Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and all poets whose theme is the essence of poetry have felt that the act of naming is disquieting and marvelous. A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, “This woman” I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being—the very fact that it does not exist.15
Blanchot is referring to Hegel’s discussion of language in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, which is a continual point of reference throughout the essay.16 A word must make what it names disappear, precisely in order to name it; this act of negation gives rise to the appearance of an idea, or a concept, which replaces that which has disappeared. Common language assumes that the woman (in this case) whom language negates can re-appear in the idea, which is given by the word “woman.” The word thus expresses the idea, fulfilling, and disappearing in, its communicative function. In this way, not only does everyday language involve the disappearance of that which it names, but also of language itself; its efficiency as a communicative tool would seem to depend upon a certain assumption of, and interest in, transparency. But in the passage above, Blanchot emphasizes the lingering absence, the loss of being, that necessarily arises in this process. The word points to the absence or disappearance of what it designates, what has been sacrificed for the appearance of the idea. Blanchot focuses upon the woman’s death, rather than her recovery—a death at the heart of that which remains, because it (death) has paradoxically become the condition for the woman’s existence, despite her absence.
In the previous passage, Blanchot notes the poet’s interest in the “disquieting and marvelous” power of naming—its ability to put to death in order to create the world. Instead of looking past death, the poet makes it the concern of the work; rather than accepting the act of naming as a constructive activity that provides meaning, the language of literature brings attention to what has disappeared, precisely by demonstrating its disappearance. Blanchot writes:
When literature refuses to name anything, when it turns a name into something obscure and meaningless, witness to the primordial obscurity, what has disappeared in this case—the meaning of the name—is really destroyed, but signification in general has appeared in its place, the meaning of the meaninglessness embedded in the word as expression of the obscurity of existence, so that although the precise meaning of the terms has faded, what asserts itself now is the very possibility of signifying, the empty power of bestowing meaning—a strange impersonal light. (385)
Literature’s refusal to name thus involves the obfuscation of the name, which negates the ability of the name to make something appear. Now, nothing appears—both in the sense that literature’s negation is not constructive, and also, in the sense that nothingness, the “empty power of bestowing meaning,” appears as the movement of disappearance, which is unable to make itself disappear. After the negation of the world and the name, negation confronts its own excessive persistence. In his essay “Crossing the Threshold: Literature and the Right to Death,” Christopher Fynsk discusses this moment: “The inability to avoid signifying, become the ‘empty power [of bestowing meaning],’ is the expression of the ‘powerlessness to disappear’ of the being of what is before the day, the existence from which one must turn away to speak and to understand.”17 In this way, the power of signification, negation, or disappearance (which work as synonyms here), reaches the point of its powerlessness to deal with itself, and thus expresses that which precedes and exceeds its power—the “primordial obscurity” from which it is always and necessarily turned away.
Returning to The Space of Literature, Blanchot’s discussion of Mallarmé engages many of the reflections developed in “Literature and the Right to Death.” The earlier essay can help elucidate Blanchot’s approach to Mallarmé’s exploration of language and poetry. Blanchot traces the “experience” of Mallarmé, as he does with a number of writers who continually emerge throughout his work. His discussion of these writers emerges as something closer to a conversation than a definitive critique where he takes a stand for or against what seems to be proposed by the writer. It is sometimes even hard to tell who is speaking—Blanchot, or the writer with whom he is conversing, or neither—as the voice of the text often seems to float between vague citations, developments, commentary, and questioning. This mode of writing becomes especially apparent in Blanchot’s later works, like The Infinite Conversation, but I would argue that his conversations with Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin in The Space of Literature already demonstrate the deliberate un-grounding of the voice of the text. In these conversations, Blanchot explores the various contradictions and difficulties that arise with attempts to respond to the demand and to the question of literature, emphasizing the persistence and the inexhaustibility of both the demand and the question.
Blanchot begins by considering some of Mallarmé’s early attempts to define “essential,” or literary, language, and to distinguish it from “crude” language. He explains that Mallarmé understands both crude and essential language in terms of their respective relations to silence. The crude word is “silent [ . . . ] because meaningless”; it designates the language of everyday exchange and functions within the “reality” of the world (SL 39). It seeks to make things appear, and to make them present to us—without mediation, or, in other words, as if language transparently expressed the idea or concept. Like Blanchot, Mallarmé is interested in the way that negativity functions in language, and he brings attention to what necessarily disappears in the act of naming. But Mallarmé’s characterization of crude language focuses on the assumption of what it can make appear; the role of silence, in the case of everyday language, refers to the way that language itself disappears into its function—“language as language is silent” (40). On the other hand, the essential word indicates a language “whose whole force lies in its not being, whose very glory is to evoke, in its own absence, the absence of everything” (39). Rather than relying on the power of language to make things appear, essential language exposes their disappearance—the silence of the world. “It is always allusive. It suggests, it evokes” (39). Unlike the crude word, the essential word does not function as a tool in the world, relying on generalizations in order to name and identify things, in the interest of communication and understanding.18
“Poetry expresses the fact that beings are silent” (41). But, here, we encounter a problem: if silence is the essence of essential language, then it would seem that everyday language touches upon this essence, in the sense that it must, like essential language, silence the world in order to name and designate things, even if it pretends otherwise. In other words, the crude word might at first seem only to silence language (because it encourages us to look through or past it), but it relies upon the essential silence of language in order to function, despite its efforts to hide it. The distinction of the crude word and the essential word by their relation to silence thus becomes problematic. Blanchot writes of the crude word: “A word which does not name anything, which does not represent anything, which does not outlast itself in any way, a word which is not even a word and which disappears marvelously altogether and at once in its usage: what could be more worthy of the essential and closer to silence?” (39-40). Since, as Blanchot demonstrates in “Literature and the Right to Death,” everyday language presents the absence of what it has made disappear, it does “[express] the fact that beings are silent,” just like essential language—perhaps even more essentially, precisely because it pretends otherwise, because it attempts to hide this absence. It seems that the distinction of crude and essential language relies on the ability of the crude word to make the concept appear, to make it immediate to us; this veils the more “essential” silence at work. Blanchot continues, “[ . . . ] it is nothingness in action: that which acts, labors, constructs.