‘my’ book (to be published) . . . I become appearing-disappearing.”3 And: “I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, ‘proceeds’ from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing.”4 The author’s disappearance or death, in other words, is implied in the trace whether he or she is already dead or still living. The brilliance of deconstruction, Derrida reminds us one more time, in the last response of his final interview, is to constantly show how this type of death transmits an experience of incomparable richness and intensity. “Everything I say,” he says, “from Pas on, about survival as a complication of the opposition life/death proceeds in me from an unconditional affirmation of life. This surviving is life beyond life, life more than life, and my discourse is not a discourse of death, but, on the contrary,

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The Disappearance of Literature the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus surviving to death, because survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible.”5

Earlier in the interview, Derrida links the particular intensity of survival to the question of the archive: “It’s the ultimate test: one expropriates oneself without knowing exactly who is being entrusted with what is left behind. Who is going to inherit, and how? Will there even be any heirs?”6 The archive, what has been copyrighted and deposited in libraries, is at least the quasiguaranteed realm of heirs, if any should appear, though even this space is altered by what Derrida calls an “acceleration in the forms of archivization,” in both the use and destruction of the archive, a process that transforms the “structure, temporality, and duration of the legacy” that it is entrusted with. For Derrida, facing death, the question of the archive and of generations is more relevant today than ever before. It preoccupies me constantly. But the time of our techno-culture has radically changed in this regard. The people of my “generation,” and a fortiori those of previous ones, had been accustomed to a certain historical rhythm: one thought one knew that a particular work might or might not survive, based upon its own qualities, for one, two, or, perhaps, like Plato, twenty-five centuries. Disappear, then be reborn . . . When it comes to thought, the question of survival has taken on absolutely unforeseeable forms.”7

This reflection resonates with the passages on technology in Blanchot and Agamben, which we examined in the introduction, though Derrida seems to harbor much more anxiety about the situation than they do. While Agamben glimpses an “ungovernable” subjectivity that emerges from the state of crisis wrought by technological apparatuses, and Blanchot calls the situation “fortunate,” Derrida sees a future in which two outcomes seem equally possible, his own works surviving or else consigned to absolute oblivion in an archive with no scholars, no students: “in the end it is later on that all this has a chance of appearing; but also, on the other hand, and thus simultaneously, I have the feeling that two weeks or a month after my death there will be nothing left.”8 How can we account for the difference between these approaches, of Blanchot and of Agamben on one hand, and of Derrida on the other? This difference could be a measure of personal confidence, or of a self-effacing tendency, or, perhaps, a sign of a real textual or thematic discord. A full examination of this question, which would need to consider Agamben’s reflections on linguistic survival in Remnants of Auschwitz, is beyond the scope of the present inquiry, but for our purposes of tracing the disappearance of literature it is enough to wonder if it might pertain to the figure of the student, the figure that is missing from the archive in Derrida’s anxious second hypothesis about the future of (his) writing, but which constitutes the fullest expression of Blanchot’s and Agamben’s renderings of the “Ungovernable.” While Derrida wrote voluminously on the topic of education, most notably in his excellent books Eyes of the University and Who’s Afraid of Philosophy, to my knowledge his texts never explicitly approach the ontology of the student. In the

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previous chapter, we took the first step down this path by examining the ontological substratum from which the figure of the student emerges, the place where images hold us in thrall before they can be used, where things, texts, and memories lock us into an experience with the most “disastrous” consequences, in Blanchot’s terminology, being none other than the nearly complete loss of the very self that underwent the experience in the first place. In this context, study becomes a procedure that opens onto this vertiginous disappearance wrought by the image, perhaps one of the most potent and reliable of such procedures, for reasons that we will detail in the next chapter. The disappearance of literature that Blanchot foresaw is implicated in this idea of study; in the following chapters, we will see that some of its most imaginative and potent manifestations are told from the perspective of the student, whether it be the faux literary essay perfected by Vila-Matas, the strange memories of young student life we find in Aira’s novel How I Became a Nun, or the brief scholarly essay at the heart of Anne Carson’s Decreation collection. In marking these texts (and others) as related sites of literature’s disappearance, aligned on the basis of “study,” I hope to test Derrida’s double hypothesis about the promise/failure of his heirs, the fate of the archive. Blanchot and Agamben, at least, wager this fate on an uncompromising vision of the student: Bartleby, Ishmael, and, especially, K., the land surveyor. The figure of the student, perhaps one of the “absolutely unforeseeable forms” manifested by the question of survival in Derrida’s uncertain future, may allow us to say, for now, that the work of Derrida and the writers he refers to as his “generation”—Lacan, Althusser, Levinas, Kofman, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, Blanchot, and Lyotard—has not disappeared into oblivion, but is instead carried on in the books of some especially astute student-writers. *** While Agamben’s analysis of In the Penal Colony pinpoints the breakdown of law and language at its metaphysical roots, it is not, as we have just seen, only a diagnostic tool. It also divulges the same type of advice that Joseph K. seeks in his conversation with the priest in the dark cathedral, that is, how to situate oneself entirely outside the grasp of the law. Whether one values or disdains this advice or insight is another matter, but it is present in Agamben’s work as a necessary component of a mapping operation that, when it develops an ethical and political subjectivity, always does so under the auspices of the dictum “the only way out is through.” To map and study, he says, is to resist. This claim has not been met without derision, even from other thinkers in the poststructuralist trajectory. Jacques Rancière, for example, claims that Agamben’s work amounts to a mere “sense of messianic waiting for salvation to emerge from the depths of catastrophe,”9 while Antonio Negri chides him for not being involved enough in established political movements.10 However, Agamben’s recent work on the role of self-slander in Kafka’s novels is one possible counter to these arguments, as it harbors a characteristic inflection of ontology onto the terrain of community and ethical subjectivity. In Homo Sacer Agamben emphasizes the baselessness of the law by articulating one element of its origin, the whim of the sovereign who has the power

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to suspend law in the state of exception. In that volume, however, and especially in recent writings on The Trial and The Castle, when he theorizes the contingent core of the law, he does so by identifying not only the mechanisms of the state but also another element that coexists with the sovereign’s word of command on the plane of the law’s foundation: the acquiescence of every citizen to the implication of its own being in the sphere of the law. The attempt to map the operations of the law always coincides with the constitution of agency and revolutionary subjectivity because the subject is what appears in the “daily hand-to-hand struggle” between living beings and apparatuses, the latter of which Agamben defines in his essay “What is an Apparatus?” as a “set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings.”11 The material outline of this struggle, in other words, is the clearing where a potential to not-be rises up against the capture mechanism at work in every identity. This positive element, while not entailing a specific program of political action, does, however, take the form of a strategy for community in Agamben’s recent writings on Kafka. The idea I wish to propose here is that this strategy coalesces around the concept of study. Contrary to the claims of those such as Rancière and Negri, strategies such as that of study do not imply inertia in the face of the awesome deployment of state power. Rather, the student, in the image, for example, of a lone man staring down a tank in Tiananmen Square, is a figure of what Agamben calls the “Ungovernable,” the elusive subjective element that appears any time a living being is able to intervene in its own processes of subjectivization, as in its own apparatuses. This, and only this, Agamben claims, is the “beginning and, at the same time, the vanishing point of every politics.”12 How does study attain such weight? What is its ontology? And what implications does study have for a conception of literature and its disappearance? To answer these questions we can return to Agamben’s engagement with Kafka, an encounter that heightens the intelligibility of the figure of the student that appears in Aira’s novel How I Became a Nun and Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby and Co., and vice versa. This constellation will allow us to begin to fill in the outline of potentiality that we have traced so far, in order to further discern its impact on where Blanchot said literature is heading. *** As he continues to develop the concept of self-slander in the essay “K.”, Agamben turns to the famous parable, “Before the Law,” told by the priest to Joseph K. in the Prague minster. Focusing his analysis on the precise meaning of the “deception” referred to in the opening line of the parable (“In the introductory texts to the law it says of this deception: Before the law stands a doorkeeper”), Agamben traces it to the law’s invitation to self-accusation, an invitation that is deceptive not only because of the legal fiction it demonstrates and the illusory form of subjectivity it inaugurates but also because of how it entices through a welcome, through an open door that is meant just for you, as the doorkeeper confidently assures the man from the country. The doorkeeper’s seemingly contradictory remarks (that “he can’t grant him admittance now” and that “this entrance was meant solely for you”) are resolved by Agamben’s

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reading of these statements as “You are not accused” and “The accusation concerns you alone; only you can accuse yourself and be accused.”13 These statements are, in other words, “an invitation to self-accusation, an invitation to allow oneself to be captured in the trial.”14 Instead of opposing the man from the country with the sovereign ruler or with God, two common figures of the law of the state, Kafka instead takes aim at the doorkeeper, against “those who belong to the court,” those who populate it and work for it, who have exchanged their own innocence and that of those they handle and administer for a meager share of individual security, the “humanism,” “human rights,” and socioeconomic status that constitute the reward for adhering to the particular bios of the law. As Agamben writes, “The true deception is precisely the existence of doorkeepers, of humans—from the lowliest bureaucrat all the way up to the attorneys and the highest ranking judge—whose aim is to induce other humans to accuse themselves and have them pass through the door that leads to nowhere but the trial.”15 This insight allows us to glean some “advice” from the parable: What is at stake here is not the study of the law—which in itself bears no guilt— but rather the “long study of its doorkeeper” to which the man from the country dedicates himself uninterruptedly during his sojourn before the law. It is thanks to this study, to this new Talmud, that the man from the country—in opposition to Joseph K.—was able to live to the very end outside the trial.16

What is the nature of this type of study, an intellectualized form of hand-to-hand combat? Why does it have the effect purported by Agamben’s reading of Kafka, which, results in a decisive victory for the man from the country, the student? *** Agamben discerns the continued development of this idea of study and the advice for community it bears in The Castle. He begins by linking K., the name of the land surveyor, with the Latin word kardo, which means, in the language of land surveyors that Kafka was familiar with, “the one who directs himself toward the cardinal point of the sky,” toward its limit or boundary.17 The profession of the land surveyor, then, which K. “provokingly claims to have, and which the functionaries of the castle consider a kind of defiance,” is, Agamben claims, directed toward an assault on “the constitution of limits.”18 The novel’s central conflict, then, does not have as much to do (as according to Brod’s reckless suggestion) with the possibility of settling in the village and being accepted by the castle as it does with the setting (or transgressing) of borders. If the castle (again, according to Brod) is grace understood as the “divine government” of the world, then the land surveyor—who presents himself not with his instruments but rather with “a knobby stick within reach”—is engaged in an obstinate struggle with the castle and its bureaucrats over the limits of this government, in an implacable and very special constitutio limitum.19 (33)

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Where, precisely, do these limits stretch? What boundaries of the castle’s government does the land surveyor question? For Agamben, It is not the boundaries between the gardens and the houses of the village that he has come to occupy himself with. Rather, given that life in the village is, in reality, entirely determined by the boundaries that separate it from the castle and, at the same time, keep the former inseparable from the latter, it is these limits, above all, that the arrival of the land surveyor calls into question. The “assault on the last limit” is an assault against the boundaries that separate the castle (the high) from the village (the low).20

Agamben then defines the struggle against the limit that divides the high and the low, the powerful and the subjugated, the sacred and the profane, not in terms of a battle against the sovereign or the transcendence that girds the law, as common readings of The Castle would have it, but in terms of “a confrontation with those that actually administer the deception of the law’s rule.”21 After all, as Agamben explains, Count Westwest is barely mentioned in the novel, and K.’s encounters are only with castle functionaries: various “girls of the castle,” a substeward, a messenger, a secretary, and a director, Klamm, with whom K. never has direct contact. As Agamben writes, “At stake here—pace Kafka’s theological interpreters, whether Jewish or Christian—is not a conflict with the divine but rather a relentless struggle with the lies of humans (or angels) concerning the divine.”22 These lies gird “the boundaries, separations, and barriers established between humans, as well as between humans and the divine, which the land surveyor wants to put into question.”23 But where, still, does the “last limit” run? If K.’s strange behavior and desire to unsettle and provoke the villagers are any indication, for him this limit runs not through the space of the village or the castle, but, as Agamben claims, through the bodies of every single person: “K. does not know what to make of the village as it is and even less so of the castle. What the land surveyor is concerned with is the border that divides and conjoins the two, and this is what he wants to abolish or, rather, render inoperative. Where this border actually passes, no one seems to know. Perhaps it does not really exist but passes, like an invisible door, within every human being.”24 The land surveyor, then, seems to have a strange pedagogical vocation as well, that of unsettling his pupils with a strange manner of speech and gesture that confidently endeavors to point out the imaginary boundaries they have agreed to impose on themselves, boundaries that consign them to a “higher power” they do not even understand. *** But we could probably just as easily call K. a student as a teacher, given his obstinate curiosity, his desire to encounter the castle’s denizens in the ghostly squalor of their own quarters, in the bedrooms, school halls, inn taverns, and stables they occupy as they quietly live out their lives in consignment to the castle. His investigations place him in the same category as the man from the country who constantly interrogates the

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doorkeeper in The Trial. The land surveyor is also engaged in a “long study,” another “new Talmud” that allows him to remain an Ausländer to the castle while he continues to probe and challenge its subjects, just as the man from the country is able to remain outside the law to the end. In this way, the political strategy Agamben borrows from Kafka culminates in the figure of the student. For Agamben, the development of this figure traverses at least 3 decades of thinking. Its origins in his work can be traced back at least as far as his 1985 book Idea of Prose, where he devotes a fragment to “The Idea of Study.” Here he begins by characterizing study as an existence of pure potentiality or inoperativity: Study, in effect, is per se interminable. Those who are acquainted with long hours spent roaming among books, when every fragment, every codex, every initial encountered seems to open a new path, immediately left aside at the next encounter, or who have experienced the labyrinthine allusiveness of that “law of good neighbors” whereby Warburg arranged his library, know that not only can study have no rightful end, but does not even desire one.25

Study, in its constant oscillation between undergoing and undertaking, receiving, and conceiving, participates in the ontological structure of the historical image and of Blanchot’s para-subjectivity, a point Agamben emphasizes by clarifying the etymology of studium: “It goes back to a st- or sp- root indicating a crash, the shock of impact. Studying and stupefying are in this sense akin: those who study are in the situation of people who have received a shock and are stupefied by what has struck them, unable to grasp it and at the same time powerless to leave hold. The scholar, that is, is always ‘stupid.’”26 But this astonishment and absorption, “a pure and virtually infinite undergoing” is only one pole of what Agamben calls “the rhythm of study,” which shuttles between bewilderment and lucidity, loss and discovery, patient and agent.27 The initial stupor of the study gives way to a messianic drive toward closure and pursuit. This means that alongside a radical passivity, the study also nurtures a type of activity or trajectory, “an unstoppable drive to undertake, an urge to act,” an urge that, however, is only felt after a long dwelling in potential: “only after a long, studious rubbing together of names, definitions and knowledge is the spark struck in the mind which, in enkindling it, marks the passage from undergoing to undertaking.”28 However, the urge to act in the realm of pure study immediately refers the student to a line of research or digression that inevitably stupefies once again and indicates that the end of study may never come, a situation that was realized by Thomas Aquinas shortly before his death when he confided to his friend Rinaldus: “The end of my writing is coming, for things have now been revealed to me that make everything I have written and taught look foolish, and so I hope that with the end of learning that of life will also come soon.”29 In this case, Agamben says, when what had appeared to be a finished work turns out to be mere study, the “work is stuck forever in the fragmentary or note stage” and the end of study could only coincide with the moment of death. For Agamben, the prototype of this ceaseless abeyance in potentiality that is the being of the student is Bartleby, the scrivener who has ceased to write. Bartleby’s

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gesture reverses the messianic tension of study, or, rather, “allows it to go beyond itself.”30 The potential that was to fall into the actuality of a particular activity, copying, instead draws back in a resolute but indeterminate “I would prefer not to,” just as the student remains a student by never actually finishing anything, by remaining eternally faithful to the flows of digressive research. These renunciations, in other words, leave a potential that does not so much precede as follow its act, a potential that is not consumed in the act and therefore resists the direction and grasp of the law, which functions via a complete fall of potential into act, of zöe into bios. So, while Bartleby’s meager existence in a bureaucratic hell severely limits his possible range of actions, and so exhausts his potential to do, this separation from the possibility of action is not the cause for ontological despair, we learn, because the reality of possibility encompasses what we cannot do as much as what we can do. Bartleby’s persistent study is enabled by this other side of potentiality, what we cannot do, which is what allows it to attain its crucial political significance. As Agamben explains in a recent essay, “On What We Can Not Do”: “Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist; they can still not do. Those who are separated from their own impotentiality lose, on the other hand, first of all the capacity to resist.”31 To study, in other words, Bartleby teaches us, is to resist. *** However, the special resistance of study does not merely consist in negativity, in fending off the imposition of certain actualities. Rather, it also harbors a unique sustenance. “At this point,” Agamben says, “study shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns to its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the soul.”32 What is the basis of this cryptic remark? How could a transformative power arise from the process of study? Hannah Arendt briefly raises these questions decades earlier, near the end of On Violence, where she makes the following aside without ever pursuing it further: “For better or worse—and I think there is every reason to be fearful as well as hopeful—the really new and potential revolutionary class in society will consist of intellectuals, and their potential power, as yet unrealized, is very great, perhaps too great for the good of mankind. But these are speculations.”33 As David Kishik notes in a brief but incisive essay, “Educative Violence,” there is an echo of this idea, which Kishik calls “intellectual violence,” in Agamben’s early (and still untranslated) essay, “On the Limits of Violence.” Following in Arendt’s footsteps, Agamben begins by admitting that on the face of it any link between violence and politics seems contradictory, because politics is the sphere of language, of persuasion, from which brute violence is strictly excluded. Nevertheless, in Kisihik’s reading, Agamben argues that today we are witnessing with our own eyes the emergence of a new phenomenon that he calls “linguistic violence.” Probably the most obvious example of how the modern age transforms the apparatus of language into a special form of violence is propaganda (in late capitalism, Kishik writes, we use the terms “public relations” or “advertisement”).34 Violence enters language at the moment in

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which language assumes a performative aspect that works to establish a certain mode of subjectivization that can be easily manipulated. On the contrary, Kishik continues, one could also say that today it is obvious that certain acts that we would traditionally call “violent—from independent terrorist attacks to established wars—are nothing but twisted means of persuasion or manipulation of public opinion: Linguistic means and violent means—which were completely separated in Arendt’s mind—therefore enter a dangerous zone of indetermination, where the expression ‘linguistic violence’ no longer appears to be contradictory at all.”35 Thus Agamben claims that writing today could be suffused with the sort of powerful linguistic violence that already led Plato to call for the banning of poetry from the Greek city. Agamben therefore treats Sade as an example of an author who exercised, by means of his writings, a form of intellectual violence that, in Kishik’s translation, would go on having perpetual effect, in such a way that so long as I lived, at every hour of the day and as I lay sleeping at night, I would be constantly the cause of a particular disorder, and that this disorder might broaden to the point where it brought about a general corruption so universal or a disturbance so formal that its effects would still be felt even after my life was over.36

The hypothesis that Kishik advances is that the field of human actions that we could place under the provisional titles “intellectual violence” and “linguistic violence” corresponds to what Benjamin calls “pure violence.” In “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin describes his adjacent notion “divine violence” as certain acts of God that have nothing to do with laws or boundaries, acts that are not meant as a retribution for the wrongdoing of the people. Such divine acts are meant to evoke in the people neither fear nor guilt, but expiation or atonement: “When humans witness an act of divine violence, they may come to change their ways, their minds, and hearts, but not because of the threat that breaking God’s word will lead to dire consequences” (like, Kishik says, “little children who eat their lunch only because they want to go out and play”).37 Benjamin’s text articulates a divine violence that may be lethal; however, it does not specifically desire extreme violence but rather the transformation of the form of life of the survivors, the remnant, or remaining people, thereafter: all of us. Benjamin’s only example of this divine violence is the Old Testament story of Korah and his followers, who rebelled against Moses and were consequently swallowed alive by the earth. But Kishik claims that even more illustrative is the story of Jonah, to whom Gershom Scholem dedicated “On Jonah and the Concept of Justice,” an essay from 1919 that, Kishik claims, appears to be the model for Benjamin’s conception of divine violence.38 Scholem explains that what is so striking about the Book of Jonah is its substitution of law for justice. Since it contains very little concrete prophesy, it is essentially a “pedagogical” or “didactic” book: “A human being is taught a lesson about the order of what is just. And there is indeed no figure more representative for the teacher than God himself, nor one more representative for the student than the prophet.”39 Jonah’s rebellion against God and his subsequent expiation (after spending

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3 days and three nights inside the belly of a whale) is thus essentially a story about the education of the prophet, who is presented to the reader, according to Scholem, as “a childlike person.” Going back to Benjamin’s essay, Kishik says, we can now better understand his decision to move away from the notion of divine violence to a claim that is one of the most decisive, and most neglected, in his entire cryptic essay: “This divine violence,” Benjamin writes, “is not only attested by religious tradition but is also found in presentday life in at least one sanctioned manifestation. Educative violence (erzieherische Gewalt), which in its perfect form stands outside the law, is one of its manifestations.”40 How, then, are we to understand this “educative violence”? In one way it could mean the violent measures (from spanking to detention and “grounding” and worse) used by teachers or parents in order to achieve their pedagogical goals. But, according to Kishik, “in a different sense we could define any effective form of education as a form of pure, immediate, and bloodless violence that does not appeal to a law or an end, but to a different way of thinking or living”: “This type of education thus exceeds the strictures of formal systems of education, especially those of the prevalent corporate model in America. It shows that frontal education, with its fixation on the presence of a teacher and a student one in front of the other, is clearly not the only possible method to influence the way people think and act.”41 Thus, education is differentiated from indoctrination (into any set of laws or rules). *** A striking image of this distinction can be found in Aira’s short novel How I Became a Nun, a work that heeds Blanchot’s call to remain faithful to the event of language by imagining it on the threshold in a child’s life (the author’s own?) where its use in uncovering endless, often harsh, but sometimes joyful, illuminations of the world begins to be pitted against its more legalistic function in the classroom of the education system. The existence of this text itself is a tribute to language taken all the way toward its originary, childish experience. “César Aira,” the novel’s 6-yearold, sometimes male, sometimes female narrator, a version of the author himself, describes how her (his) early experiences with language in the rough neighborhoods and playgrounds of an impoverished area on the outskirts of Rosario, Argentina contrast with the institutional uses of language that his class is being indoctrinated in. For the narrator it was a very rough, very wild environment, a Darwinian struggle for life. The fights were bloody, and the vocabulary that accompanied them was brutal. I knew about swear words, I even knew the words themselves, but for some reason I had never paid them much attention. It was as if I registered them with a second sense of hearing and transferred them to another level of perception. I had come to the conclusion that they functioned as a set and their meaning was a kind of action, which wasn’t too far from the truth.42

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This profane understanding of language as capable of tasks other than the expression of thought or predetermined meaning allows the narrator to resist the language of indoctrination as his class is being taught to read. “I was present,” she (he) says, “but not a participant, or participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the performance, but that gap was me!”43 The young student ignores the reading instructions of the teacher, preferring to maintain a state of passive resistance at her (his) desk, where she “vegetated day after day.”44 She (he) decides, instead, to teach herself to read by studying a message tagged on the school’s bathroom wall: “I opened my virgin exercise book, picked up my pencil, which I still hadn’t used, and reproduced that inscription from memory, stroke by stroke, without a single error or any idea what I was writing: “YOFUCKNSONFABITCHPUSSY.”45 The narrator’s reading starts with this graffiti because, as a profanity, “its meaning was a kind of action,” the sort of use of language she (he) would have become accustomed to in order to maneuver the “rough, very wild environment” of her (his) neighborhood.46 Knowledge of the inscription could never be reduced to the types of monolithic definitions that characterize the teaching of words at the narrator’s school. Aira writes, I didn’t know how those drawings translated into sound. And yet, as I wrote, I knew. Because knowledge is never monolithic. We know things in part. For example, I knew that they were swear words, that it was a conglomerate, that the mother was implied at some level; I knew about the violence, the fights, insulting the mother, the fury, the blood, the tears . . . There were other things I didn’t know but they were so inextricably entwined with the things I did know that I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. As it happens, in this case there were things I wouldn’t discover until much later on . . .47

This resistance to the foreclosure of meaning characterizes an understanding of language as a potential capable of initiating the forward dawning of thought. It also further illuminates the divide between indoctrination and education, a point Aira starkly conveys in a grotesque and deranged monologue the narrator’s teacher delivers to the class in order to warn them of the narrator, whose self-taught method of learning to read threatens the teacher’s attempts to enforce the doctrine of signifying language. The teacher screams, Gggooood! Protect your teacher. She has 40 years of experience. She could die at any moment, and then it’ll be too late to be sorry. The killer is after her. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not saying all this for my sake, no, I’ve had my life already. Forty years teaching first grade. The first of the second mothers. I’m saying it for you. Because he wants to kill you too. Not me. You. But don’t be afraid, teacher will protect you. You have to watch out for vipers, tarantulas and rabid dogs. And especially for Aira. Aira is a thousand times worse. Watch out for Aira! Don’t go near him! Don’t talk to him! Don’t look at him! Pretend he doesn’t exist. I always thought he was a moron, but I had nnno idea . . . I dddidn’t realize . . . Now I do!

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The Disappearance of Literature Don’t let him dirty you! Don’t let him infect you! Don’t even give him the time of day! Don’t breathe when he’s near . . . If you don’t talk to him or look at him, he can’t harm you. Teacher will protect you. She is the second mother. Teacher loves you. I am the teacher. I always tell the truth . . .48

The authoritarian overtones of this harangue, conveyed by the comically nightmarish teacher, fail to phase César, as he (she) begins to lose interest: “At some point she started repeating herself, word for word, like a tape recorder. I was looking through her. I was looking at the blackboard where she had written: zebra, zero, zigzag . . . in perfectly formed letters . . . That calligraphy was her prettiest feature . . . She seemed upset, but I didn’t think she was talking nonsense.”49 The teacher’s perfect ornamental handwriting, which the impoverished students would never duplicate or use in the notes they pass or the graffiti they tag, is the cipher of a language that is mobilized toward the aims of cultural and economic stratification, because it insists on a pattern of signification that is as ossified and monolithic as the rote reading techniques enforced by the crazed teacher. The habit of representational thought is nurtured first of all in language itself, before it is directed toward the formation of identities in the ubiquitous capitalist marketplace, a process that often begins in the classroom. César resists the tendencies encouraged by the teacher, instead finding peace and mental sustenance in a space that is outside the normal flow of time, just as it is outside the grasp of the educational system (“the teacher went on ignoring me, which was just as well”). He (she) describes this new refuge as an addition or “supplement” to the ordinary progression of time: “one kind of time always conveys another, as its supplement.”50 How are we to understand this supplement? And how exactly does the young narrator arrive there? As César describes this process, he (she) immediately links it to the time of study or learning: “A certain peace had come over me . . . Time was enough. I clung on to time, and consequently to learning, the only human activity that makes time our ally.”51 The narrator’s abeyance in the supplemental realm of learning proves productive, as she (he) uses this space to develop a new theory of how education could be transformed to nurture the habits of a self-sponsored student. In her (his) imagination, she (he) constructs a classroom of forty-two students: “ They were my classmates, the only children I knew, and they were ideal for my purposes, because I had no idea of their lives outside school. For me they were absolute schoolchildren.”52 The students present extreme pedagogical challenges for the narrator, who assumes the role of teacher in the make-believe classroom. “ To make the game more fun,” she (he) says, “I gave them twisted, difficult, baroque personalities. Each one suffered from a different and complicated kind of dyslexia. Being the perfect teacher, I dealt with them individually, attentive to their particular needs, setting tasks adapted to their capacities.”53 Some of the disorders border on the fantastic: “one child’s particular dyslexia consisted of putting all the vowels together at the beginning of the word, followed by the consonants. He would write the word ‘consonants’ as ‘ooacnsnnts’.”54 Other ones happen to be more realistic: “Others got the shapes of the letters wrong, writing them back to front.”55 César imagines each student as a “novel,” enmeshing them in a web of social

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relationships that are bolstered by a “cooperative” that supports the students and their families with whatever they need: for each kind of dyslexia I had also come up with a unique and appropriate family background and etiology, couched in the somewhat deranged terms at my disposal, but displaying remarkable intuition on the part of a 6-year-old. For example, in the case of the boy who wrote letters back to front, his dad was a woman and his mom was a man. This affected his performance at school, either because he had to help his mom prepare the meals (being a man, his mom didn’t know how to cook), leaving no time for homework or because the family lived in wretched poverty (his dad, being a woman, couldn’t get a proper job). I had to make sure that the cooperative provided the family with stationary, pens, pencils, etc. And every one of the forty-one other cases was just as involved.56

A concept of singularity is crucial to the pedagogical principles César imposes on (her)himself, which, contrary to his teacher’s legalistic, rote methods, nurture the development of a myriad of languages that have never been uttered before. The standards and directions of this class, that is, are imposed by the students, who are each free to impose their own “unique and nontransferable rule” on the trajectory of their learning: “The idea wasn’t to correct each student’s dyslexia, not at all. I wanted to teach them to read and write on their own terms, each according to his particular hieroglyphic system: only within that system was progress possible.”57 For example, César suggests that the boy who wrote back to front could start by writing the word mother that way and then proceed to write “a thousand-page back-to-front book, a dictionary, anything.”58 (ibid.). In this way, César “hadn’t invented disorders so much as systems of difficulty. They weren’t destined to be cured but developed.”59 Running such a classroom requires absolute commitment, which she (he), in throes of a burgeoning imagination, readily gives: “I conscientiously examined forty-two hieroglyphic texts, correcting each according to its unique and nontransferable rule.”60 The repetition of this exercise eventually gives way to a strange mode of existence that allows the supplemental time of learning, which César could previously only find alone, motionless, and with intense focus, to carry over into the other parts of his (her) life. “I found this pastime absorbing,” she (he) says, “So absorbing that it began to give me pleasure, the first lasting and governable pleasure of my life . . . And soon it underwent a sublimation, transcending itself . . . Almost independently of my will, it created a supplement, which my imagination seized upon with a mad voracity. I transcended school.”61 For César, this transformation occurs via a mechanism of proliferating “instructions,” whereby every single thing he (she) does is doubled by a mental list of instructions for doing it. “Activities and instructions were indistinguishable. If I was walking I would also be instructing a ghostly disciple in how to walk, the best method for walking . . .”62 The instructions take on the form of the various potential alternatives to the particular activity, while it is unfolding: “Do it like this . . . never do it like that . . . once I did it like this . . . be careful to . . . some people prefer to . . . this way the results are not so . . . ”63 In fact, as the instructions continue they also become

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a curious and awe-inspired description of the world as it unveils itself before her (his) eyes. This function blends into the principles of self-pedagogy carried by the instructions, to the point where the figure of the student and the figure of the teacher become indistinguishable in the life of the narrator: But it wasn’t an exercise for me: it was a class. I took it for granted that I already knew everything, I had mastered it all . . . that’s why it was my duty to teach . . . And I really did know it all, naturally I did, since the knowledge was life itself unfolding spontaneously. Although the main thing was not knowing, or even doing, but explaining, opening out the folds of knowledge . . . And so curious are the mechanisms of the mind and language, that sometimes I surprised myself in the role of pupil, receiving my own instructions.64

For César, education becomes something that he (she) does to her(himself) much more than something that is done to him (her). In this way, Aira’s child-narrator is the figure of the autodidact, the self-taught person, who is perhaps the pure incarnation of what Agamben calls in his early essay “self-violence” and in the later fragment on study “the self-nourishment of the soul,” of what Benjamin describes as “educative violence,” and of what Arendt cryptically refers to as an intellectual power capable of fomenting revolution. Benjamin’s confirmation of the unique political training of study in a note from The Arcades Project, where he defines the “pedagogic side” of his project by citing Rudolf Borchardt’s words in his Epilegomena zu Dante: “To educate the image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows.”65 How I Became a Nun could be seen as an exemplary account of precisely this type of education. Its narrative is that of an imagination unpacking the “folds of knowledge,” of a student learning to encounter the self-unveiling of the world as it dawns in the interest taken in an object or event. This is why “YOFUCKNSONFABITCHPUSSY” becomes, for “César Aira,” a cipher of an unfolding awareness in language that, in the moment of its dawning, both refers her (him) to the past and opens itself up, in turn, to future re-vision at a higher level of intelligibility. From this perspective, the idea of study, in the transformative potency it harbors, may extend to any linguistic or intellectual undertaking, any reflexive act that allows one to see or do things differently, that has, in other words, an ethical or communal effect. In this way, study is able to present a unique challenge to the law, which is plainly shown both by the vanguard status frequently attained by student revolutionary groups and by the extreme violence historically deployed by the state to try to crush them. *** The revolutionary potency of the student is best understood in the context of messianism, a vital current of the ontology of potentiality that is most fully developed by Benjamin and Agamben. To examine the relationship between the student and the messiah, and the implications of this relationship for literature, it is necessary to

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further probe the ontology of the law. According to Benjamin, divine or educative violence “de-poses” law at its foundation where the dialectical oscillation between a violence that posits law and a violence that preserves it fuels the infernal machine of state power. In Western “democracies,” this state violence is perhaps most tangible in the state of exception, when the sovereign suspends civil liberty laws in order to more efficiently eliminate enemies of the state. In this case, as we have seen in the work of Blanchot, the language of the sovereign is that of rigid signification. This is partly because, as Arendt says (and Kishik notes), “words used for the purpose of fighting lose their quality of speech; they become clichés,”66 which then leads to an “impotent language, degraded to pure instrument,” as Benjamin puts it.67 However, in the state of exception, the originary legal and ontological conflicts are actually not that which pit the signifying language of the sovereign against the asignifying language of the writer. For, while the dictator does reduce the immanent possibilities of the world’s selfunfolding to the specific bios of the word of command, his ability to do this depends on the prior abeyance of the law in the realm of pure potentiality. This is because, in the state of exception, law is reduced to its mere form and continues to be in effect without signifying anything. Again, this is the paradox of the state of exception: the law withdraws into a state of potentiality that the sovereign then wields toward the fulfillment of a specific bios that would certainly have among its effects the restoration of order needed for the propagation of the statist machine. Thus, while the actions and language of the sovereign betray a flimsy signifying order, this signification always reserves the right to withdraw into the realm of absolute potency. The law in the state of exception, in other words, is always signifying after the instance of its application, and the life of the citizen is therefore reduced to an obscure reading of the signs in which its life could be put into play, signs as horrifying as the police beating of a student who had just immolated himself in a Cairo square and as grotesquely theatrical as the clamoring Nazi band that accompanied storm troopers as they paraded Jewish sympathizers through the late-night streets of Berlin. Now in the United States, long after Fred Hampton was murdered by Chicago police officers while he lay asleep in his bed, and after children were held captive in an experimental prison devoted to keeping people neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war, it is clear that the use of the state of exception to intensify violence against political enemies has wrought the most extreme conceivable violence on the beings consigned to these times. Even the prison at Guantanamo Bay, a rallying point for the American institutional Left during Barack Obama’s first election, has become, rather than a real opportunity for a communal reading of signs that could lead to an awakening, instead a cause for amnesia, indifference, or “patriotic” support. In this way, it simply becomes another mark of a law that withdraws from these individual situations or “works” in order to insist on its ability to do anything, not just that prescribed by its letter. Unfortunately, no amount of expertise in deciphering all these signs could gain one access to the whims of a tyrant’s will right now or to how the burgeoning interpretations of command by police forces could explode in unexpected and bloody ways in a moment of encounter with a possible “enemy.” Thus, any strategy directed toward ending the conflict of the state of exception, which pits the bare lives of citizens against the whim of the sovereign police

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force, must register that the problematic functioning of the sovereign violence is due to its ability to resist the fall of its own zöe into a particular bios, its ability to maintain the ability to do anything or not do anything. *** We can now consider the relation between sovereignty and messianic thought, in order to see how the law is threatened by the student and then how this threat may be nurtured in words, the studious procedures of the writers of the No. In Shiite Islam, just as in Judaism and Christianity, the figure of the messiah constitutes, according to Agamben, not just one “category of religious experience among others but rather the limit concept of religious experience in general, the point in which religious experience passes beyond itself and calls itself into question insofar as it is law.”68 The messiah, then, comes to reckon with the law, as is clearly revealed in the motto of fourteenth-century messianic figure Sabbatai Zevi, “the fulfillment of the Torah is its transgression,” and, most bluntly, in the words of Paul that serve as an epitaph for Agamben’s treatise on messianism, The Time That Remains: “The law I was told was ordained unto life, I found to be unto death.” But if this is true, Agamben asks, “then what must a messiah do if he finds himself, like the man from the country, before a law that is in force without signifying? He will certainly not be able to fulfill a law that is already in a state of suspension, nor simply substitute another law for it.”69 For Agamben, a miniature painting in a fifteenth-century Jewish manuscript on “He who comes” opens one possible answer to these questions. In this painting, the Messiah appears on horseback at the sacred city’s wide-open gates, behind which a window shows a figure who could be a doorkeeper. A boy in front of the Messiah is standing one step from the open door and pointing toward it. Agamben likens this figure to the man from the country in Kafka’s parable; his task of preparing and facilitating the entry of the Messiah is a paradoxical one because the door is already wide open. In terms of the ontological scheme we are tracing, what the boy must do is somehow compel the potentiality of Law to translate itself into actuality, just as the man from the country finally convinced the doorkeeper to close the door of Law. In the eighth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Benjamin refers to this task as that of making the virtual state of exception real: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.70

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If it is true that the Messiah will only be able to enter the gates once they have closed, after the law’s being in force without significance is over, then discerning the strategy of the youth or the man from the country becomes even more urgent. This figure would seem to be well schooled in Benjamin’s understanding of how the suspension of law, purported to be a temporary measure to quell the threat, in order to assure the law’s functioning in the normal situation, no longer refers back to such a “normal” situation because it has become the permanent state of affairs. Just as the officer from Kafka’s penal colony calls the bluff of the law by forcing it to its limit in the full light of exposure to the public, capturing its true nature in language via the journalist’s studious narration, so are the man from the country and the youth waiting at the gate involved in an attempt to force the law to signify, to reduce it from potentiality to actuality, to capture its essence so powerfully in language that it is held captive there, frozen in an image of supreme signification or documentation. This moment could be described as a collective recognition that extinguishes the law because it can no longer function under any signifying regime, its whole apparatus being entirely dependent on the suspension of law and of the signifying word of law, the dwelling in absolute potential that levels the torturer and the victim, the sovereign and the prisoner, on the same biopolitical plane. It is this absolute potency that the victims and the prisoners, every citizen, must seize, hold, and maintain, in a situation fraught with risk, lest another law springs up to rival them in its pure potentiality. Kishik notes, therefore, that, despite Arendt’s critique of the confusion of violence with power, the sphere of the coming political power could therefore be ultimately indistinguishable from the sphere of pure violence, as long as both are conceived in their intellectual, linguistic, or educative manifestations. Linguistic, intellectual, or educative violence could properly be called “pure” only when it remains within a sphere of means that are not directed at a particular or ultimate end, only which it has nothing whatsoever to do with law, only when it merges with the life that Agamben calls “form-of-life,” for which, according to Kishik’s reading, “what is at stake in its way of living is living itself, and what is above all at stake in living itself is a way of life.”71 Such a form-of-life, in its insistence on a pure language, the new language that appears as it casts over the void, the unfolding of the world, is involved in the task of superimposition—the harmonization Blanchot sought between the inside and the outside of the novel—because of the ways this language cleaves an opening at the heart of the language of the ordinary and keeps it open for indeterminate periods in the lives of those who speak it. This, I think, is the meaning of “the self-nourishment of the soul” that Agamben glimpses arising from the long dwelling in potentiality that characterizes the being of the student, the autodidact sketched by César Aira: the ability to draw sustenance from the folds of knowledge that open up in a strange new language that unveils the world and gives rise to the collective. The terrain of this new language, which we have attempted to understand via concepts of disappearance and study, opens onto increasingly unpredictable and experimental trajectories—the realm of the writers of the No. Before we pursue these directions, however, it is necessary to gesture to the sense of collectivity at issue in

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them, the bond that unites even the most solitary individuals in the forward dawning of thought. The nuances of this “diffuse intellectuality,” which we will examine in the next chapter, fill in the final aspects of the ontological mapping we aim to carry out in this first section, and will ultimately allow us to extend Blanchot’s formulation of literature’s disappearance to a renewed concept of friendship at the threshold of the present work.

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Toward a Constellation of Literature’s Disappearance

Attempts to tell the void, the moment of subjective disappearance, from the explicit narrative perspective of its impersonality are fraught with danger. An author’s style, for instance, Agamben tells us, depends less on his encounter with the void than the part of him that is deprived of this encounter, his character or grace. And his true immanent subjectivity, the aspect that makes him lovable, is also his rapid evasion of both poles, his “rapid back-and-forth between Genius and character.”1 For Blanchot, Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities, is one of the most sustained attempts to render the approach of the void, the unindividuated aspect of being that unfolds the coming world. In an essay on Musil, Blanchot attempts to understand the nuances of how this moment announces itself to the author. At the onset of the writing, Blanchot writes, Musil discovered that his protagonist, the man without particularities, “could not reveal himself in a personal form or in the subjective tone of an over-particular ‘I.’ ”2 Musil’s obsession with the new role of impersonality in science, modern life, and in himself gave rise to a long uncertainty about the form he should choose for his work. One possibility: “a novel in the first person,” but in which the “I” of the narrative “would have been neither that of the fictional character nor that of the novelist, but the relationship of one to the other, the self without self that the writer must become by impersonalizing himself through art—which is essentially impersonal—and in this character that assumes the fate of impersonality.”3 In this way the “I” would be abstract, “an empty self intervening to reveal the emptiness of an incomplete story and to fill the between-space of a thought still being tested.”4 But, in the end, Musil settled upon “the ‘He’ of the narrative, that strange neutrality whose perhaps untenable demand the art of the novel constantly tries and constantly hesitates to welcome.”5 Musil provokes Blanchot to ask several questions regarding this “strange neutrality” that ultimately point us toward the final aspect of literature’s disappearance that this work aims to trace: the paradox of writing about what escapes language altogether. In the final chapters we will examine how Vila-Matas, Carson, and Aira address this paradox. But in order for such an inquiry to have any pertinence, we must first raise the questions about what moves beyond the name that will ground our investigation in ontology before we extend it to literature. These questions, from Blanchot: “What is this neutral power that suddenly emerges in the world? How does it happen that,

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in the human space that is ours, we have to do no longer with distinct people living particular experiences, but with ‘experiences lived without anyone living them’? How is it that in us and outside us something anonymous keeps appearing while concealing itself?”6 Musil’s novel is an attempt to register the effects of the neutrality indicated by these questions via a dispersed form of narration. For Vila-Matas, Musil’s work is a new odyssey, one that departs from the circular voyage that characterizes the journeys of Ulysses and Leopold Bloom. “The other odyssey,” he writes, “was that of Musil’s man without qualities, who, unlike Ulysses, moved in an odyssey without return, in which the individual hurried forward, never returning home, continually advancing and getting lost, changing his identity instead of reaffirming it, dissolving it in what Musil called ‘a delirium of many’.”7 The man without qualities in this way partakes in the mode of being of Benjamin’s flâneur, as well as of that found in his image of the kaleidoscopic subject. These “living kaleidoscopes” or delirious wanderers are material manifestations of the “neutral power” that gives rise to the writerly paradox we will encounter in the final chapter. *** Some initial answers to the questions Blanchot raises can be found in his cryptic account of his miraculous escape from certain death before a firing squad in the short work The Instant of my Death. For Blanchot, the accident of near-death became, in the instant death was announced, the accident of a life he no longer could possess, into which a neutral power has entered. “I die before being born,” Blanchot writes in The Writing of the Disaster, “This uncertain death, always anterior, the attestation to a past without present, is never individual, just as it overflows the whole.”8 When Blanchot writes of this irreplaceable death that is not individual because it is not tied to any subjective expectation but is instead characterized by an encounter with a neutral, nonindividuated power, he proffers a claim that shatters the “mine every time,” which, according to Heidegger, characterizes a Dasein that announces itself to itself in its own being-for-death. In this recognition of a subjective death that shatters any metaphysics of the individual, Blanchot is instead aligned with Kafka, who wrote 70 years earlier about such a death: “There is no having, only a being, only a state of being that craves the last breath, craves suffocation,”9 and with Macedonio Fernández, Borges’ forgotten mentor who wrote, in a prologue that bears a title, “A Home for Non-Existence,” that is also an apt description of his work: “One does not die for oneself.”10 To survive the arrival of death, as Blanchot did when he miraculously escaped the firing squad, is to “know that death has taken place even though it has not been experienced.” A type of death then, has occurred, which demands to be recognized “in the forgetting that it leaves, whose traces, which can be erased, call upon one to exempt oneself from the cosmic order, where disaster makes the real impossible and desire undesirable.”11 What has been forgotten here, if remembering it would destroy the real and desire? Nothing other than the self or the “I” of modern subjectivity. This death

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without death is thus only one form of death, the entry to a new life, also a life without life. The announcement of death, in other words, irrevocably consigns Blanchot to a neutral power that obliterates the subject’s determination by the order of the law in all its forms, an order that is founded on the individual and not the common, on ego, not genius; identity, not singularity; transcendence, not immanence, and certainly not on the mutual indistinction of any these pairs. The life that results from this encounter with an impersonal power becomes increasingly impersonal itself; it negates the old regime of order, not through transgression but by refusal. It indicates a step beyond any concept defined by a dialectical relation, especially the concept of life itself, which, as Agamben has shown in his Homo Sacer volumes, has always been defined in the West by the Aristotelian opposition between animal life and human life, zöe and bios, natural life and politically qualified life. *** Here, in this life without life or death without death, we find a key to Blanchot’s work that further develops the “neutral power,” the struggle with which to give form to prompted Musil’s narrative. These formulations are examples of Blanchot’s use of the neuter, which Jacques Derrida defines in a reading of The Instant of my Death as “the neither . . . nor that is beyond all dialectic and also beyond any negative grammar that the word neuter, ne-uter, seems to indicate”12 (Demeure 89). According to Derrida, all the phrases that Blanchot tirelessly forms according to the model “X without X” (death without death, life without life, happiness without unhappiness, being without being, etc.) take their possibility from the instant Blanchot was delivered the verdict condemning him to death without death being what ensued. Speaking of Blanchot’s cryptic narration of this event, Derrida notices that “there will be for him, for the young man, for his witness and for the author, a death without death and thus a life without life. Life has freed itself from life; one might as well say that life has been relieved of life.”13 In this ecstatic movement, the neuter is the experience or passion of a thinking that cannot stop at either opposite (death, not-death, etc.) without also overcoming the opposition. In Blanchot’s words: “Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond.”14 *** This “step beyond” is the instant of the subject’s referral outside itself toward the void, the neutral power that Blanchot and the writers of the No, each in their own way, attempt to understand. In Montano’s Malady Vila-Matas details the intimate link between disappearance and the void. In a journal entry near the end of the novel, its “literature-sick” narrator and protagonist assesses the subjective task of disappearance in terms of the distance still to be traveled to the void: “God, what will we do to disappear? We are immeasurable distances away from achieving it. But I plan to try, I shall go to the limits of the limitless void.”15

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In Agamben’s work, the neutral power engenders a thought-machine that may form when the disappearing subject deactivates the void in a moment of pure intellectual activity, in which he or she is simultaneously referred to the profundity of the past and the newness of the present. This condition of being-taken momentarily hooks the subject up to that which moves its thought forward, insofar as this thought becomes impersonal and strange, and thus transformative. This movement, as gift, points to its origin in the common or the general, in all that has been developed in the realm of thought and all that waits to be developed, for better or worse, and which whisks the subject into its new terrain. Agamben locates this concept in the thought of Dante and Averroes, and describes it as a “diffuse intellectuality” that “names the multitude that inheres to the power of thought as such” of the “thought of the one and only possible intellect common to all human beings.”16 Dante’s affirmation of this concept in De Monarchia is decisive for Agamben. The poet writes: It is clear that man’s basic capacity is to have a potentiality or power for being intellectual. And since this power cannot be completely actualized in a single man or in any of the particular communities of men above mentioned, there must be a multitude in mankind through whom this whole power can be actualized . . . The proper work of mankind taken as a whole is to exercise continually its entire capacity for intellectual growth, first, in theoretical matters, and, secondarily, as an extension of theory, in practice.17

In a passage that is key for our purposes of linking the ontology of potentiality and disappearance to the disappearances of literature that we are attempting to trace, Agamben theorizes a mystically inflected version of something like the General Intellect as the fulcrum of these transformations: “Just as, according to Averroes, thought is unique and separate from the individuals who use their imaginations and fantasies to join with it from time to time, so do the author and the reader enter into a relationship with the work only on the condition that they remain unexpressed in it,” that they disappear into it and allow their lives to be “played out” in it.18 What remains difficult to grasp about this collective movement of thought is the “from time to time” that Agamben mentions, its dispersed sites of activation in the realm of things, of absolute particularities, in obscure details of texts, as in the call of memory evoked by a passing tree or glinting windowpane. The actual manifestation of the collective, forward-dawning intellect comes in the space between the general and the specific, replacing the subject who, as it were, has kindly disappeared to make way for it, and who will only be able to examine the ashen traces of its appearance in words or images left behind, that nonetheless move in an uncanny, scarcely understood way for some of those who chance to encounter them. The contingent aspect of these movements, however, should always incorporate a critical awareness of the neutrality of this mode of thought. In this way, we must constantly remember Hannah Arendt’s warning when she describes an intellectual power, an educative power, harbored by the coming revolutionary class. For Arendt, this potential power “as yet unrealized, is very great, perhaps too great for the good of mankind.”19 The modes of mysticism are not

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reserved for saints alone. This power is, as Blanchot reminds us more than anyone, a neutral power, both in the sense that it neutralizes the subject, and in the sense that it is not inherently directed toward any end or another, it is just the heightened exposition of potentiality as such, of a being that has learned to think itself and therefore become more aware of what a body can do. *** How can one build an art or a language on the void? How to construct a project that would do justice to the imaginary experience of the world on the level of immanence beyond the image, that of the thing itself? What creative power could be borne from the collective, general experience of ecstasy? What is needed is a new “philopoeisis,” a term Casarino uses to describe Agamben’s cryptic writing style.20 Vila-Matas describes this type of writing, in a fragment on Agamben, as the attempt to sustain the “dislocation between the naming word and the named object.”21 This dislocation, as we have seen, opens the space for newness, for the writing of the future that is increasingly concerned with its own disappearance, even taking that disappearance as its primary task. The neutral power that captivated Musil forms in this empty space, and his narration is that of its continual approach, the advance of an impersonal language that could never take the form of an “I,” just as Blanchot cannot ever really refer to himself in the narration of his own death but only to the otherness designated by the use of quotation marks: “Blanchot.” As Blanchot’s text shows, even the “pure” language of the asignifying word, which rises up in the approach or wake of the void in zones of interference and struggle in everyday life, is not enough to do justice to the actual encounter, the contact zone where subject and object dissolve in a singular flash that arrests time and indelibly marks the being that emerges from it, which we will see in an exemplary fashion in César Aira’s rendering of landscape painter Johann Moritz Rugendas. Aira’s text extends and renews Wittgenstein’s overused precept that Blanchot cites at the close of The Unavowable Community, “whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent.” As Blanchot says, because Wittgenstein does enunciate this, he is unable to impose silence on himself and in this way shows that one has to talk in order to remain silent. Blanchot’s own text, his most personal, The Instant of My Death, also remains faithful to Wittgenstein’s principle in a recursive moment that resonates with how he invokes it at the end of the earlier book, to indicate the passage from literature to nonliterature, from ontology to nonontology; in other words, to inscribe it in the same category as Mallarmé’s linguistic absolute. At the end of this brief narration, Blanchot reflects on what remains of “Blanchot’s” experience before the firing squad, in a passage we have already partially examined: There remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer but to come, the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? the infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond. I know, I imagine that this

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The Disappearance of Literature unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. “I am alive. No, you are dead.”22

Here the narration tells of itself as a knowing representation that has reached the limit of language and stops there to contemplate what is beyond the edge: untranslatable, unanalyzable, yet still there in questioning words—“freed from life? the infinite opening up?” These brief questions enact the freedom and openness they announce because they do not attempt to appropriate the impersonal, preferring instead to let it be outside of language. Here the work humbly removes itself from every predication; it withdraws into a silence indicated by a few murmured questions; it enters again a state of pure potentiality, passivity, or decreation. Agamben articulates this sort of leavetaking as the mechanism of the avant-garde in his essay “Genius”: One writes in order to become impersonal, to become genial, and yet, in writing, we individuate ourselves as authors of this or that work; we move away from Genius, who can never have the form of an ego, much less that of an author. Every attempt by Ego, by the personal element, to appropriate Genius, to force him to sign in one’s own name, is necessarily destined to fail. Hence we have the pertinence and success of ironic operations like those of the avant-garde, in which the presence of Genius is attested to in the decreation and destruction of the work. But if the only work worthy of Genius is the one that has been revoked and undone, and if the truly genial artist is the artist without a work, then the Duchamp-Ego will never be able to coincide with Genius and, to the admiration of all, will pass through the world like the melancholic proof of its own nonexistence, like the ill-famed bearer of its own unworking.23

The “Duchamp-Ego” is the disappearing subject, the artist “without content” or without a work he could be said to possess as his own, who accepts the inability of language to express the moment of being shaken and traversed by Genius, by the void. The work it makes must always also be an unworking, the place where the approach of the impersonal that was being announced in language suddenly leaves language behind as it enters a contact zone, continuing unmoored in a kaleidoscopic ecstasy that is magical because it seems consigned to chance and risk. The task of literature appears here, again but intensified, as a gesture of the No, as a refusal to impersonate the impersonal, to lend one’s lips, in the words of Agamben, to a voice that does not belong to one. Blanchot’s strategy of refusal is that of a few small questions indicating the approach of the absolute. The rest of what follows in the final chapters is an attempt to register the other forms this type of strategy takes in the lineage of writing that emerges from Blanchot’s challenge to those who wish to extend the unsayable, not in language but by using language to indicate what passes beyond it. These hybrid literary forms operate according Mallarmé’s principle of the linguistic absolute, the approach of the absolute that coincides with words that spring alongside it as long as they can. But even the profound humility that stamps the Mallarméan asignifying word reaches

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new depths in the strategies that mark the passage from the void’s approach to its encounter. Again, the danger faced here is immense, and those stepping forward on this funambulate tightrope should take Ahab’s fate as a warning. As Agamben says, “In the face of Genius, no one is great; we are all equally small. But some let themselves be shaken and traversed by Genius to the point of falling apart.”24 Instructive, dramatic, and tragic these characters and these lives may be, those shaken to the point of falling apart like Ahab consumed by the image of the white whale, it is instead the destiny of Ishmael that is inscribed in the trajectory of literature’s disappearance, the journey of a narration that is drawn nearly to the point of oblivion and yet somehow survives the encounter enough to tell of it. *** Another way to introduce our examples of this type of narration in the next section is to continue to interrogate the collectivity of disappearance via a concept of citation that figures heavily in the work of the writers we are concerned with. Agamben, VilaMatas, Carson, Blanchot, and Benjamin rely on it as a basic aspect of the philological methodology that pervades their hybrid works, which often blend poetry, fiction, philosophy, and scholarship. In this context, citation is an aspect of study, the instant where study opens up a new and unforeseen hermeneutic sphere. This sphere, we will see, coincides in some way with the manifestation of the collectivity of the No. Benjamin develops this scheme in an exemplary way, and the theory of citation he develops in The Arcades Project is an explicit touchstone for Carson’s writings, in an experimental oratorio, Lots of Guns. In the section “Guns and Robbery” we find the theory of citation. “Quotations in my writing,” Benjamin says, “are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve the idle passerby of his convictions.”25 In two brief sentences of commentary that follow this passage, Carson ironically invokes the very type of situation in which Benjamin staged his intervention: “Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., no one is surprised anymore by a break-in. They just hope they get a ‘clean’ robber—one who takes the jewels and electronics without shitting on the rug.”26 Benjamin’s mode of citation hooks up the unaware “idle passerby” to the forward dawning of thought, or at least offers an introduction to its mechanism, as every quotation contains a historical index that indicates both its belonging to a particular historical period and its ability to reach full legibility only at a determinate time in the future. The sense of incompletion that characterizes the quotation is extended to the subject taken off-guard by it, who is momentarily stunned enough to understand that a moment of the present has taken a moment of the past as its own concern, to experience the awakenings that are harbored when, never anticipated, the past bursts into the “now” of its knowability (jeztzeit). This mechanism, in other words, has its origin not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences, as “to thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts.”27 In this mode, consciousness takes the form of a crystalline image or array, which Benjamin categorizes as a capacity or a medium, as something that gives rise to a higher form of being or possibly nonbeing, outside of being. He assigns the development of this medium to his own

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Arcades Project as its “pedagogic” task, which, as we have seen, he defines as that of educating “the image-making medium within us.”28 We are incomplete, according to Benjamin’s theory of citation, because we are capable of hooking up to this source of “referential” or “imagistic” experience, which is outside us, part of a general or collective unfolding of thought. If, in Washington, D.C., no one is surprised any more by break-ins, it is not because they happen more frequently there than in other cities. Rather, it is because the identity-driven politics that pervade this place forestall any real surprise from ever occurring, rooted as they are in the repetition of prefabricated modes of being. The subjects captured by this system are chained to their own epoch via the continual fall of their potentiality into the small range of actualities delineated by established legal, political, and consumerist identities. They have lost their capability to not-do, their ability to resist, and so are powerless to intervene in the catastrophic movement of historical “progress.” In these ways, identity politics, in its insistence on the self-constituting individual who cannot cease the flow of his own time enough to critically glimpse it, effectively limits the movement of collective consciousness, a situation the writers we are concerned with seek to remedy, just as Benjamin did in his own times of peril. What, further, is the nature of this consciousness, how does it attain communal efficacy, and can it continue to unfold even amidst the crises of our day, which mobilize forces of conformity that Benjamin’s era had just begun to glimpse? These questions are inscribed throughout the present work, as a way of extending the challenge Blanchot issues to those who would follow literature’s disappearance through to its very end, to see it extended in their own language via the mechanism of study. To study something, he reminds us, is to hope that a new language or new experience could emerge from it, and to nurture this appearance when it actually does occur. What appears is more precisely a new alignment of thought in general, in the form of an image, which happened to strike a particular person for unbeknownst reasons in the act of fulfilling a certain historical exigency. This is the latent power of study: to transform the subject into the pure placeholder of the forward dawning of thought, the expansion of the communal intellect. In other words, to let it disappear, to become disappearing/appearing. To begin to see how the unfolding of collective consciousness is extended in the writing we are tracing, it is helpful to return to its articulation in The Unavowable Community, where we find Blanchot’s challenge to the writers of the future. This text forms productive constellations with each of the works we will look at next, as it is the textual point of departure for important works by Vila-Matas and Agamben, while harboring the conceptual framework that Aira and Carson respond to and extend in their own books. While a sense of great intellectual privacy and solitude characterizes the life and writing of Blanchot, Bataille, and Duras, the encounter found in Blanchot’s book instead celebrates a community of those whose extreme separation is nonetheless superseded by a type of belonging that can only be found in these vicissitudes. These writers are joined by virtue of penetrating a special communal movement of thought and undergoing a transformation there, a change that will always be noticeable as the signature of their works, the mysterious index of their reading or writing that sought the others for the composition of a work, for example, in the case of Blanchot seeking

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Duras and Bataille. Variously understood as an element of collective consciousness, a unique form of the General Intellect, or, in a certain sense, as Walter Benjamin’s neglected formulation, the “dreaming collective,” the forward dawning of thought unfolds in a moment of absolute deactivation, in which the subject is struck by a text, an event, or an object that momentarily aligns with a moment of the past in the form of an image, to jar the subject loose from its own moorings, as though struck dumb: a crash, the shock of impact.29 This collectivity makes use of the momentarily empty space formerly occupied by the subject in order to attain higher, material concretion. This is what leads Benjamin to describe the collective as a being in itself: “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally wakeful, eternally agitated being that—in the space between the building fronts—lives, experiences, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls.”30 The streets become the dwelling place of the collective because they are able to undergo a transformation under the gaze of the flâneur who drifts through them. In the figure of the flâneur Benjamin inscribes the experience of the artist in the same mode of negativity that Blanchot invokes when discussing literature’s disappearance. Free as he is to be taken and redirected by the objects, scenes, and images of his milieu, the flâneur sees a new world unfold before him, a slightly altered double of the old world that owes this change to the collective that works here, in the place opened by the flâneur’s empty subjectivity, to bring a new sight into the world, to stamp perception with a myriad of references to the creative potentials harbored within every situation: For the flâneur, a transformation takes place with respect to the street: it leads him through a vanished time. He strolls down the street; for him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward . . . into a past that can be all the more profound because it is not his own, not private. Nevertheless, it always remains the past of a youth . . . The ground over which he goes, the asphalt, is hollow. His steps awaken a surprising resonance; the gaslight that streams down on the paving stones throws an equivocal light on this double ground. The figure of the flâneur advances over the street of stone, with its double ground, as though driven by a clockwork mechanism.”31

Here Benjamin ascribes three important qualities to the transformation that “takes place with respect to the street,” the place where the flâneur encounters the collective: it utilizes the aspect of the collective memory that has to do with youth, with dawning and awakening; it is bathed in an “equivocal light” that falls on a “double ground”— Benjamin emphasizes the double ground by quickly repeating it—and it occurs, “as though driven by a clockwork mechanism,” through, that is, no real effort of the will of the flâneur. We will return to the first characteristic, the “equivocal light,” in great detail in the last chapter as we develop a figure of light as a mechanism of disappearance that attracts the writers of the No, but for now I would like to dwell on the last two qualities that Benjamin points out, in order to point out a certain penetration of the literary into the real that may correspond to the harmony Blanchot seeks between

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the inside and the outside of the novel. This affinity is important as more evidence of the common ontological schema drawn on by Blanchot and Benjamin, which further illuminates how their works are aligned in a constellation with Agamben, Vila-Matas, Carson, and Aira, each of whom is also committed to the specific harmony sought in The Unavowable Community and The Arcades Project. *** Shortly after the preceding remarks, Benjamin elaborates on how the flâneur is driven by the “clockwork mechanism,” through which, by no mind of his own, in a sort of intoxication, he almost alchemically manifests abstract facts from the past in the lived experience of the drift: “Another thing: that anamnestic intoxication in which the flâneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but can very well possess itself of abstract knowledge—indeed, of dead facts—as something experienced and lived through.”32 Benjamin relates how this experience has its roots in the fascination the nineteenth-century Parisian culture developed with the history of its own streets, an obsession that allowed this “felt knowledge” of the flâneur to be deposited in an immense literature, for example, in Charles Lefeuve’s massive five-volume work Paris Street by Street, House by House, published in 1875.33 Benjamin notes how “the study of these books was, for the Parisian, like a second existence, one wholly predisposed toward dreaming; the knowledge these books gave him took form and figure during an afternoon walk before the aperitif.”34 The literary here is the configuration of historical layers, in the form of abstract facts about a certain place. Its penetration into reality occurs when the layers reach such a density that they are able to fall through the membrane separating reality from dreams, which has been rendered more permeable by the flâneur’s ecstatic intoxication. Now tinged with dreams and kindled by the imagination, these facts take on a form of material existence, because every place harbors an image of the past that rises up in the interface between it and the flâneur that encounters it after soaking in the study of its historical literature. He strolls through a dreamlike world from the past that he discovers superimposed upon the “real” world. This superimposition or differential not only shows that things had at one time been much different and will be again; but it also reveals how some so-called imaginary experiences can break down, in an absolute sense for the ones undergoing them, the barriers between dreams and reality, literature and life, past and present. For Benjamin’s flâneur the becoming-indistinct of these categories is the unique gift of collective consciousness, of an absolutely new image that momentarily holds the flâneur in its sway before referring him to an entirely new mode of existence generated by its convergences, to an abandonment that resolutely leaves this world behind: “with each step, the walk takes on greater momentum; ever weaker grow the temptations of bistros, of shops, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next street corner, of a distant square in the fog, of the back of a woman walking before him.”35 This pursuit, the drive of the collective, is one of an endless leave-taking that is signaled by a glance to the horizon, to the next street corner, or a distant foggy square. We will return to the nuances of this glance in the final chapter because its

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encryption turns out to be a special signature of these writers, in the sense that it marks the place where signs and signatures in their texts open on to the unsigned, the unsaid, where ontology opens onto nonontology, where beings are left outside of being, and where literature opens onto life. For now, however, it is enough to say that the flâneur is a node or passage by which the collective imagination is lived, by which it attains higher concretion via the unique awakening of disappearance, when the subject takes leave in order to make way for its appearance. This is why Agamben can describe this sort of collective consciousness as “thought that is separate from the individuals that happen to join to it from time to time”: the encounter leaves nothing in its wake, and the subject is hereafter incessantly erased insofar as it perceives and extends the trace of this experience, which is indelibly inscribed in its history as absolute rupture, eternal point of departure, as a mark of another time and a different belonging, a permanent superimposition.36 To have lost oneself, then: this is the stamp of the community of those who have no community. To finish our explicit study of this collectivity, we can now consider its relationship to the oneiric dimension of literature, its proximity to dreams and awaking. *** For Blanchot, one of the most important effects of literary language is that of simulation and mimesis, of doubling, of propagating special types of illusions. As Jeff Fort notices in his essay on Aminadab, the world of this novel is “made up of crude but fascinating images that double the already artificial world containing them.”37 The doubling in this novel starts with the omnipresent paintings found in a large boarding house, the closed space of which the protagonist, Thomas, enters on a whim at the beginning of the text, never to leave. The paintings variously depict each room in the house, as well as numerous employees and boarders. Thomas himself is doubled by a grotesque companion attached to him by handcuffs, who in turn features a doubling of his own face as its likeness is tattooed over its own flesh. The effect of these proliferating doubles is to render the border between their existence and Thomas’s own “reality” increasingly indistinct. As Blanchot’s novel is an allegory of the literary experience itself, the ambiguous or nonexistent border among various illusory realities corresponds to the “harmony” he seeks between the inside and the outside of the novel. In this scheme, the task of politics comes into greater relief, not as the burden of choosing an “authentic” reality or way of life proffered by the established world from among the “illusory” ones that do not coincide with it, but in viewing this world itself as just another illusion, not a necessary world but a potential one, something we can awaken from into a new reality. From this it follows that this world always harbors a dream of itself, and to proceed from this dream we must invoke a special kind of awakening. This, at least, is Marx’s youthful insight in a September 1843 letter. He writes, first, on the topic of actualization: “The reform of consciousness consists solely in . . . the awakening of the world from its dream about itself.”38 And then, as if stirred by the thought, he pursues it in greater detail with a heightened, almost pedagogical tone: “Our election cry must be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but

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through the analysis of mystical consciousness that is unclear to itself, whether it appears in a religious or a political form. Then people will see that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing—and that it only needs to possess the consciousness of this thing in order really to possess it.”39 The dream that gradually rises to the surface of collective consciousness here, that of a new world, is never a given but an artifice, the dream of being able to create new, pure surfaces of light in waking life, just as our mind effortlessly creates them in the dream: the dream of the power of dreams. The writers we are concerned with make every effort to extend this power in their works. They glimpse a mode of dreaming that breaks with the common status of the dream as a fantastic alternate world that we experience through a willing or imposed suspension of disbelief. Rather, their dreams do not even solicit belief. It is not necessary to also believe what one is experiencing here, in addition to experiencing it, because experience accounts for the whole of the striking reality of the dream, an illusory reality, or a false world in which potentiality and actuality become indistinguishable in the enthrallment of pure dissimulation, pure fiction, and artifice. At every point, the fictive nature of the dream is incorporated into the dream itself. In this way, literature begins to inhabit the space of the dream, a shift noted constantly by Blanchot, most explicitly in his short text or récit entitled The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, where the first-person narrator asks over and over: “Here where we are, everything is dissimulated, isn’t it?”40 Both literature and dreams inhabit the disenchanted “no-place” of a simulation, one sustained entirely by language in the former and light in the latter. In literature, everything can be illusion and allegory, a saying-otherwise, a pure outside, as Foucault says in a moving essay on Blanchot, that is located in “the simple but vertiginous ‘I speak’ that has been deprived of all bearings and continues in a perfect coincidence with its own unmoored taking place.”41 In this formulation, then, the “I speak” coincides with the taking place of language, which here has been deprived of all relation to the subject that utters it, given that this subject disappears into language in order to let it unfold. This aspect of language is further illuminated by the dream, where images rather than words initiate the coming to light of not-yet-conscious awareness in a glistening surface that, on awakening, will allow this awareness to reach a higher state of concretion as it is further unfurled in the events of language that course alongside the forward dawning of thought. In the words of Benjamin’s beautiful formulation: “For who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else.”42 This is what language does, it unwraps the arabesques that line the fabric we wrap ourselves in when we dream. In this way, it coincides with the invention or presentation of the world, the awakening from the dream, the synthesis of dream consciousness and waking consciousness. *** It may be tempting to confuse the doing at issue here with J. L. Austin’s famous formulation of the performative in How to Do Things With Words. For Austin, the performative is a linguistic enunciation that does not describe a state of things, but

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immediately produces a real fact. In this way, while it does not describe a state of affairs, it ends up creating one, much as the sovereign posits a new status quo by proclaiming the state of exception. The closely knit link between the sphere of the performative and the sphere of law is an important theme in Agamben’s excurses on messianic history, The Time That Remains, where he writes: “The law could be defined as the realm in which all language tends to assume a performative value.”43 A Lacanian approach also reveals how discourse itself, in its fundamental structure, is authoritarian, since out of the free-floating dispersion of signifiers it is only through the intervention of a master signifier that a consistent field of meaning can emerge. In Chantal Mouffe’s reading of Lacan, this authoritarian intervention is threatened by a “subtraction” that “disintegrates” the symbolic field. “For Lacan,” she writes: the status of the master signifier, the signifier of symbolic authority, founded only on itself, is strictly transcendental: the gesture that distorts a symbolic field, that curves its space by introducing a nonfounded violence is sensu stricto correlative to its very establishment. This means that, if we were to subtract from a discursive field its distortion, this field would disintegrate—it would “de-quilt,” to speak in Lacanese.44

As the strictures of the law, in all its forms, are what the writers we are concerned with aim to render inoperative, they ask us to look beyond the performative to this gesture of “de-quilting” or deactivation, to a different way that words and deeds, linguistic expression and real efficacy, coincide, not in the closure of potential worlds wrought by the word of command, but toward an openness of speech and writing that refuses to rest in any determinate signification. This experience of the pure event of the word, the revelation, or taking place of language that exceeds every signification in a moment of enthrallment does not, however, have to remain infinitely suspended in this overwhelming openness. If language is unable to impose itself as a law, in other words, this does not mean that it has to be passive or inert. Rather, Agamben says, “it acts in its own weakness, rendering the word of law inoperative, in de-creating and dismantling the states of fact or of law, making them freely available for use.”45 The deactivation carried out by language, in other words, is intimately involved in the process of unfurling the becoming-new of the world, its release from any stasis, even the nourishing cessation of time that heralds its coming. In this sense, its efficacy coincides with its unique ability to bear witness to thought and experience understood as what Ernst Bloch called “forward dawning,” the unexpressed and insignificant element of the world that is intelligible as a field of forces or intensities uniquely arranged and felt in moments of rupture and surprise.46 Agamben claims that this element “remains in use forever near the word” without ever coinciding with it.47 It is the word’s ability to call itself into question or move beyond itself as it points to a new world and a new hermeneutic sphere, and, because of this, also to its own erasure. The word is the ossified trace of a potential that could have turned toward it and forever remained in its grasp of signification but instead turns back toward itself in order to skip fleetingly to another word or work, another

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expression, each being one of so many touchstones that function as the cipher of a new world, the unfolding of which language humbly deigns to announce as it springs alongside it. *** Language, then, in addition to nurturing and housing the dream, in the form of the novel, is also implicated in the awakening from the dream, the passage from potential to act, the movement that, rather than extinguishing the dream, extends its essential elements into the material world, by synthesizing dream consciousness and waking consciousness. To turn to Benjamin, again: “We construct an awakening theoretically— that is, we imitate, in the realm of language, the trick that is decisive physiologically in awakening, for awakening operates with cunning. Only with cunning, not without it, can we work free of the realm of the dream.”48 I think there are two meanings that can be drawn from the “linguistic trick” at issue here. The first is that language, in order to be enlisted in the task of awakening, must adopt a mode of unfolding itself, a neutral, a-signifying mode. We have already addressed this immanent conception of language in great detail, so now I would like to focus on the second, more specific meaning that could be drawn from the cunning use of words prescribed here by Benjamin. What in language, he asks, could correspond to the physiological strategies the body employs to rouse the sleeper who has overslept, who now needs to awake to face the material exigency of a full bladder or a coming alarm? In the case of the former, a feeling in the bowels is, for the dreaming subject, a cipher of what, in the dream world, carries over into the waking one. The uncomfortable feeling is the fulcrum of a synthesis that allows something of the experience of the dream to carry over into actuality, even if in this example it is only the experience, for instance, of desperately seeking a public toilet on a busy dream street. What are the other ciphers, Benjamin ask us, that could possibly synthesize dream life with waking life in such a way as to be imitable in language, in order to carry over something more significant than a pinch in the abdomen? If we consider the unique capacity of dreams to generate images that correspond to unconscious or semiconscious sediments, then the mere appearance of these images could be such a cipher for someone trained to recognize them, a prompt to awake, to remember that appearance is not everything, and if, for example, I am seeing my childhood rival succumb to the attack of an alligator, I am not actually seeing him but glimpsing, in dazzling form, my own hidden jealousy turned to the outside. In the dream, again, everything is a matter of appearance, a matter of light. This realization could trigger, if it leads to physical awakening, a transferal of this function into the waking life of the dreamer, if one takes Benjamin’s notion of cunning seriously. In this case the dreamer’s subjectivity would be momentarily erased or emptied into the outside, rendered wholly onto light, in a process that corresponds to the ecstatic mode of subjectivity harbored by Blanchot’s comments about literature’s disappearance. The sediments of unconsciousness or semi-consciousness would be brought to the light of waking day, just as dreams call them forth in the strange, brilliant light of sleep. But, if this is the outcome of the cunning at issue here, it still remains to be seen exactly

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what trick brings it about, which Benjamin says imitates another trick that is “decisive physiologically for awakening.” In the process of physiological awakening from a dream, the recognition that I have bodily obligations on another plane of existence is what results from my body’s scheme to wake me, and this knowledge is really what passes over from the dream. In a similar way, the very realization itself that the depths of my unconscious self are being figured in the light of the dream, in its images, is the outcome of another, higher scheme of awakening, the one Benjamin says can be constructed theoretically by being imitated in language. Benjamin further develops the physiological trick of waking from a dream, this time as a political metaphor in a fragment from The Arcades Project: Microcosmic journey which the dreamer makes through the regions of his own body. For he has this in common with the madman: the noises emanating from within the body, which for the salubrious individual converge in a steady surge of health and bring on sound sleep if they are not overlooked, dissociate for the one who dreams. Blood pressure, intestinal churn, heartbeat, muscle sensations become individually perceptible for him and demand the explanation which delusion or dream image holds ready. This sharpened receptivity is a feature of the dreaming collective, which settles into the arcades as into the insides of its own body. We must follow in its wake in order to expound the nineteenth century as its dream vision.49

The awakening at issue here takes place first within the dream. It consists in a “sharpened receptivity” that recognizes the depths of consciousness in their progression toward the higher concretion of daylight. This mechanism of enhanced receptivity, honed in the dream, is extending into waking life, in the ability to recognize the ways that aspects of my own psychology—along with the objects, people, and events I encounter—are involved in the same sort of progression, that of rendering every aspect of being to the outside, including personal dreams and the dreams of the collective. As the ecstatic intoxication of Benjamin’s flâneur suggests, this awakening does not originate with us. It emanates from the collective in the space opened by the dislodged or intoxicated subject, one who is intoxicated by rapturous study as easily as the allure of a clamorous street or beckoning alley: it cannot be willed but its conditions can be sought. So we can now make the preliminary suggestion that the linguistic trick Benjamin refers to would consist, in part, in inscribing a certain “mark of recognition” in a text. Just as in a dream it is possible for the very form of the dream, its fantastic surface, to provoke the dreamer to recognize it for what it is and awake (or stay asleep for that matter), so in the literary text a certain mark or image could act as a beacon that both signals the existence of a certain shared concept or experience, the outside of the text, and that seeks to extend the event that opens onto the outside, into a “contact zone”: an uncanny appearance of light that triggers an awakening, a moment of connection that temporarily interrupts the solitude of study and opens onto the realm of action, help, friendship. This sort of inscription carries the second meaning of the “linguistic trick” that Benjamin prescribes. The image at

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issue is a signal of awakening for a surprising number of writers in the trajectory we are concerned with, especially Benjamin himself. Awakened in this way, the subject itself turns into an amplifier and reflector of light, if we are to trust Baudelaire’s wonderful description of “the perfect flâneur,” which Benjamin cites in The Arcades Project: “We might also liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which, with each one of its movements, represents the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.”50 The final chapter of this study will be a contemplation of this light, the uncanny image of light encoded by certain writers in terms of a strange friendship. *** The works we will register in Chapters five through seven—by Carson, Vila-Matas, Aira, and others—present criteria for a new category of writing, in which an understanding of reality as mere appearance, mere light, is intensified to the point that it becomes, in the words of novelist Adam Thilwell, “permeable to dreams.”51 Here we can glimpse a use of language and writing that corresponds to a philosophy of “shimmering surfaces” that finds exemplary expression in the dream, where even the deepest realms of the subconscious become nothing more than a glistening surface. Thilwell’s reading of suppressed Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky shows how the sort of oneiric intensification at issue in the works we are concerned with is inherently political, and therefore a variation of the harmony Blanchot sought between the inside and outside of the novel and of Agamben’s concept of deactivation. “ The more reality becomes a matter of pure appearance,” Thilwell writes, following David Hume, “the more it is therefore permeable to dreams. If vivacity is the only criterion of reality, then a new reality can be created if the dream is strong enough.”52 This statement evokes the theory of dreams developed by Lacan. As Carson notes in an essay on sleep found in her Decreation collection, Lacan’s psychoanalytic alegebras develop a notion of sleep as “a space from which the sleeper can travel in two directions, both of them a kind of waking.”53 She praises this therapeutic method of healing because of its special hopefulness, which consists in “a continuity between the realms of waking and sleeping, whereby a bit of something incognito may cross over from night to day and change the life of the sleeper.”54 What is this incognito element? We can begin to glimpse it, according to Carson, in the way that Lacan’s dream therapy resonates with the project carried out at the ancient temple of Asklepios at Epidauros, where sick people slept the night in order to dream their own cure. An account of one of the sleep cures at Epidauros is an exemplary expression of how a philosophy of perception becomes indistinguishable from a philosophy of politics via the fulcrum of the dream, a process mimicked or carried out in literature. According to the ancient text, which Carson cites in her essay: There came as a suppliant to the god Asklepios a man who was so one-eyed that on the left he had only lids, there was nothing, just emptiness. People in the temple laughed at him for thinking he would see with an eye that was not there. But in

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a vision that appeared to him as he slept, the god seemed to boil some medicine and, drawing apart the lids, poured it in. When day came the man went out, seeing with both eyes.55

For Carson, nothing is more hopeful than this story of an empty eye filled with seeing as it sleeps. Following Lacan, she could say that the one-eyed man has decided to journey all the way in the direction of his dream and so awakes to a reality more real than the waking world: “He dove into the nothingness of his eye and is awakened by too much light.”56 Benjamin also thinks of ancient Greece when writing on the transformative power of dreams: “One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld—a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise.”57 The Paris arcades of the late nineteenth century strike Benjamin as one of these certain hidden points, and even the underworld of the arcades has its own, even deeper, underworld: intricately detailed dioramas, hidden and strikingly illuminated by a strange light. It is here, in the dioramas, that Benjamin’s flâneurs find the same sort of magical light that is perceived in the dream of the suppliant at Asklepios. In a singular passage from the Arcades Project Benjamin recounts the experience of entering this light in ecstatic terms: The innermost glowing cells of the ville lumiere, the old dioramas, nested in these arcades, one of which today still bears the name Passage des Panoramas. It was, in the very first moment, as though you had entered an aquarium. Along the wall of the great darkened hall, broken at intervals by narrow joints, it stretched like a land of illuminated water behind glass. The play of colors among deep-sea fauna cannot be more fiery. But what came to light here were open-air, atmospheric wonders. Seraglios are mirrored on moonlit waters; bright night in deserted parks loom large. In the moonlight you can recognize the chateau of Saint-Leu, where a 100 years ago the last Conde was found hanged in a window. A light is still burning in a window of the chateau. A couple of times the sun splashes wide in between. In the clear light of a summer morning, one sees the rooms of the Vatican as they would have appeared to the Nazarenes; not far beyond rises Baden-Baden in its entirety, and were we not writing of 1860, one could perhaps make out its figurines, on a scale of 1:10,000, Dostoevsky on the casino terrace. But candlelight, too, is honored. Wax tapers encircle the murdered Duc de Berry in the dusky cathedral that serves as the mortuary chapel, and hanging lamps in the skies beside practically put round Luna to shame. It was an unparalleled experiment on the moonstruck magic night of Romanticism, and its noble substance emerged victorious from this ingenious trial.58

Here, the light of the diorama in the dream world of the arcades opens up the surfaces of an entire artificial world; one that bleeds into the substance of the real one in Benjamin’s perception via the mechanism of historical reference. What is found here, nested deep in these enclosed corridors, is indeed the real world, with real people

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(Dostoevsky, de Berry) bathed in the light of the dream. The effect is to show the essence of the real world to be the same as that of the dream, the free play of light as it moves along the surface, never to be absorbed in the depths of psychology that are now turned to the outside as part of the kaleidoscopic milieu that can always be found there. Benjamin finds an awakening here, tunneled away from reality (“It was an unparalleled experiment”), one that derives in a fundamental way, he tells us, from the gesture of Romanticism. What is this gesture, and why does Benjamin figure it in terms of light? Agamben has suggested that artistic Romanticism can be understood as a response to the tension between art conceived, on one hand, as a disinterested attention to form and, on the other, a rapturous desire to extend a particularly overwhelming experience in some way via a medium.59 Romanticism rejects this divide altogether in order to develop a theory of the indivisibility of sound and sense, semiotics and semantics, style and subject matter, in the sense that each element of the pair is not autonomous but rather both are different intensities or currents that traverse the same linguistic substance. The poem oscillates between these polar intensities without ever coinciding with them. If the light of Benjamin’s encounter with the diorama is the magic light of Romanticism, then this magic must consist of a synthesis that would correspond to the Romantic conception of indivisibility or oscillation in art. This would be a variation of the synthesis between dream life and waking life that is found in awakening, and of the harmony Blanchot posits between the novel’s inside and its outside. In another citation from The Arcades Project Benjamin momentarily fixes this magic light in an image that becomes a signature or emblem of the constellation the present work aims to trace, the cipher that opens up the meaning of Benjamin’s “cunning” use of language. We will return to this signature, which is encoded in works by many of the writers of the No, in the final chapter, where we conclude our examination of the ways they tell the passage beyond ontology and literature. *** This liminal movement is often figured in terms of an aperture or a tear in Being, one that allows a different world to explode into this one. Carson approaches it by extending Lacan’s praise of sleep as “a blindness which nonetheless looks back at us” into the realm of reading and writing.60 The blindness of the dream is not the blindness of being unable to see anything. Rather, it is the blindness that results from an abundance of light: “He dove into the nothingness of his eye and is awakened by too much light.”61 The dream, the nothingness of his eye, looks back at him via this abundance, which overflows his sockets so much it could be said to be a type of blindness, the blindness of a lightning strike that becomes the blindness of a transformation, a là Saul/Paul of Tarsus or Johann Moritz Rugendas, César Aira’s landscape painter who is knocked from his horse in a flash that seems to intensify and extend the Pauline trajectories of messianic displacement and transformation that were initiated by the incident on the road to Damascus. This light is the light of the collective entity Benjamin glimpsed between street corners and in alleyways, which

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announces its appearance with a look back at the flâneur lucky enough, or intoxicated enough, to give rise to it. The flâneur is beholden to a new space that is stamped by this look, a wink from the void that charges objects with an intelligibility that bursts forth to propel the flâneur to the awakenings that, Benjamin indicates, joyfully erase the subject and therefore free it to participate in the creation of the world and the forward dawning of thought that can only occur when we brush up against the nothing. Benjamin beautifully describes this space in a fragment on mirrors and light in the arcades: The space that transforms itself does so in the bosom of nothingness. In its tarnished, dirtied mirrors, things exchange a Kaspar-Hauser-look with the nothing: it is an utterly equivocal wink coming from nirvana. And here, again, we are brushed with icy breath by the dandyish name of Odilon Redon, who caught, like no one else, this look of things in the mirror of nothingness, and who understood, like no one else, how to join with things in their collusion with nonbeing. There is no thing here that does not, where one least expects it, open a fugitive eye, blinking it shut again; and should you look more closely, it is gone.62

Each writer in our constellation is an acolyte of this winking light, the light of a strange recognition, and the awakening it harbors as it works its way in language, a blindness that is the only way to the vision of the student or the scholar, sight’s capacity for immediate hermeneutic citation, for unexpectedly referring its objects into a new array of intelligibility, a new image that can only arise in the empty space cleaved by the subject’s disappearance. While up to this point we have explored the link between these understandings of the image and the subject, on one hand, and the task or “forward dawning” of language and literature, on the other, now we can fully turn our attention to the writers that take this disappearance as their own point of departure. *** The writers of the No welcome the ethical and political challenge posed by an ontology of disappearance/appearance, which is to conceive of an existence in which language is not a trap one finds oneself in or an original sin that must be expiated. Rather, these writers imagine a new human innocence or infancy in which, in the words of Agamben’s encounter with novelist Elsa Morante, “the creature from limbo lifts up its fragile arm against the historical tragedy of a language in a hopeless gesture, in a silent confrontation whose outcome cannot be easily understood.”63 This study can, then, also be read as an extended commentary on these fragmentary remarks on Morante found in the last of four appendices to Agamben’s book The End of the Poem, on this “outcome that cannot be easily understood.” This is where the sense of negation implied in Blanchot’s writing about the disappearance of literature attains perhaps its most vivid image, that derived from Morante’s tragic claim in a poem from Alibi: “There is no Elysium outside limbo.”64 As Agamben explains, “limbo is the place not of innocents but rather of those who have no other guilt than natural guilt, of

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those infants who could not have been submitted to the punishment of language and to whom Elsa looked lovingly for her whole life.”65 What links between history, art, and language allow us to glimpse this image of infancy? And what process of learning could stimulate such a “hopeless” gesture of defiance that rises from it? The pursuit of Blanchot’s claim about literature’s disappearance and of Morante’s image of an infant in limbo leads to an interrogation of writing at its limits, where the experience of the work, as reader or author, becomes a paradigm for the disappearance of subjectivity itself. This new writing continually points beyond itself, not to an ineffable transcendence, but toward a new form of being outside of being, a new way of life that breaks through the constraints of identity that are upheld by linguistic signification. In this way, this study is also devoted to the continued taxonomy of “the literary art of refusal,” a category that could be defined by Vila-Matas’s reference to Hofmannsthal’s emblematic text “Letter of Lord Chandos,” which he sees as “a manifesto of the passing away of the word, the shipwreck of the ego, in the convulsed and indistinct flow of things which can no longer be named or tamed by language.”66 This “taxonomy of the breakdown of taxonomy,” or whatever else it could be called, should not merely identify a monolithic term, such as “the disappearance of literature” or “the erasure of the subject,” but would preferably open new avenues of interrogation along the creative trajectories springing from what these concepts, in their multiple forms of intelligibility, do for community, philosophy, art, and language. In these ways, we may begin to see how the becoming indistinct of disappearance/ appearance is the theme that carries the meaning of Blanchot’s sense of literary negation. In the words of Agamben, “here we can say that something ends forever and something begins and that what begins, begins only in what ends.”67 The rebirth at issue is carried out in the movement to and from the inexpressible or the unavowable, the ecstatic experience of a creature coaxed outside itself by the shattering appearance of the “community of those who have no community,” or a community of two, the reader and the writer, or of lovers, anyone involved in the extreme abandonment of the self for the other that follows no external law and is, therefore, for Blanchot, a “return to the wilderness that does not even transgress prohibitions, given that it ignores them, or to the ‘anogistic’ (Holderlin) which unsettles any social relationship . . . and cannot be satisfied with a society of two where the reciprocity of the “I-you” would reign, but prefers to invoke the original, precreational chaos, the night without end, the outside, the fundamental unhinging . . .”68 For Agamben, this type of love, the “unhinging of the self,” opens the space of politics through its orientation toward the vicissitudes of unindividuated experience, which he partly develops via the Roman conception of Genius, the god that accompanies each person and opens the gate to the impersonal: “Witnessing the pleasure and the passion of others is the supreme emotion and the first politics because we seek in the other the relationship with Genius which we are incapable of grasping on our own.”69 What does Genius demand? Everything: “One must consent to Genius and abandon oneself to him; one must grant him everything he asks for . . . If in order to write you need—he needs!—a certain light yellow paper, a certain special pen, a certain dim light shining from the left, it is useless to tell yourself that just any pen will do, that any paper and any light will suffice.”70 The absolute

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asymmetry of one’s abandonment to Genius or to the other, then, corresponds to the structure of the writer’s relationship to the nonontological absolute, the ceaseless dawning of a collective intellectual movement that Genius unveils and which Agamben pursues and defines, after Averroes, as “thought that is unique and separate from the individuals who use their imaginations and fantasies to join with it from time to time.”71 What, exactly, does the writer find here, where, as Jeff Fort, Translator of both Agamben and Blanchot, tells us, “the nature of the novelistic world, however ‘unreal,’ and the nature of the ‘real’ world both have their common source in the most essential operations of language?”72 Blanchot, a novelist himself, offers one description of the writer’s journey that perhaps is authorized by his own experience: “he heads towards those strange tenebrous regions where he seems to awaken in the deepest sleep, towards that pure presence where things appear so bare and so reduced that no image is possible, towards that primordial spectacle where he never tires of contemplating what can be seen only after a complete self-transformation.”73 The “pure presence” of the self-unfolding of the world is the originary element of the world, its “essence” as forward dawning and unveiling. The startling reality of this essence, Blanchot tells us, is that it is accompanied by the appearance of a strange language that somehow continues something of this originary unfolding (Carson’s “incognito” element) while also leaving it inexpressible and unavowed. What remains unavowed is precisely the movement of transcendence, when a new world and a new language derive from words that would otherwise ossify in a denial of the “knowing representation” that is the limit of language. This movement is perhaps most forcefully articulated by Stéphane Mallarmé, a writer important for Blanchot as well as Agamben and VilaMatas because of his awareness, according to Blanchot, that “language is an absolute, the very form of transcendence, and that it can nonetheless find its way into a human work.”74 This idea bears the meaning of the moving paragraph that concludes The Unavowable Community and ends up being the point of departure for what remains of this study: The unvavowable community: does that mean that it does not acknowledge itself or that it is such that no avowal may reveal it, given that each time we have talked about its way of being, one has had the feeling that one grasped only what makes it exist by default? So, would it have been better to have remained silent? . . . Wittgenstein’s all too famous and all too often repeated precept, “Whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent”—given that by enunciating it he has not been able to impose silence on himself—does indicate that in the final analysis one has to talk in order to remain silent. But with what kinds of words? That is one of the questions this little book entrusts to others, not that they may answer it, rather that they may choose to carry it with them, and, perhaps, extend it. Thus one will discover that it also carries an exacting political meaning and that it does not permit us to lose interest in the present time which, by opening unknown spaces of freedom, makes us responsible for new relationships, always threatened, always hoped for, between what we call work, oevre, and what we call unworking, désoeuvrement.75

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5

Anne Carson and the Study of Mysticism

Anne Carson takes up the theme of an immanent mysticism in order to develop the theory of mystical writing that she offers in a brief essay, “Decreation,” the conceptual fulcrum for her collection of the same name, which includes forms as varied as opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, and rapture. The essay’s subtitle states its constellation: “How women like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God.” In the first three of four brief sections Carson examines how the mystical tendencies of these women counter the negativity of traditional mysticism, its blindness to what captivates it, in favor of a positive mysticism, one that opens up a world rather than closes it off, that unwinds the self instead of sealing it up. In the fourth section she considers the relationship between this new mysticism and writing. In order to open Carson’s text onto the genealogy of literature’s disappearance that we are tracing, we can try to follow it through each of its four touchstones. This encounter should aim for concision, to honor that which Carson offers in her essay, which is a jewel of brevity and lightning flashes of awakening. As Carson indicates in her short introduction, Part One is about Sappho, who she characterizes as “a Greek poet of the seventh century BC who lived on the island of Lesbos, wrote some famous poetry about love and is said to have organized her life around worship of the god Aphrodite.”1 Carson’s text is a reading of Sappho’s thirtyfirst fragment, which says: He seems to me equal to gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me no: no tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass

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I am and dead—or almost I seem to me. But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty . . .2

For Carson, this last line that breaks off carries the meaning of the poem. She says that it distinguishes the question it asks from the “predictable lovesong complaint,” Why don’t you love me?, which would be one way of misreading the scene of jealousy depicted in the fragment. Rather, Sappho may be posing a deeper spiritual question, one about the “theology of love”: What is it that love dares the self to do? To understand the pertinence with which Carson raises this question, we must first detail the scene that Sappho offers. Carson notes how it is bathed in a “weirdly enclosed light of introspection,” which indicates a thought experiment; she is staging an ambiguously erotic scenario “inside the little theatre of her mind.”3 The characters are anonymous, she says, their encounter obscure: “It is hard to tell what the man is doing there, why the girl is laughing, how Sappho’s response to them makes sense.”4 Carson wonders if the characters’ ambiguity or lack of depth serves to emphasize their relative positions in Sappho’s image: “Sappho seems less interested in these characters as individuals than in the geometric figure that they form. This figure has three lines and three angles. One line connects the girl’s voice and laughter to a man who listens close. A second connects the girl to Sappho. Between the eye of Sappho and the listening man runs a third. The figure is a triangle.”5 This triangulation sets the stage for a reflection on jealousy that never actually takes place. Instead, after the first stanza, Sappho seems to forget the other two people in the scene entirely to focus the spotlight onto herself. For Carson, this movement indicates that the poem is actually not about jealousy. Rather, jealousy is just a figure, a way of inscribing a certain subjective modality into the experience of the text: “A jealous lover covets a certain location at the centre of her beloved’s affection only to find it occupied by someone else. If jealousy were a dance it would be a pattern of placement and displacement. Its emotional focus is unstable. Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves.”6 The displacement that is initiated in the first stanza intensifies after that in what Carson calls an “unexpectedly spiritual spectacle” in which Sappho’s own subjectivity begins to disintegrate, along with the objects of her perception.7 She “describes her own perceptual abilities (visual, aural, tactile) reduced to dysfunction one after another; she shows us the objects of outer sense emptying themselves.”8 And then, just when it seems that Sappho is about to enter the mode of traditional mysticism that posits a blindness to what overwhelmingly captivates, just when the scene is set to dissolve, something else appears in an even sharper light. “And there,” Carson writes, “on the brightly lit stage at the centre of her perception appears—her own Being: “I am . . .,” she says at verse 15 (“greener than grass I am”).”9 Here Sappho predicates of her own Being an attribute observable only from outside her own body, in a formulation of ecstasy that aligns with the para-ontology we traced earlier: “ ‘Greener than grass I am . . .” In the context of Sappho’s Greek, Carson notes, “this is the condition called ekstasis, literally ‘standing outside oneself,’ a condition regarded by the Greeks as typical of mad persons, geniuses and lovers, and ascribed to poets by Aristotle.”10 This ecstasy signals another shift in the poem, one marked by

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an experience of near-death (“and dead—or almost”). There, at the end of the fourth verse, the poem seems to break down and stop, like Sappho herself, only to start up again in the fragmentary last verse: “All is to be dared because even a person of poverty . . .,” What type of rebirth is this? Carson treads carefully onto this terrain: “It is a new thought. The content of the thought is absolute daring. The condition of the thought is poverty. I don’t want to give the impression that I know what this verse is saying or that I see where the poem is headed from here, I don’t. Overall it leaves me wondering.”11 Through this sense of wonderment, which pervades Decreation, Carson, a classicist, inscribes in her narrative perspective the exact definition of study that Agamben traces to its Latin roots and connects to an ontology of potentiality in Idea of Prose, the etymology of studium, which implies an incessant oscillation between the subjective poles of stupefied astonishment and the pursuit of closure.12 The page that remains in the first section of Carson’s essay attests to the oscillation of study that Agamben articulates, as she moves from pure wonderment to an attempt to open Sappho’s text to a sphere of intelligibility that it never had before, an intelligibility that coincides with the student’s subjective mode of oscillation and the potentiality generated or revealed by its constant evasion of any set identity or individuality as well as its ability to detach from the impersonal element of the world’s unfolding and enthrallment enough to not be captured by it, to not absorb it in an interiority but to let it flit along the surface like so many beams of light. For Carson, the special mode of potentiality found in study is also inscribed in the last line of Sappho’s fragment. Since the poem is clearly about love, Carson approaches this last line by considering the possible relationship between daring and love: “What is it that love dares the self to do?”13 As she explains, “Daring enters the poem in the last verse when Sappho uses the word tolmaton: ‘is to be dared.’ This word is a verbal adjective and expresses a mood of possibility. Sappho says it is an absolute potential: pan tolmaton: all is to be dared.”14 As Carson notes, when the poem breaks off at the end, Sappho is on the verge of consenting to this absolute daring. But if we wonder why, she continues, we are left without words, just as we seem to be left without Sappho and just as she seems to be left without herself: “Why does she consent? Her explanation no longer exists. So far as it goes, it leads us back to her ecstatic condition. For when an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do?, she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.”15 Here, where Sappho ceases to write, her gesture is aligned with that of Bartleby, who permanently disavows any act in favor of a continual leave-taking, or, more accurately, the leave-taking of leave-taking itself, an absolute potential. *** Part Two of “Decreation” focuses on Marguerite Porete, who, Carson argues, extends Sappho’s notion of an ecstatic, “absolutely daring” love into the realm of the experience of the divine. Porete was burned alive by the papal inquisition in the public square of Paris in 1310 because she had written a heretical book about the love of God. Carson

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describes this book, The Mirror of Souls, as “a kind of handbook for people seeking God.”16 Porete’s central doctrine is that love consists of seven stages that a human soul may pass through, starting with a period of “boiling desire,” to “an ecstasy in which the soul is carried outside her own Being and leaves herself behind.”17 Carson explains this schema and its relation to Sappho’s fragment: Like Sappho she sees herself split in two by this consent and experiences it as a kind of “annihilation.” Marguerite’s reasoning is severe: she understands the essence of her human self to be in her free will and she decides that free will has been placed in her by God in order that she may give it back. She therefore causes her will to depart from its own will and render itself back to God with nothing left over.18

Carson notes that it is striking, especially in light of Sappho’s account of ecstasy and poverty, that Marguerite twice describes her subjective mode in the instant when God’s abundance overflows her as “I who am in the abyss of absolute poverty.”19 She further refers to this poverty as a condition of physical and metaphysical negation: “Now such a Soul is nothing, for she sees her nothingness by means of the abundance of divine understanding, which makes her nothing and places her in nothingness.”20 She continues to emphasize this impoverishment throughout her book by speaking of herself as worthless, deficient, null, deprived, and naked. But, Carson says, “at the same time she recognizes her poverty as an amazing and inexpressible kind of repletion; and of this absolute emptiness which is also absolute fullness she speaks in erotic language, referring to God as ‘overflowing and abundant Lover’ or as ‘the Spouse of my youth’. ”21 This recalls the “self-nourishment of the soul” that emanates from the long dwelling in potential, the disappearance or emptiness of the subject that characterizes study in Agamben’s formulation, the ontological structure of which is duplicated in Porete’s conception of the fullness of poverty. And, in another striking similarity to Sappho, Marguerite frames this notion in a strange image of jealousy. She twice offers jealousy as a figure for her relationship with God, referring to God as “the most high Jealous One.”22 She writes, “Jealous he is truly! He shows it by his works which have stripped me of myself absolutely and have placed me in divine pleasure without myself. And such a union joins and conjoins me through the sovereign highness of creation with the brilliance of divine being, by which I have being which is being.”23 Here, as Carson observes, we can begin to glimpse a “strange erotic triangle consisting of God, Marguerite, and Marguerite.”24 Its movement of displacement has the same ecstatic effect as the three-person scene in Sappho’s fragment: “Marguerite feels her self pulled apart from itself and thrown into a condition of poverty, to which she consents.”25 While Sappho expresses this type of consent with her simple formulation of absolute daring, Marguerite’s takes the form of a complex triangular fantasy: . . . and I pondered, as if God were asking me, how would I fare if I knew that he preferred me to love another more than himself? And at this my sense failed me and I knew not what to say. Then he asked me how would I fare if it could

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happen he should love another more than me? And here my sense failed me and I knew not what to say . . . Beyond this, he asked me what would I do and how would I fare if it could be he preferred another to love me more than he . . . And there I fainted away for I could say nothing to these three things, nor refuse, nor deny.26 (165)

As Carson emphasizes, this is another articulation of jealousy as a dance in which everyone moves. Just as Sappho imagines its possibilities as a thought experiment in the theater of her mind, so does Marguerite Porete turn her fantasy from one position to another, conceiving its anguish from every angle. For Carson, Marguerite’s text draws out the nuances of this dance in an especially intense way, by articulating its mode of being as that of a dialectical relationship between two subjective poles: It is a dance with a dialectical nature. For the jealous lover must balance two contradictory realities within her heart: on the one hand, that of herself at the centre of the universe and in command of her own will, offering love to her beloved; on the other, that of herself off the centre of the universe and in despite of her own will, watching her beloved love someone else. Naked collision of these two realities brings the lover to a sort of breakdown—as we saw in Sappho’s poem—whose effect is to expose her very Being to its own scrutiny and to dislodge it from the centre of itself. It would be a very high test of dialectical endurance to be able to, not just recognize, but consent to this breakdown. Sappho seems to be entering on a mood of consent when her poem stops. Marguerite faints 3 times before she can manage it.27

The ontological structure of this experience, the “naked collision” of dialectical elements that halts the dialectical operation entirely in a breakdown, corresponds precisely to Walter Benjamin’s notion of dialectics at a standstill, which Carson alludes to earlier in the same collection when she invokes his theory of citation. In Porete and Benjamin, both dialectical poles cease their frenetic movement; the dance of jealousy halts just as the dialectical image freezes the elements of thought in a constellation. And just as Agamben’s reading of Benjamin discerns a new subject that appears in the space freed up in between the dialectical standstill, left to be outside of being, so does Carson’s reading of Marguerite Porete glimpse an absolute subjective transformation rising from the dialectical “breakdown,” one that moves beyond traditional notions of love and selfhood. Marguerite explains that these concepts only instantiate the dialectical machine of jealousy, while God bids her to leave it behind: “And so long as I was at ease and loved myself ‘with’ him, I could not at all contain myself or have calm: I was held in bondage by which I could not move . . . I loved myself so much along ‘with’ him that I could not answer loyally . . . Yet all at once he demanded my response, if I did not want to lose both myself and him . . . I said to him that he must want to test me in all points.”28 Here, Carson notes, “Marguerite realizes that her loyalty to God is actually thwarted by her love of him because this feeling, like most human erotic feeling, is largely self-love: it puts Marguerite in bondage to Marguerite rather than

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to God.”29 Marguerite’s line of thought thus uses the figure of jealousy in two ways: as an “explanation of her own feelings of inner division,” and as a “test of her ability to de-centre herself, to move out of the way, to clear her own heart and her own will off the path that leads to God.”30 This path is not the trajectory of the metaphysical sacred, nor does it lead to a god that would have been easily assimilated into the legalistic strictures of religion, as the categories of the law—will and necessity—are what Marguerite casts aside in favor of the absolute potentiality and univocity of God’s being and her own. Carson describes this movement toward being as “one” as an absolute negation of the three perspectives of jealousy: “For in order to (as she says) ‘answer God loyally’ she cannot stay one with her own heart or with her own will, she cannot love her own love or love herself loving or love being loved. And insofar as she can ‘annihilate’ all these—her term—she can resolve the three angles of the dance of jealousy into a single nakedness and reduce her Being from three to two to one.”31 The final expression of univocity in The Mirror of Souls is in this way an exemplary formulation of the absolute potentiality that Sappho exhibits in her poem. Marguerite writes: “Now this Soul . . . has left three and has made two one. But in what does this one consist? This one is when the soul is rendered into the simple Deity, in full knowing, without feeling, beyond thought . . . Higher no one can go, deeper no one can go, more naked no human can be.”32 *** In Part Three of her essay, Carson considers how the texts of Sappho and Marguerite Porete bear a startling resonance with the writing of Simone Weil. Carson locates this connection in Weil’s notebooks that describe a program for moving the self out of the way so as to arrive at God, which she called “decreation.”33 “The self,” Weil writes, “is only a shadow projected by sin and error which blocks God’s light and which I take for a Being.”34 Like Marguerite Porete, she tells of a desire to give back to God the self that he has given to her: “We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say ‘I.’ This is what we must yield up to God.”35 Her conception of this yielding as a kind of test is another point of similarity with Marguerite: “God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him. It is like one of those traps whereby the characters are tested in fairy tales. If I accept this gift it is bad and fatal; its virtue becomes apparent through my refusal of it. God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization.”36 Carson notes a further affinity with Marguerite, a sense that she is an obstacle to herself inwardly: “The process of decreation is for her a dislodging of herself from a centre where she cannot stay because staying there blocks God.”37 And, as for Marguerite, there is nothing less at stake in this process than the ability to experience God’s love. Simone writes: “God can love in us only this consent to withdraw in order to make way for him.”38 For Carson, this statement about withdrawal and consent initiates “a strangely daring and difficult negotiation” that seems to evoke both Sappho and Marguerite. In the beautiful passage that follows this statement in Simone’s notebook, she weaves her idea of God together with her love of the world to articulate an idea of ontological univocity. Like Sappho and Marguerite,

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she also figures this idea in terms of a unique erotic triangle. As Carson explains, here Simone Weil “wants to discover in the three-cornered figure of jealousy those lines of force that connect a soul to God. She does not, however, fantasize relationships with ordinary human lovers. The erotic triangle she constructs is one involving God, herself, and the whole of creation.”39 Simone writes, in a passage that is exemplary of the disappearance we are tracing in this study: All the things that I see, hear, breathe, touch, eat; all the beings I meet—I deprive the sum total of all that of contact with God, and I deprive God of contact with all that insofar as something in me says “I.” I can do something for all that and for God—namely, retire and respect the tete-a-tete . . . I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves. It is tactless of me to be there. It is as though I were placed between two lovers or two friends. I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed but the unwelcome third who is with two betrothed lovers and ought to go away so that they can really be together. If only I knew how to disappear there would be a perfect union of love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear . . .40

Carson notes that the keys to Simone’s quest to disappear are already present in Marguerite Porete and Sappho: “If only she could become what Marguerite Porete calls an ‘annihiliated soul,’ if only she could achieve the transparency of Sappho’s ecstatic condition ‘greener than grass and almost dead,’ Simone Weil would feel she had relieved the world of an indiscretion.”41 This indiscretion consists in absorbing God’s light, the light of the world, in an interiority that disperses it throughout the orders of representation that constitute the self. In this sense, Simone’s program of decreation resonates with the modality that Benjamin glimpses in the flâneur, a “kaleidoscopic” being that would never capture the light of the world’s unfolding, only reflect it and redirect it, with a difference, as part of a dazzling array of images that flit along surfaces in a continual process of becoming. The further purpose of the figure of jealousy becomes clear here, as the challenge posed by an ontology of potentiality and disappearance. This perspective demands a resolution to jealousy: it raises it as the fundamental diagnosis of a subject that can no longer proceed on the path to God—the world that dawns forward—because it is too individualized, too apt to absorb light rather than participate in its dazzling movement through the outside. As Carson says, everybody moves in the dance of jealousy because one of them is always extra—three people trying to sit on two chairs. In other words, one has to go. Marguerite Porete acknowledges this diagnosis and sets apart the one that has to go, herself, by what Carson calls a “canny” use of quotation marks: “I loved myself so much along ‘with’ him that I could not answer loyally.”42 For Carson, this is Marguerite’s attempt to use “the simplest language and the plainest marks to express a profoundly tricky spiritual fact, viz. that I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along. And so in the deepest possible sense I can never be alone with God. I can only be alone ‘with’ God.”43 The productive aspect of the diagnostic mechanism of jealousy is then revealed, because “to catch sight of this fact brings a wrench in perception, forces

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the perceiver to a point where she has to disappear from herself in order to look.”44 Simone Weil longingly describes this point: “If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. But when I am in any place I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart.”45 These mystics tell us, Carson says, that this is a landscape “where joy is so full that it seems to go unexperienced.”46 As Marguerite Porete writes, “Such a Soul . . . swims in the sea of joy—that is in the sea of delights flowing and streaming from the Divinity, and she feels no joy for she herself is joy, and swims and floats in joy without feeling any joy because she inhabits Joy and Joy inhabits her . . .”47 Simone Weil, however, Carson notes, finds this kind of joyless joy not an experience of swimming, but one of exclusion and negation, of stillness and disappearance. Simone writes: “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying ‘I’. ”48 The terms of this formulation of mysticism should be familiar by now, as they recall Blanchot’s and Agamben’s articulation of the asymmetrical ontological relationship between the object and the subject that is held in its sway. Unlike traditional mysticism, as we have seen, this version does not refer the subject to the transcendent nothingness that Kojève described. On the contrary, it opens onto a sphere of intelligibility, or of potential intelligibility, a piece of writing, a notebook, a fragmentary poem, a heretical treatise. None of these signifies in the order of representation founded by the nothingness that Kojève inherited from Hegel. Rather, their asignifying words register in creative spheres of the self-unfolding of the world, as marks that humbly deign to gesture to what they refer to, the unfolding, rather than trying to represent it, in the facile image, for instance, of the moth inexorably drawn to the flame. *** The question of the limits of mystical writing, then, is not located where Kojève wishes, not where it is enshrined in a metaphysical ground of nothingness, but in the same location as the question of the limits of the gesture, which is a place that cannot be glimpsed through the dark lens of metaphysics. In the fourth and final part of her essay Carson tries to locate this place, which is the limit of language itself. Are there vicissitudes of experience, she inquires of these mystics, that will always render their telling to be an absolute contradiction, even in the immanent mode of gestural language? Yes, but this does not mean that they reach a point where language breaks down. Rather, they rest within the contradiction and carry it on in their own works, which must, however, still seem extremely impersonal to them. They are exposed to what demands silence, and, in accordance with Wittgenstein’s tenet that Blanchot invokes at the end of The Unavowable Community, they recognize that the only viable place for this silence is in writing. For them, this literary principle evokes the very form of their mystical experience. Just as the mystical subject is absolutely detached from herself, from her own subjectivity, but yet keeps functioning in a very important way as a manifestation of the self-unfolding of the world, so does this experience compel her to write while maintaining a full awareness of the absolute gap that separates this writing from what it emanates from. And yet the special “ignorance” of

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this writing, to use Agamben’s term, allows a whole new world to spring up in the gap. This paradox, that of telling from the nonplace of subjective disappearance, is evoked by Carson in Part Four when she notes how Marguerite Porete’s work goes beyond the Hegelian dialectic: Her common images carry us beyond the dialectical account of God and soul. For dialectic is a mode of reasoning and an application of the intellectual self. But the soul that has been driven by love into God, the soul consumed as into fire, dissolved as if into water—such a soul has no intact intellect of the ordinary human kind with which to construe dialectical relationships. In other words such a soul passes beyond the place where she can tell what she knows. To tell is a function of the self.49

Marguerite expresses this contradiction in blunt terms at the beginning of Mirror of Souls, when she claims that no one who talks about God can have experienced God’s Love, because such Love “takes away absolutely the practice of telling”: “For whoever talks about God . . . must not doubt but must know without doubt . . . that he has never felt the true kernel of divine Love which makes the soul absolutely dazzled without being aware of it. For this is the true purified kernel of divine Love which is without creaturely matter and given by the Creator to a creature and takes away absolutely the practice of telling.”50 As Carson notes, Marguerite emphasizes this point later by arguing that once a soul has encountered divine Love, no one but God ever understands that soul again. This gives rise to the writerly paradox, because, despite these clear formulations of the absolute impossibility of telling anything of divine Love, Marguerite goes on to write 139 chapters about exactly this topic, a detailed, step-by-step account of the soul’s progress toward the annihilation wrought by God’s Love. As Carson says, “we might wonder what all this telling is about. But we are unlikely to receive an answer from Marguerite Porete herself. Nor I think will any prudent writer on matters of God and soul venture to nail such things down. Quite the contrary, to leave us in wonder is just what such a writer feels compelled to do.”51 Here Carson again invokes the wonder of the student, as the mode of potentiality this type of mystical writing gives rise to, the mode of dialectics at a standstill, where an image of thought or language may arise that spurs the forward dawning of thought, the unfolding of a new world. She explicitly emphasizes the mode of study as she marks out the remainder of her essay, which will focus on this compulsion to leave us in wonder: “We have said that telling is a function of self. If we study the way these three writers talk about their own telling, we can see how each of them feels moved to create a sort of dream of distance in which the self is displaced from the centre of the work and the teller disappears into the telling.”52 In this sort of disappearance, when the telling is all that remains, the words that appear are told by nobody. As Simone Weil writes, “In the operation of writing, the hand which holds the pen and the body and soul attached to it are things infinitely small in the order of nothingness.”53 These words thus do not speak of any sort of existing world or appeal to any sort of presupposition, because these need a subjective perspective. This level of absolute immanence moves beyond knowledge and being, and yet the

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words that appear from it reach back into the world of subject and object, only to summon it to dissolve by awakening readers. In this way a writer who has disappeared, and only this type of writer, may tell what is near and far at once; only she may reify the paradox of telling what absolutely escapes our language, because she is not the one telling: such a one does not exist. To be both near and far in this sense recalls a passage near the end of The Open, where Agamben ascribes this paradox to the special modality of the pataphysical being that has let both poles of its subjective oscillation be outside of being. For him, “it is neither open nor closed, it is outside of being; it is outside in an exteriority more external than any open, and inside in an intimacy more internal than any closedness.”54 Simone Weil expresses this idea by imagining a world where the typical boundaries between potential and act no longer exist. Simone, who, as Carson says, “had a problem with eating her whole life,” glimpses this world via a figure of the indistinction of eating and looking. Simone writes: “Man’s great affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.”55 As Carson explains, here Simone “creates in her mind a dream of distance where food can be enjoyed perhaps from across the room merely by looking at it, where desire need not end in perishing, where the lover can stay, at the same time, near to and far from the object of her love.”56 In other words, what is at stake in the paradox of telling of a mystical experience, as in the paradoxical breakdown of nearness and farness of food that can be enjoyed by a mere look, is the abeyance of an absolute potentiality, where desire does not so much precede its object as follow it, where light conveys what is essential about the object or person we encounter, what opens these to our enjoyment: an apple, a face, a pure vibrant surface. Simone, who wants to maintain this abeyance at all costs, goes so far as to conceive of her own existence as an exemplary figure of absolute potential, that of a book. Before she left France for America in 1942, Simone left her notebooks behind in the hands of Gustave Thibon, a farmer who owned the vineyard she had been working in. Her final letter to him closes with a gentle piece of advice: “I also like to think that after the slight shock of separation you will not feel any sorrow about whatever may be in store for me and that if you should happen sometimes to think of me you will do so as one thinks of a book read in childhood . . .”57 Carson extends this thought with a memory of her own childhood book: When I think of books read in childhood they come to my mind’s eye in violent foreshortening and framed by a precarious darkness, but at the same time they glow somehow with an almost supernatural intensity of life that no adult book could ever effect. I remember a little book of The Lives of the Saints that was given to me about age 5. In this book the various flowers composing the crowns of the martyrs were so lusciously rendered in words and paint that I had to be restrained from eating the pages. It is interesting to speculate what taste I was expecting from those pages. But maybe the impulse to eat pages isn’t about taste. Maybe it’s about being placed at the crossing-point of a contradiction, which is a painful place to be and children in their natural wisdom will not consent to stay there, but mystics love it.58

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The written page and eternal beatitude coincide here as the two places where “to look is to eat.” Carson’s childlike attempt to eat her book, her way of rejecting the contradiction, gives way to Simone’s effort to maintain it, to tell what is near and far at once, even if this telling, like the contradiction it stems from, happens in a burst that cannot be anticipated, nor sustained for very long without running the risk of Ahab, but which, nonetheless, could happen anytime the conditions are right, when the flâneur loses himself in the “double ground” of his intoxicating saunters or when the mystic embarks on the thought experiment inscribed in an image of jealousy. Just as Benjamin’s jeztzeit (now-time) is the time of a particular explosion of knowability, when, Agamben says, in the empty subjective space of the historical image “truth is charged to the bursting point with time,”59 so does Sappho posit the rupture in time of mystical experience as a charged drop that explodes into the world: “Sappho imitates the distance of God in a sort of suspended solution—and there we see Divine Being as a dazzling drop that suddenly, impossibly, saturates the world.”60 For Marguerite, this idea is figured in terms of a spark or aperture, which she names “the excellent FarNear”: For there is an aperture, like a spark, which quickly closes, in which one cannot long remain . . . The overflowing from the ravishing aperture makes the Soul free and noble and unencumbered [and its] peace lasts as long as the opening of the aperture . . . Moreover the peace is so delicious that Truth calls it glorious food . . . And this aperture of the sweet movement of glory that the excellent FarNear gives is nothing other than a glimpse which God wants the soul to have of her own glory that she will possess without end.61

In the mystical scheme that Carson traces, the farness and nearness of God correspond precisely to the two poles of subjective oscillation that Agamben refers to as Genius and ego, the general and the particular, the unindividuated share of our being, and the aspect that is personalized. The mystical program of decreation, then, concerns the unwinding or separation of these two intensities that traverse every human being. Carson identifies Sappho’s use of a hymn of the type called “kletic” as the last exemplary instance of this decreation. As Carson notes, a kletic hymn is “a calling hymn, an invocation to God to come from where she is to where we are. Such a hymn typically names both of these places, setting its invocation in between in order to measure the difference—a difference which it is the function of the hymn to decreate—not to destroy, but to decreate.”62 The specific kletic hymn that Carson mentions indicates the special suspension of far and near, which she calls “an impossible motion possible only in writing,” via several syntactic choices, including the suppression of the imperative verb in the first line of the poem: “Here to me from Krete.”63 The poem, in the mode of summons, would be expected to start with an imperative (Carson supplies “Come” in her own translation), but instead we wait until its very last word: “pour.” Carson attributes this choice to Sappho’s desire to inscribe how the mystical moment of subjective disappearance, and the new world it announces, is always to be found now, in the middle of the established world. It is

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not some event perpetually deferred until it is “deserved” or “destined.” As Carson writes, “The effect of this suspension is uncanny: as if the whole of creation is depicted waiting for an action that is already perpetually here. There is no clear boundary between far and near; there is no climactic moment of God’s arrival. Sappho renders a set of conditions that at the beginning depend on Aphrodite’s absence but by the end include her presence.”64 Just as Macedonio Fernández’s “novel that went into the streets” installs a space of interference and resistance in the homogenized “abstract” space of capitalism, so do the mystics Carson writes about manifest an “aperture” in the old world via their disappearance, one that emits the unfolding of something new. They equate this newness, which has overwhelmed them, with God. Again, an uneasy relationship with the telling of this newness is always at the foreground of their texts. How does mystical experience come to know itself?, they ask, How does mystical experience think itself as mystical experience? As Marguerite Porete writes: “. . . where the Soul remains after the work of the Ravishing FarNear, which we call a spark in the manner of an aperture and fast close, no one could believe . . . nor would she have any truth who knew how to tell this.”65 For Carson, this statement is the supreme paradigm of a mystical literature. She explains: “Inside her own telling Marguerite Porete sets up a little ripple of disbelief—a sort of distortion in the glass—as if to remind us that this dream of distance is after all just a dream.”66 If their tellings are simply dreams, then this sort of explicit falsehood may be the signal of what passes beyond the dream, into the awakening of the asignifying word, the awakening that is nonetheless not the word itself, but, rather, what it does. Carson uses the label assigned to Marguerite Porete during the proceedings of the trial that led to her execution, that of a “fake woman” (pseudo-mulier), to close her essay with an ironic warning: “So in the end it is important not to be fooled by fake women. If you mistake the dance of jealousy for the love of God, or a heretic’s mirror for the true story, you are likely to spend the rest of your days in terrible hunger. No matter how many pages you eat.”67 The ironic movement of decreation involves a continual contestation of the self, through the other, even if, as Enrique Vila-Matas demonstrates in a text we will now turn to, the other is only a reader or an anonymous audience.

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6

Enrique Vila-Matas and the Self-Study of Writing

Near the beginning of Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby and Co. its hunchback narrator responds to a colleague who asks what the literature of the future will be like: “I don’t know. If I knew I would write it myself.”1 We soon learn that the narrator himself has not-so-coyly taken the gambit: I wonder if I can do this. I am convinced that only by tracking down the labyrinth of the No can the paths still open to the writing of the future appear. I wonder if I can evoke them. I shall write footnotes commenting on a text that is invisible, which does not mean that it does not exist, since this phantom text could very well end up held in suspension in the literature of the next millennium.2

When faced with what rises in the inexpressible space of subjective disappearance, “the labyrinth of the No,” the narrator decides to leave it be, suspended in a state of potentiality that is intelligible in outline only via the addendum of the footnote. In this way, Vila-Matas attests to the disappearing literature that Blanchot glimpsed in the statement inscribed in Bartleby and Co., which can be viewed as the kernel of inspiration for his recent works: “Literature is heading toward its essence, which is its disappearance.”3 Indeed, another very similar statement by Blanchot appears as the epigraph of Montano’s Malady, the novel that follows Bartleby and Co.: “What will we do to disappear?” An explicit textual connection between Vila-Matas’s work and the final passage from The Unavowable Community, which we invoked as the point of departure for this study because so many writers of the No seem to respond to it, is established near the end of Bartleby and Co., where Vila-Matas cites Blanchot’s passage at length, ending with his question for the writers of the future, “with what kinds of words?”4 While Bartleby and Co. and Montano’s Malady are exemplary instances of a literature of potentiality and disappearance, the novel that follows in Vila-Matas’s oeuvre, Never Any End to Paris, responds most directly to the aspects we have highlighted of the specific constellation we are tracing. In this book the element of decreation we have just examined manifests via its main narrative trajectory, which is that of a scathing unveiling and annihilation of the narrator’s personal identity, an unveiling of embarrassing and poignant memories that allow him to come to grips with a past that is absolutely lost, in order to eliminate all traces of nostalgia, and the

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subject position it maintains, in his life. The roots of this perspective are found in Borges’s discussion of Orbis Tertius, an axiom of the philosophical schools whereby “the future has no reality other than as a function of our present fears and hopes, and the past has no reality other than merely as that of memory.”5 These memories that make up the past, the narrator learns, are very precarious because they are never real. Nostalgia, as a desire to maintain the actual past, is nullified because the past is never actually available to us, and even the images that claim it only end up showing the abyss that separates it from us. Vila-Matas’s narrator, a version of the author himself, learns this lesson from Borges: I heard Borges say he remembered one evening his father had told him something very sad about memory, he’d said: “I thought I could remember my childhood when I first arrived in Buenos Aires, but now I know I can’t, because I think if I remember something, for example, if today I remember something from this morning, I get an image of what I saw this morning. But if tonight I remember that thing from this morning, then what I remember is not the first image I had of that thing, but the first remembered image. And so each time I remember something, I am not really remembering it, but rather am remembering the last time I remembered it, I am remembering the last memory. So in reality I have absolutely no memories or images of my childhood, of my youth.”6

Despite this painful knowledge, however, the narrator embarks on an extended foray into his memory, not trying to recreate the past the way it actually was, but creatively using the images from the past in order to draw out elements of his subjectivity that were aligned with a tepid egoism, in order to empty out or decreate himself. “Irony” is the name he assigns to this process. As he writes, “I do think irony is a powerful device for de-activating reality.”7 Each of the novel’s 113 brief chapters, which are configured together as a three-day lecture, ironically recalls an aspect of the narrator’s formative years spent in Paris trying to evoke the lost city of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast while learning to be a writer. During this time, he says, he had no sense of irony, but the seeds of such a perspective were gradually incubated then in experiences that allow for a degree of creative separation from reality. He highlights two such experiences. The first occurs after he ingests an especially potent blotter of LSD-25. In Chapter 42 he ironically remembers this experience and shows how it contributed to the ironic, antirealist style of his mature writing. Of all the contributions LSD made to his literary project, the narrator relates, three stand out above the rest: 1) Grand questions about whether the visual reality accepted by common sense has anything to do with true reality. 2) The discovery of my taste for simulation and transvestism. 3) The discovery of the fragility of my incipient writing, mainly attributable to my scant experience as a reader, which led me to decide, given that I could barely subsist on literary material (I had little reading experience), that I would draw sustenance from the visual, cinematographic lessons the drug had provided me.8

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The first contribution is a precursor to irony, because in order to deactivate established reality its necessity must be questioned. The second stems from his desire to escape his class-based manner of dress while on acid: “many hours before I returned to normality and to reality, I realized I felt very bad about my body and also my bourgeois, corseted way of dressing and began to change my clothes frenetically, searching the mirror for a different presence from the usual one.”9 The result of this frenetic search is an experiment in cross-dressing: “I ended up dressed as Hemingway in his female version, that is, I dressed up as a little boy with a girl’s blonde ringlets, just as Hemingway’s mother dressed him when he was little, in pink gingham with a flowery hat.”10 While Vila-Matas as narrator suggests that Hemingway’s “entire virile-literary career” can be read as an “extreme reaction to the image of the effeminate mommy’s boy,” his own oevre springs from embracing such an image of himself and chalking it up to irony, to the continual processing of disappearing and becoming something other than what he is.11 This gesture reveals the third contribution made by LSD to his burgeoning project, that of delivering the knowledge that if he is to write he will not be able to do so under the auspices of social esteem, with the backing, for instance, of an erudite childhood spent in the family library: “Certainly an author who has come to the experience of writing after having imbibed the contents of the family library seems much more respectable than one who has begun to construct his literary edifice after an acid trip. The quality of my early poetics seems scant if, as I’m saying, it was basically sustained by a drug that simply widened my visual field of perception.”12 Again, though, the narrator embraces the abjection of his experience, affirming it as a treasure beyond compare in the effort to deactivate reality, decreate himself, and bring this potential mode to writing: And yet, I’m not sure now that I should reproach myself at all, rather quite the reverse. Because while it’s true later on I read quite a lot and my literary knowledge was strengthened, it’s also true that LSD, by opening up my visual field, was not at the time by any means an insignificant source of inspiration. Besides, some of those perceptions of a distinct reality have lasted firmly and still today carry a highly remarkable energy, and are the reason I can laugh at realist writers, for example, who duplicate reality and so impoverish it.13

The second experience that delivers him of a “certain distance from what people called reality” concerns an element of a dream that he is able to carry over into waking life, which transforms that life absolutely.14 Full of anxiety over his first novel, The Lettered Assassin, he is somehow bored by conversation with Marguerite Duras in her loft and begins to daydream. As he drifts off, a vivid image pops into his mind of his book, already written and published by Duras but credited to him, sitting in an old chest in that very loft, stained with damp: “This pretentious daydream with its mixture of laziness, terror and a certain idea of success, couldn’t have been more wretched—it certainly is wretched to want someone to write your book for you—but curiously, despite its detestable character, the dream managed to push me towards serious reflection.”15 The image passes over from the dream to powerfully affect his literary

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sensibility, in a moment of awakening that occurs as he walks down the stairs from the loft: Suddenly, thanks to my literal belief in those stains and in that dream and, therefore, in my imagination, I began to reflect . . . I thought I perceived the full power of the written word, and this led me, by way of a rather involved shortcut, to sense its importance as a means of acquiring a certain distance from what people called reality, which is—as it has always been for such a great number of young people—actually a very disappointing thing. I thought I suddenly perceived, coming down those stairs, the need I had for words and also the need for these to be useful to me so I could distance myself from the real world. On those stairs, I definitely began to turn into a real writer.16

For him, this special resistance of literature is eventually aligned with the mechanism of irony to forge a powerful mode of subsisting in the interferences between the established world and the coming world: But as I still had no access to irony, words could do little for me that day, although I didn’t know it then, precisely because of my lack of a sense of irony . . . Of course maturity isn’t so great either. When you’re mature, true, you understand irony. But you’re not young anymore and the only possibility of remaining so lies in resisting, with the passage of time, not relinquishing that damp chest I imagined so vividly in Neauphle-le-Chateau. You can resist, and not be like those who—as the intensity of their youthful imagination gradually diminishes—accommodate to reality and worry for the rest of their lives. You can only try and be one of the stubbornest, keeping faith in imagination for longer than other people. To mature with obstinacy and resistance: to mature, for example, by giving a three-day lecture on the irony of not having been aware of irony as a young man.17

*** This power of the literary word, the imaginative summons of another world that both beckons a writer and unfolds from the words she writes, finds exemplary expression in a formulation for Duras, who serves as the narrator’s mentor and surrogate mother during his time in Paris. In a late interview she says: “I can say what I like, but I shall never know why people write and how it is people don’t write. In life, there comes a time, and I think it is total, that we cannot escape, where we doubt everything: that doubt is writing.”18 And at the heart of the resistance of irony, of this work of contestation and doubt, Vila-Matas identifies a concept of subjective oscillation: “I don’t like ferocious irony but rather the kind that vacillates between disappointment and hope.”19 Disappointment and hope correspond to the poles of the writerly existence of Duras’ life, hope of the sort we have already examined, on one end, which Kafka said is “not for us” because it could only be truly destined for nobody, for the subject that is surprised and displaced by unindividuated being, and, on the other end, the disappointment or

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melancholy of being excluded from the collective in order to assess and shape, perhaps, the language that has sprung from it. Duras attests to this latter pole in a poignant statement: “We writers lead a very poor life: I’m talking about people who write for real. I don’t know anyone with less of a personal life than I have.”20 The hopeful side, the exuberant element of Duras, manifests in her immersion in a particular social scene, the collective existence of a group of students. Vila-Matas’s narrator describes Duras with this group, known as the “Argentinian group” of Paris, “a bunch of young people who often hung around Marguerite Duras and who I remember always seemed very comfortable in the company of her intelligent madness, very comfortable because, as well as being fun and conveying a feeling of liberty, Marguerite took a lot of interest in all of them.”21 In the words of the writer, cartoonist, actor, and painter Copi, who was part of this group: “Marguerite is alone, but she feeds off others.”22 This aspect of Duras, her elusive back and forth between the two poles, constitutes the singular potentiality that defined her existence. The narrator begins to approach her mystery and art via Blanchot’s essay on Duras’ film India Song: “Maurice Blanchot wondered what India Song was. Could it be said to be a film or perhaps a book or not one thing or the other? After reading Blanchot’s essay, I had the impression I knew less about Marguerite than I knew before starting to read the essay.”23 The poet Ullan confirms that this “knowing less” that characterizes Blanchot’s essay on Duras was a crucial aspect of her personal affect as well as the social milieu she maintained. Of Duras’ house, Ullan says, “less was known there all the time.”24 Though Vila-Matas does not mention it, and though it is not explicitly about Duras, a passage from Agamben illuminates the special “lovability” carried by her writerly mode of being, her oscillation, which constantly moves toward knowing less, toward unexpression, as the basis of writing, even amidst a torrent of words. In the essay “Genius” Agamben writes: To some extent we all come to terms with Genius, with what resides in us but does not belong to us. Each person’s character is engendered by the way he attempts to turn away from Genius, to flee from him. Genius, to the extent that he has been avoided and left unexpressed, inscribes a grimace on Ego’s face. An author’s style— like the grace displayed by any creature—depends less on his genius than on the part of him that is deprived of genius, his character. That is why when we love someone we actually love neither his genius nor his character (and even less his ego) but his special manner of evading both of these poles, his rapid back and forth between genius and character.25

As Agamben indicates, an author’s style can be located in her attempt to detach from the jolting collective dawning of thought that has captivated her, enough at least to tell about it in words that may coax readers. In the terms of Melville’s schema, Ahab has no style, he is unable to flee his genius, while Ishmael’s mode of being is precisely that of style, which can be found in his ability to narrate, to establish a certain distance from his given world, to educate his readers with voluminous excurses on the anatomy of the sperm whale as well as hold them rapt with the image of a kaleidoscopic doubloon or a coffin bearing the secret of the world etched in wood. These schematics of the

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potentiality or oscillation of style are what Vila-Matas’s narrator gradually comes to be aware of, primarily through the urging of Duras herself: “You’ve come here to Paris ready to forge your own style, isn’t that right?” she asks him one day, “in a treacherous, sombre tone.”26 But it is through the literary principles of Stendahl that the narrator comes to most fully and clearly grasp the sense of style that is at issue throughout this text. The narrator comes to understand that the failure of his first novel is due to its total lack of style. He explains that he set out to “kill” his readers in the subjective sense, with the best of intentions in the sense of death and disappearance that we have traced throughout this study, but ended up killing them in a textual sense. His early words seem cold to him now, from the perspective of time, unable to bring his readers to life, which is exactly what a writer has to do if he wants to kill them subjectively. He first learns of Stendahl via Andre Gide’s description of the pole of Stendahl’s stylistic oscillation that corresponds to his genius: In those days I had no idea that, as Gide said, the great secret of works with style— the great secret of Stendahl, for example—consists of writing on the spot. Gide says of Stendahl that his style, what we might call the malice of his style, consists in his stirring thought being so alive, so freshly colored, like a newly hatched butterfly (the collector is surprised to see it emerging from the chrysalis). From this comes Stendahl’s vivid, spontaneous, unconventional touch, sudden and naked, that captivates us again and again.27

The “malice” of Stendahl’s style, its aspect of freshness and strangeness, is one pole of its oscillation. Vila-Matas’s narrator incorporates this into his own approach, which he formulates in terms of “live thoughts”: “I think that in my first foray into literature, in The Lettered Assassin, I dissociated form from content too much, and emotion from the expression of emotion and thought . . . Emotion and thought should always be inseparable, the reader should witness live thoughts stirred by emotions in the creation of a text.”28 But this is only one pole of style, and, if the live thoughts are to be present in the finished text, no matter how strange they might be, they must attain the light of clarity, for the readers. Stendahl maneuvers away from his genius, from its raw live thoughts, to ones that, while still retaining the emotion initially stirred by the appearance of the words, are slightly more refined, without resting either on the opposite pole, that of character, the element that is totally removed from genius, because bringing readers to life requires transmissibility as well as verbal energy. As Vila-Matas writes of his early inability to understand this, “I never fully comprehended that it was unnecessary to kill readers textually. The thing is that style consists precisely in bringing them to life, instead of killing them off, in addressing new readers with the greatest clarity and simplicity possible, no matter how strange what you want to say might be.”29 (98). Again, he comes to realize this principle via Stendahl: It took me a long time to understand—if I really do understand—what Stendahl realized as he was writing The Charterhouse of Parma. He decided that to achieve the correct tone, no matter how strange what he wanted to say might be, so his

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readers would understand exactly what he was trying to say, he needed, every now and then, to read a few pages of the Civil Code. “If I am not clear,” he wrote, “my whole world is annihilated.”30

The new world that unfolds from the experience of Genius risks being lost without an adequate transmitter, without the limpid style of one who, for instance, will briefly approach the ossified words of the law, the Civil Code, if this is what will distance him from Genius enough to extend its awakenings to others. The space from which this sort of writing emanates is the space of oscillation or, in Carson’s terms, the space of contradiction. For Vila-Matas’s narrator, Duras is a pure manifestation of this contradiction. In one dazzling sentence, Vila-Matas evokes his memory of her in this sense: I will always remember her as a violently free and audacious woman, who wholeheartedly and openly embodied—with her intelligent use of verbal license, for example, which in her case consisted of sitting in an armchair in her house and, with real ferocity, speaking her mind—I remember she embodied all the monstrous contradictions to be found in human beings, all those doubts, that fragility and helplessness, fierce individuality, and a search for shared grief, in short, all the great anguish we’re capable of when faced with the reality of the world, that desolation the least exemplary writers have in them, the least academic and edifying ones, those who aren’t concerned with projecting a right and proper image of themselves, the only ones from whom we learn nothing, but also those who have the rare courage to literally expose themselves in their writing—where they speak their minds—and whom I admire deeply because only they lay it on the line, only they seem to me to be true writers.31

In an essay on Foucault, Agamben writes of these writers who risk the absolute exposure of coinciding with the work, of disappearing within it: “the author marks the point at which a life is offered up and played out in the work. Offered up and played out, not expressed or fulfilled. For this reason, the author can only remain unsatisfied and unsaid in the work.”32 This insight is the core of the theory of writing developed by Agamben in this essay, titled “The Author as Gesture.” It leads him to posit the text as the place where the reader and writer engage in an “inexhaustible game” of disappearance, one that recalls the dance of jealousy glimpsed by Sappho and the “FarNear” invoked by Marguerite Porete. This place, the taking-place of language, is, according to Agamben, therefore neither in the text nor in the author (nor in the reader): it is in the gesture through which the author and reader put themselves into play in the text and, at the same time, are infinitely withdrawn from it. The author is only the witness or guarantor of his own absence in the work in which he is put into play, and the reader can only provide this testimony once again, making himself in turn the guarantor of the inexhaustible game in which he plays at missing himself.33

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For Agamben, this conception of the author and reader is a paradigm for subjectivity itself, which he develops with reference to Foucault’s essay “Lives of Infamous Men,” which was originally conceived as the preface to an anthology of archival documents, prison records, and lettres de cachet, in which, at the very moment when they are struck with infamy, “the encounter with power pulls from darkness and silences these human existences that would otherwise not have left any traces.”34 In their confrontation with power, in their defiant gestures captured in prison photographs, these infamous men, like Bartleby, exhibit “something like the luminous traces of another life and another history,” a form-of-life that “increases its resistance at the point where its apparatuses capture it and put it into play”35: The subject—like the author, like the life of the infamous man—is not something that can be directly attained as a substantial reality present in some place; on the contrary, it is what results from the encounter and from the hand-to-hand confrontation with the apparatuses in which it has been put—and has put itself— into play. For writing (any writing, not only the writing of the chancellors of the archive of infamy) is an apparatus too, and the history of human beings is perhaps nothing other than the hand-to-hand confrontation with the apparatuses they have produced—above all with language.36 (72)

Vila-Matas begins to conclude Never Any End to Paris by invoking precisely this “hand-to-hand confrontation” with writing, which Marguerite Duras exemplified, and which she sadly takes leave of in her final departure: “Many years later, Marguerite Duras also withdrew into herself. This happened 20 years after I left my garret. My biography of those years shouldn’t end the moment I left the city but rather 20 years later, when Marguerite withdrew into herself, she drifted away from the world and left off writing forever, left off her hand-to-hand combat with writing . . .”37 *** Vila-Matas’s narrator shakes off the sorrow of Marguerite Duras’ death to keep writing, and in this way adheres to a principle of happiness articulated earlier in the book, in a discussion of the transformation wrought by his foray into pataphysics, of all things. When a friend mentions that he used to be a pataphysician, the narrator wonders how it compares to his own status as a self-identified situationist, even though he knows little about either approach given his lack of prior reading. His curiosity piqued, he embarks on a new readerly trajectory to understand pataphysics, “shoving Hemingway brusquely aside” in favor of a constellation he perceives to be the lineage of pataphysics, including Jarry, Artaud, Roussel, Rimbaud, de Sade, Lautreamont, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Mallarmé. This reading somehow sows the seeds of happiness and begins to transform the narrator’s faux tragic persona: “Now, for the first time I realized that perhaps elegance could be something different from what I had always thought, perhaps elegance was living in the happiness of the present, which is a way of feeling immortal.”38 The narrator locates four further touchstones of this

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burgeoning happiness that stems from his pataphysical reading. These references span the entire globe, from a Chinese proverb, to a passage from Montaigne, and a line from Foucault cited by Deleuze and Guattari, to the Argentinean Macedonio Fernández and the Spanish writer Fernando Savater. The first three appear in the same paragraph in Chapter 34: As the Chinese proverb says, you cannot prevent the dark birds of sorrow from passing over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair. “I do nothing without happiness,” Montaigne said. At the beginning of Anti-Oedipus we find this great sentence by Foucault: “Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.”39

The final two references appear one page later, when he mentions how long it took for him to become completely happy: For a long time I maintained my belief—which wasn’t completely destroyed until August of this year—in the intrinsic elegance of despair. Until I discovered how inelegant it is to walk, sad, in despair, dead, through the streets of your neighborhood in Paris. I realized it this August. And ever since I’ve been finding elegance in happiness. “I have embarked on the study of metaphysics several times, but happiness always interrupted,” said Macedonio Fernández. Now I think going through the world without experiencing the joy of living, rather than elegant, is just so humdrum. Fernando Savater said that the Castilian saying to take things philosophically does not mean to be resigned to things, or to take things seriously, but rather to take them happily.40

Macedonio’s formulation of happiness as that which exists beyond metaphysics, that interrupts it, is a perfect definition of pataphysics, and, indeed, his novel, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, a collection of prologues for a novel that never starts, is a wonderful consideration of the question at the heart of this study, that of literature’s disappearance. One of those prologues defines his novel as “a home for non-existence.”41 This phrase could also be used to describe Never Any End to Paris, or any novel by Vila-Matas. His works enact their own decreation; they kill readers subjectively while bringing them to life textually.

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The Friendship of Literature

In the aspect of decreation, according to novelist Roberto Bolaño, the only living writer in Spanish that compares to Vila-Matas is César Aira. In fact, we also find an oblique and playful reference to Aira in Never Any End to Paris. After pursuing a crazed adventure spurred by a series of coincidences having to do with the number of the beast, 666 (which is also a reference to Bolaño’s magnum opus, 2666), the narrator conquers his fear of the number with a treat of strawberry ice cream in the German countryside: “I had some trivial strawberry ice cream on the terrace of a roadside cafe, next to the stop for the bus that took me back to Bremen. My fear of the Beast ended there, ended in that strawberry ice cream.”1 Vila-Matas emphasizes the referential nature of the strawberry ice cream by beginning the next paragraph (in the next chapter), which has nothing to do with strawberry ice cream, with the question: “Strawberry ice cream?”; and, indeed, this reference can be traced to the opening scene of Aira’s novel How I Became a Nun, which we have already examined in the context of the study-novel. This scene begins with that novel’s child narrator, “César Aira,” telling of how he/she ate a strawberry ice cream cone laced with cyanide, an accident that provides him/her with the same distance from reality that VilaMatas’s narrator in Never Any End to Paris first attains with LSD and the daydream in the loft. Unlike Vila-Matas, Aira rarely refers to extant literary texts in any of his works, implicitly or explicitly, except for the book of Genesis, a commitment that is consistent with the ontological trajectory of his writing, which could be likened to Blanchot’s conception of the pure novel that has broken completely loose from this world. Aira’s inflection of this tendency is also visible in his rule of artistic procedure, a form of study in its habitual search in language, in “free writing” or reading, for the foothold that might spring the burst of ecstatic communication, in the form of a work, that occasionally emanates from such a practice. Aira’s procedure wagers that the appearance of such a pure literary language, which again unfolds a new world in the space of the writer’s empty subjectivity, can be encouraged or nurtured in ways that allow it to proliferate, despite the fact that it cannot be willed. In fact, each of his novels can be read as fixated meditations on precisely the possibility of this appearance. Just as Benjamin’s flâneur takes a walk in order to bring about the conditions necessary for the surprise that may occur, Aira’s artist undergoes a procedure that, on occasion, opens up the shocking experience of subjective disappearance that allows for the appearance of a new language. Aira’s procedure, which he elucidates in essays and interviews, is what he calls el continuo, or la huida hacia adelante. These concepts

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might be translated into English as “the continuum” and a “constant flight forward.” Marcelo Ballvé explains that to judge yesterday’s writing session, to censor a lapse into the absurd or the irrational, “to revive a character the work-in-progress sent tumbling over a cliff—all of these actions go against Aira’s procedure.”2 Ballvé notes in his essay “The Literary Alchemy of César Aira” that this system prioritizes an ethic of optimism, one that gambles on the potency or value of a world that is unfolding in a language that not even the writer can fully understand. Ballvé writes, “To labor to justify previous work with more strange creations that in turn establish the need for ever more artistic high-wire acts in the future—this is the continuum, the high-wire act the artist must perform when he refuses to submit to any rule that is not his autonomously chosen procedure.”3 As we have already begun to see, this notion of the continuum resonates with Vila-Matas’s conception of the writer’s task, which he says is to always continue: “All I have done in life is to continue. I would finish one book and start another, always continuing.”4 The writer who continues on in this sense indicated by Aira and VilaMatas trudges on with the determination of the flâneur, always in aimless search of the word or phrase that could arrest all continuity in order to direct the continuum toward a new trajectory and, eventually, another limit to be exceeded in another explosion of the intelligibility that every moment holds in potential if chanced to be seen in the light of disappearance. In a beautiful note from The Arcades Project Benjamin calls this experience of the cessation of time conceived as burst or explosion “now-time” (jetztzeit). “Each now,” he says, “is the now of a particular knowability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.).”5 The formula of Aira’s writing, which each of his little novels adhere to, is to document the approach of this explosion, as it is visible from retrospect in the act of narration, and then to give way to the burst itself, allowing the language of the past to catch up to the dazzling flash of the now, of the unfolding of a new language and a new world, of the origin of literature and art itself. This conception of art rooted in now-time attains its most urgent and vivid formulation in Aira’s work in his novella An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. This book weaves a layer of surreal history through the actual trip taken to the Argentinean Pampas by German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas in 1837. In the middle of a 17-year journey that had already seen Rugendas pass through Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Brazil, the artist is inexorably drawn to the Argentinean plains in pursuit of a long-hidden intuition that turns out to be the real impetus for his travel: the secret aim of this long voyage, which consumed his youth, was Argentina: the mysterious emptiness to be found on the endless plains at a point equidistant from the horizons. Only there, he thought, would he be able to discover the other side of his art . . . This dangerous illusion pursued him throughout his life. Twice he crossed the threshold: in 1837, he came over the Andes from Chile, and in 1847, he approached from the east, via the Rio de la Plata. The second expedition was the more productive, but did not take him beyond the environs of Buenos Aires; on his first journey, however, he ventured towards the dreamed-of

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center and in fact reached it momentarily, although, as we shall see, the price he had to pay was exorbitant.6

The origin of art for Rugendas, its “dreamed-of center” in the “mysterious emptiness” of the plains, is found in a flash of lightning. Like Paul of Tarsus, Rugendas is thrown from his horse by the bolt. Still attached to the flailing artist by a piece of the straddle, the horse takes off, violently dragging him along the rocky ground until, within an inch of his life, he breaks free—not soon enough, however, to prevent his face from being ground to a tattered pulp. This grotesque disfigurement, “the exorbitant price” he had to pay for reaching the origin of all art, renders his face a permanent sign of the taking-place of art and the world that he finds there at the center, which could never be reduced to a representation: Psychic activity is normally translated into facial expressions. In the case of Rugendas, whose facial nerves had been lacerated, the “representation commands” from the brain did not reach their destination; or rather they did, unfortunately, but scrambled by dozens of synaptic confusions. His face expressed things he did not mean to express, but no one realized, not even Rugendas, because he could not see himself.7

This image is of Rugendas near the end of the novel, when, against all advice, he pursues a band of Indians carrying out a raid on European settlements. The aim of his crazed chase is to paint the scene of orgiastic violence, and he is driven to this as though not aware of what he is doing. The description of him as being “unable to see himself ” resonates with the mode of being that he has assumed since the incident on the road through the Pampas, which is that of complete attachment to the void, the self-unfolding of the world that is the source of art. This puts him in the position of Ahab, unable to detach enough from the Genius pole of subjectivity to participate in the oscillation of immanent being. Unlike Ahab, however, he is not destroyed by this extended encounter. In fact, the intense manifestation of the void that he has fully become extends the jolting effects of its experience to the members of the raid, which are held spellbound by the grotesquely disfigured painter that feverishly works away right in front of them as they eat by a roaring bonfire. The effect of this experience is consonant with the historical image, the literary image, or any other manifestation of the forward dawning of thought: it irrevocably changes those who chance to find it. In the stunning final passage of the book we can see the coming of this change for the raiding party. Here we can also find the key to why Rugendas does not suffer the fate of Ahab, which lies in the role of his friend and constant companion, Krause, and which points us to the final section of this study. Aira writes: The tongues of flame flickered higher, splashing the Indians with golden light, illuminating a detail here, another there, or plunging everything into a sudden wave of darkness, animating the absent gesture, endowing mindless stupor with a continuous activity. They had begun to eat, because they couldn’t resist, but

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everything they did led them back to the center of the fable, where drunkenness was mounting. Following their foray, a painter had emerged from the night to reveal the delirious truth of the day’s events. Owls began to moan deep in the woods and the terrified Indians were captured in swirls of blood and optical effects. In the dancing firelight, their features drifted free. And although they were gradually beginning to relax and crack rowdy jokes, their gazes kept converging on Rugendas: the heart, the face. He was the focal point of that waking nightmare, the realization of the terrifying possibility that had haunted the raid in its various manifestations over the years: physical contact, face to face. As for the painter, he was so absorbed in his work that he remained oblivious to the rest. In the depths of that savage night, intoxicated by drawing and opium, he was establishing contact as it if were simply another reflex. The procedure went on operating through him. Standing behind him, hidden in the shadows, the faithful Krause kept watch.8

Following his disfigurement, Rugendas is entirely shot through with this sustained connection to what Agamben calls Genius. So much so that he radiates its effects to an entire group of people that happen to encounter him, “face to face.” This “terrifying possibility” had haunted the raid precisely because it forms a contact zone with the absolute Other, one that threatens to transform this moment into an indelible point of departure for their own lives. But if Rugendas is so ravished by Genius that he is capable of producing such effects, then how does he avoid the fate of Ahab, who fell into the abyss of his Genius, never to return? The last line of this passage, which concludes the book, orients the answer to this question in the direction of friendship, as Krause stands close by Rugendas, ready to help when he collapses, which he has already done several times by this point. The bonds of friendship they have formed, which are detailed throughout the book, render Rugendas open to Krause in such a way that would allow him to help, to pull the artist back from the brink. In fact, the two are shown entwined so much that they can be seen to coincide with the two poles of subjective oscillation. Before Rugendas is thrown from the horse, his aspect is more toward the individualized, legalistic pole, with Krause tending toward the general, “mystical” side, while after the accident these roles seem to be reversed. When they are together as friends they share a common experience that oscillates between the poles that each bring to the encounter. This aspect is shown many times throughout the novel, but perhaps most clearly when the two are navigating a treacherous mountain pass high in the Andes. Here they encounter a scene that defies the imagination: “amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once. Jagged lines, impossible angles, trees growing downwards from ceilings of rock, sheer slopes plunging into mantles of snow under a scorching sun.”9 The landscape even intensifies as they progress: How could these panoramas be rendered credible? There were too many sides; the cube had extra faces. The company of volcanos gave the sky interiors. Dawn

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and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess. Grey expanses hung out to dry forever in colossal silence; airshafts voluminous as oceans.10

Just as they have reached a geographical space of absolute departure from any point, any determinate location, so does their friendship allow them to share acts and thoughts that blend their being into one, placing them mutually outside themselves. The striking landscape spurs their imaginations after initially placing them in a stupor, and they engage in a conversation that reflects the subjective transformation at stake in friendship: They wondered if one day cities would be built in those mountains. How might that be? Perhaps if there were wars, when they ended, leaving the stone fortresses empty, with their terraced fields, their border posts and mining villages, a hardworking frontier community composed of Chileans and Argentineans could settle there, converting the buildings and the infrastructure. That was Rugendas’s idea, probably influenced by the military painting of his ancestors. Krause, on the other hand, in spite of his worldly outlook, was in favor of mystical colonization. A chain of affiliated monasteries perched in the most remote attics of stone could spread new strains of Buddhism deep into the inaccessible realms, and the braying of the long horns would awaken giants and dwarves of Andean industry. We should draw it, they said. But who would believe it?11

Their shared being oscillates here between “militarism” and “Buddhism.” At the end of the passage this oscillation manifests in their speech, which is no longer addressed one to the other. The singular “they” that they have become manifests the dawning, awakening, or new thought their friendship gives rise to in the space of their mutual disappearance into the language of a particularly charged conversation, one that brings them beyond all established or accepted ideas: “But who would believe it? ” Agamben takes up this notion of friendship in his essay “ The Friend,” where he argues that friendship is a “proximity that resists both representation and conceptualization,” because it is “neither a property nor a quality of a subject.”12 Agamben maintains that the word “friend” belongs to the class of terms that linguists define as nonpredicative, terms that do not allow one to designate a class encompassing all things that possess the predicate in question. These terms, which carry a pure experience of language and not a reference to the world, share their condition, Agamben also notes, with the terms that philosophy calls “transcendental,” ones that do not possess an objective denotation, that simply signify being.13 Friendship, in other words, in this movement of transcending or exceeding the limits of the selfconstituting subject, is the perfect figure of the disappearance we have been tracing in and through literature. Agamben glimpses a certain “sweetness” that emerges here and charges being with something like a supplement, a “halo,” as Agamben defines it elsewhere: “ The friend is not an other I, but an otherness immanent to selfness,

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a becoming other of the self. The point at which I perceive my existence as sweet, my sensation goes through a con-senting which dislocates and deports my sensation toward the friend, toward the other self. Friendship is this desubjectification at the very heart of the most intimate sensation of the self.”14 In this way, for Agamben, friendship becomes the very paradigm of politics: It is essential that the human community comes to be defined here, in contrast to the animal community, through a living together that is not defined by the participation in a common substance, but rather by a sharing that is purely existential, a con-division that, so to speak, lacks an object: friendship, as the consentiment of the pure fact of being. Friends do not share something (birth, law, place, taste): they are shared by the experience of friendship. Friendship is the con-division that precedes every division, since what has to be shared is the very fact of existence, life itself. And it is this sharing without an object, this original con-senting, that constitutes the political.15

Aira beautifully evokes the sweetness that, for Agamben, defines this politics of friendship, in an image of Rugendas and Krause departing together toward “openness”: The clouds came down so low they almost landed, but the slightest breeze would whisk them away . . . and produce others from bewildering corridors which seemed to give the sky access to the center of the earth. In the midst of these magical alternations, the artists were briefly granted dreamlike visions, each more sweeping than the last. Although their journey traced a zigzag on the map, they were heading straight as an arrow towards openness.16

This image of the artists linked by friendship and granted “dreamlike visions” amidst “magical alternations” could be taken as an emblem of the literary tendency we have followed in this study, the disappearance of literature. The oscillation or “alternation” of their existence, which includes landscapes shifting from low to high as well as the movement between the poles of subjectivity each carry to their shared experience, opens onto the sweeping visions, which in turn propel them into pure “openness.” Their mode of being cannot be defined under any category. It is a pure existential, and, as such, cannot be conceptualized. They are outside of being, or in a state of pure being that cannot be predicated. *** If Aira’s image can be read as one emblem of literature’s disappearance, here, at the close of this study, I wish to propose one more, which relates to it in a particular way. The image of friendship I am thinking of involves no less than five writers. There are two versions of this image. The first we will look at is invoked by Agamben in Appendix C of The End of the Poem, but it does not originate with him. In this appendix, titled

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“The Just Do Not Feed on Light,” Agamben relates a peculiar experience shared twice by Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs in Paris: In May 1960, Paul Celan met Nelly Sachs for the first time. It was the Feast of the Ascension, and while the two poets were speaking in front of the cathedral (“we spoke of your God,” Celan writes, “and I spoke against him”) it seemed to them that a golden light shone from the water in which the facade was reflected. A few months later, the two friends met again in Paris, in Celan’s home. “While we were speaking at our home for the second time about God, about your God, the one that is waiting for you, the golden light shone on the wall.17

Eight years later, Celan returns to this light in Fadensonnen. In a letter to Sachs regarding the publication of this collection he writes: “Thank you for your lines, for the remembrance of that light. Yes, that light. You will find it named in my next collection, which is coming out in April, named—called by a Hebrew name.”18 The poem he refers to is the one that begins “Nah, im Aortenbogen”: Nah, im Aortenbogen, Im Hellblut: das Hellwort. Mutter Rahel weint nicht mehr. Rübergetragen alles Geweinte. Still, in den Kranzarterien, unumschnurt: Ziw, jenes Licht. (Near, in the aorta-arch, in the bright blood: the bright word. Mother Rahel no longer cries. Everything cried—carried over. Quiet, in the coronary arteries, untied: Ziw, that light.)19

As Agamben notes, Ziw is the name the Kabbalists assign to the splendor of the divine manifestation, the Shekhina. For them, in the world to come, “the just feed on this light.”20 This notion of light is also found in a tradition still alive in Dante, where, Agamben says, “the form of light” is identical to the divine substance and “is the cipher of the perfect transparency of a thinking that, in thinking itself, thinks all things.”21 In this brief appendix, Agamben attempts to alter or update this tradition by tracing a new conception of light, one that notes how, in modern times, the Kabbalistic and

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Dantean divine light is fractured into two different forms: the sacred and the profane. Celan may have invoked the Kabbalistic name of divine light only to profane it, we learn, as the image of light returns as what Agamben calls a “keyword” in Celan’s next collection, Lichtzwang, where it appears as a “light compulsion” that prevents humans, who are lost and huddled as if in a wood, from touching themselves: Wir lagen schon tief in der Macchia, als du endlich herankrochst. Doch konnten wir nicht hinüberdunkeln zu dir: es herrschte Lichtzwang. (We were lying deep in the macchia, by the time you crept up at last. But we could not darken over to you: light compulsion reigned.)22

Instead of the splendor of divine manifestation, this light is vulnerable, possibly just a glimmer. What sort of potential can we glimpse in this profane light, and how could it relate to experience shared by Celan and Sachs, from which it seems to stem in a strange way? Agamben addresses the first of these questions by turning to modern Italian poet Eugenio De Signoribus, who he calls “the greatest engaged poet of his generation.”23 For De Signoribus, the fracture of divine light manifests in a “hypocritical beacon” that lights up the night and in whose service there are “tinselwearers” and “prayerpredators” whose language refrains from “following the course/of the common good,” on the one hand, and, on the other, a “defenseless, unredeemed light” that, Agamben says, “searches gropingly for its brothers in an inhospitable world.”24 In De Signoribus’s Belliche series, we find this poem: Luce inerme, irredenta luce che bruci nel mondo inospitale tra i solchi scellerati e i cancelli fissati dalla mente criminale . . . nell’angolo cieco o nel vuoto delle stanze tu sei, o nel pianto del luminio campale . . . il faro ipocrita illumina le bande ma tu esisti, e cerchi i tuoi fratelli.

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(Defenseless, unredeemed light, you who burn in the inhospitable world, between the wicked furrows and gates fixed in the criminal mind . . . you are in the blind corner or the emptiness of rooms, or in the lament of the battle-field glare . . . the hypocritical beacon lights up the troops, but you exist and search for your brothers.)25

In his analysis of this poem we can begin to see how Agamben’s description of bare life coincides with his conception of light; or, more precisely, we can see how bare life begins to emit a stronger light, one that shines in what Benjamin calls the “saved night” of a world and a human that has definitively overcome metaphysics, when there is nothing left to profane. While Blanchot assigns this life to the realm of the sacred in the moment near the end of The Unavowable Community, perhaps briefly giving in to a temptation he otherwise wards off quite remarkably, Agamben takes great care to direct bare life entirely toward the realm of the profane, of oscillation. He does this in his engagement with the poem, by asking about the voice that speaks the light in it: “The off-screen voice that speaks this completely profane light seems to come from nowhere—or from a television that someone has forgotten to turn off, a television that shows houses leveled to the ground, Iraq in flames, the ‘electrocuted stare’ of children. Lost, sub- or para-human, like that of a just human being who has learned to fast on Ziw.”26 Much could be said about these two sentences. We must at least register that this voice intrudes from nowhere, or from a television that someone has forgotten to turn off, that no one is watching. It is meant for no one; it exists for its own taking-place. The light manifests in the speech of the poem, which takes place in the empty space of the para-subjectivity that we traced earlier in this study, now called the “para-human.” This being has learned to fast on the light of divine splendor, in favor of its own, profane light, which emits from it like the light from a television that someone has forgotten to turn off and now ceaselessly glows in a strange way that would arrest anyone who would happen to enter the room, just as the Indian raid is held rapt, against their desires, by the grotesque landscape artist that flails about with a brush in front of them, by the fire, his rapid movements reflecting splashes of golden light: “the tongues of flame flickered higher, splashing the Indians with golden light . . .”27 For Agamben, this light that springs forth from bare life intensifies to the point of shining in a formulation at the end of The Open. “It is not easy,” he writes, “to think this figure—whether new or very ancient—of the life that shines in the “saved night” of nature’s (and, in particular human nature’s) eternal, unsavable survival after it has definitively bid farewell to the logos and to its own history.”28 This shining is the existence of what Agamben elsewhere calls the “Ungovernable,” which, he says, “is the beginning and, at the same time, the vanishing point of every politics.”29 It shines because its oscillation constantly renders its being to the outside, enhancing the glint of the world’s light that it refracts back with an arresting difference, so shiny it lights up the night.

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To approach the final aspect of this shimmering vanishing point, the disappearance of politics as well as literature, we can turn to the remaining question that we initially derived from the experience shared by Sachs and Celan, and related by Agamben, that of how the light they glimpsed was set on the path of the profane, “towards its brothers,” instead of being carried off toward the realm of the sacred, of the “tinselwearers” and “prayer-predators.” It seems that a crucial element of their experience, outside the cathedral, influences this direction. As we have seen, in Agamben’s reading Celan suggests this possibility by connecting the two poems with the “keyword” of light. The first registers the appearance of the light at issue, while the second inflects it in the way we have mentioned, toward the profane. What aspect of their experience initiates this movement? I want to suggest a response to this question by turning to neither Agamben, nor Celan or Sachs, but to another writer intimately acquainted with the figure of light at issue here, Walter Benjamin. In The Arcades Project, we find an image cited that resonates with the light glimpsed twice by Celan and Sachs. In the section on the flâneur, Benjamin invokes Jules Romains to inscribe a similar image of light in his project, which he described as the “theater” of his ideas. He writes, In Jules Romains’ Crime de Quinette, one finds something like the negative of the solitude which is generally companion to the flâneur. It is, perhaps, that friendship is strong enough to break through such solitude—this is what is convincing about Romains’ thesis. “According to my idea, it’s always rather in that way that you make friends with anybody. You are present together at a moment in the life of the world, perhaps in the presence of a fleeting secret of the world—an apparition which nobody has ever seen before and perhaps nobody will ever see again. It may even be something very little. Take two men going for a walk, for example, like us. Suddenly, thanks to a break in the clouds, a ray of light comes and strikes the top of a wall; and the top of the wall becomes, for the moment, something in some way quite extraordinary. One of the two men touches the other on the shoulder. The other raises his head and sees it too, understands it too. Then the thing up there vanishes. But they will know in aeternum that it once existed.”30

The constellation this passage forms with the image of light glimpsed by Sachs and Celan is quite striking, and rendered even more so by the fact that the first appearance of the golden light, the one that initiates Agamben’s reflections, occurs during the first meeting between Celan and Sachs. This encounter initiated a friendship, carried on in letters and one more meeting, that seems to have been, for both reclusive poets, the deepest and most nourishing they ever enjoyed. The appearance of friendship is also at stake in the passage from Romains, as the two are united as friends via the arrest of a striking image, an extraordinary splash of light. It seems, then, that this study could be titled The Friendship of Literature as easily as The Disappearance of Literature, because the one there with me to experience the unfolding of the world in the asignifying words of a literature of disappearance, the kaleidoscopic light of a book I have read, is none other than the author of that book: my friend. We are joined in the mutual displacement wrought by the words on the page, which we disappear into.31

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Notes Introduction 1 Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby and Co, trans. Jonathan Dunne (New York: New Directions, 2004), 50. 2 Alexander Garcia Düttman, “Integral Actuality.” Introduction to Idea of Prose by Giorgo Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 3. 3 Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 6. 4 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 134. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Agamben, The Time That Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 53. 9 Ibid., 52. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 53 12 Ibid. 13 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 134. 14 Ibid. 15 Agamben, The End of the Poem, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 131. 16 Ibid., 106. 17 Ibid., 107. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988), 55. 21 Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18, 61. 22 Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14. 23 Ibid., 21. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Blanchot, “Man at Point Zero,” Friendship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 82. 27 It is possible that both passages can be traced to these wonderful lines from Kafka: “How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold—all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however,

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Notes means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish.” (“Letters to Milena,” trans. Tania and James Stern [New York: Schocken, 1954], 229.) Blanchot, Friendship, 101–2. Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?”, 24. Blanchot, “The Great Reducers,” Friendship, 67. Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., 18. Vila-Matas, Montano’s Malady, trans. Jonathan Dunne (New York: New Directions, 2007). Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., 65. Ibid., 157. Ibid. Blanchot, “The Disappearance of Literature,” trans. Charlotte Mandell, The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 201. Macedonio Fernandez, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, trans. Margaret Schwartz (Rochester, NY: Open Letter Press, 2010), 12. Blanchot, “The Pure Novel,” A Blanchot Reader, trans. Lydia Davis (London: Blackwell, 1995), 39. Jeff Fort, “Introduction,” Aminadab by Maurice Blanchot (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), xvii. Agamben, “Art, Inactivity, Politics.” In Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art, ed. Joseph Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008), 204. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 60. In his essay “Rousseau” Blanchot elucidates this law in terms of a notion of “authenticity” in writing that is distinguished from the domain of truth. He cites Starobinski’s “remarkable” commentary on Rousseau to introduce this idea. Starobinski writes: “Authentic speech is a speech that no longer forces itself to imitate a preexistent given: it is free to deform and invent, on condition that it remain faithful to its own law. Yet this inner law eludes all control and all discussion. The law of authenticity forbids nothing, but is never satisfied. It does not demand that speech reproduce a prior reality, but that it produce its truth in a free and uninterrupted development” (“Rousseau,” The Book to Come 46). The terminology of help also appears in Agamben’s essay “The Thing Itself.” Potentialities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, Selected Writings, Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 297. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2002), 453. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 112. Ibid.

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Notes 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

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Agamben, Idea of Prose, 65. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 56. Anne Carson, Decreation (New York: Vintage, 2005), 180. Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 17. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–73, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 70. As Hollywood notes, Bataille does this “with the proviso that method alone does not ensure success.” Andrew Mitchell and Jason Winfree, “Community and Communication,” The Obsessions of George Bataille (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 4. Giorgio Agamben, interview from Maurice Blanchot, a French documentary film directed by Hugo Santiago (Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la communication, 1998). Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Confronted Community,” 24. Jacques Derrida, interview from Maurice Blanchot, a French documentary film directed by Hugo Santiago (Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la communication, 1998). Agamben, “Kommerell, or On Gesture,” in Potentialities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 77. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 79. Agamben, “The Thing Itself,” 31. Ibid., 32. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Ibid. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Agamben, “Kommerell, Or On Gesture,” 80. Agamben, “What is a Paradigm?,” 21. Ibid.

Chapter 1 1 Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 55. 2 As he details in a footnote to The Unavowable Community, here Blanchot follows a certain reading of Freud, which confirms a conflict between men, “makers of groups thanks to their homosexual leaning, be they sublimated or not, and the woman who alone can speak the truth of love, which is always ‘encroaching, exclusive, excessive, terrifying.’ The woman knows that the group, the repetition of the Same or the Similar, is in truth the grave-digger of real love which feeds only on differences. The ordinary human group, the one that acknowledges itself and is, par excellence, civilizing, ‘tends more or less to let the homogenous, the repetitive, the continuous

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Notes prevail over the heterogeneous, the new and the acceptance of the fissure.’ Woman then becomes the ‘intruder’ who perturbs the quiet continuity of the social bond and who does not recognize the prohibition. She conspires with the unavowable” (59). Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 44. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 9. Ibid. Agamben, “Genius,” trans. Jeff Fort, in Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 11. However, as Catherine Mills points out in an important essay, Agamben’s work may harbor its own problematic rendering of women, in a way different from what we find in Blanchot. In a critique of Agamben’s discussion of pornography in Idea of Prose, where he claims that “pornography achieves its intention” in “representing the pleasure of the woman, inscribed solely in her face,” Mills has this to say: “What is one to make of this figuration of woman within the domain of the ephemeral pleasure of everyday life, unable to move from that to the ‘everlasting heaven of pleasure’? There is of course a long philosophical tradition of casting women as the privileged figure of ephemerality, unable to gain or yield access to the universal” (“Introduction,” Politics, Metaphysics, and Death [Durham: Duke University Press, 2005], 32). What is more specific to Agamben, she says, is that in his work women cannot enter in the “homeland of humanity,” the “everlasting pleasure” of happy life, and the condition of historicity as women, since that entrance requires the erasure of all traits of identity: “It is not as women that women can enter into everlasting happiness but only as ‘whatever.’ But this relegation of all identifying characteristics to the traps of chronological time, discourse (as opposed to vocality and the experience of infancy), and control by the state is surely problematic, even when one does not favor an identitarian politics instead” (Ibid.). For Mills, this problem can be traced to the notion that “the romanticized ideal of a radically immanent, unified life beyond all identity precludes analysis of the various regimes of identification and disidentification that currently operate to establish the different political and ethical valuations of lives in their manifold expression. This moves Agamben’s conceptions of politics and justice too far from an appreciation of the unequal imposition of burdens and vulnerabilities within a globalized biopolitical order” (Ibid.). Mills develops this prescient analysis with reference to Derrida’s critique of Agamben. “As Derrida sharply remarks, the distinction of bios and zöe is not as straightforward as Agamben takes it to be. The point here is not that ‘girls’ or ‘women’ should, as if they could, simply be added to the scene of play or biopolitics in such a way that the scene itself and the conceptual framework built on it would remain without substantial change. Nor is the point to simply note the exclusion of women from Agamben’s philosophical lexicon at an explicit textual level—the consistent use of gender-specific pronouns as if their reference were universal may well be indicative of a philosophical blindness or ‘amnesia’ but it does not reach to the depths of the problem in itself. For what would it be to ask the ‘question of gender’ within the messianic framework that Agamben proposes? Indeed, can such questions be asked within that framework?” (31). Claire Colebrook develops a similar criticism of

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Agamben’s failure to recognize the “highly gendered (and theological) humanism” implicit in the Western philosophical tradition, which, she says, he unwittingly mobilizes via his appeal to “a more proper life, a life that does not just circle around and maintain itself, a life that creates and brings forth what is not itself ” (“Agamben: Aesthetics, Potentiality, and Life,” South Atlantic Quarterly. Vol. 107, No. 1 [Winter, 2008], 110.) Colebrook writes, “from Aristotle to the Renaissance, the masculine has been associated with formgiving power and, therefore, with what truly is, while the feminine as mere matter is what requires the life of spirit in order to be. What is repressed is what has always been figured as ‘woman’: a birth, production, or creation that is neither expressive, free, nor open, a production all too weighed down by the already actualized” (Ibid.). For Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, this tendency in Agamben’s work, his obviation of difference and identity, indicates “that his ontology of potentiality is developed to undermine sovereign will and not to transform bare life—the configuration of the impossible—into a site of contestation and political possibility” (“Bare Life on Strike,” South Atlantic Quarterly. Vol. 107, No. 1 [Winter, 2008)], 98.) While it is my hope to show that Agamben’s (and Blanchot’s) nuanced rendering of the literary concept constitutes one way that bare life can become the site of contestation and struggle, I also want to highlight the essential value of arguments such as those advanced by Mills, Colebrook, and Ziarek for understanding how Agamben himself sometimes gives in to, as he puts it in the “warning” he extends to readers of Elsa Morante and Simone Weil, the “temptation of the spirit of the desert,” the consignment of some aspect of one’s own being, or of some aspect of one’s relationality with others, to the sacred, or, in this case, to a systematic history of repression, which amounts to much the same thing on an ethical level. As Agamben urges, if we continue to apply his hermeneutic principle to his own work, it is important to recognize this tendency for what it is and to search his work for the antidotes contained there when he refuses the temptation of the desert. 12 Agamben, Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Césare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 7. Agamben’s reading of Bataille’s notion of sovereignty could be contested on grounds that “sovereignty,” like so many terms in Bataille, carries multiple, often contradictory meanings, a strategy that serves to dramatize the oscillation of “inner experience” or ecstatic communication, in which what is communicated is other than discourse, disrupting discourse. While Bataille’s thought often draws near to the totalitarian sovereignty Agamben takes aim at, it does so only in order to explode the limit it imposes on his life, a limit drawn through him that his own “sacred sovereignty” of ecstatic communication is designed to contest. As Andrew Norris notes in his introduction to Politics, Metaphysics and Death, a collection of essays on Homo Sacer, Agamben also briefly dismisses Bataille’s account of sovereignty in that volume, insisting that Bataille’s analysis is compromised by its emphasis on the erotic nature of sacrifice, and by its uncritical acceptance of the early-twentieth-century anthropological reading of the sacred (26). Paul Hegarty’s essay in the same collection, “Supposing the Impossibility of Silence, and of Sound, Of Voice” is an excellent examination of the relationship between the work of Agamben and Bataille, though this article was apparently written before Agamben’s sustained consideration of Bataille in The Open. Hegarty explains the “failure” of Agamben’s early reading of Bataille in this way: “Agamben might well have usefully considered what the difference between Hegel

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Notes and Bataille consists of: that mastery is not the aim in Bataille (“thought taken to the limit of thought requires the sacrifice, or the death, of thought”)—loss is the aim, to the extent that loss as aim falls away” (236). Agamben, The Open, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 85. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 56. Agamben, The Open, 87. Ibid. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 482. Agamben, The Open, 87. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 87. Ibid. Ibid., 90. Pablo Lopez, Pataphors, 26. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–2. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 69. Ibid. Alfred Jarry, Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Exchange, 1996), 114. Agamben, The Open, 91. Carson, Decreation, 155. Luis Casado, Casado, Luis. “Patafisica y Patafora.” El Clarin. Website. Accessed 31 October 2011. Translation mine. Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris, trans. Anne McLean (New York: New Directions, 2011), 60. Agamben, Notes on Politics, 6. Agamben, The Open, 5. Georges Bataille, “The Sacred Conjuration,” Acephale, issue 1, 2–3. “Democracy reposes upon a neutralization of antagonisms relatively weak and free; it excludes all explosive condensation . . . the only free society full of life and force, the sole free society is the bi or polycephal society that gives to the fundamental antagonisms of life a constant explosive outlet, but limited to the richest forms. The duality or the multiplicity of heads tends to realize in the same movement the acephalous character of existence, for the principle even of the head is reduction to unity, reduction of the world to God.” (Acephale, January 1937). Agamben, The Open, 5. Ibid., 89. Ibid. Ibid., 89–90. Ibid., 90. Ibid. Ibid., 91. Bataille, Inner Experience, 169. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 12.

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47 Agamben, Language and Death, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xii. 48 Martin Heidegger. On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: 1971), 107. 49 Agamben, Language and Death, xi. 50 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 487. 51 Agamben, The Open, 83. 52 Alexandre Kojève, “Letter to Georges Bataille,” cited by Agamben in Language and Death. 53 Ibid. 54 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (New York: Penguin, 2005 ed.), 143. 55 Agamben, The Open, 59–60. 56 Blanchot invokes mescaline as a figure of an immanent mysticism and literature in an essay on Borges, where the the “infinite” aspect of mescaline corresponds to the movement of the Mallarmean absolute in writing: “Speaking of the infinite, Borges says that this idea corrupts others. Michaux evokes the infinite, enemy of man, and says of mescaline, which ‘refuses the movement of the finite’: ‘Infiniverted [infinivertie], it detranquilizes.’” (93) trans. Charlotte Mandell. (“Literary Infinity: The Aleph.” The Book to Come [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 93–6.) 57 Agamben, “Magic and Happiness,” trans. Jeff Fort. Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 19. 58 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Letter to Joseph Bullinger, 17 August 1778, The Letters of Mozart and His Family, ed. Emily Anderson, A. Hyatt King and Monica Carolan, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1966), 594. 59 Agamben, “Magic and Happiness,” 19–20. 60 Ibid., 21. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 21–2. 63 Agamben, “Theory of Signatures,” trans. Luca D’Isante with Kevin Attell, The Signature of All Things (New York: Zone Books, 2009). The title of the collection is a phrase that Agamben explicitly traces to Paracelsus. However, he does not mention that this precise wording also appears in an important passage from Ulysses, where Joyce, in the words of Stephen Daudalus, defines the task of the artist in the same terms that Agamben defines the scholar in the essay on Paracelsus, as the one who is here to read the “signatures of all things”: “Inelecutable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.” 64 Agamben, “Magic and Happiness,” 22.

Chapter 2 1 Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Potentialities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 270. 2 Ibid. 3 Agamben, Idea of Prose, 65. 4 Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” 271.

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140 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Notes Vila-Matas, Montano’s Malady, 219. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 80. Agamben, “Art, Inactivity, Politics,” 203. Spinoza, Ethics, 143. Agamben, The End of the Poem, 108. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 854. Tom Jacobs, “The Value of Being Befuddled, Occasionally. Or, the Attempt to Live a Life of Constant and Eager Observation.” 3 Quarks Daily. Website. Accessed 7 March 2011. Ibid. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995 ed.), 271. Jacobs, “The Value of Being . . .”, 2. Ellison, Invisible Man, 273. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 463. Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 46. Ibid., 55. Agamben, Infancy and History, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 2007), 107. Agamben, “Nudity,” trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Nudities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 55–90. Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 87. Translation slightly altered by Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity, 109. Agamben, “Nudity,” 84. Ibid. Franz Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971), 247. Robert Musil, “Sketch for an introduction to The Man Without Qualities.” In The Book To Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 261. Roberto Bolaño, “The Incredible César Aira.” in Entre parentesis, Editorial Anagrama, 2004. César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006), 25. Ibid. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 255. Agamben, Infancy and History, 132. Césare Casarino, Modernity at Sea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xl. Eugenio de Signoribus, Belliche, in The End of the Poem, 128. Ingeborg Bachmann, conversation recalled by Agamben in The End of the Poem, 131. Agamben, The End of the Poem, 131. Agamben, “What is an Apparatus,” 14. Aira, Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, 26. Marcelo Ballvé, “The Literary Alchemy of César Aira,” The Quarterly Conversation. Website. Accessed 31 October 2011. Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., 166. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 96. Agamben, “Art, Politics, Inactivity,” 204.

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Notes 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

141

Ibid. Agamben, “Theory of Signatures,” 80. René Char, in The Book To Come, 251. Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge: Exact Exchange, 1991), 24. Blanchot, “Death of the Last Writer,” trans. Charlotte Mandell, The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 222. Ibid. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 223. Agamben, “The Author as Gesture,” trans. Jeff Fort, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 71. Ibid. Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris, 135. Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 57. Blanchot, “Death of the Last Writer,” trans. Charlotte Mandell, The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 221. Ibid. Ibid., 222. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid. Blanchot, “Death of the Last Writer,” 221. Agamben, “K,” trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Nudities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 28. Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971), 150. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China and Other Pieces, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London: M. Secker, 1933), 245–6. Agamben, “K,” 23. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid. Ibid., 28. Agamben, Idea of Prose, 115. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 160. Ibid., 161. Agamben, Idea of Prose, 117.

Chapter 3 1 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2007), 50. 2 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (1988), xxxii.

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142 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

Notes Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 32. Ibid. Ibid., 50–1. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 32–3. Ibid., 33. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 120. Antonio Negri and Césare Casarino, In Praise of the Common (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 152. Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” 14. Ibid., 24. Agamben, “K,” 30. Ibid. Ibid., 30–1. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 33. Ibid. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Ibid., 36. Ibid. Ibid. Agamben, Idea of Prose, 64. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. This phrase can be traced to Plato’s Seventh Letter, which Agamben discusses in his essay “The Thing Itself ” (Potentialites, 27–38). Ibid., 65. Ibid. Agamben, “On What We Can Not Do,” Nudities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 45. Agamben, Idea of Prose, 65. Arendt, On Violence, 112. David Kishik, “Educative Violence,” Notes for the Coming Community, Website. Accessed 31 October 2011. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Scholem, Gershom, “On Jonah and the Concept of Justice,” trans. Eric J. Schwab. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 25, No. 2, “Angelus Novus”: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin (Winter, 1999), 353–61. Kishik, “Educative Violence,” 1. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250. Kishik, “Educative Violence,” 1. César Aira, How I Became a Nun, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2007), 48.

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Notes 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

143

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 57–8. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 82–3. Ibid., 83. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 85. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 88. Ibid. Ibid., 89. Rudolf Borchardt, Epilegomena zu Dante, in The Arcades Project, 857. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954 (New York: Knopf, 2005 ed.), 308. Walter Benjamin, “Letter to Martin Buber,” 80. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 56. Ibid. Benjamin, Illuminations, 257. Kishik, “Educative Violence,” 1.

Chapter 4 1 Agamben, “Genius,” 17. 2 Maurice Blanchot, “Musil,” trans. Charlotte Mandell. The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 147. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Vila-Matas, Montano’s Malady, 202. This is not to say that Joyce’s work can be opposed to the writing of the “No.” In fact, what could be called a literature of recursivity is a closely related strain of the writing we are tracing in this study. An understanding of history, art, and being as repetition can be traced back to Giambattista Vico’s 1725 publication of The New Science, a text that would attain fuller intelligibility centuries later in the writings of Nietzsche, Spengler, Foucault,

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144

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Notes and others. For Vico, history moves in cycles: corso, or “flow,” is followed by ricorso, an ambiguous term that has the double sense of “repetition” and of “retrial” or “appeal.” According to the anonymous authors of the recent “Declaration on the Notion of ‘The Future’,” “the implication of Vico’s analysis is that, historically speaking, we advance not onto new ground but over old ground in new ways: more consciously, with deeper, more nuanced understanding” (“Declaration” 1). In other words, in the terminology of Gilles Deleuze, this understanding of history amounts to a “repetition of difference,” to finding ever more novel ways of engaging with the endlessly repetitive externality of daily existence, of affirming even the most quotidian repetitions as Beckett’s characters do, because even when I perform the same act tomorrow as I did today, as though I were an actor, I will not inhabit the “same phenomenological and kinetic instant” as I do when I do it now (Ibid.). Tomorrow’s act will be, then, not a simple repetition, but rather, to some extent, a citation and a re-enactment, the same old situation with a higher degree of potentiality or playfulness. For Tom McCarthy, also a novelist who takes his cue explicitly from Blanchot, this creative repetition is most richly depicted in the works of Beckett, especially in the characters of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. In McCarthy’s essay “Between Pain and Nothing,” he writes about these characters: “They may go through the same procedure each day, but their self-consciousness makes each day different from the one before, even if its actions are the same. They even re-enact their recent past, displacing identities, reallocating roles: ‘I’ll do Lucky, you do Pozzo,’ Vladimir tells Estragon as he begins imitating the way they both saw Lucky sagging under the weight of baggage as his master Pozzo cursed him. ‘Curse me!’ Vladimir says; ‘Stronger!’” (1). For the authors of the manifesto against the future, The International Necronautical Society, a group that includes McCarthy, who also cite Blanchot and Benjamin, the defining moment of literary modernism can be found in Finnegans Wake, where “Joyce will use Vico’s system as a trellis on which to grow his vision not only of social and international history but also of culture: both, he tells us in the novel’s opening sentence (which is famously also the conclusion of its incomplete final one), follow a ‘commodius vicus of recirculation’” (2). Recursivity marks the development of the present work as well, in order to register the affinity these authors have for inventive “recirculation,” for clustering their works with citations and for heeding the ways in which even the most well-worn concepts and objects can, in the right circumstances, be seen in a new light. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 101. Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks, 89. Fernandez, Museum of Eterna’s Novel, 19. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 66. Jacques Derrida, “Demeure.” Demeure/The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 89. Ibid. Blanchot, Instant of My Death, 9. Vila-Matas, Montano’s Malady, 214. Agamben, Notes on Politics, 10–11. Ibid., 11. Agamben, “Author as Gesture,” 71.

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Notes

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19 Arendt, On Violence, 112. 20 Césare Casarino, Modernity at Sea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xiv. 21 Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., 166. 22 Blanchot, “Instant of my Death,” 9. 23 Agamben, “Genius,” 14. 24 Ibid. Ishmael’s narrative time blends extended periods of study, of the scholarly recitation of illuminations of the sperm whale, sailor life, protestant theology, with scenes of action and speech, recounting Ahab’s urgent soliloquies and crazed addresses, Starbuck’s wary vows, the kaleidoscopic meaning of a doubloon. In this way, his telling is an exemplary expression of the experience of one’s own time or epoch that Agamben calls “contemporariness.” While Ahab’s magnetic fascination with the white whale ultimately annihilates him in what Blanchot calls a “worldless space toward which the fascination of one single image draws him,” Ishmael, like Odysseus who drew close to the sirens without disappearing into their trap, is able to survive the encounter with Moby Dick without vanishing into the abyss (Blanchot, “Encountering the Imaginary,” The Book to Come,” 8). For Blanchot, the Pequod’s relentless pursuit of the whale is a trace of Melville’s encounter with the void, the impersonal unfolding of the world that beckons him nearer and nearer on the plane of immanence: “for Melville, what is there more important than the encounter with Moby Dick, an encounter that takes place now, and is ‘at the same time’ always yet to come, so that he never stops going toward it by a relentless and disorderly pursuit, but since it seems to have no less a relationship with the origin, it also seems to send him back to the profundity of the past: an experience under the fascination of which Proust lived and in part succeeded in writing” (9). The fates of Ahab and Ishmael become more intelligible from this perspective of Melville’s artistic hunt that oscillates between a “relentless and disorderly pursuit” of the void and a disconnected referral to the “profundity of the past.” These two poles correspond to the two categories humans fall into before the void. The first is the category of Ahab: those who coincide too well with the void, with the unfolding of their epoch, who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, which renders them unable to see it, unable to “firmly hold their gaze on it” (11). Like Ahab, they automatically assume the reality of the void, even if it is directed toward oblivion, because they cannot render it inoperative, cannot see it as such or contemplate it as such. The second category is that of Ishmael, or Odysseus, those who are neither able to perfectly coincide with their time, with the void, nor adjust themselves to its demands. It is “precisely because of this condition,” Agamben says, “precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time” (11). This latter category is that of the contemporary, the one who forms a singular relationship with one’s own time, with the unfolding of the void, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. Contemporariness is, more precisely, “that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism” (11). Ahab is consumed by the image of Moby Dick, while Ishmael is always left to merely contemplate it, a pause that opens up a whole world. As Blanchot writes, the difficulty of contemporariness “stems from the ambiguity of time, which enters into play here, and which allows us to say and feel that the fascinating image of the experience is, at a certain moment, present, while this

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Notes presence does not belong to any present, and even destroys the present into which it seems to introduce itself ” (9). Here, again, we are in the rhythmic interval of the historical image where Benjamin’s angel of history is momentarily freed from its backward gaze at the rubble and oblivion of the past that piles up, in order to connect that past with the present in the flash of a constellation that destroys linear time and provokes the forward dawning of thought. Carson, Decreation, 109–10. Ibid., 110. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 475. Ibid., 857. Ibid., 390. Ibid., 879. Ibid., 880. Ibid. Charles Lefeuve, Paris Street by Street, House by House (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1875. Gallica. Website. Accessed 31 October 2011). Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 880. Ibid. Agamben, “The Author as Gesture,” 71. Jeff Fort, “Introduction,” Aminadab by Maurice Blanchot (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), xiii. Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus: Die Fruhschriften, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Leipzig: Landshut and Mayer, 1932) in The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, 226. Ibid., 226–7. Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981), 50. The translation used is slightly altered by Jeff Fort in his introduction to Aminadab. Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From the Outside.” trans. Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman. Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 12. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 881. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 132. Chantal Mouffe, “Agonistic Public Spaces, Democratic Politics, and the Dynamic of Passions,” Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art, ed. Joseph Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008), 103. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 137. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 115. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 137. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 907. Ibid., 842. Ibid., 443. Adam Thilwell, “The Master of the Crossed Out,” The New York Review of Books. Website. Accessed 31 October 2011. According to Thilwell, “David Hume once ventured that a dream is distinguished from reality simply by the greater ‘vivacity’ of the impressions we receive from reality. Reality is a phenomenon of pure surface, a consistent series of sense

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Notes

53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

147

impressions. In the logic of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, such materialism means that reality is therefore always fragile” (2). Agamben invokes a similar concept at the close of the introduction to his early work Stanzas, where he describes his own project as an “insufficient attempt to follow in the wake of the project that Robert Musil entrusted to his unfinished novel: a project that, a few years previously, the words of a poet had expressed in the formula ‘Whoever seizes the greatest unreality will shape the greatest reality.’” (xix). Carson, Decreation, 22. Benjamin illuminates this cross-over: “one of the tacit suppositions of psychoanalysis is that the clear-cut antithesis of sleeping and waking has no value for determining the empirical form of consciousness of the human being, but instead yields before an unending variety of concrete states of consciousness conditioned by every conceivable level of wakefulness within all possible centers” (The Arcades Project, 389). Carson, Decreation, 22. Ibid. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 875. Ibid., 878. For a detailed examination of this suggestion, see William Koch’s essay “The Disciples of Ugliness.” Escape Into Life. Website. 26 August 2010. Accessed 31 October 2011. Carson, Decreation, 22. Ibid. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 878. Agamben, The End of the Poem, 132. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 132. Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., 89. Agamben, The End of the Poem, 101. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 40. Agamben, “Genius,” 16. Ibid., 10. Agamben, “Author as Gesture,” 71. Fort, “Introduction,” ix. Blanchot, “Mallarmé and the Art of the Novel,” trans. Charlotte Mandell, Faux Pas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 44. Ibid. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 56.

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Carson, Decreation, 157. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 160. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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148 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Notes Ibid. Ibid., 160–1. Ibid., 161. Ibid. Agamben, Idea of Prose, 64. Carson, Decreation, 162. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 163. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 164. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 165. Ibid. Ibid., 165–6. Ibid., 166. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 167. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 168. Ibid. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 88. Carson, Decreation, 168. Ibid., 169. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 170. Ibid. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 173. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 174. Agamben, The Open, 91. Carson, Decreation, 175.

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Notes 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

149

Ibid. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 175. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 145. Carson, Decreation, 179. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 178–9. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 176. Ibid. Ibid., 181.

Chapter 6 1 Vila-Matas, Bartleby and Co., 3. 2 Ibid. 3 Maurice Blanchot, “The Disappearance of Literature,” trans. Charlotte Mandell, The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 195. 4 Vila-Matas, Bartleby and Co., 139. 5 Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris, 123. 6 Ibid., 124. 7 Ibid., 25. 8 Ibid., 72–3. 9 Ibid., 72. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 73. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 83. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 84. 18 Marguerite Duras, “Interview,” in Never Any End to Paris, 151. 19 Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris, 5. 20 Duras, “Interview,” in Never Any End to Paris, 151. 21 Vila-Mats, Never Any End to Paris, 152. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 181. 24 Ibid., 23. 25 Agamben, “Genius,” 17. 26 Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris, 92. 27 Ibid., 93. 28 Ibid., 94. 29 Ibid., 98. 30 Ibid.

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150 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Notes Ibid., 24. Agamben, “The Author as Gesture,” 69. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 65. Ibid. Ibid., 72. Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris, 191–2. (Italics mine). Ibid., 59. Ibid. Ibid., 60. Fernández, Museum of Eterna’s Novel, 19.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris, 52. Ballvé, “The Literary Alchemy of César Aira,” 1. Ibid. Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., 166. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 463. Aira, Episode in the Life, 5. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 14–15. Giorgio Agamben, “The Friend,” What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 31. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 34–5. Agamben’s discussion of the halo can be found in Chapter XIII of The Coming Community, titled “Halos.” Ibid, 36. Aira, Episode in the Life, 9. Agamben, End of the Poem, 126. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 127–8. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 128. Ibid. Ibid. Aira, Episode in the Life, 87. Agamben, The Open, 90. Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” 24. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 444.

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Notes

151

31 It is possible that the image of light is an example of a coded language, one shared among friends. The use of such a coded language has two precedents, which draw out the purpose of this type of cipher. The first is an exchange between Jacques Derrida and Antonio Negri, in which Derrida agrees to use the word “ontology,” which he otherwise associates with the metaphysical tradition, only if they both agree that it means something else: “perhaps the two of us could, from now on, agree to regard the word ‘ontology’ as a password, a word arbitrarily established by convention, a shibboleth, which only pretends to mean what the word ‘ontology’ has always meant. In that case, we could, between us, use a coded language, like Marranos” (Derrida, “Marx and Sons.” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx”, ed. Michael Sprinker and trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1999, p. 261). The second precedent that comes to mind is Agamben’s discussion of a cipher in Benjamin’s work, in the final chapter of The Time That Remains. Those who spend long hours reading Benjamin may be aware of his predilection for ciphers in writing, for codes hidden in his texts that open up an entirely new hermeneutic sphere for those who can unravel them. The background of this strategy can perhaps be found in the Kabbalistic, Gnostic, and messianic themes that pervade his texts, though such an investigation is beyond the scope of the current work. For our purposes it is enough to say that the ciphers I am referring to function as signs for those who can recognize them to remember something essential, which is bound up in the presentation of the cipher itself, as its form blends into its function. Agamben, in fact, has devoted an entire book to decoding one such cipher. The Time That Remains, his sustained consideration of messianism via a reading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, hinges on his unraveling of a secret citation encrypted in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. The second thesis, read in Benjamin’s original typescript, says, “Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a w e a k messianic power” Dann ist uns wie jedem Geschlecht, das vor uns war, eine s c h w a c h e messianishe Kraft mitgegeben (139). Agamben wonders why weak is emphasized in this way, via the typographical convention of spacing that Benjamin sometimes employed, a curiosity that refers him to Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history, to its image of a hunchback dwarf who hides beneath a chessboard and, through his movements, wins the game for a mechanical puppet disguised as a Turk. Textual clues eventually point to what Agamben claims is the only writing to explicitly theorize the weakness of messianic power, a passage in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (12:9-10). Aided by previous fleeting intuitions recorded by Jacob Taubes and Gershom Scholem, Agamben proceeds through a litany of textual references to posit Paul as the writer inscribed in the figure of the hunchback dwarf, and in this way aims to show how Benjamin enlists a messianic weakness or poverty, the very form of disappearance, in the conflict with a law that is in force without signifying. Just as the spacing of “weak” in Benjamin’s typing seems to carry out the contraction of messianic time that it aims to tell, so, perhaps, does the image of light shared or written about by the writers we have looked, when discovered as a constellation, carry out the subjective displacement or opening onto the outside that is the unique chance of the “extraordinary” light that these writers have glimpsed. Henri Bergson offers a beautiful formulation of this immanent light and the refractory subjectivity it gives rise to in Matter and Memory: “As though we reflected back to surfaces the light which emanates from them, the light which, had it passed unopposed, would never have been revealed” (New York: Zone Books, 32).

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Index Agamben, Giorgio 1–58, 62–9, 74–9, 81–6, 88–9, 91–2, 94, 96–9, 103–5, 108, 109–11, 117, 119, 126–132 “Art, Inactivity, Politics” 10 “Author as Gesture” 119–20 “Bartleby, or On Contingency” 1, 39–40 The Coming Community 20 The End of the Poem 128–32 “Genius” 79, 84–5, 98–9, 117, 126 Homo Sacer 6, 22, 53, 63, 81, Idea of Prose 2, 12, 39, 58, 67, 103 Infancy and History 45 “K.” 56–8, 63–7 Language and Death 5, 31–2, 51 “Magic and Happiness” 35–7 The Man Without Content 44–7 Notes on Politics 23 “Nudity” 46 The Open 19–37 Remnants of Auschwitz 3, 6, 62 The Sacrament of Language 55 Stanzas 147 “Theory of Signatures” 36, 51, 139 The Time That Remains 4, 76, 91, 151 “What is an Apparatus?” 6–9, 49, 64 Aira, César 3, 27, 88, 94 anarchic 14 An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter 47–9, 83, 96, 123–8 How I Became a Nun 12, 37, 63–4, 70–4, 77 Aquinas, Thomas 39, 67 Arendt, Hannah 12, 68–9, 74–5, 77, 82 Austin, J. L. 90 Bachmann, Ingeborg 48, 58 Ballvé, Marcelo 49, 124 Basilides 28–9 Bataille, Georges 8, 13–15, 19–23, 27–35

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Baudrillard, Jean 26 Benjamin, Walter 41–2, 85–6, 96, 105, 131 The Arcades Project 88, 95, 124 “Critique of Violence” 12, 69–70 dreaming collective 87 dreams and language 90, 92–3, 95 education 32–3, 70, 74–5 history 47–8 image 41, 45–6, 55, 85 influence of Aby Warburg 18 jetztzeit 111, 124 light 97, 132 magic 35 “One-Way Street” 20, 24–5 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 76–7 Blanchot, Maurice 1–56, 61–4, 67, 70, 75, 77–99, 108, 113, 117, 123, 131 Aminadab 10, 89 “Death of the Last Writer” 52 “The Disappearance of Literature” 9 “The Instant of My Death” 80–1 The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me 90 “The Pure Novel” 10 “Two Versions of the Imaginary” 45 The Unavowable Community 2–3, 6, 8, 11–12, 19–24, 27, 30–3, 35, 59, 83, 86, 88, 99, 108, 113 The Writing of the Disaster 80 Bloch, Ernst 91 Bolaño, Roberto 47, 123 Borchardt, Rudolf 74 Carson, Anne 3, 12–13, 19, 27–8, 63, 79, 85–6, 88, 94–6, 99, 101–12, 119 Casado, Luis 27 Casarino, Césare 48, 83

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Index

Celan, Paul 50, 129–32 Char, Rene 52 Colebrook, Claire 136–7 community 4, 6, 8, 11, 13–15, 17, 19–24, 27, 53, 59, 63–5, 86, 89, 98, 128 death

14, 19–22, 24, 27–8, 30–2, 34–6, 45, 61–2, 67, 76, 80–1, 83, 103, 110, 118 Deleuze, Gilles 26, 40, 63, 121, 144 Derrida, Jacques 15, 61–3, 81, 136, 151 désoeuvrement 24, 32 disappearance 1, 3, 6–17, 20–2, 24, 27, 33, 35–6, 39, 41, 44, 46–53, 59, 61–4, 77–9, 81–3, 85–7, 89, 92, 97–8, 101, 104, 107–13, 118–19, 121, 123, 127–8, 132 dreams 16, 88–95, 112 Duras, Marguerite 6, 20, 86–7, 115–20 Düttman, Alexander Garcia 2 ecstasy 14, 21–2, 35, 61, 83, 84, 102, 104 ego 9, 21–2, 25, 40, 45, 50, 81, 84, 98, 111, 117 Ellison, Ralph 42–3 ethics 21, 23 Fernandez, Macedonio 1, 9, 80, 112, 121 flâneur 80, 94, 97, 107, 123 Fort, Jeff 10, 89, 99 Foucault, Michel 51, 63, 90, 119–21 friendship 4, 78, 93–4, 123–32 God

26–7, 69, 101–12, 129

Hegarty, Paul 137 Hewson, Mark 2 Heidegger, Martin 19, 31–2, 34, 80 history 13, 17, 28–30, 33, 41–9, 56, 76, 88–9, 91, 98, 120, 131, 143–4, 146 Hollywood, Amy 13–14, image 2, 6, 17, 20, 23, 27, 33, 37, 41, 43–9, 53, 55, 63, 67, 74, 82–3, 85–90, 92–4, 96–9, 105, 107, 109, 111, 114, 125, 128, 130–2 immanence 5, 30, 40–1, 47–9, 52, 54, 81, 83, 109, 145

Disappearance.indb 154

Jacobs, Tom 42–4 Jarry, Alfred 25–6, 29–30, 32, 120 jouissance 13–14, 24 Kafka, Franz 5, 26, 34, 36, 50, 64, 116 The Blue Octavo Notebooks 52, 80 The Castle 12, 65–7 “The Great Wall of China” 47 “In the Penal Colony” 56–9, 77 letter writing 133–4 The Trial 51, 63, 76 kaleidoscopic subjectivity 25, 80, 84, 94, 96, 107, 117, 132 Kishik, David 68–70, 75–7 Kojève, Alexandre 28, 30–5, 108 Lacan, Jacques 13–14, 63, 91, 94–6 language asignifying 10, 33, 52, 75, 83–4, 108, 112, 132 and mysticism 33, 109–12 of the dictator 53–6, 75 Lefeuve, Charles 88 linguistic absolute 27, 83–4 love 20, 24–6, 98, 101–12 Marx, Karl 89 McCarthy, Tom 144 Melville, Herman 39–40, 50, 63, 67–8, 85, 103, 117, 120, 145 Mills, Catherine 136–7 Mitchell, Andrew 14 Morante, Elsa 4–6, 27, 97–8, 137 Mouffe, Chantal 91 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 5, 35, Musil, Robert 47, 50, 79–83 mysticism 12–16, 19–20, 29, 33–5, 61, 82, 90, 101–12, 126–7, 139 myth 5, 44–5 Nancy, Jean-Luc 15, near-death 61, 80–1, 103 Negri, Antonio 22, 63–4, 151 neuter 81 Norris, Andrew 137

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Index pataphysics 6, 25–30, 110, 120–1 Porete, Marguerite 101, 103–9, 112, 119 posthistory 28, 30, 33, 48 Rancière, Jacques 22, 63–4 representation 10, 16, 17, 26, 31, 46–7, 50, 52–6, 58, 72, 84, 99, 107–8, 125, 127 Rimbaud, Arthur 5, 120 Sappho 101–7, 111, 112, 119 Scholem, Gershom 69–70 solitude 12, 86, 93, 132 Spinoza, Baruch 5, 17, 34, 40 study (and student) 3, 6, 11–18, 30–2, 34, 37, 39–40, 53, 59, 61–77, 85–9, 93–4, 97–8, 101–12, 113–21, 123 subjectivity (and parasubjectivity) 4, 6–18, 20–5, 30–1, 33–4, 36, 40–1, 44–57, 61–4, 67, 69, 79–98, 102–21, 123–32

Disappearance.indb 155

surprise

155 36, 53–4, 74, 85–6, 91, 116, 118, 123

theology (and atheology) 145 Thilwell, Adam 94

27, 34, 51, 102,

Vila-Matas, Enrique Bartleby and Co. 1, 3, 50, 52–3, 58, 63–4, 80, 83, 98 Montano’s Malady 9, 40, 81 Never Any End to Paris 12, 27, 113–21 Wall, Thomas Carl 2–4, 7, 12, 40, 46 Warburg, Aby 15, 18, 67 Watkin, William 2 Weil, Simone 5, 13, 19, 40, 101, 106–11 Winfree, Jason 14 Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska 137

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